Six Colors: Recent Episodes
Six Colors
After a visit to Jason’s backyard, we discuss OpenAI’s response to Apple’s lawsuit, the future of Apple’s wearable line, the return of “Ted Lasso,” and some starters for Spider-Man.
Go to the podcast page.
We trust Apple with a lot of our data. In general, that hasn’t seemed like a bad idea; in particular, compared to its competitors, Apple seems to ensure that it can inspect or interact with very little of our data. The company has built its platform and its reputation on being an elegant, frictionless, hands-off conduit. While we can make many complaints about Liquid Glass, its increased focus on invasive (and poor) advertising, its software quality, and much else, Apple has kept its corporate nose cleaner than anybody else. Its transparency and documentation are, oddly, worse than its actions and clear intent.
The Apple Watch is the only wearable with end-to-end encryption for first-party health data. (Image: Apple)I was thinking about this when I received an email from an anonymized iCloud Hide My Email account, asking for more detail about how Apple managed the transition from the old method of presenting or escrowing (in iCloud) your macOS FileVault Recovery Key to the new method, in which the key is stored in Passwords. This transition, which I’ve documented in a few places, was a step forward in privacy and security.
But not transparency! I’ll explain, but you can’t find an explanation on Apple’s site about the transition. The support documentation remains out of sync with Tahoe. That leaves it to yours truly to explicate.
Don’t trust and verifyThe Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a newsletter with a round-up of how fitness wearables, like rings, watches, and bands, preserve your privacy from government intrusion, as well as whether they protect you from unwanted security invasions by using end-to-end encryption (E2EE). (The former often requires the latter: governments typically can’t break through E2EE.)
I want to quote two full paragraphs to make this point:
In the end, we found that only four of these companies (Apple, Google, Whoop, and Oura) promise to notify users of law enforcement requests in publicly available documentation. And just two of those companies, Apple and Google (which also owns Fitbit), currently publish transparency reports on how often they hand users’ data to the government.
Support for end-to-end encryption—a method that ensures your personal data is only accessible by you, and not the company who makes the device and manages the cloud storage—is more rare than transparency reports among wearable device makers. The Apple Watch is the only popular fitness wearable that supports end-to-end encryption.1
Apple wasn’t an early player with E2EE. Really, it was seen as the kind of thing only true security geeks cared about, even while people like EFF and other digital privacy advocacy groups and individuals warned us that our data was only lightly protected. Over time, as the criminal, exploitative, and political monitoring and extraction of our secrets became clear, Apple kept stepping up.
I don’t understand every part of this flowchart, but it shows how Apple uses the Secure Enclave to ensure the integrity of device-based end-to-end encryption. (Image: Apple)The Secure Enclave is a keystone of those moves, as the tamper-resistant silicon subsystem allows devices to keep locally generated security keys entirely private. Most of these keys never leave the Secure Enclave! Rather, it’s the encryption hub.2
iCloud initially had a fairly cursory level of protection, with the then-Apple ID account password serving as the only real bar. Two-step verification in March 2013 provided better account protection, but didn’t cover iCloud backups, which could be retrieved without that second step. A rash of celebrity account leaks in late summer 2014 led Apple to extend two-step to iCloud data within a couple of weeks. The next year, it upgraded security to the more rigorous two-factor authentication, which later became mandatory.
As part of its response to the iCloud data hijacks, Apple began to beef up iCloud. It began rolling out E2EE for all the device-based services it could, leaving synced data still relatively lightly protected. (iCloud data is always encrypted with Apple’s at-rest keys, which only it ostensibly has access to, and in transit with HTTPS. However, a security breach at Apple or someone able to hijack one end of an in-progress HTTPS sync allows access to that unencrypted data.)
Then, suddenly, months after shipping major updates to its operating systems, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection in December 2022. Enabling this feature put the E2EE aegis over nearly all synced or stored data at iCloud; mail, contacts, and calendar entries remain an exception because of their interoperability with third-party apps and services. You can view Apple’s document that explains what level of protection applies to data, with and without ADP enabled.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the Recovery Key transition.
Recovery Key is not recovered? I think notThe particular reader question driving this was their concern about the FileVault Recovery Key that was in place when the Tahoe-driven transition occurred. Was the old key destroyed and a new one created and stashed in Passwords? Or was the old one just moved over? If the latter, isn’t that a security hole, if a tiny one?
My initial reply wasn’t entirely glib, but I said, having not documented the upgrade, I believed Apple explained the process when it occurred. But I couldn’t find any screen captures of how that occurred. Apple’s documentation remains in the past—it doesn’t mention the Passwords method at all. The Passwords User Guide perversely mentions the Recovery Key, but not how to interact with turning it off or on.
People who had FileVault disabled (whether they never turned it on, or turned it off at some point) did receive an alert during the upgrade:
Your Mac is Ready for FileVault: FileVault keeps your Mac safe by encrypting your data and protecting it with the password you use to log in. If you forget your password, you can use your Recovery Key to reset it.
Clicking Not Now bypassed the process; Turn On opted the user into the new Passwords-based storage for the Recovery Key.
I’ve explained in previous columns how FileVault provides an extra layer of protection. FileVault requires a Recovery Key, so you have recourse if your password stops working, you forget it, or corruption happens in the boot data. This shouldn’t happen, but it can. The Recovery Key and your password (transformed by a cryptographic formula—or hash—after you enter it) are both “key encryption keys,” delightfully named KEKs. Neither directly encrypts your data. Each instead unwraps the key that the Secure Enclave uses to unlock your drive for use in macOS.3 (You can find out a lot more about this topic in my Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices, a revised version of which, including “27” betas, will be out shortly as a free update.)
The Recovery Key entry in Passwords identifies the Mac by its model, and provides a shortcut to FileVault settings.Apple never knows your macOS passwords, and it shouldn’t know your Recovery Key. That was the flaw with iCloud escrow: your Recovery Key could be retrieved by someone with your Apple Account information who had access to your Mac.
With that said, how did Apple manage the transition from the old system to the new one that uses Passwords? Into this lacuna of details, jump I with inferential logic about what Apple must have done.
With a “show me once” Recovery Key: Apple would generate this key, show it to you, then destroy it. The company (and macOS) didn’t need a record of it, because its purpose was to be used to decrypt another key: don’t have the key, can’t decrypt that other key. If you opted for that method, Apple had to destroy the existing KEK to replace it with a new one derived from the newly created Recovery Key.
With an iCloud escrow key: The same scenario applies from a different angle. Apple can’t retrieve your escrowed key unless you use your Apple Account. That isn’t a per se security weakness, but Apple doesn’t need that escrowed key, and it doesn’t want to decrypt it at iCloud to send it to you. I would warrant that the company once again destroys the KEK, creates a new one, and that’s what’s stored in Passwords. Anything else leaves a potential gap in my explanation of why Apple made this change in the first place.
Now, you say, if macOS generated the key and it stored it in Passwords, doesn’t it “know” the key? Not exactly. The key is ostensibly generated in memory, added to Passwords, and destroyed. To have accessed the key, an attacker would need to be monitoring your screen or grab particular memory locations at an exact moment. If someone has undetected remote observation of your Mac display, the game is already over.
Passwords uses end-to-end encryption with device-based secrets. You can enter a device password or use biometrics to unlock Passwords (or chained biometrics with an Apple Watch linked to your Mac). That’s as secure as we can get to protect any password. If someone wanted to access your Recovery Key through Passwords, they need access to one of your devices; cracking your Apple Account and its second-factor or passkey authentication wouldn’t help—and that’s a big stretch to begin with. Nor does just having your macOS account name and password without the ability to have physical or remote screen access to your device.
I believe Apple handled this transition awkwardly. The company could have provided more clarity about the requirement to change how a FileVault Recovery Key was stored, and explain exactly what measures it took to ensure security across that transition. And it could update its support pages!
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Note that EFF is discussing the core Health app here, not third-party apps granted access to Health data by a user. ↩
- The iPhone 5s in 2013 was the first Apple device with a Secure Enclave. It expanded to iPad starting with the 2013 iPad Air, and the Mac with the T1 chip in Touch Bar MacBook Pro models in 2016. ↩
- Full-drive encryption is always on and can’t be disabled on M-series Macs and Intel Macs with the final-stage T2 security chip. ↩
This is turning out to be the year of immersive sports.
In January, Apple worked with Spectrum and the L.A. Lakers to debut a series of immersive NBA games. And beginning August 28, it’ll be airing a live immersive Major League Baseball game every Friday night for the rest of the Friday Night Baseball season.
Unlike the NBA games, which were limited to cable subscribers, these games are part of Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball package and will be available to all Apple TV subscribers with a Vision Pro. (In Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S., anyway.)
As with the NBA games, this will be an immersive-specific telecast with its own announcers (Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, Michelle Margaux), replays, and graphics. Apple says that during commercial breaks, viewers will “stay immersed in the in-stadium experience from all angles.”
As always, the details will be fascinating to see. While I thought that the immersive NBA games were pretty good, some viewers complained that there were too many changes in camera angle that broke immersion. Baseball is a very different sport, in terms of pace and in the size of the field, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple chooses to approach its coverage.
The four immersive games on the schedule are: Red Sox at Yankees (August 28), Angels at Pirates (September 4), Padres at Giants (September 11), and Giants at Dodgers (September 18).
Your voice may be your passport, as a certain Robert Redford picture once asserted, but two macOS apps in our spotlight this week view your voice as a way to get more things done on your Mac. We’re talking transcription apps with two apps that take very different approaches to what you can do with vocal recognition and AI.
But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.
Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.
Vox DictumI record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.
Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.
I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.
As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.
Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.
BonfiyahLike Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.
Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.
Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.
Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.
LetterboxxLetterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.
With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.
You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.
Echo Photo AlbumI don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.
You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.
You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.
Chess PeaceAll work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.
The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.
The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.
Our favorite ways to share data between devices, what we’d like to see iOS on next after PontoonPlay, whether Private Relay concerns us, and any “dead” media formats we still enjoy.
Go to the podcast page.
A story by 404 Media’s Joseph Cox, who last month broke the news about a flaw in Apple’s Hide My Email feature, is now back to report that iCloud Private Relay, a feature that is supposed to obfuscate users’ IP addresses, may not be so private:
A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool, which is supposed to hide a user’s IP address, in many cases doesn’t actually work. Instead, the issues mean a malicious attacker can set up a website to learn a Private Relay user’s real IP address, or that many websites have also already collected this information incidentally. The issues also impact OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network, the researchers who discovered the issues say.
Fascinatingly, this flaw seems to be due to the implementation of passkeys: the authentication happens out of band, in a separate connection, and therefore never runs through Private Relay.
The security researchers who uncovered the issue have put up a site that lets you check if you’re affected; I wasn’t able to test it this morning, as the Wi-Fi network I’m using as of this writing doesn’t support Private Relay at all. (Joke’s on me, I guess!) They’ve also reported the vulnerability to Apple, who did not provide a timeline for fixing it, but allowed them to disclose the issue nonetheless.
Cox points out that along with the Hide My Email bug, this is the second time that a vulnerability has affected Apple’s paid privacy features, since both are part of the iCloud+ subscription. Though Apple did finally patch the Hide My Email flaw late last month, a second flaw is not a great look for a company that prides itself on privacy and security.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Moltz has a can-do attitude but it’s Lex and Dan who get the questions about actually doing things.
Go to the podcast page.
Tanya Reynolds and Jason Sudeikis in “Ted Lasso.”“Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV, which was no sure thing after the series more or less wrapped up in May of 2023. But it’s back for a fourth season, in which—after an episode-long visit to Ted’s home of Kansas City—the football-turned-soccer coach returns to Richmond, where—as teased at the end of season 3—a new women’s team is launching and just might need a coach.
I’ve seen the first half of the season, and I’m happy to report that though the teams have changed, this is still “Ted Lasso” through and through. Thematically the first three seasons were about Ted’s journey in running away from a dissolving marriage. With season four, a whole new set of themes begin to emerge.
Yes, love ’em or hate ’em Ted’s homespun aphorisms still abound. The relationship between owner Rebecca and marketing genius Keely continues to be as strong as ever. Higgins is still doing his Higgins stuff. Mae is still tending bar. Those three fans in the pub are as random as ever. But in coaching a barely-formed women’s team that is in desperate need of players and fans, “Ted Lasso” returns to its roots as an underdog story, which helps make the whole thing feel more like the show’s first season. (There’s even a press conference scene that is disastrous for entirely different reasons from the original.)
It’s great to have series co-creator Brendan Hunt back as Coach Beard, but the addition of Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) as Alice Chilton introduces a new dynamic. Chilton is the only coach who can go into the locker room without permission, she thinks she deserves the managerial job, and she’s got some serious anger control problems. Reynolds adds a lot of grit to the proceedings, preventing it from becoming too much of a sickeningly sweet reunion love-fest.
The character least served from the season, at least so far as I’ve seen, is breakout character Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). He’s there and has some moments, but since he’s the manager of the men’s team, he’s often relegated being a gruff, bearded question mark attached to questions about his relationship status with Keeley. I appreciate the ironic turnabout of the men’s manager being an afterthought who’s only relevant in terms of his romantic storylines, but I do wonder if Roy is too strong of a character to be served in such limited doses.
Anyway, the best review I can give to season four of “Ted Lasso” is that each episode made me laugh out loud, a lot. Not only was it nice to see these familiar characters again, but the show did the most important job any comedy has—it’s funny. Welcome back, coach.
The almost-natural-language notepad calculator Soulver’s latest release adds better tools for calculating durations or intervals between dates and times, planning travel itineraries, tracking inflation, finding distances, performing bandwidth math, and splitting restaurant bills or other expenses. That’s not all, but a good starting list. Should it do all these things? A point we could argue about! But many of the features it offered in the past, and several of the new ones it provides, previously required one or more web searches to find a tool or to pull together disparate information. That’s welcome.
Soulver 4’s release comes at an interesting time, when many people have turned to chatbots and Google’s search dialog—and soon will turn to Siri AI—to answer questions that are better written out or spoken than described as just numbers or operators.
This significant update succeeds in bringing a sort of authoritative basis to stuff you need to calculate or convert. Behind the scenes, there’s no inference or autocompletion—it’s numbers, baby, all the way down. However, the developers aren’t unaware of the AI glow-up. They’ve addressed it in an interesting way, making it easy for agents to ask questions of Soulver!
Soulver 4 lets you perform a variety of calculations that transform units, days, distances, and vastly more than I can show.How many bushels in a peck as I travel a furlong faster than a parsec?Soulver has filled a gap for me in my calculating needs since I dug into the subject in 2015. While I love PCalc and use it for regular and advanced calculator needs, Soulver is where I go when I need to mix things up.1
PCalc and Soulver offer overlapping Venn diagrams of what’s possible in number space, but they are distinctly different beasts at heart. Where PCalc mostly calculates within a calculator-style interface, Soulver mostly offers a way to make sense of numbers, units, percentages, time, intervals, and much more. I think of it as a “take stuff in various units or other formulations and then produce an output in a way I want” tool.
I sometimes go days without using Soulver, and then find myself typing in an array of calculations. For instance, as a tiny print book publisher (it’s just me), I am often dealing with the weight of paper, the weight of books, the cost of shipping, and other variables. The number of sheets I have in some of my Numbers documents is alarming, but I often need conversion that sounds like a story problem: “The printer in Canada is giving me paper weight in gsm (grams per square meter). I know the book’s area per page (typically in inches). I need to calculate the weight of 1,000 copies in pounds.” I can type the query faster than I describe it. For instance, I need to estimate the weight of a new book based on the weight and page count of one I am holding:
(6 inches x 9 inches) / (5.875 inches × 8.25 inches) × (352 / 204) × 302g in lbs
Version 4 continues to offer all of what I consider its basics. You type out numbers and units with operators between them. You can set variables, add comments, and drag results into subsequent lines as part of further calculations. You can force-convert units, as above, telling it to use a metric unit instead of imperial, or to use a different unit scale. Say you want inches instead of feet, or kilograms instead of pounds.
Because it’s a notepad, your work is persistent. You can use Soulver to create the equivalent of tabs within sheets, collected into a “sheetbook.” This is somewhat like the Notes app, and it lets you organize calculations into projects and sub-projects. I have a monolithic sheet I use for essentially everything. Soulver can store files locally or sync via iCloud.
I use Soulver for a lot of different purposes, sometimes several times a day.Where version 4 starts to diverge from previous releases is in what feels like a baroque set of options that aren’t stapled on, but most require a bit more effort to get the nuance and make them work for you.
How much did Minions & Monsters make in 1940 dollars?It took me a few weeks to write this review, quite honestly, because every time I looked at the upgrade page, my eyes glazed over as I thought about how to best present this. I mean, the release notes page is broken into ten sections. The answer—which didn’t require Soulver 4—is that I need to cherry-pick more than usual for an app to give you the flavor.
Here are a few new elements that will keep me away from search engines and other resources more than any other:
Inflation calculation. As a historian, and as somebody who just wants to use his numeracy to interpret the world, I find myself jumping for an inflation calculator all the time.2 You need an online source, as it has to have a table of the historical values to provide the correct cumulative percentage between two years or dates. Because of the relatively high inflation in developed nations since the start of the pandemic, I find myself trying to understand why I’m staring at a jar of peanut butter and can’t comprehend what it costs now. (Soulver currently does annual inflation calculations, but will add monthly data in a future update.)
It’s a date: Date math is the hardest math, in my experience. Soulver previously let you perform the magic of subtracting one date from another or adding days to a date to figure out the right month, day, and year. In the update, you can do more tricks, like figuring out work hours (set by default, and you can change) in periods of time or differences, calculating relative to cultural and religious holidays, finding the number of daylight hours in a particular place, and (as should be obvious so far) much more. As a person of the Jewish faith, I honestly never know when Hanukkah starts, and Soulver doesn’t appear to know either. (Soulver says Hanukkah is coming in a future update.) However, it does include Christmas and Ramadan; there’s no list of this category, but you can look in Soulver: Settings: Dates & Times and click Public holidays to see that list, set by your region.
How far away? I don’t know about you, but I regularly want to know the distance between two places, sometimes nearby, sometimes far away. Soulver 4 lets you ask, distance between [place name] and [place name], and get the proper curvature-adjusted distance. (I have a proviso about this that you can read at the end.)
How long to upload? I’ve used Soulver for bandwidth and file-transfer time calculations since I first installed it. With the latest release, you don’t have to punch in nearly as many units or conversions to get an answer to a question like time to upload 1TB at 900Mbps. (Answer: 2.47 hours.)
Elements you’ll find added or improved that I haven’t found a particular use for yet but seem significant include:
- Better formatting: You can highlight expression lines with one of eight preset colors, as well as add divider lines. This makes data in sheets easier to parse. In addition to the previously available export function, Soulver 4 lets you email sheets to yourself with full HTML formatting.
You can plan itineraries in Soulver 4, which will calculate hours or days and reveal when you haven’t left enough time. Trip planning:* I’ll be honest that this feature looks powerful, but requires breaking out of the Soulver mold, as it uses a multi-line approach by defining the top and bottom of the trip range as a “time point” via the contextual menu. However, because of how it calculates time intervals and provides warnings if the duration you’ve set doesn’t fit, you can use it for short itineraries (getting to the airport on time) or planning a long trip.
It’s a fair division, given how much I ate at this lunch.One of the many ways tags can be used in Soulver 4 for tracking line-based expenses without resorting to a spreadsheet. Tags workflow: Coders are amazing people, and you can see that in the simplicity and complexity of this tagging feature. When you tag a line with a hashtag and a tag name, the associated value can be summed, and operations can be performed on it. For instance, you can tag everyone’s individual orders on a dinner bill, add in tax and tip, and then have it divvied out. But that’s just one example. A spreadsheet could be easier, but it can also be overkill. * A command-line interface:* If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like a GUI, a command-line approach to Soulver might fit you, but the developers created it mostly to allow a simple way for you to have various other things, whether scripts, editor plug-ins, or coding agents, use Soulver as a kind of engine of numerical accuracy.
Weather goest thou?Soulver is a $59 one-time purchase and gives you access to Mac, iPhone, and iPad versions. (There’s a 60-day free trial to test it out.) While that might seem high, I think given inflation—wink, wink—that’s comparable to the $30–$40 we might pay for a single-platform great utility in 2010! The iPhone version can be purchased on its own for $15. Soulver 3 owners pay $29 to upgrade to version 4. You can also get Soulver 4 via the $15 a month Setapp subscription, and have full access to it and over 330 other apps.
But you might run into one not-quite-hidden subscription option if you make certain weather or stock queries. With the App Store version of Soulver, $26 a year gives you access to what the app labels Live Weather (a number of current metrics), Live & Historical Stocks (a deep trove of data and real-time), and Inline Knowledge Assistant (which lets you use Wolfram|Alpha). It’s included at no extra cost for Setapp subscribers.
An optional subscription provides access to more data, but most people won’t need it.I ran afoul of an aspect of this in testing, as Soulver (as of 4.0.2) included about the top 700 most populous cities and leaned on Wolfram for more, but didn’t prompt me as to why it couldn’t identify a city I mentioned. Developer Zac Cohan said the next minor update will add dynamic place-name lookups as part of the base price to reduce confusion and better fit the user base.
This subscription is not at all necessary to use Soulver 4, and Zac says the vast majority of Soulver users don’t need it. However, the cost to provide the data and services is too high to include for all users, hence the subscription to defray those costs.
- Disclosure: I wrote a version of the PCalc manual several years ago for a flat fee. ↩
- Minions & Monsters reportedly grossed $450 million as of July 1, 2026, which is $18.7 million in January 1940 dollars.) ↩
From an un-bylined post on OpenAI’s site:
Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.
The post itself includes numerous transcripts of message conversations1 and emails that supposedly bolster OpenAI’s case that it studiously avoided using Apple information.
This is, as The Verge’s Jess Wetherbed notes, a pure public opinion play. Because if they have evidence, the only correct answer is “we’ll see you in court.”
What kept running through my head while reading this was the old legal chestnut: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
- I can’t call them screenshots because even though they superficially resembles Messages, they are subtly off—the font, for example, is not correct. I’m not sure if it’s a screenshot of a third-party app that looks like Messages, or a wholesale re-creation of the conversations in a Messages-like format. My hunch is the latter, but I don’t know. As my pal Lex Friedman points out, it’s all done in HTML, so clearly just a re-creation. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Dan Moren joins the Upgrade program to discuss the new Apple Upgrade program, along with Apple’s financial results, the approach of Apple’s new home strategy, and the perfect phone for iPhone 13 mini fans.
Go to the podcast page.
The reckoning is coming. Apple has done it before, and it’s doing it again. After macOS 27 Golden Gate, you will no longer be able to run legacy Intel apps using Rosetta 2. After the 26.4 update in March, when running any affected app in macOS 26 Tahoe, you see a notification banner when you launch affected software or a background component launches that uses Intel code:
Support Ending for Intel-based Apps. This version of “[App Name Here]” will not open in a future release of macOS. Learn how to update to an Apple silicon version. [Learn More pop-up menu]
Whenever you launch an Intel-only app, macOS politely tells you the end is coming.There is one carveout noted for “certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks,” so far unnamed.
With information in hand, you can plan how to deal with Intel-only apps that have been abandoned, or the developers have seemingly no interest in updating. Printer makers are, so far, the worst.
A history of looking backwardApple has done this before—many times, in fact. I’ve argued in the past that one of Apple’s key strengths, and a key to the continuity of the Mac’s operating system, is how well it’s managed transitions across chip architectures, frameworks, and operating system changes.1
Look at what Apple has managed:
- Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC (silent emulator)
- Mac OS 9.1 (or later) to Mac OS X (Classic)
- PowerPC to Intel (Rosetta, original flavor)
- 32-bit to 64-bit code (warnings)
- Intel to Apple silicon M-series chips (Rosetta 2)
At each of those milestones, Apple offered either advance warnings about a future lack of compatibility, an emulator tool, or both. Does anyone have fond memories of running QuarkXPress using Classic in Mac OS X in its early days? When it crashed, which was often, it only took down the Classic “app” and didn’t require a Mac restart.
To be fair, Apple could have continued to let older software run for as long as it was willing to devote time to maintaining emulators or compatibility layers. We could be using apps written for Motorola 68030s on our M5 Macs right now! However, it makes increasingly less sense to support the past after a reasonable transition, particularly one that stretches years and sees the company discontinuing compatible hardware.
Apple released the last Intel-based model in August 2020, introduced its first M-series computer in November 2020, and halted sales of computers with Intel inside in 2023.
As part of this shift, you receive the Intel software warning, not just the first time you launch an affected app or an Intel-based component or even Terminal-accessed binary runs, but the next time you do it after a restart. Yes, it is trying to bug you to get a newer version of your software. Golden Gate also pulls an interesting trick: When you upgrade, it removes the Rosetta emulator. You’re prompted to install it the first time you need Intel code. I guess this is an extra spur to remind you.
Because Intel-only apps will continue to work under Rosetta until you install macOS 28 Dumbarton, these reminders will continue for at least another 16 months or so.2 Once you upgrade to macOS 28, those apps and components will simply stop working.
Sunsets can be beautifulUse Golden Gate to review a list of Intel-only apps, although third-party apps can provide more information.Apple includes a helpful tool in Golden Gate in System Settings: General: About. Click Details next to Intel-based Apps, and a dialog box appears that lists everything installed that requires Rosetta. As a nice touch, Apple shows you apps launched in the last year, along with when, so you know the most critical to upgrade or swap out.
Golden Gate will list all the apps (but not all components) that require Rosetta.You can also examine any app in the Finder, choose Get Info from the File menu, and note the warning next to Kind. Apple allows apps to be compiled as universal binaries that include both Intel and Apple silicon code, and offers an Open using Rosetta checkbox that was useful in the early days of the swapover when some M-series versions of an app were missing features or were buggy compared to the Intel version. You sometimes checked that box to use the more stable Intel variety, and then surely forgot about it. (For instance, Adobe updated its primary apps faster than third parties did their plug-ins. To use some Photoshop plug-ins, you had to force Photoshop to run in emulation.)
The Get Info dialog is a way to check on the code status of an app.Hover over the item, and you can click Visit Website if Apple has a link to one, or click the More … button and choose Show App in Finder or Move to Trash. Not every app or component has a Move to Trash item, and I’m not sure why. I also suggest installing AppCleaner, a free app that will root out all files associated with an app when it’s deleted. (Turn on SmartDelete to monitor the Trash, or you can drag apps onto it.) This ensures you’re not leaving cruft behind when you get rid of the app proper.
This is all fine for rooting out installed apps, but Apple may not catch every system component, command-line utility, or other software that lives in crevices and emerges in particular conditions. For that, you should take a look at:
- Go64: The free app from St. Clair Software, the makers of our favorite app, Default Folder X, provides details in a list form.
- Rosetta Check ($7): Turn to Rosetta Check for even more information about each unsupported app, which may be useful if you have a lot of software to work through updating.
- HoudahSpot: If you use HoudahSpot, you can construct a search.
A few companies that have Intel-only apps or components have explained their migration path, with PaperCut being an excellent example. Others without any financial incentive—such as hardware makers, who sometimes barely care about compatibility for software required to support their products—may wait until after the 2027 transition to wake up and make changes. This has happened many times before!
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Apparently, I wrote about this 20 years ago, in reviewing the Intel Core Duo iMac, a review and computer I have zero recollection of. ↩
- Dumbarton Bridge, south of the Golden Gate, is highly underappreciated. ↩
I’m still the boss, kid.I’ve been covering Apple financial results and earnings calls for a very long time, dating back to my time at Macworld when Steve Jobs would occasionally parachute into earnings calls presided over by, among other people, Tim Cook! This week’s earnings call was Cook’s 90th and final installment, and that’s probably the most notable thing about it.
Even the fact that it was a record third quarter isn’t that notable. It’s more notable when Apple doesn’t set a quarterly record, especially given economic changes and inflation.
Still, as always, the results and the earnings call provided a few things I thought were worth pointing out. And so, powered by my second cup of tea while I’m on a summer trip to visit family (that was a late-night flight!), here are some thoughts about financial things.
It’s not a chip shortage, it’s demandApple is having supply-constraint problems. Maybe you’ve noticed the lack of new Mac minis and Mac studios? The Mac is the hardest-hit product line when it comes to supply, but Cook said the iPhone has also been affected, and anticipates constraints on the iPad as well.
This isn’t the whole story, of course, but it is part of it—and a part that Apple wants to crow about. Apple is limited in how many Macs, iPhones, and iPads it can sell because they are all powered by systems-on-chips that are coming off of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor’s most advanced production nodes. Here’s how Cook put it:
The root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do. And we had high expectations, so it wasn’t that our expectations were low, but as you can see from iPhone’s growth being 22% and Mac’s growth at 29%… these are extraordinary numbers and the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal. So we’ve been pulling supply ahead, and at some point there’s a limit to that. And so we’ve got a quarter that we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side, essentially.
This isn’t a partner or supplier issue. This issue is an incredibly strong… iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation.
You can’t argue with the strong iPhone and Mac sales figures, and Apple specifically called out the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo, which Cook said “has been especially popular” and suggested that the company is still struggling to make them fast enough.
It’s admirable (and sensible) that Cook isn’t pointing fingers at anyone but customers who want Apple products, but the key phrase in his statement is “the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal.” This is an acknowledgement that while in the past, Apple might have been able to boost chip production from its partners, today the chip industry is maxed out thanks to the wild building of chips for AI applications.
Still, I do take Cook at his word: Even in a normal world, there’s only so much TSMC could do to rapidly respond to a dramatic increase in chip orders from Apple. I’m sure Apple is kicking itself for not anticipating stronger demand, especially given how tight the whole industry has gotten. And Cook’s suggestion that Apple is going to be “scrambling on the supply side” because the impact will “increase significantly” (and Cook really emphasized that word!) suggests that this may get worse before it gets better.
Oh yeah, and this isn’t just about cutting-edge SOCs. It goes for memory too. According to Cook, the price Apple pays for memory just keeps going up, and the offsetting Apple has been able to do by using existing inventory is going to be less effective as supplies run out.
As an aside, Cook also alluded to reports that Apple has tried to get the U.S. government to authorize purchase of RAM from some forbidden Chinese chipmakers, which has aroused political ire. “Obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side.”
How does Apple increase prices?One of the analysts on the earnings call asked a question about Apple’s recent price increases, which was a great opportunity for Cook to explain Apple’s pricing philosophy.
It started out pretty normal, with Cook pointing out the price increases were done “reluctantly” and only because it’s “a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing.” But then it got more philosophical:
In terms of our philosophy on dollars or percentages, we look at units, revenue, and margin, and then come to a business judgment as to how to handle that. And so it’s not a mathematical formula that gets us to a specific result or just looking at one dimension of that. We look at all three dimensions and think about it over the long term instead of a 90-day clock. Hopefully that helps.
Yep, that helps, Tim. Three-dimensional pricing. Imagine pricing as a cube, and you’ll finally see the Matrix.
Soft Services storiesServices revenue, while up year-over-year, was (shockingly?) not up sequentially for the first time in more than three years. Apple laid most of the blame at various foreign-exchange rate “headwinds,” but CFO Kevan Parekh also tried to blame the softness on a few other factors:
- Theatrical gross from “F1: The Movie” last year
- “Headwinds in mobile gaming”
- Changes to the App Store business model worldwide, mostly driven by regulation
- The U.S. court order allowing developers to link out of Apple’s payment model without penalty
It felt like a real stretch, and more of an opportunity to complain about the App Store being regulated and litigated. But I will admit that a softening in mobile gaming, which obviously drives a lot of App Store revenue, is an interesting data point. And it’s more interesting that Apple felt it was worth sharing.
But, Parekh went on to say, “Despite this, the App Store did set a June quarter revenue record.” So… maybe not the reason for the softness after all?
Apple is an EGOTDid you know that Steven Spielberg just won a Grammy award, which made him an EGOT? Winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony is a pretty rare accomplishment that any individual should be proud of.
But did you know that large corporations are also keeping score? It’s true.
“It was wonderful to see Apple TV earn the industry’s top honors, adding Tony Awards this year to its Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar wins,” Cook said Thursday. “We reached that milestone faster than any streamer in history.”
I wonder which marketing person at Apple had the job of figuring out how quickly every other streamer became an EGOT. Also, thanks to cancelled series “Schmigadoon” for the Tony. Maybe do everyone a solid and bring it back?
This was TimThrough the earnings call, financial analysts showed their softer side by thanking Cook for all his years of service and revenue generation. Cook made a point of thanking them all individually before answering their questions, which I thought was a nice, and human, touch. He also made a final farewell statement designed to warm Wall Street hearts:
Thank you to all of you, from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era. He is truly one of a kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company.
Oh! The new guy! I didn’t even mention it, but John Ternus was on the call the entire time, and didn’t say a peep. At least, not until Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America decided to devote one of his two questions to him. He threw him a softball about how the competitive landscape is changing overall.
Ternus did not pick up the ball.
“Well, thank you for asking,” Ternus said, rousing from his call-long slumber. “I guess I would just reiterate what Tim said, there is so much opportunity for us with everything that’s happening in this space, and we’re just really focused on our plans and very excited about it.”
Deferring to the big guy and not letting Wamsi Mohan bait you into stealing Cook’s moment. That’s future CEO thinking right there, pal.
Tim Cook signals for victory!For the 90th and final time, Apple CEO Tim Cook hopped on a conference call with financial-industry analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe take one final victory lap. CFO Kevan Parekh and incoming CEO John Ternus were there, too.
This is Six Colors’s complete transcript of the call for July 30, 2026.
Tim Cook’s introductionThank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is pleased to report $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year ago and a June quarter record. We were able to achieve this despite supply constraints and sequential foreign exchange headwinds.
We continue to see enormous customer enthusiasm for our most popular lineup ever, with iPhone revenue growing 22% from a year ago to reach a June quarter record. We saw so much excitement around the best Mac lineup we’ve ever had, growing a strong 29% to achieve a June quarter revenue record. Services also set a June quarter record with $30.7 billion in revenue.
We achieved June quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. We were pleased to see strength across the board with June quarter records in the U.S., Latin America, Western Europe, India, China mainland, Japan, and Southeast Asia. We also achieved June quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets and saw double-digit growth in most emerging markets.
This year’s WWDC was a wonderful showcase of our latest innovations. We were tremendously excited to unveil the all-new Siri AI, a completely reimagined version of Siri that is profoundly capable, deeply personal, and integrated seamlessly across our platforms. And we’ve been absolutely thrilled by the response who’ve been using Siri AI in the developer and public betas. The reviews from early users have been phenomenal, and it’s been so wonderful to hear from people who are excited about the capabilities we’ve built. And it underscores our philosophy that building AI that is private and based on personal context can change how users find information and get things done with our products in a way that truly enriches their lives. We really couldn’t be more excited about it, and we are feeling incredibly enthusiastic about the impact it’s going to have.
At WWDC we also announced new tools to help parents keep kids safe online and we were pleased by the overwhelmingly positive reaction. New child safety features like Ask to Browse and Time Allowances will help parents encourage kids to develop healthy digital habits. These new tools integrate guidance from leading clinical and child development research, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. Our goal is to make it easier for parents to manage what their children see, who they interact with, and how and when they can use their devices. We’re looking forward to bringing these new capabilities to users this fall, in addition to amazing new updates across our operating systems.
Now let me turn to the results for the quarter, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue for the June quarter was $54.3 billion, up 22% from a year ago. We achieved June quarter records in every geographic segment, and set a June quarter record for upgraders. According to IDC, we gained share globally during the quarter. As I’ve said before, this is the most powerful and most popular iPhone lineup we’ve ever had. More people are relying on iPhone every day for AI, powered by the outstanding performance of A19 and A19 Pro. Across the lineup, iPhone continues to deliver the performance, battery life, durability, and camera capabilities that people count on every day. Whether it’s the extraordinary camera system of iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the remarkably thin design of iPhone Air, the balanced performance and durability of iPhone 17, or the exceptional value of iPhone 17E, there’s an iPhone for every customer.
Mac delivered its best June quarter yet, with $10.4 billion in revenue, growing an impressive 29% from a year ago despite significant supply constraints. This revenue growth was driven by the incredible strength of our latest lineup, with MacBook Pro and the all-new MacBook Neo. According to IDC, we gained share globally. We also set a June quarter revenue record in developed markets and an all-time record in emerging markets with particular strength in Greater China, where we had an all-time revenue record. In addition, we achieved all-time records for upgraders and customers new to Mac.
With the power of Apple Silicon, the Mac lineup delivers outstanding power-efficient performance, massive memory bandwidth, and next-level AI capabilities. Mac continues to be the ultimate AI powerhouse, excelling at high throughput, on-device inference, and creation across a broad range of AI workloads. And we’re seeing customers increasingly put those capabilities to work, from using Mac Mini as a powerful platform for agentic AI to deploying clusters of Mac Studio systems to run frontier-class models locally.
Across the lineup, customers continue to embrace the Mac family. MacBook Neo has been especially popular, with its distinct design and excellent value resonating with customers around the world, and we’re continuing to work hard to meet demand. MacBook Air, the world’s most popular laptop, continues to deliver the portability and performance customers love with M5. And MacBook Pro, powered by M5 Pro and M5 Max, remains a go-to choice for professionals tackling the most demanding AI, development, and creative workflows.
In iPad, revenue was $6.2 billion for the June quarter. iPad continues to be the ultimate go-anywhere, do-anything device for students, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds, thanks to its incredible power, portability, and versatility. The addition of M4 to iPad Air has made it even more capable, delivering a significant performance boost for everything from personal productivity and immersive learning to advanced creative workflows. Together with a remarkable performance of iPad Pro, the amazing value and versatility of iPad, and the ultra-portable iPad Mini, we’re offering customers our strongest iPad lineup ever.
Revenue for Wearables, Home, and Accessories was $7.9 billion, up 6% from a year ago. We grew in every geographic segment and achieved a June quarter record for upgraders for Apple Watch. Our Apple Watch lineup brings together the most comprehensive set of health and fitness features we’ve ever had. We’re delivering useful features backed by research to enable users to better understand their health and wellbeing. It’s gratifying to receive almost daily reminders of the meaningful impact Apple’s health innovations are having for users all over the world—changing, even saving lives.
Meanwhile, we continue raising the bar across our AirPods lineup, whether it’s the immersive listening experience of AirPods Pro 3, or the premium listening experience and exceptional active noise cancellation of AirPods Max 2. And with live translation powered by Apple Intelligence, people are crossing language barriers and connecting like never before.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re excited about the work we’re doing on the next generation of Apple Intelligence, including Siri AI and the AI features we’re developing across our platforms. These experiences are intuitive and useful, while also deeply integrated in a way that’s personal and private, with the latest models running on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. We began laying the groundwork for users to have the best possible experience with AI when we introduced the Neural Engine in 2017. Ever since then, we’ve innovated and invested deliberately in silicon, systems, and scalable unified memory architecture designed with AI at their core.
What sets Apple apart is the unique combination of massive unified memory bandwidth, industry-leading power-efficient performance, and deep on-device intelligence, all built around the customer experience from the ground up. The result is that Apple has created the world’s best hardware to experience AI, whether using Apple Intelligence, including Siri AI, or third-party offerings. That’s why developers and researchers are increasingly using Apple devices to build ever-more advanced tools and models.
Turning to services, revenue was $30.7 billion, a June quarter revenue record and up 12% from a year ago, despite significant sequential foreign exchange headwinds. We also set an all-time revenue record in developed markets and a June quarter record in emerging markets. Apple TV continues to leave audiences spellbound with new releases like Widow’s Bay and Cape Fear alongside returning favorites like Silo and Sugar. And next week, we’re excited that Ted Lasso is back for its fourth season.
It was wonderful to see Apple TV earn the industry’s top honors, adding Tony Awards this year to its Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar wins. We reached that milestone faster than any streamer in history. We’re also looking forward to this year’s Emmy Awards, where Apple has landed a record 89 nominations, leading all networks in both the major drama and comedy series categories with three outstanding drama series nominations and three outstanding comedy series nominations. Widows Bay also stands out as the year’s most nominated new program, earning 19 Emmy nominations. In the six and a half years since launch, Apple TV has earned more than 850 wins and nearly 3,800 nominations.
In time for the World Cup, we expanded Apple Sports to include more than 170 countries and regions worldwide and made it easier than ever for fans to follow every moment of the tournament from the opening game to the final whistle. At the same time, we’re halfway through an unforgettable year of F1, and Apple TV subscribers have been tuning in all season to follow their favorite drivers and teams.
In retail, we were pleased to announce Apple Upgrade this week for customers in the U.S. Apple Upgrade is a new hardware leasing program launched in partnership with Klarna and makes it even easier for customers to get their hands on Apple’s latest products with a plan that’s right for them.
In all of our work, we’re thoughtful and intentional in how we show up for our users and across our communities. That means innovating to protect user privacy with the next of Apple Intelligence or helping parents keep kids safe, as I mentioned earlier. In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we unveiled new features to help users get more out of the products they use every day. New intelligent capabilities are coming to VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader to make them more useful and intuitive. We’re also using on-device speech recognition to generate subtitles for video content without captions. And Apple Vision Pro is adding a feature for power wheelchair users to control drive systems using just their eyes. All of these features were born out of Apple’s longstanding commitment to ensuring that the benefits of technology are shared with everyone.
As we continue to develop new capabilities for users around the world, we’re also doing our part to invest in innovation close to home. Last year, we made a $600 billion commitment to the U.S. over four years, and now, as we said before, we plan to reinvest the tariff refunds we’ve received into the U.S.
We’re pleased with the progress we’ve already made advancing the American supply chain. Earlier this month, Apple announced a new agreement with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting-edge wireless connectivity technologies. The new, multi-year agreement with Broadcom, which is part of Apple’s American Manufacturing Program, is expected to exceed $30 billion. This marks our largest-ever American Manufacturing Program commitment. It’s also an important step forward in our work to build an end-to-end silicon supply chain here in the U.S.
We’re excited for the upcoming opening of the Apple Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. The center is located in a facility where we currently assemble advanced AI servers. Later this year, we’ll make Mac mini there, too. The center will teach students, supplier employees, and business of all sizes, the same innovative processes we use to make our products. The goal is to empower American manufacturers to take their work to the next level and strengthen the entire advanced manufacturing ecosystem.
We have an exciting fall ahead and an incredible future beyond. Our road map is phenomenal, and we are so excited about the way Siri AI will enrich our users lives. Throughout all of it, we will remain guided by our North Star: building the best products and services to enable people to do magical things. It’s a special privilege to be part of people’s lives in lasting and meaningful ways, helping them to create, connect, and experience the world around them. I couldn’t be more excited to watch our phenomenal story of innovation continue to unfold, and I’ve never been more confident that the best is yet to come. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevan.
Kevan Parekh’s opening remarksThanks, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Here’s a quick rundown of our key financial metrics. Our revenue of $109.4 billion was up 16% year over year, a June quarter revenue record. We saw strong performance around the world with double-digit growth in every geographic segment despite supply constraints. Products revenue was $78.7 billion, up 18% year over year, driven by double-digit growth on iPhone and Mac, both of which set new June quarter records.
Our installed base of over two and a half billion active devices has reached another all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments. Services revenue was $30.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year. We set revenue records in every Services category, including all-time records in cloud services and payment services. Company gross margin was 50.1%, up 80 basis points sequentially. This included a benefit from tariff refunds, which had a favorable impact of approximately two percentage points. When you remove this favorable impact, we would have been at the midpoint of the guidance provided last quarter.
Products gross margin was 40.1%, up 140 basis points sequentially. This also included a benefit from the tariff refunds I just mentioned, which had a favorable impact of over 2.5 percentage points. Services gross margin was 75.6%, down 110 basis points sequentially, driven by a different mix. Operating expenses came in at $19.1 billion, up 23% year-over-year, driven by investments in R&D. Net income was $29.8 billion. Diluted earnings per share was $2.02, up 29% year-over-year, and included 11 cents of favorable impact from tariff refunds. Operating cash flow was very strong at $34.4 billion. All three of these metrics set June quarter records, even when excluding the tariff refund benefit.
Now I’m going to provide some more details for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was $54.3 billion, up 22% year-over-year, driven by the iPhone 17 family. We grew double digits in the vast majority of markets we track and reached June quarter revenue records across both developed and emerging markets. The iPhone active installed base grew to an all-time high and set a June quarter record for upgraders. According to a recent survey from Worldpanel, iPhone was a top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, the U.K., France, Australia, and Japan. We were thrilled with the response to the iPhone 17 family. Customer satisfaction in the U.S. was recently measured at 99% by 451 Research.
Mac revenue was $10.4 billion, up 29% year-over-year, a new June quarter record, driven by the strength of MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro. We grew in both developed and emerging markets, with strong double-digit growth in markets like Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. The customer reception to MacBook Neo has been incredible. We continue to attract new customers to the product around the world. As Tim mentioned, Mac had its best quarter ever for customers new to the Mac and for upgraders worldwide, including in the U.S., China mainland, and India. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction for Mac was recently measured at 95%.
iPad revenue was $6.2 billion, down 6% year-over-year, driven by the continued difficult compare against the launch of the A16 powered iPad in the prior year. At the same time, the iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, and over half of the customers who purchased an iPad were new to the product. And 451 Research recently measured customer satisfaction at 98% in the U.S.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $7.9 billion, up 6% year-over-year, driven by strength in wearables and accessories, and we saw growth in both developed and emerging markets. The wearables installed base reached a new all-time high. We set a June quarter record for upgraders on Apple Watch, and over half the customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction on Apple Watch was reported at 95%.
Our Services revenue reached a June quarter record of $30.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year, despite significant sequential FX headwinds. For the total services business, we saw a double-digit growth in the vast majority of markets we track. We set records in every category, with June quarter records in advertising, App Store, AppleCare, music, and video, as well as all-time records in cloud services and payment services. We are optimistic about the long-term future of our services business. With our large installed base of over two and a half billion active devices, we have an incredibly strong foundation for growth opportunities. Our services continue to attract more customers, and we have now surpassed $1.5 billion in paid subscriptions. Both transacting and paid accounts reached new all-time highs in the quarter, with double-digit growth for both in emerging markets. And we continue to improve and expand our services offerings, from powerful updates to Creator Studio to exciting new features we’re bringing to services later this year, like splitting bills with Apple Cash using Visual Intelligence.
Turning now to enterprise and education, organizations are using the Apple platform to drive AI innovation and empower the next generation of students. Starting with Enterprise, Morgan Stanley has deployed over 20,000 iPhone 17 devices globally as part of a shift from employee-owned to corporate-owned devices for liability and security. More companies are choosing Mac for on-device AI advantages, including lower costs, better performance, and enhanced privacy and security. At Disney, creative teams are increasingly turning to Mac for on-device AI workflows that reduce overall cloud token costs and keep their IP secure. And Credit Agricole, France’s leading retail bank, is using on-device AI and MacBook Pro to streamline regulatory workflows, reducing manual processing time by over 80%. Our newest addition to the Mac lineup, MacBook Neo, is reaching new enterprise users in many environments, from bank branches to retail storefronts.
In education, MacBook Neo continued to accelerate adoption of Apple products, with many districts leveraging Apple financial services to deploy at scale. Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, is transitioning 25,000 students from Windows devices to MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. And in Oklahoma, Midwest City-Dell City School District purchased over 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students. In fact, in the last quarter, about half of the MacBook Neo large purchases by U.S. education institutions displaced Windows and Chromebook devices.
Let’s turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $147 billion in cash and marketable securities and $84 billion in total debt. During the quarter, we returned $33 billion to shareholders. This included $4 billion in dividends and equivalents and $25.8 billion in share repurchases.
As we move ahead into the September quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to. Importantly, the color we’re providing assumes that global tariff rates, policies, and their application remain in effect as of this call, and the global macroeconomic outlook does not worsen from today.
We also expect our September quarter total company revenue to be impacted by two main factors. First, we expect foreign exchange to be a sequential headwind of about 2.5 percentage points to the year-over-year total company growth rate from the June quarter to the September quarter. Second, we expect the impact from supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially. The projected supply constraints in the September quarter affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad. As a result, we expect our September quarter total company revenue to grow between 9% and 11% year-over-year.
On iPhone, we expect to continue to see high levels of demand; however, we do expect iPhone revenue to be impacted by these foreign exchange headwinds and supply constraints. Therefore, we expect the September quarter reported growth rate for iPhone to be mid-teens year-over-year. For Services, we expect September quarter year-over-year reported growth rate to be largely similar to what we reported in the June quarter after removing the negative sequential impact of about two and a half percentage points from foreign exchange that we just described.
We expect gross margin to be between 47 percent and 48 percent. This includes an expected benefit of approximately one percentage point related to tariff refunds. We expect operating expenses to be between $19.1 billion and $19.4 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $350 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16.5 percent.
Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.27 per share of common stock payable on August 13, 2026, to shareholders of record as of August 10, 2026.
Before we take questions, let me turn it back over to Tim.
A farewell from TimThanks Kevan. Before we get into questions, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you. Thank you to all of you, from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era. He is truly one of a kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company.
As I’ve said, I couldn’t be more confident in his leadership, in our executive team, and in the extraordinary people at Apple who are determined to enrich the lives of our users all over the world. We have a bright future ahead, and I truly have never been more optimistic. So thank you all, and now Kevan and I will be happy to take your questions.
Analyst Q&AAmit Daryanani, Evercore: Tim, best of luck. It’s been a pleasure working with you over the years. Maybe to start with, if I think about the 9 to 11% sort of growth that’s guided for September, it’s about a 500 basis points or so deceleration versus what we’re seeing really in June quarter, even through this year, I would say. Can you just talk about how much of this decel is really supply constraint versus other factors like FX? And if you could just flesh out what these supply constraints are, broadening beyond these advanced SOCs you talked about last quarter as well.
Kevan Parekh: Amit, this is Kevan. How are you doing? Why don’t I start with just kind of describing the sequential change, and then I’ll let Tim jump in for kind of a bit more color around the supply constraints. So I think as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we expect the September quarter total revenue to grow by 9% to 11% year-over-year, and then we expect that to be impacted by two main factors. So first, when we look at going from the June quarter to September quarter, we expect foreign exchange to be a sequential headwind of around 2.5 percentage points to the year-over-year company growth rate. And then the second impact is that the impact from supply constraints, we expect that to increase significantly when we go sequentially from June to September, and that projected supply constraint in the September quarter will affect the iPhone, Mac, and the iPad. And really, when you combine those two factors, we get pretty close to the June overall total company growth rate.
Tim Cook: Yeah, Amit, it’s Tim. First of all, thank you for your comments. During the June quarter, we did experience supply constraints primarily on the Mac and to a lesser extent on iPhone and iPad. These were driven by very high levels of demand, and as we’ve said before, we are seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, and were primarily driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on. If you look forward then into the current quarter, the September quarter, we continue to expect high levels of demand. However, with less flexibility in supply chain, we expect the impact from the supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially. The projected supply constraints in the September quarter, as Kevan said, affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad. And so, we’re seeing some very significant constraints currently, with limited flexibility in the supply chain to remedy it.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Got it. That’s really helpful. Thanks a lot for that. And then, Tim, I just have a memory question for you. Apple has historically, I think, done a really excellent job about delivering capability and utility to customers without really making them pay disproportionately more. The stagnant memory inflation seems to challenge that equation for you folks right now and there are reports that suggest that you’re seeking greater sourcing flexibility for memory. Can you just talk about, is this sourcing options really about ensuring that you have supply and it’s a way to mitigate memory inflation, or is more to preserve the value proposition for your customers. Just any light you could shed on this would be helpful. Thank you.
Tim Cook: Yeah, let me back up and talk about memory in general, ’cause I know this is a subject on many of your minds. As I’d said on the last call, we paid more for memory in the March quarter than the December quarter. And then, as I alluded to last quarter, we expected to pay significantly more in the June quarter than the March quarter, and that is what happened. It was partially offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. For September, we expect to pay even higher memory costs. And we’re able to offset partly by a few factors, and let me walk through kind of what they are.
The first is, as you would expect, we have a benefit from some carry-in inventory in the September quarter. However, we believe this will see decreasing benefit from this over time, beyond the September quarter. The second is, we’re expecting lower costs on certain non-memory components that are in our BOM, and then if you look beyond September, we see the market pricing for memory continuing to increase, which could drive an increasing impact on our business, and we’re continuing to evaluate this.
In terms of the sources of supply, you know, primarily the DRAM market has three suppliers, and obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side. It’s unclear on the pricing side, but it could help on the supply side, and so, we’re evaluating all options.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Good afternoon. First, Tim, congratulations on the extraordinary run and [inaudible] on these earnings calls. In terms of my questions, I have two as well. First, on the Apple Upgrade program, could you talk a little bit about the expected adoption rates across your 2.5 billion device installed base in success? Do you see it shortening the replacement cycle for iPhone, or also having an equal impact to Mac and iPad, which may have not have benefited from device subsidies in the U.S. like iPhone has historically.
Tim Cook: Michael, first of all, thank you for your comments. I really appreciate that. If you look at the upgrade program, what it’s all about is making it easier for for customers to get their hands on our latest products with a leasing plan that’s right for them. And of course, as you know, the residual values on Apple products are generally much higher than the residual value on several of our competition, and so it’s a way to get into a product on a fairly affordable basis, particularly for those customers who want to upgrade on some kind of schedule, and so we’re very excited about it. It is offered in our retail stores, and so it’s not widely offered in all channels, and so we’ll see what the customer uptake is, but the early feedback on it is quite positive.
Kevan Parekh: Yeah, Michael, I just mentioned that it’s only available in the U.S. right now as well.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you. That’s very helpful, and then my second question, just on iOS 27 and Apple Intelligence. Went into public beta earlier this month. Could you talk about learnings from the public beta? Will the new Siri AI be a demand driver for iPhones this holiday? How does the Apple Intelligence usage to date in the open beta inform how you’re thinking about compute costs and the ability to recover some of those costs through iCloud Plus.
Tim Cook: Yeah, thank you for that. First of all, we are off the charts excited about Siri AI. We had a great reception from WWDC. We released the developer beta immediately after the keynote. The developer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The feedback from reviewers and so forth have been overwhelmingly positive. We released it to the public for a public beta a few weeks ago and the continued feedback is really, really great. I think it’s a very big idea have AI that’s private, that’s based on your personal context, and that’s integrated across the operating system, and so we couldn’t be happier with how things are going. In terms of what it means for compute cost, it’s obviously early going for us, and so I don’t want to say that we have a complete plan for that. We do believe there will be people that want to use it a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people can buy up the stack on iCloud Plus, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is. But we could not be more excited about where the product is.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for the question, and obviously, Tim, known you a long time, I’ll really miss you. I wanted to ask about the supply constraints again, and I think people are just trying to make sense of it a little bit this way, is that the Street had you at 12% growth for the quarter of September, and so you could argue that to get to the 10% you guided, that’s just the FX, and then in the first quarter, which is December, the Street has been decelerating quite a bit, to like 8% to 9%. So I think what we’re struggling with after hours here is how much these supply constraints really hit you in December and impact that because, you know, the Street did a pretty good job of taking that number into the higher single digits. You know, is there any guidance you can give us there as you see it, Tim? And we’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
Tim Cook: Let me talk about the constraints a little more and then Kevan can weigh in on the guidance for revenue. As I had mentioned before, the primary issue is advanced nodes that we run our SOCs on. That’s the primary supply constraint now, and the root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do. And we had high expectations, so it wasn’t that our expectations were low, but as you can see from iPhone’s growth being 22% and Mac’s growth at 29%, and the iPhone is 22% year to date as well, that these are extraordinary numbers and the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal. So we’ve been pulling supply ahead, and at some point there’s a limit to that. And so we’ve got a quarter that we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side, essentially. And Kevan, you want to add on the revenue guidance?
Kevan Parekh: Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Tim. Ben, let me jump in here. The dynamics Tim mentioned combined with the foreign exchange impact I mentioned earlier sequentially is really what’s built into the 9 to 11 percent guidance we’re giving for the September total company revenue year on year growth rate. Beyond September, we’re not providing any color. At this point I think you mentioned December, so we’re not providing any kind of color or guidance beyond the September quarter.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Ok. And then, if I could just ask, and you guys know what’s in the press all the time. But there’s this little company that is also building a fab in Arizona that you guys have been speculated you guys could work with that could potentially alleviate some, at least your silicon constraints. Is there any possibility that you guys broaden out your silicon providers in a reasonable time frame to alleviate these so we feel better about supply?
Tim Cook: Yeah, let me stress again, this isn’t a partner or supplier issue. This issue is an incredibly strong… it’s a great issue in some ways. It’s an incredibly strong iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation. In Arizona, we do source over 100 million components this year out of Arizona. And so, it is part of our $600 billion commitment to the U.S., and we could not be more pleased with how that fab has ramped and is producing for us.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Thanks so much for taking my questions, guys, and Tim, just echo what everyone is saying, it’s been a pleasure working with you. Hope to still talk to you in the future. I want to maybe focus on pricing here, Tim, and kind of unprecedented for you to take pricing in the ways that you have. I guess two related questions… Is it your intention to pursue some of these multi-year LTAs with your suppliers just to ensure access to supply at pre-agreed prices? And when you approach product pricing in this environment, is it your intention to protect product gross profit dollars? Is it your intention to protect product gross margins? We’d just love the kind of thought process behind the pricing.
Tim Cook: Yeah, on the pricing front, we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. And we did it because we’re in, what I would characterize as a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices, and so that was the rationale for it. In terms of our philosophy on dollars or percentages, we look at units, revenue, and margin, and then come to a business judgment as to how to handle that. And so it’s not a mathematical formula that gets us to a specific result or just looking at one dimension of that. We look at all three dimensions and think about it over the long term instead of a 90-day clock. Hopefully that helps.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, yeah, no, that does help. Thank you, Tim. And then just maybe a quick follow-up. I guess, Tim or Kevan. 12% services growth was just a bit below your guidance. I imagine FX maybe played a role there. I think the fiscal 4Q guidance assumes another deceleration. I think the math would imply below 10% year-over-year as reported. So can you maybe just help us understand the kind of function factors underlying that deceleration? And if that’s App Store, which I think some third-party data sources would suggest, is that a function of AI maybe reprioritizing time away from parts of the App Store? I just want to make sure we understand the moving pieces on services, please. Thank you so much.
Kevan Parekh: Hey, Eric. This is Kevan. I’ll take that one. So, let’s walk from kind of the 16 percent in our fiscal second quarter to kind of the 12% that we just talked about in the June quarter that you referenced, and we look at that, relative to the March quarter, foreign exchange was the main driver for the change in the year-on-year growth rate sequentially, and also a couple other factors to keep in mind. One is we had the theatrical release of F1, which is one of the highest grossing sports films in history, and this year we didn’t have a theatrical release. So that had a favorable impact on both the June quarter and also the September quarter in the year ago. We also had some factors that impacted the performance of the App Store. We did see some headwinds in mobile gaming, and then keep in mind, we also made some changes to the App Store business model in certain countries, and in the U.S., we do continue to operate under a court ruling impacting the link-out transactions. But we’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear our appeal. Despite this, the App Store did set a June quarter revenue record. So if we take a step back, there are several positive trends in the services business, and during the June quarter, we saw strong double-digit growth in categories like cloud services, video, payment services, and advertising, and we set revenue records in every category, with June quarter records in advertising, the App Store, AppleCare, Music, and Video, where Apple TV viewership reached an all-time high in the quarter. And then we also set all-time records in cloud services and payment services, where Apple Pay saw a record level of users in both developed and emerging markets. And services also had a June quarter record in emerging markets. And as we outlined in the prepared remarks, you know, our services continue to attract more customers, and we now have surpassed one and a half billion in paid subscriptions, and our transacting and paid accounts hit an all-time high, with double-digit growth in both those two and emerging markets.
So I think when I step back, if I look at, you know, kind of how we landed versus our expectations that we had outlined in the March quarter, for the June quarter, I would say that we roughly met our expectations, but we did see a bit more softness on mobile gaming in the App Store. As we go into the September quarter, what I would say is we expect foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind, and in fact this is a theme that’s impacting the services business moreso than the total company. We expect foreign exchange to drive about a 5 percentage point headwind to the year-on-year growth rate from the March to September quarter. So if we look at the sequential change from the June quarter, the 12% services we reported, to what we’re guiding for the September quarter, we are going to see another 2.5 point sequential headwind.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Thanks for taking the questions and also best wishes, Tim. I guess I want to… maybe it tethers with the memory pricing dynamic, but as you look at the demand that you’re seeing right now, I’m curious of how you assess whether or not you’ve seen any pull forward of demand either from the consumer or even the enterprise and education markets, and whether or not you’re factoring that into your views as we look forward at all.
Tim Cook: You’re talking about on iPhone, I assume, in general. We’ve been running at this 22% growth rate for the last while, for this cycle has been a 22% increase year to date, and so it’s not obvious in the data that what you’re asking is true. Obviously, we’ve now had to increase prices on iPad and Mac, and the price elasticity there, it’s just too early to come to a definitive conclusion of what happens there. Because it takes a little while for the channels to adjust since there’s channel inventory and it takes a while for the consumer to respond, and so we’ll understand that more in the weeks ahead.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Very helpful, and then as a quick follow-up, maybe more longer-term thematically, as AI proliferates towards the edge and more consumers utilize AI, I’m curious, Tim, if you see AI opening up additional opportunities. I can appreciate that you’re not going to give us specifics, but do you see other kind of addressable markets evolving from AI over time?
Tim Cook: Yes. I think there are enormous opportunities for Apple moving forward in AI. And I’m so excited about Siri AI and kind of where it is and where it’s going, and I’m excited about the feedback that we’re getting there, and of course, the ability to run some percentage of requests on device is also very strategic and sort of a competitive weapon, if you will. So I could not be more excited about the opportunities there.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Yes, thank you. Tim, first, congrats on your tenure as CEO. You joined back in 2011 when Apple reported $108 billion in revenue and you just delivered a quarter of $109 billion. So just an amazing journey.
Tim Cook: Thank you for that, I really appreciate it.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Yeah, sure, Tim, it’s been a pleasure. For my question, first on Siri AI, Do you expect that Siri AI would change the capital intensity of Apple, despite the fact that you have the ability to do so much differentiated workloads on device and you have this distributed compute? You do have some requests that go into the backend, both in your own first party cloud as well as third party. So is it right to think that the capital intensity of Apple will change in the future because of Siri AI?
Tim Cook: We use a hybrid model, as I know Kevan has reviewed with you earlier, and so we use some third-party cloud and we do our own data centers, and so there will be a mix. But generally speaking, as you know, we have been growing our OPEX and spending more in AI in general. Quite a bit more. And there are other locations on the P&L other than OPEX, like OCOGS, et cetera, that also have AI expenditures, and so we’ll see what Siri AI does from the cost side of it. But there’s also the ability when people use it a lot for them to move up on an iCloud plan as well, and so what the balance of that is, is a bit uncertain at the moment.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: And John, since you’re on the call, congrats on the new role. I’d love to get maybe just a high-level take from you if you think that the competitive landscape here is changing, especially as you hear about, potentially, companies like OpenAI building an AI-enabled competitive device or SpaceX AI potentially having a phone that could bypass some of the typical carrier tax. Just would love your high-level thoughts on how you see the competitive landscape evolving and Apple’s position there.
John Ternus: Well, thank you for asking. I guess I would just reiterate what Tim said, there is so much opportunity for us with everything that’s happening in this space, and we’re just really focused on our plans and very excited about it.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Hi, thanks for squeezing me in here and Tim, best wishes from my side as well. Maybe just for my first one, if I go back to WWDC when you announced Siri AI, you also did mention along with the rollout that probably we won’t have the initial rollout in China and Europe, so just wanted to get your thoughts on that front and any more color in terms of what hurdles you need to cross to be able to launch it in those regions.
Tim Cook: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question. Let me take them individually. If you look at the EU, we’re working closely with the Commission. Obviously, our complete desire is to launch everything everywhere at the same time. That’s always the philosophy that we have. We have not been able to do that in the European Union, but we’re working closely with them to try to get to something that would allow us to offer Siri AI there. It is offered, or will be offered for the Mac there, because the Mac is not covered by the same regulations as the iPhone and the iPad. So, net-net, we’re working with them, and hope to reach some sort of solution. If you then look at China, last week we received approval to ship sort of the original features of Apple Intelligence. Things like Clean Up and so forth, and so we’re working now through the rollout of those, and there will be more work required down the road for Siri AI, but we’re at the front end of that.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Follow-up, Kevan, just not to beat sort of this FX thing to death here, but if I look at the gross margin, you delivered 48% in the quarter without the tariff refund benefit. You’re guiding to like 46 and a half. Any way to walk us through the sequential driver there and how much of that is FX impacting it versus maybe like increased commodity costs that’s driving that sequential moderation because it does seem a bit more atypical than your normal sort of years.
Kevan Parekh: Yes, that’s a good question. So let me walk through kind of what’s impacting our gross margins. We look at our gross margin change from the 49.3% we had a total company level for the March quarter, and as you mentioned, the 48.1% adjusted for the tariff refund in the June quarter, that hundred and twenty basis point change, if you look at the drivers of that, more than 100% of that can be explained by the memory cost change that Tim outlined. While FX was a factor, really the main driver was really the memory cost impact, and as Tim outlined earlier when we talked a bit about the dynamics around the memory cost, is we did see some partial offsets from things like the benefit of carry-in inventory, reduction in non-memory component costs, and some favorable mix. We are seeing the same dynamics when you go from the 48.1 that we printed in the June quarter to the 46.5 midpoint you referenced of our range without the tariff refund impact. That 160 basis point change is also… more than that is explained by the change in memory costs, and we had partial offsets, again, from things like the benefit of carrying inventory, lower cost and non-memory components, and as well favorable mix. I think that FX was a pretty minimal impact when you look at that versus the memory, and so generally, the sequential change from the March quarter to the 46.5 you referenced is really driven by memory.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Great. Thank you both for taking my questions. And congrats again, Tim.
Tim Cook: Thank you so much for saying that, I appreciate it.
On Thursday, Apple announced record third-quarter earnings, with total revenue of $109.4B, up 16 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone revenue was up 22%, Mac revenue was up 10.4%, Services revenue was up 12%, and Wearables revenue was up 6%. iPad revenue was down 6%.
Shortly thereafter, Apple execs spent an hour on the phone with financial industry analysts, and we’ve got our usual complete transcript, including many farewells to Tim Cook.
And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs:
On Thursday afternoon, Apple will announce the results of its third fiscal quarter for 2026. It will presumably be the last appearance of Tim Cook on the post-release earnings calls, which he’s been doing for ages. In fact, today’s call will be his 90th. That’s more than two decades of talking on the phone once a quarter to financial analysts. He’s probably earned a break.
As usual, Six Colors will be here to report on the whole thing. Around 1:30 pm PDT, the company will release its financial reports and we’ll be on the scene with our usual load of colorful charts and some analysis. At 2pm PDT, it’s that hour-long phone call with analysts that I’ll also transcribe. Due to summer travel, we’ll be foregoing our usual post-results live stream (and there’s no Six Colors podcast this week, either), but you can tune in to the Upgrade podcast on Monday, where Dan will join me to break down all the results.
Back in April of this year, I suggested that the MailMaven email app for macOS might become my new best friend. Months later, with continuous minor and major improvements, the friendship has only grown richer. MailMaven 1.1 in April added POP support for those people who rely on the ancient email mailbox protocol. But MailMaven 1.2, out last week, packed more punch: fully realized AppleScript support coupled with the open standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) to allow large language model AIs to engage with MailMaven. Michael Tsai evaluated the AppleScript support and wrote that it is “really impressive.”
Support for MCP via AppleScript means that you can have AI agents communicate directly with MailMaven to improve spam detection, recognize important messages, collect order or financial information, or perform an infinite number of other tasks in which your incoming or outgoing email acts as the hub of knowledge. SmallCubed, the app’s developer, has created a basic MCP server for Claude as a working example. You can write AppleScript from scratch using its terse, thorough guide, or point a code chatbot at the page to write AppleScript for you. I currently have a few nightly scripts that collate book sales and archive the day’s email by digging into MailMaven’s database; I need to rewrite those to use AppleScript instead!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Ted Lasso’s return and Apple TV recommendations, a year of Apple Journal on Mac, our tech cleaning and maintenance habits, and old technologies we’ve fired up just to learn or relive.
Go to the podcast page.
(Left to right): Annotate, Kickabout, and Undolly.For the most part, I’m going to focus on Mac apps with these columns, because that’s where the action seems to be these days. But iOS remains a vibrant platform, too, and every now and again, we’ll look at some of the interesting apps being created for iPhones and iPads. This is one of those now and agains.
Want to see your app included in a future round-up? Get in touch at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and you just might make the cut.
KickaboutThe World Cup is just a memory now, but if you’re missing the daily infusion of soccer (or football, depending on what part of the globe you’re reading this from), Kickabout brings the action back to your iOS device in a very condensed form.
Kickabout will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever gathered around a foosball table in a rec room, with a look that will bring a smile to the face of Subbuteo tabletop football aficionados. You take charge of an 8-player team, with players only free to move about certain areas of the pitch. (No length-of-the-field Maradona-esque wonder golazos for your squad.) You use your finger to drag your players around, swiping any which way to boot the ball toward the goal as you look to rack up the most goals in each 2-minute match.
Goals and shots off the post earn you points, which translates to tickets that you cash in to collect various national teams, from the U.S. all the way to newly minted world champion Spain. You can also buy gear, including stands for your virtual stadium. It’s a fun element that adds to Kickabout’s replayability as you try to assemble your own World Cup field.
Kickabout has both single-player and dual-player modes, though I found the latter to be a little cramped for my iPhone 17 screen. I imagine head-to-head matches are much more enjoyable on the iPad. Still, Kickabout offers plenty of fun even for single players, as you try to master the game’s different difficulty levels.
Kickabout is free to download, and a $3 in-app purchase gets rid of any ads.
UndollyThe Photos app has a built-in tool to weed out duplicate images, but if you find yourself taking a lot of photos, Undolly brings a whole suite of tools that promise to bring order to your iOS device’s photo library. Besides getting rid of duplicates, the mobile app also lists large videos taking up space in your library, rounds up any screenshots you may have stashed somewhere and keeps tabs on other potential space-takers like RAW, timelapse and animated images.
The value of Undolly will depend heavily on how you use your photo library. For instance, I take a lot of screenshots for articles that I don’t always remember to delete, and the app helped me track down some that were three to five years old. I also appreciate Undolly’s swipable comparisons of similar shots, so you can see for yourself whether the images differ enough to keep. Undolly’s algorithm also rates images by their framing, quality and expressiveness of subject to better help you determine the shots that deserve a place in your library.
While it’s free to download initially, you will have to subscribe to Undolly to use its features, with a free three-day trial letting you get the lay of the land. After that, a monthly subscription costs $4, while annual and lifetime payments go for $15 and $40, respectively.
VWLSSNearly five years after Wordle first appeared, we’re still living in a golden age for daily word puzzles. Add VWLSS and its daily serving of mobile word play to the pile, though there are some unique iPhone elements that could help this free offering earn a place in your regular rotation of gameplay.
You have eight words to guess, each tied to a specific category and with all the vowels stripped out. It’s up to you to figure out the actual word, which you can do either by typing in the answer or using a handy speech feature. I prefer talking to typing, though I’m still sore that my guess of “Bob Barker” in the game show hosts category was misheard as “Bob Parker.” Revenge will be mine tomorrow, I guess.
AnnotateBetween Notes and the still-new-to-iOS Preview app, you’ve got more than a few built-in tools for marking up documents and images on your iPhone or iPad. The Annotate app looks to expand on that with 17 tools that allow you to crop, blur and add notes to your heart’s content. If you find yourself making a lot of the same annotations, the app lets you create and save templates and there are shortcuts for watermarking and auto-redacting faces and phone numbers.
You can download Annotate for free and export up to five annotated photos and documents. After that, you’ll need to make a one-time $10 payment to use the app. Annotate works well enough on my iPhone, though I suspect iPad users will get more out of using this app’s many features on their larger-screen devices.
(Angelo D’Amico/Shutterstock)I’ve been thinking about soap again.
Back in February I wrote about an Apple-related revelation I had while washing my hands on vacation:
We stayed at a nice hotel rather than the less-nice-but-cheaper VRBO condo rental we usually do. Because I’m me, I started thinking about Apple. Like Apple, the nice hotel’s brand promise is that it’s a nice hotel. If the hotel didn’t clean its rooms well, didn’t provide soap that smelled nice, didn’t maintain the in-room refrigerator, didn’t clean the swimming pool, it would probably decrease its expenses and increase its profit margin. But over time, it would lose its niceness and become a lousy, overpriced hotel.
Earlier this month, John Gruber wrote about how he hopes incoming Apple CEO John Ternus can perform a bit of a reset on Apple’s advertising strategy. In recent months Apple has announced that it’s adding ads to Apple Maps, and (as John has documented) it’s allowed incredibly low-quality, scammy ads to infest Apple News.
While Apple can spin adding ads to Apple Maps as a revolutionary new way for businesses to be discovered, it’s telling that its initial announcement was hidden inside a press release about an entirely different product, and introduced as “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps.” Those choices show that this isn’t something Apple is actually proud of—and that the people in charge of communicating and explaining Apple’s decisions to the world are at odds with those who are making the decisions about expanding revenue.
Apple also recently expanded App Store ads, creating more clutter at the top of App Store search results. It similarly pitched this as an opportunity for developers—but of course, it’s really an opportunity for developers to take a portion of the money they make from the App Store after Apple’s cut and hand it right back to Apple so that their apps don’t become invisible. What a racket.
But Apple’s approach to grinding out additional revenue doesn’t stop with advertising. The recent release of Apple Creator Studio should’ve been a highlight, because it groups a bunch of useful creative apps in one place for a reasonable price. Instead, its launch was marred by the inclusion of Apple’s free productivity apps in the bundle, requiring users to download new versions and (at least initially) display aggressive subscription promotions in the Numbers, Pages, and Keynote interface.
To this day, you’re confronted with an ad for Creator Studio every time you create a new document in those apps, and their default toolbars contain buttons that won’t work unless you subscribe to the bundle. As a result, Apple has essentially turned its free productivity suite—software that was designed to enhance the inherent value of Apple’s products—into a freemium package with upsell to a creative professional subscription bundle that’s irrelevant (and a terrible value!) for most of its existing users.
There are many more examples. Using notifications to promote subscriptions and badging the Settings app to push AppleCare plans are among the ways Apple has chosen to intervene in the user experience to drive revenue. I’m actually not opposed to the idea that Apple should communicate opportunities for its customers to get more out of their devices—but it should be careful not to cross the line into actively annoying those customers. If someone doesn’t want to see what you offer, you need to accept that and go away—not keep needling them. Apple often falls on the wrong side of that line.
Which brings me back to the hotel soap.
Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products—you pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the low-price leader. It didn’t put stickers on the first Intel Macs to get some marketing dollars from Intel. It doesn’t load up new Macs with loads of lousy bundled third-party software like so many PCs do.
Those are choices Apple has made that cost the company revenue, but they’ve got a bigger purpose. They reinforce the brand.
Opting not to add more revenue to the bottom line is a difficult choice for anyone working at a profit-driven corporation. I used to be in that position at my former employer, defending the overall product against a constant stream of advertising and biz-dev deal proposals that would add incremental revenue. Believe me, arguing to corporate executives that we should leave money on the table is a deeply uncomfortable role to take on—but it’s vital if you care about the bigger picture.
How many companies out there have made the wrong decision, time and again, and taken the easy shot of increased revenue at the expense of their product?
It makes me wonder if the people making these decisions at Apple have lost track of the Apple brand and what it stands for. I know for a fact there are people at Apple who understand these points—the sheepish marketing we sometimes see from them is quite the tell—but clearly those people are not influential enough to counter those empowered to push these initiatives forward.
Nice hotels have lots of ways of generating revenue. They charge resort fees. They charge for parking and wi-fi. The drinks are expensive. The room service is expensive. But what those hotels have learned is that there is a fundamental level of quality that you diverge from at your peril. If you don’t buy the nice soap, the good shampoo, and the soft mattresses, if you don’t clean the rooms properly, if you allow your grounds to get shabby, you are in danger of losing your status as a nice hotel, and just becoming an expensive cheap hotel—and nobody wants to stay at one of those.
This is the opportunity Apple has during this leadership reset: To remind itself of what the Apple brand represents in the market. I’m not making an innocent touchy-feely request for Apple to just be better, gosh darn it! This is serious business.
People buy Apple’s products because they are nice and work well and are not lousy in a lot of ways the cheaper competition is. Apple’s revenue-grubbing approach to the user experience in its products and services threatens to erode the Apple brand, and once lost, it can be hard to recover. No amount of incremental revenue from lousy ads and nagging upsells can counteract long-term brand damage.
Always choose the good soap. And empower the people who will push back against those who want to tell you how much money can be saved by giving the customer cheap, lousy soap instead.
It’s a Summer of Fun takeover! Jason asks Myke about the state of his current workflows, and we both highlight our current Macs and current favorite Mac utilities.
Go to the podcast page.
Several years ago, Apple began hiding disk partitions and volumes on the startup drive. The first was a secret volume with a tiny operating system on it that would let you boot from it, after which you could restore from a Time Machine backup, run First Aid in Disk Utility, or reinstall Mac OS X or macOS. Over the years, Apple has multiplied those hidden locations and added more sophistication to what they offer.
These boot volumes are:
- recoveryOS: The current name and form of the special volume described above, which boots into the Recovery Assistant “app.” You can run Disk Utility (and First Aid), reinstall macOS, launch Safari to access Apple Support pages, modify startup security settings (rarely required these days), and access Terminal. With Terminal, you can reset your macOS password. If your Mac can’t start up properly, it will try to launch the Recovery process within recoveryOS, which performs automatic repairs that Apple doesn’t document. If successful, you can then restart into macOS.
recoveryOS has many faces, including these four, here showing Activate Mac after it was unlock following a Find My lock. Fallback recoveryOS: If recoveryOS is damaged—and that can happen—you can press the power button twice, quickly, and then keep holding it the second time. This fallback recovery volume can’t change startup security, but it can help you diagnose what’s going on. This is the duct-tape belt that helps if your pants come unbuttoned (macOS won’t boot) and your suspenders break (regular recoveryOS fails). * Repair Assistant: From a powered-down state, press the power button until you hear the startup chime, then press and hold Command-D. (On an Intel Mac, hold the D key at startup.) The Diagnostics app can run hardware tests that might help narrow down a problem before you bring in Apple Support, or they may ask you to boot into that mode and share the results of the tests they have you run. Repair Assistant can fail, too, if its volume is damaged. You may then have to perform a special “revive or restore” operation, which requires another Mac. Or you may need a full reinstall using a bootable macOS installer. * macOS:* macOS is a sort of hidden boot volume for the last several releases. You don’t boot from the system; instead, a read-only snapshot of the system is mounted, and then booted from. This is part of Apple making system resources immutable through cryptography and at startup.
Besides using recoveryOS for the above tasks, you might also need to use it to unlock your Mac after locking it in Find My and to reset your password using a FileVault Recovery Key. Here’s how.
Unlock your MacWhen you lock devices in Find My, they appear with a question mark overlaying their icon.While it’s not a common scenario, it could happen to you: you accidentally leave your Mac somewhere, or it’s stolen. Thinking quickly, you launch Find My on another of your devices or go to iCloud.com/find and log in. You then tap or click a few buttons to lock your Mac. If the Mac is connected to the Internet, it restarts and locks immediately. (Despite promising to display the message you entered when you locked it, macOS does not do so.) If it’s not connected, it restarts the next time it has Internet access.
The account used to lock the Mac is the only one that can unlock it, and you must be in front of the Mac to perform that operation. Apple limits each Mac to having Find My enabled from a single account. Here are the steps:
- When you see the macOS Recovery title, click the account profile below it. Enter the account’s password and click Continue.
- If you entered it correctly, “Authentication succeeded” appears. Click Restart.
- The Mac restarts and shows Activate Mac after it boots up. This time, all the active macOS accounts are shown. Click one, and then enter its password. Click Next.
- You now can choose to either use your Apple Account or a macOS password to continue. If you opt for the Apple Account, enter the full address or phone number as shown. Then enter the account’s password. Otherwise, you can click to enter the Mac password, which Apple says is the last one used to unlock the Mac in a regular session before it was locked. If you’re the only user on the Mac, that’s easy to figure out. (In testing with Golden Gate public beta 2, I wasn’t able to get the Mac password option to work, and I’ve had it fail in Tahoe, too.) Sometimes neither works. Choose Restart from the Apple menu in that case and try again.
- On a successful entry, the Mac restarts yet again after a one-minute countdown. Enter your password when prompted to start up into a regular session.
- Apple Pay will have been disabled, and your iCloud sync will probably be paused as well. When prompted after the macOS session starts, enter your Apple Account password (or passwords if you have multiple accounts linked to your macOS account).
If you try this too often, as I did while testing, or for other security reasons only Apple knows, your Apple Account may be locked. At step 6, I was told I had to reset my Apple Account password from one of my other devices; all four linked to the account were shown. I made that change. In the Golden Gate second public beta, clicking Unlock Account did nothing before or after changing. I was able to click Cancel, complete step 4 again with the new Apple Account password, and proceed to step 5 and restart.1
If your Apple Account becomes locked, you have to reset your Apple Account password on a linked device.Years ago, when you locked your Mac, you had to set a passcode to unlock it. While that isn’t supported on M-series Macs or Intel Macs with the T2 Security Chip, the email Apple sends still shows an image of a screen where you would enter that code and says you can only unlock your Mac with that non-existent passcode.
Apple’s email after you lock your Mac shows an outdated image and provides outdated information about the unlock procedure.Unlock via FileVaultIf you try to log into your Mac and can’t recall the password or it isn’t accepted, you can use your FileVault Recovery Key to unlock the volume and reset your password. The Recovery Key is a long code that’s a last-ditch way to unlock your startup volume. It’s also a back-door way to help with a post-Find My lock operation if your password won’t work or you’ve forgotten it.
[I’ve described how to set up FileVault and how to deal with the Recovery Key in “FileVault on macOS Tahoe uses iCloud Keychain to store its Recovery Key” and “FileVault keys can’t be escrowed in iCloud anymore.”]
Here’s how to use your Recovery Key to unlock FileVault:
- At the login prompt, click the ? icon to the right of Enter Password to bring up the Reset Password link. (This also appears if you enter your password incorrectly a few times.) Click Reset Password.
- Your Mac restarts into Recovery Assistant using its Reset Password pathway. Enter your Recovery Key (see articles above). Click Next.
- If you entered your Recovery Key correctly, you are prompted to enter a new password for the account you rebooted from, and confirm it. Do so.
- When you restart, you can now enter the new password.
Enter your FileVault Recovery Key to then be able to reset your macOS password.If you forgot or can’t enter a correct password for unlocking your Mac in step 1 in the previous section, you can click “Forgot all passwords?” This will launch the FileVault-based password reset, let you reset the password for that account, then proceed with unlocking.
For further readingTo learn a lot more about Find My locking and unlocking, consult my book Take Control of Find My and AirTags, which covers the whole ecosystem. For a lot of insight into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS security, including FileVault, check out Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.
Revisions of those two titles for the 27 series of operating systems are coming out soon. You can purchase either today and receive a free update to the new version when it’s out.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- In the screenshot, you’ll notice the title is Update Phone Number, even though I have no opportunity to do so. This may be fixed by Apple later, though I doubt it. ↩
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad and tracker blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And with the new Apple TV Ad Blocking feature in v5.1, it extends the powerful Safari, YouTube and App ad blocking protection to your Apple TV; allowing you to:
- Block ads in your favourite streaming apps
- Stop hidden in-app trackers
- Speed up your internet
- See what has been blocked
So, join the community of over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: Ford CEO Jim Farley has been bullish on CarPlay and the UEV project was previously headed up by Doug Field1, who spent several years at Apple both on the Mac hardware team and, more significantly, leading up the abandoned car effort.
This integration is interesting, though, because of the lukewarm reception of CarPlay Ultra in the automotive industry. The new “MapKit for Automotive SDK”, which as far as I can tell is being announced in this press release, seems more like the Android Automotive approach of building in support at a low level, though here it’s predominantly focused on navigation rather than providing the full stack for the car. Here’s how Apple describes it:
This integration is made possible by Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, which allows automakers to embed and customize Apple Maps. The SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles, and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences.
I also appreciated this little tidbit nestled at the very end of the press release:
In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford’s UEV Platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car.
Translation: Eat it, GM.
- Field announced his departure earlier this year. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
How much waterproofing matters in our tech and our riskiest water moments, the last time we changed our minds about a technology, how we buy our phones and thoughts on upgrade programs, and the recent tech purchases we feel guilty about.
Go to the podcast page.
An e-reader magneted to the back of a smartphone, just as the prophecy foretold.The market for small e-readers has been booming lately. Earlier this year, Jason took a look at the Xteink X4, a pint-sized reading device that was about as light and small as they come. But those maniacs at Xteink weren’t done yet: they followed it up with the $79 X3, which is unbelievably even lighter and smaller.
I wouldn’t blame you for wondering if there’s such a thing as too small and light—at 3.84 inches by 2.51 inches (and just 0.2 inches thick) the X3 is still larger than, say, a credit card, but not by much. The screen itself measures just 3.7 inches, more than half an inch smaller than the X4’s 4.3 inch, but its 259 ppi resolution still makes it plenty easy to read on.1 At that size it’s little imposition to take it with you wherever you go. Easy to lose? Maybe. Easy to love? Yes.
For one thing, this small size unlocks at least one capability that the X4 couldn’t fully deliver upon—the ability to stick to the back of your phone. Like the X4, the X3 has a MagSafe-compatible magnet in its rear case and it fits just about perfectly on the back of my iPhone 17 Pro, nestled below the camera plateau.
However, the magnet is not particularly strong, and it lacks the secondary stabilizing magnet that you see on official MagSafe accessories, meaning it wobbles around a bit. I wouldn’t call it a super secure connection, but it’s pretty good if you’re just slipping it in and out of a pocket. Just be aware that it probably will come loose.
Like the X4 before it, the X3 features a pair of rocker switches on the front for a total of four possible buttons. But they’ve opted to skip the X4’s side mounted rocker switch in favor of a single buttons on each side. There’s also an on/off switch at the top (plus a recessed button used for resetting the device). And with all of that, they somehow managed to continue to fit a microSD slot in the top. The bottom left corner also has a little set of holes for a lanyard or wrist strap.
The X3 is about the size of just the display on the X4.The one casualty of the smaller X3, however, is the port. The X4 was big enough to accommodate a USB-C connector, but the X3’s thin profile makes that impossible. Instead, there’s a pogo-pin USB cable that connects to four magnetic contacts on the reader. Is this a step back? Strictly speaking, yes. Using a proprietary connector is a bummer in the year 2026, especially because it means having to keep track of a single-use cable. That said, once you get the X3 up and running, the only real need for the connector is charging, and the battery on this thing lasts a very long time. (I’ve yet to run it down in several weeks of usage.) Just remember to make a note of where you stow that cable for the point months down the road when you do need to charge it and find yourself wondering whatever happened to it.
As with the X4, the X3 lacks any sort of screen lighting, meaning that it’s strictly a “read in bright light” device. But don’t worry, because Xteink has already unveiled a new X4 Pro with the company’s first lit screen.2
All in all, I found the X3 very comfortable to read on, whether attached to my iPhone or not. The side buttons work great as page-turners, and the screen is high-contrast and sharp enough to make text render very clearly. All in all, it’s a great reading experience—if you take into account one major caveat.
Soft where?The elephant in the room for the Xteink X3 is the software. Xteink ships the X3 with its own built-in firmware which, by all accounts, has improved since the first version. But I can’t really tell you, because upon opening the box and powering up the device, the first thing I did was install Crosspoint, the open-source community-built firmware that has turned this device from a curiosity into a real contender.3
Unlike a lot of other firmware replacements, Crosspoint is super easy to install; you can do it right from a web browser. While it’s not fully free of technological hurdles, I’d say that most people comfortable using an e-reader or updating their iPhones will be able to handle the process with few problems. And the benefits are manifold.
Crosspoint is extremely configurable for all your reading needs.Crosspoint goes beyond simply turning this into a functional device and into one that is actually fun to use. It’s got a straightforward, easy to navigate interface that makes it simple to do everything from reading to loading books (accomplished via a web-based interface). For those who like to tweak their reading setup, there are plenty of configuration options, everything from screen orientation to hyphenation and, yes, custom fonts loaded via the SD card.
Even the onscreen keyboard that you need to use for various configuration tasks is pretty solid for what’s available—on par with navigating via an onscreen keyboard with a game controller, in my opinion. I wouldn’t want to have to type in my Wi-Fi password every time—and you don’t, because it saves it for you—but one time was fine.
There are also a bunch of other features that might appeal to those who want to take reading to the next level. For example, support for Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) standard means that if you want to host your book library on your own server, you can point your reader at that and download any of the books you already own directly to your device. There’s also support for KOreader sync to help keep your place between supported devices.4
Crosspoint has been so successful, in fact, that the team at Xteink has smartened up and started collaborating. (This after a brief moment when it looked like the company might try to firmware lock its devices.) Now, not only do the “developer editions” sold directly by the company continue to allow you to install the custom firmware, the company has been working with the Crosspoint team to make sure new devices, like the X4 Pro, will already be supported when they arrive. While Xteink hasn’t quite adopted Crosspoint as the default OS, it’s not far off.
The world is not enoughGiven how positive I’ve been above, you might be all too tempted to run out and snap up an Xteink X3 for yourself. I don’t blame you! At $79 (and often discounted for less than that), it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.
Just try to tell me this wee fella isn’t charming.If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap5 and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.
Both of these companies benefit from lock-in in the form of Digital Rights Management. DRM is, of course, largely pushed by publishers, who insist upon cryptographic schemes to lock down the books they sell in order to nominally protect against piracy. Never mind the fact that books are still easily and widely pirated, the DRM is relatively simple to crack6, and many of those books have been vacuumed up by the boatload by an even more insidious thief in the form of AI training data.
I come at this, of course, from the perspective of both reader and writer. As a writer, I certainly want to be compensated for all the hard work I put in to create my books, but I also want people to read and enjoy them. That’s why you’ll find no stauncher defender of libraries.
Personally, I find the industry’s insistence on DRM misplaced, just as I did with the music industry two decades ago. The lack of these security features does not automatically turn people at large into thieves and it’s insulting to think that it would. In fact, the sci-fi publisher Tor, one of the biggest names in the business and a subsidiary of Big Five publisher Macmillan, has put out its titles without DRM for almost fifteen years and I haven’t seen any significant indication that it’s harmed their business. Many of my books are also available directly from my publisher without DRM, and I don’t think that’s put a dent in my bottom line either.
I would love to be able to easily load any book I’ve ever purchased onto my Xteink devices—or, for that matter, any e-reader or e-reading app of my choice. There are, of course, extensive repositories of DRM-free public domain books available. Amazon, to its credit, does now allow you to download DRM-free copies of any book that you’ve purchased.7 I argued a few years back that this is an opportunity for Apple to distinguish its stagnant ebook marketplace from the competition. But for first-run books, your options are currently more limited (and sometimes harder to suss out).
I’d also love to somehow see support for Libby, the popular library ebook borrowing app, on Xteink devices, though I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But in my opinion, the bottom line is that more ways to read makes more readers of books, which in turn makes more customers of books.
But I digress.
The conclusionThe other week I was riding the train with my kid, our usual weekend pastime. As he was enjoying looking out the window, I was reading a book on the X3, magneted to the back of my iPhone 17 Pro. As we neared a stop, a woman nearby caught sight of it and marveled over it. “Is that a tiny e-reader?”
I extolled its virtues for a moment before they got off at their stop. But it told me one important thing: there’s a hunger for these types of devices. Because people who self-select as readers in this day and age are, above all, passionate. You have to make a choice to be sitting and reading a book when you could be watching TikTok or Instagram or listening to music or a podcast, all of which are constantly at your fingertips.
That’s where the X3 (and the X4) deliver. A Kindle or Kobo isn’t exactly bulky, but they’re not pocketable either. Being able to take your e-reader with you just as we stuffed mass market paperbacks in our back pockets in days gone by is freeing and fun. Now if the world might just shift a little bit more to meet us, maybe we could free ourselves a little further.
- Fun fact: the X3’s display is 0.2 inches larger and has almost 60 percent higher pixel density than the screen on the original iPhone. ↩
- Did I buy one? Yeah, I did. Because apparently these guys have my number. ↩
- I should say that there are many other custom firmware projects for Xteink’s hardware, but Crosspoint is indisputably the most prominent and best supported. ↩
- If you’re not familiar with KOreader, it’s an open source reading app that you can install on Kindle and Kobo, as well as other platforms; one of the features is its own syncing system. ↩
- Though, to be frank, not as cheap as it used to be. ↩
- Not unlike in music, the problem is that in order for someone to actually to consume your music or books, they must possess the means to unlock it. ↩
- With some caveats. For example, if you’re in a household with someone else who’s purchased a DRM-free book, you can still read it on your Kindle, but only they can download the DRM-free version. ↩
Dan starts drinking early, James gets bad vibes and Moltz screams for ice cream.
Go to the podcast page.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is set to announce a new “Apple Upgrade” program (paywalled) next week to replace both its existing financing offerings and the iPhone Upgrade program. Details are still vague at present, but it will supposedly offer lease-style arrangements for not just iPhones, but Macs, iPads, and Apple Watches as well.
I’ve been in the iPhone Upgrade Program since Apple debuted it more than a decade ago. There have been plenty of ups and downs over that time—especially in the early years, when Apple was still figuring out how the whole program worked, but more recently it’s been pretty smooth.
And, I have to say, effective: I’ve had a new iPhone every year, without fail, and I’ve ended up paying only about half of what I would pay for a new phone outright.1
I do, however, have some concerns about the details Gurman does report. For one, the involvement of Klarna. They’re best known for their buy-now-pay-later service—a realm Apple was prepared to play in but ended up quickly abandoning. At the time I wondered if part of that about-face was Apple “perhaps not wanting to be in a business that can feel a bit troublesome.” But the company still subsequently partnered with other companies that offer that feature, like Affirm and, yes, Klarna.
Unlike the iPhone Upgrade program, this new offering will also reportedly not include AppleCare, meaning that you’ll have to shell out to protect the device you are leasing from Apple. There’s more than a whiff of “services revenue” around that, AppleCare now being somewhat more expensive than it was. No doubt some will choose not to go through the hassle and additional cost of purchasing it, which means a subset of those people will invariably damage their phones and incur additional payments to Apple. AppleCare as part of the iPhone Upgrade Program was fundamentally a good deal because it insured devices that Apple was probably getting back, whether for eventual refurbishment or just for parts.
But the iPhone Upgrade Program often felt like an afterthought to Apple—for example, despite Apple officially telling me devices on it were eligible for the company’s restructured AppleCare One program, I heard from several users that this was effectively not the case.
Additionally, this part of Gurman’s story made me hesitate:
The Apple Upgrade service will work like a subscription and users can pay off the device early during their term, upgrade early to a new model or keep it at the end of the leasing period. In certain cases, those transactions will incur an additional fee. Like a car lease, it can also be returned at the end of the term. [emphasis added]
So “certain cases” and “an additional fee” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. How many cases? What kind of fee? 9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy points out that if this really is structured like a car lease, that could mean some serious charges.
The iPhone Upgrade Program was, by comparison, straightforward. The cost of buying your phone was divvied up into 24 payments; after 12, you can upgrade. Loans were backed by Citizens Bank, but there were no interest charges or other fees. Hence it probably wasn’t a big money-maker. I don’t know what Apple’s deal with Klarna will be, but I’m skeptical that it’s going to be as consumer-friendly.
Finally, the other questionable part circling this is this report from 9to5Mac’s Marcus Mendes that code in iOS 27 suggests Apple will be able to restrict features of devices that fall behind on their payments:
The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks.
If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in “Restricted Mode,” which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available.
Forget paying for heated seats, imagine if your car just decided not to offer CarPlay or, I don’t know, climate controls if you fell behind on your lease payments. This just feels, for lack of a better term, gross. Certainly predatory on lower income consumers who are most likely to take advantage of such a payment structure to buy an expensive phone.
As I said, details are still not concrete, so it’s always possible that this won’t be the exact situation. But if it is, I can say with some confidence that my days in Apple’s upgrade programs are at an end, and I certainly would be loath to recommend them to anybody.
- How that compares to if I’d re-sold or traded in my old devices is, of course, an open question. But I avoided the hassle of having to do any of that. ↩
The season finale of Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey’s excellent Origin Story podcast is about the Luddites, and why the name doesn’t mean what you think it means.
It’s really about people reacting negatively to new technology that threatens their jobs, and therefore their livelihood. This might be extremely relevant to some modern technology topics, come to think of it.
(Available on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Overcast / YouTube and everywhere else.)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
While OpenAI readies a familar-sounding smart speaker, Jason and Myke break down the public betas for macOS, iOS, and watchOS, including Siri AI and new Photos features.
Go to the podcast page.
I dispense what might be called valuable insight to my friends, as well as in this public forum. My friends know the danger: they might become the topic of a column, which is true for my buddy Jeff, who left a bag containing his passport behind at a hotel. Fortunately, he had an AirTag in his bag. That was, however, just the beginning of the journey. (Jeff gave me permission to share his story.)1
To avoid suspense, I’ll tell you that Jeff doesn’t have his bag back, but will soon.
Grate newsJeff was out of town on business for a few days—he’s one of those nearly extinct creatures called a “full-time technology reporter“—and was carrying his passport to Texas not because it’s another country (it hasn’t seceded yet), but because he lacks a Real ID-upgraded driver’s license. He had a small bag with a few items, including the passport and an AirTag, that he didn’t need to carry, so he used the hotel safe. There have been many articles written about how unsafe hotel safes are, but it feels as if you’re in a decent hotel, it’s still another bar for someone to get through to steal your stuff.
Leaving in a bit of a rush, Jeff didn’t retrieve the bag from the safe. When he realized it wasn’t with him, thousands of miles later, he was peeved. Shouldn’t the “left behind” feature in Find My have alerted him? Find My showed the bag’s location, however. For some reason, it appeared as if it were in the hotel parking lot. I catastrophized with him, assuming it was stolen. He called the hotel, which said it wasn’t in lost and found.
Jeff’s bag is in the parking lot, according to this map.A staff member went out, looked in the parking lot, and said the rough location was a grate—perhaps the bag had been stolen and someone had found the AirTag and dropped it through the slats? Which would imply that a hotel employee or a thief had managed to get into Jeff’s room after he left, open the safe, leave the hotel, and rummage through the bag in the parking lot before absconding.
That wasn’t the case (or valise). The hotel called back the next day. The previous staffer didn’t know, for some reason, that valuable left-behind items were tagged and placed in a safe in the basement, presumably below or near the parking lot. His bag, containing his passport and other items, would be sent back to him.
Jeff’s experience reveals several aspects of the Find My tracking system that you can take advantage of in advance or use if you’ve lost something or left it behind.
Don’t leave me!Jeff had the option enabled to know when he left his AirTag-equipped bag behind.Every device and item you have can be set to alert you when you “leave it behind.” I believe this setting is enabled by default, though Apple’s documentation isn’t clear on this point. All of my devices and items have it enabled, and Jeff found it was turned on for all his gear. Here’s how to check:
- In a native Find My app, select the device (like a Mac) or an item (an AirTag or other Find My network item) in the list of such things.
- On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, the action sheet appears. On a Mac, click the info (i) icon next to the item’s name on the map. In the upcoming version 27 operating system releases on all platforms, tap or click the More (…) button that appears when you select the device from the list.
- Tap or click Notify When Left Behind, which should already show On. (In the 27 releases, tap or click When Left Behind.)
- If disabled, turn it on.
Here’s a crucial detail: examine the “Notify me, except at” list. You can manually add to this set of locations (tap or click New Location). However, it primarily grows when you’re notified by an item or device being left behind, and then you tap or click in the notification to ignore it at that location. You are presented with the option to just exclude that item or device from that location or all of your equipment.
It’s very easy to approve that exclude-all button. (Jeff did not; his list didn’t include the hotel.) This can be convenient when you’re at a hotel, a friend’s house, or another location for a few days or frequently, and sometimes leave Find My-tracked stuff there. But once you ignore the location, you won’t get notified in the future. You can modify the list by hand, too.
Jeff may instead have been tripped up by the safe acting as a Faraday cage—a metal mesh or box that shields electromagnetic signals from passing through. The AirTag and other Find My items use Bluetooth to broadcast a rotating identifier at regular intervals.2 If the safe blocked that signal, Jeff’s iPhone lost contact with the AirTag the moment the bag went in—a few days before he left. With no fresh separation between the phone and the item at departure time, the alert may have lacked the necessary trigger. Jeff was on the verge of sharing the location with the hotel when they found it.
You can mark an item or device as lost, then share contact information, and a URL that someone else can use for a limited time to also find the hardware.Apple says this takes longer than the few days Jeff was on his trip: “You can see its last known location for up to seven days in the Find My app.” After seven days, the device or item’s location will appear as “No location found” or “Offline.” Jeff could see the item’s location, which made the lack of notification seem like a bug.
Now for the grate part (not great part): once Jeff’s bag was removed from the safe in his former room, it would have been carried through the hotel and detected by every iPhone, iPad, or Mac nearby. When it reached the hotel’s lost-and-found safe, the rough location would likely still be relatively close before it entered that particular Faraday cage. At which point, when Jeff looked at Find My, he saw it at (or under) the parking lot.
Sack attackThe hotel works with a service that handles the return. Jeff paid both a whopping and reasonable $60 to have it sent two-day air back to him. Fair enough! Unfair enough, days after he paid, the bag is still at the hotel (as I write this). Jeff will, of course, follow its progress via Find My.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Just so he doesn’t feel bad, I’ll note the time back in the day of paper airline tickets when I couldn’t find my tickets and had to rush to a United counter (in a hotel!) to get them reissued. When I came home, I put them in the secret place where I keep all my important stuff, where I also found my original “lost” tickets. ↩
- The identifier is broadcast as the Bluetooth network name. To avoid being associated with an individual, Apple frequently rotates or changes the name. ↩
Do you want an all-in-one solution to block ads, trackers and annoyances across all your Apple devices?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
With Magic Lasso Adblock you can effortlessly block ads on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
Magic Lasso is a single, native app that includes everything you need:
- Safari Ad Blocking – Browse 2.0x faster In Safari by blocking all ads, with no annoying distractions or pop ups
- YouTube Ad Blocking – Block all YouTube ads in Safari, including all video ads, banner ads, search ads, plus many more
- App Ad Blocking – Block ads and trackers across the news, social media and game apps on your device, including other browsers such as Chrome and Firefox
- Apple TV Ad Blocking – Watch your favourite tv shows with less interruptions and protect your privacy from in-app ad tracking with Magic Lasso on your Apple TV
Best of all, with Magic Lasso Adblock, all ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, ensure your browsing history, app usage and viewing habits stay private with Magic Lasso Adblock.
Join over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Just ahead of WWDC 2026, Jason Snell noted that he gets a lot of pitches about Mac apps, attributing the sudden boom in macOS offerings to vibe coding aided by artificial intelligence. Regardless of how apps are getting built — be it with AI tools or the more conventional developer kits that Apple offers — it’s certainly true that a lot more macOS apps seem to be popping up, extending the capabilities of your hardware. And some of those apps deserve a little extra attention.
And that’s what I’m hoping to do with these app spotlights for Six Colors. We’ll profile some interesting new apps for the Mac (and maybe the odd iOS offering every now and again), and explain why you might want to give it a download.
Do you have an app you’d like to bring to my attention? Simply drop me a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and we’ll take it from there.
With that housekeeping out of the way, here’s what I’ve been downloading lately.
Park ShelfCleanliness may be next to godliness, but for most of us, our Mac screens are an unholy mess. Open windows clutter up the view, adding another layer of complication to multitasking. An app called ParkShelf from Digital X Design looks to bring some order to the chaos with a handy place for storing open windows instead of placing them in the dock or relying on your Mac’s App Switcher to jump between windows.
Instead, ParkShelf features a floating bar you can position anywhere on your screen (though there is an option to pin it to a specific area if you prefer). That way you need to call up a particular window, it’s just a matter of heading over to where you’ve stashed it in ParkShelf and summoning what you need. The rest of the time, you’ve got a clean, uncluttered workspace so that you can focus on the task at hand.
I’ve been trying out the free version of ParkShelf, where you can store up to three different windows at any one time. For unlimited storage, you’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Pro version. In addition to the unlimited storage, the Pro version also gives you the ability to customize a hot key that sends an open window into ParkShelf’s waiting arms. (In the free version, option-P serves as the default hot key.)
For my purposes, ParkShelf works best when I’m focusing on a specific project. If I’m on a writing assignment, I can use the app to stash a window of notes, a browser page I’m using to research the topic, and data sheets in PDF form while I type away in my text editor. When I need anyone of those windows, I can turn to ParkShelf to look something up, but otherwise, those windows are out of sight and out of mind.
I’d like it better if I could store multiple web pages or notes, but ParkShelf seems to treat each app as its own window. For instance, even when I have web pages open in Safari for multiple windows instead of tabs, ParkShelf stores the whole kit and caboodle. Still, the free version of Park Shelf is certainly worth trying out if you’re looking for a way to better manage all the open windows on your screen.
Other apps ScrollPods lets you control scrolling on a Mac by tilting your head. The free utility works with 3rd-gen AirPods as well as any AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and Beats Fit Pro models. Install the app, turn on a switch, and a tilt of your head lets you scroll through emails, web pages and other windows. Mastering just the right tilt takes a little bit of practice, but this is a pretty clever accessibility tool that takes advantage of an accessory you probably already have on hand. * Sleepr is a $5 app that serves as a sleep timer that lives in your Mac’s menu bar and lets you time shutdowns after 15-, 30-, 60- and 120-minute intervals; you can also have your Mac go to sleep at a very specific time. The 3.0 release adds Liquid Glass support, recurring bedtimes that automatically start themselves, a floating alert that can even appear over full-screen apps, and a live menu bar countdown. * Senqu Image Converter* is a $5 image utility that lets you convert among JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and PDF files. The recent 1.2 update added the ability to drop images onto a preset in the full window for instant conversions, while dropping a file now immediately starts the conversion process using current settings.
Writing at The New York Times, tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the strange story (NYT gift link) of coming across an AI-generated biography of herself on Amazon.
To me, the sobering part is when Hill, unable to track down the source of her own biography, talks to an “author” of hundreds of AI books:
Mr. Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.
“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”
[stares directly into camera]
Lest you think this exclusively an Amazon problem, this comes just a few weeks after Joanna Stern’s story of AI-generated knockoffs of her book on Apple Books.
You know, it’s hard enough making any sort of living as a writer, but crowding the field with AI slop? It’s not even as if people are buying them and reviewing them favorably. They’re just old socks stuffed down the drain, clogging up the sink with putrid water.1 What are we even doing here, people?
- Could an AI write that metaphor? I mean. Maybe. But it didn’t. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Analyst Dan Rayburn, on (sigh) LinkedIn:
Going forward, Apple TV hardware is now essentially dead. Last month, Apple raised the price of its Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi (64GB) from $129 to $199, while the Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi + Ethernet (128GB) now costs $249, up from $169. That’s a major increase for hardware that hasn’t changed since its 2022 debut…. I don’t envision anyone in the market spending $200 on a streaming device.
Leaving aside Rayburn’s bizarre complaints in his post about Apple TV audio format support (which reflects nothing I’ve seen and sounds more like a user grinding a personal axe), this is a classic example of something we don’t see around these parts much anymore: The market share argument.
Apple’s strategies used to be attacked by the market share argument all the time. The premise is this: If you don’t have market share, nothing else matters. You could be making a profit. You could be serving a nice niche audience that is happy with your product. You could, in fact, be servicing your own lucrative ecosystem rather than focusing on competing with companies that are happy to race to the bottom.
Or as Rayburn puts it:
Of course, Apple has never competed on price and has shocked many by refusing to compete in the living room. Apple prioritizes the premium experience of its tvOS platform over low-margin hardware without home-screen ads and promoted content.
So the Apple TV is dead because of the (admittedly ridiculous) recent price hikes… but also, Apple has always “refuse[d] to compete in the living room” and made the heinous decision of prioritizing a “premium experience” over cheap boxes stuffed with ads and paid marketing. Apple TV was always mostly dead, because Apple has never deigned to make a $20 streaming stick infested with ads, but this price hike is the final stake in the heart?
Okay.
I have always been frustrated with the price of Apple’s TV box. And it’s ridiculous now—those are prices that should only be applied to brand-new models with great functionality, not to stale years-old hardware. But Apple’s competition in this market is selling $20 sticks at Walmart. They’re monetizing through TV licensing deals and aggressive user tracking, including logging everything you watch so that it can be used to profile you.
As for Apple not being competitive, the Apple TV used to start at $129, and the Roku Ultra is $100, so in the premium segment where Apple plays, they weren’t that far off. Now they’re twice as expensive, which is rough.
In his post, Rayburn concedes that “A small minority of users might purchase the hardware to stay in the Apple ecosystem, but that won’t increase Apple’s market share.” His point is that market share matters for TV streaming boxes because streamers won’t ultimately bother to support the platform at all if nobody’s using it.
I think that’s poor analysis, because I’m positive Apple TV owners are more engaged with their devices and probably have extremely favorable demographics compared to the users of a $20 streaming stick. Also, those streamers will be building iOS apps anyway, at which point it feels like tvOS apps just aren’t far enough removed. In fact, some streamers like building apps for tvOS because they can show off advanced features (like on-device multiview) that cheap boxes just can’t handle.
I came across Rayburn’s post via this post from Janko Roettgers, which is all about installing custom home screens to Android TV boxes. Why would you do that? Roettgers writes:
Monet is just one of a number of home screen replacements (or launchers, as they’re called among Android enthusiasts) that takes cues from Apple TV to bring a new sense of minimalism to Google’s streaming platform. Most of these launchers do away with the endless rows of content recommendations, the big hero images that try to get you hooked on the latest TV shows, and the increasing amount of ads and sponsored content.
“Honestly, the stock Google TV launcher [keeps] getting worse,” [Monet developer Nico] Klein says. “It’s clunky and full of ads. It actively gets in the way of what users are trying to do. You have to fight your way through a jungle of menus just to get where you actually want to go, it’s just not intuitive.”
Sounds fun. When I tried out a bunch of non-Apple streaming boxes last year, I pretty much found the same. The whole space is infested with this kind of garbage and clutter.
Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.
Apple’s public betas, how we read for pleasure, whether we have multicolored smart lighting, and digital disaster preparedness.
Go to the podcast page.
Guy meets someone in the woods, Moltz makes a proposal and Dan finds books frustrating.
Go to the podcast page.
By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI.
The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement, but this is the beta period, and improvements may be forthcoming.
Still, the promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new possibilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.
As of today, iOS 27 is available to any and all who want to try it as a public beta. Some features are buggy, others aren’t yet finished, and every once in a while something may go haywire. But it’s all in the name of getting everything working for the final release in the fall.
Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.
Siri AI’s capabilities go far beyond what the old voice assistant was capable of.The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the app on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.
But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written Siri off as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.
New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down from the middle of the top edge of the screen, a gesture that’s now available not just on the home screen but in any app. It’s got a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.
There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also ended up with a few orphan blank “New conversations” which I deleted, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.
Play it, Siri. Play As Time Goes By The Rest is History.I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the month-plus that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.
After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.
Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that includes.
The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie still in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games1, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.
Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message.
Of course, some of this is easily ascribable to this being beta software. But some of it also the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.
All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.
In general, I’m bullish on the future of AI, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding, but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. Especially because it’s already there, built into your phone.
One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available on that continent either.
All roads lead to SiriiOS 27 would really, really like you to write with Siri.While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.
There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.
Liquid Glass half fullTo call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.
The Liquid Glass slider can be set to More Clear (left), the default (middle), and More Tinted (right).In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.
In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.
Even just the addition of a more delineated toolbar in iOS 27 (left) vastly improves the feel over iOS 26 (right).It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.
Performance, no anxietyTempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.
That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.
Otherwise If? Where’s my fainting couch?!All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.
The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
AirDrop transfers were also notably rapid, though I say was because in recent beta builds my iPhone has stopped sending files via that method, though it still receives them. (That’s betas, folks!)
Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement.
I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones, but the public beta experience will certainly bear out the truth of that claim.
Photo fit and finishIf there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.
The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.
There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.
Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.
A five-star photo if I’ve ever seen one.For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).
There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.
And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)
But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful.
There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.
Reframe seems to work better with small tweaks, as in this photo where I lowered the angle at which I shot it.Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.
Other featuresApple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.
Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.
Passwords has an agentic AI feature that will scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Even on that subset though, my experience was uneven, with just 5 of 18 updated. It’s a very cool idea, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses, but right now it’s hit or miss.
If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.
In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. Unfortunately, my experience with this was a little disappointing, with it not correctly assigning the event to the right day and ignoring my attempt to provide timezone information; nor did modifying the event with natural language after the fact seem to work. I hope that gets ironed out before the end of the beta period.
Maps’s improved Flyover in iOS 27 (right) improves some 3D imagery over iOS 26 (left).For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. In my testing, this isn’t fully rolled out everywhere yet: Boston’s satellite maps were actually two-dimensional compared to iOS 26’s, but if I flew down to New York, I could see far more detail on a building like One World Trade Center.
FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!
Apple’s improved Shortcuts with a bunch of new actions and streamlined automations by including them as part of the shortcut itself. There’s also an impressive new AI “describe your shortcut” mode. It works pretty well for simpler shortcuts, but can start to get a little off the rails the more complex you get. Unfortunately, Shortcuts has been among the buggiest features during the beta period; I’ve had a lot of them stop working, and run into some perplexing issues.
Safari likewise has a few new features, including being notified when a page content changes (as frequently as on the hour, if you’re watching for price changes, for example), as well as a “describe your extension” feature not unlike the Shortcuts functionality. I haven’t had as much of a chance to put this through its paces, but it’s a fascinating addition and will be interesting to see if lots of people who never would have tried their hand at this kind of thing will end up making extensions.
You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.
ConclusionDespite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.
But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.
As for the shortcomings, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a beta period. Proceed with caution. Sometimes things just don’t work, and you may have to live with it until the next build comes along. But sometimes things also improve build-to-build, and that’s the fun of being at the cutting edge. For the next couple months you get your chance to live in the future.
- Okay, I did think it was lying here for a minute. ↩
Let’s just get this out of the way: I liked macOS 26 Tahoe. I liked it because it marked the first time in years where Apple seemed to embrace the fact that Mac users deserve productivity improvements, not just syncing up with whatever (often useful, yes) new features were being introduced to iOS.
I didn’t like the interface changes, especially the way the redesign handled toolbars and sidebars. It actually felt like macOS dodged a bullet by being treated as an afterthought, because pouring more Liquid Glass atop macOS would have made the situation even worse. But over the last summer, I got used to the interface offenses and instead focused on all the improvements.
Turns out that at least some of my friends and colleagues decided that Tahoe’s interface offenses were too great to bear, and despite all those tasty new productivity boosts, they would sit this one out and hope that Apple came to its senses with macOS 27.
Good news for them: While they’ve spent a year without Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight, their upgrade to macOS 27 Golden Gate will net them last year’s features as well as a host of other improvements, all wrapped in an interface that is an unequivocal improvement over what Tahoe wrought.
To those folks, welcome back to the current OS version. To those of us who spent a year floating on the glassy surface of Tahoe, welcome to Golden Gate. Available today as a Public Beta and arriving on every Apple silicon-based Mac this fall, it’s an update I’m not going to have to spend a year apologizing for liking.
Design takes a step forwardThe fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.
Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.
Compare and contrast macOS Tahoe (top) and macOS Golden Gate (bottom): Windows are a little less rounded, toolbars float a little more clearly and buttons are more defined, and sidebar icons are colored.Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.
In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.
Compare and contrast macOS Tahoe (top and middle) and macOS Golden Gate (bottom): The Photos toolbar is back, and there’s no longer a distracting fade effect between two different button styles depending on the content scrolling underneath. You can also see the reattached toolbar to the left.Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.
To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is probably fine, though I’ve currently got the slider right in the center. We’ll see how that goes.
Siri AI takes the SpotlightSiri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.
In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.
The result is… still a work in progress, at least so far. Siri AI is a beta feature inside a beta operating system. Betas within betas. First off, it’s a struggle to remember that Siri is actually useful and I should take advantage of it. Years of training myself never to consider Siri have to be untrained, and that’s going to take some time.
Thus far, I’ve found Siri AI’s responses to general-knowledge queries to be very good. But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. This is where things start to fall apart, though this is not surprising—it’s an early beta, and many third-party apps will need to update to better integrate with this system. I don’t use Apple’s default calendar or email apps, which puts me at a disadvantage. It frequently failed to answer fairly basic questions about files on my system—”where’s that PDF that contains my company’s tax ID number?”—that I’d hope that a smart assistant with access to my entire Mac should be able to find.
There’s also the question of Siri/Spotlight choosing the right context. When you type Command-Space, Spotlight comes to the fore—and that’s good, because if you want to use it as an app launcher, you want instant responsiveness. When I typed a question that’s more appropriate for Siri, however, I found I needed to wait a few seconds for “Ask Siri” to appear so I could ask my query.
Ask Siri has been welded onto the top of contextual menus. It feels wrong and seems needy.There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. The contextual menu used to open with all of its contents down and to the right of the pointer (unless you were too far to the right or bottom of the screen); now it starts shifted down a little bit, as if the old context menu was being drawn and then an Ask Siri item was being overlaid right at the top of the menu, sticking up over it. It’s darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. It’s disconcerting every time I right-click on something.
The most useful actions tend to be placed at the top, and I’m not convinced that even a fully functional Ask Siri would always be the most useful command in a context. This feels more like a weird add-on to existing context menus, and all to promote the new Siri features. Apple, if a feature is good, users will use it. Distorting the geography of context menus on the Mac to promote them feels aggressive and almost desperate.
Touchscreen Macs, at last?One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.
The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.
It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.
Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.
After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.
Shortcuts, reduced and enhancedThe Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut. As I wrote in June:
This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it…
But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical. And perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.
Describe a Shortcut is limited, but it really works quite well. I hope it continues to grow and improve, because it lowers the bar for user automation across Apple’s platforms in a delightful way.
Shortcuts will analyze and describe any of your shortcuts, but that right pane needs to be hideable.For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.
There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)
The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has unfortunately distorted the Shortcuts interface in some unfortunate ways. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Which is fine, except it’s an enormous amount of screen space devoted to something that may be entirely irrelevant. Somehow, Shortcuts won’t let you hide this pane.
New horizons for PhotosDuring WWDC week, I wrote about the changes to Photos this year, but just to reprise:
Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.
Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.
As for the three AI-powered features in Photos, they’re a mixed bag. I have high hopes for a much improved Clean Up, which was already okay but could be a lot better. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context imagery, though of course it’s not perfect.
The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.
Extend added people, scaffolding, and trees to this shot. (Original frame inverted for reference.)Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. It’s also going to be great for straightening images, since Extend can fill in the slivers of unknown image that are exposed when you rotate, which otherwise require that your image be cropped as you rotate.
However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.
Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down, and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.
The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.
Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.
There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos.
Wait, there’s more…There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them. Keeping in mind that we’re entering the long cruise to the fall release of the final version, here are some other highlights so far:
- Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there1—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) nearly five years ago. Better late than never, I guess.
- Safari’s now got an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, but I noticed that this approach is also being applied to the Start Page, where recently viewed pages also now appear clustered by topic.
- The Passwords app gets an injection of agentic AI through a new feature that offers to change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you, navigating various websites and generating new, high-security passwords automatically. It’s a clever idea, but the most unfinished of any feature in the beta. It managed to change three of the 39 passwords it attempted. If you were trying to break into my Ikea account, well, you’re going to need to order more Kallax shelves on someone else’s dime now.
- Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!
A file name suggestion based on the file’s content.A note about stabilityThis summer, the vibe has been that Apple’s 27 releases are very stable for betas, which is not surprising since improved stability and reliability have been key Apple goals. And I would agree, I’ve been running the developer beta on my main Mac since the week after WWDC, and it’s been mostly fine.
But don’t be fooled: These are betas, and they will do weird stuff. I have to occasionally reboot my Mac to get things working normally. Shortcuts just stop working, and then start working again, willy-nilly. Third-party apps frequently quit unexpectedly, or refuse to quit at all and hang out in my Dock forever! And as I mentioned above, my menu bar manager is busted, though the developers are working on it.
If you’re willing to put up with the quirks in exchange for a glimpse at the future of the Mac, jump in. If you refused Tahoe entirely, you are in for an extra treat. And if you’d rather just wait… relax. Fall will be here before you know it.
- It’s worth noting that Apple’s changes to the menu bar seem to have broken compatibility with existing menu bar utilities. They’ll need to be updated. If you rely on them and want to jump into the Public Beta, be warned. ↩
Inside Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit: How do trade secrets conflict with expert knowlege, was there a concerted effort to steal secret documents to kickstart OpenAI hardware, and how does Apple’s own vulnerability inform the whole situation?
Go to the podcast page.
I had a simple task that involved Apple Home. If you use Apple Home, you know what happened next. Tears, frustration, the arrival of batteries, paperclips pushed into hard-to-reach holes, many online searches, and—if you are lucky, as I was—success.
Siri, am I lazy?My goal was straightforward: can I know if the garage door is open without going to look? Early in the pandemic, we occasionally forgot to close it. While there was a locked door between the garage and the house, it still felt like we were playing with fire, as someone could steal a bike or other lesser goodies from the garage.1 The garage is on our basement floor (ground level on one half of the house), and the last thing I enjoy doing at night is walking downstairs before bed to check the door.2
I purchased an Eve Door & Window Contact Sensor to have this capability reported by Apple Home, joining a growing set of HomeKit devices, including our front-door deadbolt. Because of our old-style single-piece swing-up garage door, I had a heck of a time finding the right place and right adhesive to stick the sensor where it was close enough for the two components to register.
The red-on-pink Characteristic is Shortcuts tells me it couldn’t read anything back from the sensor.I spent enough time on the vagaries of physics and materials that I was probably more frustrated than I needed to be when I tried to make a workflow with the danged thing. An Automation wouldn’t work because I wanted an alert, not for the sensor to trigger other Home devices. A Shortcut should have worked, but after many hours of trying over weeks, I was unable to get anything reliable to happen. The Automation was quite simple: at 9 p.m., check the state of the sensor, and send me a message if the sensor shows Open rather than Closed. I left it in place and walked away for literally years.
After recently installing a back-driveway camera, I was determined to get this sensor online.3 First, I replaced the battery, which had died during my period of disinterest. The Eve sensor uses a weird, tiny battery: a 3.6V 1/2 AA (ER14250). After that arrived, using some better adhesive—thin-film 3M 468MP—I positioned the sensor pieces in a better location and more securely.
Now it should work! Except that after adding it, I saw Characteristic in red text on a pink background in Shortcuts. Some online research led me to reset the sensor by inserting a paperclip into a hole I hadn’t noticed. After re-pairing the sensor, I was in business! Or was I?! The sensor wasn’t responding, despite recent status updates.
Threading the sensor through the house needleThe working Shortcut tests for the garage door sensor‘s state being Open or Closed, and acts accordingly.This led me to the next culprit: the garage is too far away (one floor and the other end of the house) from my Apple TV, which acts as a Matter controller, while the Eve sensor relies on Thread as its communication protocol. What’s a Matter controller?4 And what’s Thread?
Matter is an overarching standard, painstakingly developed even as low-power sensing devices and other equipment proliferated in silos. Matter enables Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings devices to communicate across a network, regardless of the network transport medium (Ethernet, Thread, or Wi-Fi). This prevents you from needing ecosystem-specific hubs and lets manufacturers build to a common standard.
Thread fits into this mix as a low-power, wireless networking standard for sensors, allowing them to communicate their status without rapidly draining their batteries, as would happen with Wi-Fi.5 Apple initially supported Thread with a proprietary standard, HomeKit-over-Thread, and later added direct Matter support. The Eve sensor was just old enough that it was running on the older standard, but the Eve app allowed me to apply a firmware upgrade. I could then migrate the sensor to Matter, which seems to be more reliable.
Apple made things a little confusing here, too. The 1st-generation Apple TV 4K supports Matter, but lacks a Thread radio, so it can’t work with Thread-based devices. The 2nd generation added that radio, so you can do Matter over Thread. But then, with the 3rd generation, Apple bifurcated Thread hardware support: the 64 GB Wi-Fi only model lacks a Thread radio; you have to spend the now-whopping $249 for a 128 GB Wi-Fi + Ethernet version if you want to use Thread.
Failing an Apple TV 4K with Thread, you can use a Thread border router (TBR), which sometimes comes with sensor kits. This plugs into your network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet and bridges to the Thread network, allowing the Apple TV’s Matter controller to work with the Home app on your devices for automations, notifications, and so forth.
It’s that easy, folks. Sigh.
I do own a 3rd-generation Apple TV 4K with Wi-Fi + Ethernet, because I am a fancy man and a big spender, but I really wanted the reliability of plugging it into my Ethernet network. Yet, I couldn’t get the Eve sensor’s Thread radio to reach across my house to talk to the Apple TV. I bought a TBR, thinking it would solve the problem.
By the time the TBR was delivered, however, the garage door sensor magically connected via Thread to the Apple TV and has been rock solid. The TBR that arrived, on the other hand, I was unable to pair and get working, so back it goes for a refund.
Now my nightly Shortcut works! The only fly in that ointment is that the sensor status reports as Closed or Open in iOS and iPadOS, but as 0 (closed) or 1 (open) in the macOS Home app, in both macOS 26 and the beta of 27. I can live with running the Shortcut from my phone.
Shortcuts in macOS can’t seem to read the Home sensor’s text labels of Open and Closed, seeing 1 and 0 instead.[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Bikes were in short supply and sold at outrageous prices in the early pandemic, partly because supply chains to import new ones were halted. Then, there was a glut when life allegedly returned to normal. ↩
- I mean, I don’t enjoy doing it as the final thing of the evening. English is complicated. The last thing I enjoy doing before bed is some crossword puzzles while listening to a podcast. ↩
- I immediately discovered a family of bandits! ↩
- I don’t know. Whatsa Matter controller, you? ↩
- Technically, it uses IEEE 802.15.4, the same as the delightfully named ZigBee. ↩
OpenAI has not been shy about teaming with former Apple employees.Back in May, OpenAI was rattling its saber about thinking about talking to lawyers about possibly considering a lawsuit against Apple for not treating it right when it came to ChatGPT integration.
What a misdirection! Instead, Apple has sued OpenAI—and it’s alleging that the hardware program it’s been building with Jony Ive and company is being fueled by the theft of trade secrets.
Here’s the statement Apple supplied to various news outlets on Friday:
At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.
There’s a lot more in the court filing. As summarized by Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac:
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that [former Apple designer Tang] Tan used insider knowledge of Apple’s confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for “show and tell” sessions.
Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began “screenshotting and downloading files relating to a highly confidential Apple project” hours before interviewing with Tan, who then “solicited more information about that same Apple project” once the interview started. This became an “established pattern,” Apple says.
The list of bad behavior by former Apple employees goes on, including distributing internal Apple documents to new hires, evading security procedures, downloading confidential files from Apple after they had departed, coaching new hires about what confidential documents to study before leaving Apple, and lying to Apple partners to get them to disclose confidential information.
It’s… a lot to process. All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open! I’m fascinated to see where this story goes.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
If you’ve ever wondered why your data transfers to external drives aren’t going as fast as you’d like, or a certain peripheral just isn’t working, you could probably use WhatCable, a helpful little app from developer Darryl Morley.
WhatCable looks at your Mac’s USB ports and anything plugged into them, and lets you know about speeds and power supply for your currently connected USB and Thunderbolt cables, as well as what their maximums are. While there are other places on your Mac that you can find this information, such as System Information, WhatCable presents it all in a well organized, easy to read manner. It even details all the devices connected to your USB hubs.
For example, after looking at it, I realized that my backup drive was only connected via a USB2 cable. Fine in general for overnight backups, but when it reminded to me when I was troubleshooting some backup issues that maybe I should switch to a high speed cable that supports USB-3.1
You can choose to run WhatCable in your menu bar, or as a standalone app; there’s also a “Show technical details” option that gives you even more information that could be helpful for troubleshooting. There are options for font size, translucency, and menu bar icon, in case you’re so inclined.
For its base functionality, WhatCable is free and available either via Morley’s site, or via homebrew. For a £9.99 one-time purchase, you can unlock WhatCable Pro, which works on up to two Macs, lets you assign names to cables so you can remember which one it is when you plug it in later, provides more in-depth diagnostics, offers live power metering to see how much juice is being delivered right now, and even more.
[via Michael Tsai]
- Holy cow did that backup go way faster. ↩
Jeremy White of Wired has a great tip that also serves as a reminder that amazing things can be found in accessibility settings:
Surely there must be a way to set up an iPhone as the perfect dumb phone for children—one with access to only the apps you deem appropriate, no internet browser, but with all-important tracking and navigation abilities—without having to pay another company to make it work? Well, there is. It’s been hiding in the iOS Accessibility menu the whole time. And, inexplicably, it’s a feature Apple barely talks about.
It’s called Assistive Access. Introduced with iOS 17, Apple designed it for those with cognitive disabilities. If you’ve never encountered or stumbled across it, it’s a distinctive iOS experience: fewer options, more focused features, easier to navigate. The aesthetic is ideal for kids: large, friendly tiles for the apps replace the smaller icons of the “normal” Apple interface.
It’s kind of beautiful. And absolutely the sort of thing you might want to give to a younger kid.
[Via Andy Ihnatko, who also detailed his own use of accessibility features to make streamlined workflow automations.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Physical vs. digital media and how we organize it, our system for the digital “deal with it later” pile, what we do with old hardware, and iPhone ergonomics.
Go to the podcast page.
This week Lex has audio issues, Dan wants to unload some old hardware and Moltz is tired of fireworks.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple seeks RAM in all the wrong places, Jason has two tangents about FileMaker, and we deal with a large load of somewhat puzzling rumors and legal cases.
Go to the podcast page.
My beloved sister-in-law-in-law (my wife’s brother’s spouse) texted me with an important problem. Her mother had managed to delete the App Store from her Home Screen. How to restore it? While this is a common problem, I realized that the process is completely unintuitive.
For her mother’s particular situation, the answer felt like a cheat code for a video game: unlock, swipe left (once or more), search, touch and hold, drag. Done.
App Library gives you a view of all your apps organized by Apple automagically. At right, the Social folder—how embarrassing!It’s worth a full review of how modern Home Screen management even works in iOS (and iPadOS), with the App Library view off some people’s radar entirely. Apple has, fortunately, not changed this process so far in the iOS 27/iPadOS 27 betas.
Delete or hide an appI don’t use the term baroque lightly. However, Apple’s flowchart for choices you can make when deleting an app and what happens next has added some curlicues and ornamentation that can confuse the best of us.
It works like this:
First, touch and hold an app. That’s the easy part.
Now we fork into various swirls and pathways. Choose either Remove App or Require Face ID.
Remove App: You can pick from two options (or tap Cancel):
- Remove from Home Screen: The app’s icon disappears from your Home Screen page. However, it remains in the App Library, which I’ll describe below. More importantly, any data stored on your device remains accessible to the app. It’s like hiding, but not hiding!
- Delete App: Deleting an app removes the app from your device and its data stored on the device. This shouldn’t affect iCloud-synced data if you use the app on other platforms or other identical devices.
Touch and hold most apps, and you can choose Remove App, then choose which kind of removal.Require Face ID: Enabling Require Face ID hides content within the app from Spotlight results. You can add Hide to Require Face ID and also hide the app itself from Spotlight searches. Here are the two Face ID variations:
- Require Face ID: You can’t launch the app without using Face ID, separate from any authentication that may occur within an app for access to its data. You also can’t use data from the app in other apps without Face ID.
- Hide and Require Face ID: One step further, the app icon isn’t actually hidden! It remains in “obscured” fashion on the Home Screen, and appears in Hidden Apps in App Library. A hidden app that produces notifications, handles calls, or sends critical alerts has those suppressed as well. (Despite the statement that “This app will be obscured on your Home Screen,” it was simply removed for me.)
Hiding an app as part of the Require Face ID option requires a lot of disclosure by Apple—some of it, seemingly inaccurate?So, let me get this straight. If you remove the app from the Home Screen or Require Face ID, you can still search for it in Spotlight. If you delete it, it’s gone (though Spotlight may show it as a tap-to-download option from the App Store in results). If you Hide and Require Face ID, you can’t search for it or its contents, but you can find it in a Hidden folder in App Library. Got it, got it.
Despite the above, I have to throw in a big HOWEVER.1 If the app is one of a few made by Apple and preinstalled, you can only remove it from the Home Screen. For instance, touch and hold Settings, Camera, Safari, and a few others, and then choose Remove App: only Remove from Home Screen appears; you can’t delete it, and you can’t use Hide and Require Face ID. Other Apple apps, like Stocks or Weather, may be freely tossed. Perfectly consistent and clear.
Since you now have perfect knowledge of all of these states and interactions, let’s look next at App Library, your Home Screen away from Home Screen.
Apple refused to call it Junk DrawerI have used a succession of apps that I call, with affection, my “junk-drawer” apps. If you don’t have a drawer in your kitchen that is full of miscellaneous crap that you nonetheless occasionally or regularly need, but which has no place in any other drawer or organizational system, congratulations: you’ve just outed yourself as an extraterrestrial and Earth’s First Contact Committee is on its way.
For example, I throw in every piece of text, PDF, photo of receipt, file, and other detritus that I need to keep handy and email or a folder isn’t accessible enough. Then I can search within the app—convenient since everything is now OCR’d by default, so I can find any word or phrase across all media in the app.2
App Library is the equivalent of this, but just for apps. Do you find Spotlight too effusive in its results? Want to have an organizational scheme for apps you don’t have to set up or maintain? Swipe left until you get to the App Library page. You can scroll through pseudo-folders, from which you can tap to launch apps with full-size icons or tap groups of tiny icons to open the pseudo-folder categorizing those apps. You can also use the search field at the top to search only for apps, as opposed to using Spotlight. At the very bottom of the library is where you find Hidden, the not-exactly hidden set of Hide and Require Face ID apps.
To reverse previous choices from an app, App Library, or via Spotlight if the app is searchable:
- Find the app, touch and hold it, then drag it leftwards onto another Home Page page.
- For a Require Face ID app that’s not hidden, touch and hold it, validate with Face ID, then choose Don’t Require Face ID.
- For a hidden app, tap the Hidden folder, validate with Face ID, then touch and hold the app, and choose Don’t Require Face ID. This removes it from the Hidden folder.
If you deleted an app, you can search for its name in Spotlight, and you may see it in a list with a cloud download icon; you can tap that to restore it, but not its data, which you might be able to recall via logging into an account or it syncing with iCloud. You can also tap Search App Store in Spotlight. Or, launch App Store, search for the app’s name, and tap the cloud download button.
You can’t go Home Screen againReader Peter wrote in with a related question I can answer briefly: “No.” I’m sad about that, though. His question? He has a weirdly undeletable app—he can delete it, but it always reappears immediately and persists across migrations and devices. He wondered whether, after he triggered Settings: General: Transfer or Reset Phone: Reset: Reset Home Screen Layout, he could restore his painstakingly set-up Home Screen layouts.
If you have a suggestion, write me, or post in the Six Colors Discord, available to members. Discord is also where you can send a question for the column directly by using /glenn.
- Jason won’t let me use larger type here. ↩
- I started with Yojimbo, migrated to Evernote, and abandoned it for Bear, which is delightful. It’s not perfectly feature complete, but it is close enough for 99% of my purposes. ↩
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/titanic.mp4Tubi, don’t ruin this!My Apple TV has started yelling at me. Or at the very least, the Disney+ app on the Apple TV is now clamoring for my attention.
It used to be that when I fired up Disney Plus on my Apple TV, I could browse for something to watch in relative peace. But at some point, an update must have come along that caused the app to break its previously inviolable vow of silence. Because now, when I hover over the thumbnail for a particular movie or show, a preview starts to autoplay.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the latest Avatar picture or something from Pixar or even a Hulu original that now lives in Disney’s app — one moment of hesitation, and a preview plays until I move on to the next thumbnail and the cycle begins anew. New season of The Bear? Preview. An Indiana Jones picture? Preview. X-Men ’97? A particularly angering preview that doesn’t even feature Gambit, for crying out loud.
Disney’s Apple TV app is not alone in blasting previews whether I want them or not. In the land of streaming services, you are dealing with an attention economy, and the purveyors of streaming apps have decided the only way to command that attention is to shout as loud as possible. Hence, nearly every app from every streaming service of note turns on auto-playing previews by default, no matter how you feel about them.
And make no mistake — I feel that auto-playing just about anything is an assault on my senses. When I am trying to decide what to watch, I want to pause on a thumbnail and maybe glance at the information a bit without having to hastily scroll away once audio and video playback begin. Maybe I want to have a conversation with a family member about whether this is a program we both might enjoy without having to shout over some Na’Vi chittering at me about some sort of trouble brewing on Pandora.
The good news is that Apple TV apps have a setting for turning off autoplay previews so that you can go back to browsing through a streaming catalog in blessed silence. But there’s bad news, too — each app seemingly puts that setting in a completely different place, and it’s up to you to hunt down where that might be.
Should Apple impose some order on tvOS apps and require some degree of standardization when it comes to autoplay settings? Or should it go one step further and tell developers not to turn on that feature by default so as to spare the eardrums of paying customers? It’s not for me to say, even though the answer is emphatically yes to both questions.
But I fear my wisdom will fall upon deaf ears — and not just because they’ve already been deafened by all those autoplaying previews. So instead, I can do the next best thing, which is share the hard-won knowledge I have on how to turn off autoplay features in all the big streaming apps that might be living on your Apple TV.
Please don’t thank me. The silence is reward enough.
Apple TVApple’s TV app will start to preview content from the Apple TV streaming service if you let it. That’s certainly Apple’s right, but maybe I don’t want to hear about Your Friends and Neighbors each time I launch Apple’s app.
To make Apple TV shut up about the new season of Ted Lasso, go to the Settings app and select Accessibility, followed by Motion. Toggling off Auto-Play Video previews should, in Apple’s words, control whether you allow “video content to auto-play in apps like TV.” In my experience, though, the only app this setting seems to control is TV itself. For third-party apps, you’ll need to dive into settings on your own.
Tubi, HBO Max, but not really Paramount+Tubi has among the easiest autoplay settings to disable, which is good because it also has the most annoying autoplay behavior. Tubi not only starts to play a preview if you momentarily pause while browsing through its vast library, but if you let that preview reach its conclusion, the movie or show will immediately start playing. For heaven’s sake, Tubi, your entire raison d’etre is to let me comb through the back alleys of your content to let me find something obscure to watch — stop ruining this for me!
Anyhow, with Tubi, all you have to do is head to the app’s settings where you select Video. There, you can disable autoplay to your heart’s content. See? Simple.
The story is similar for HBO Max and Paramount+—sort of. On HBO Max, choose Settings and then under the Playback tab, you can turn off a whole variety of autoplay features. In Paramount+, the Settings icon is hidden at the far bottom left of the screen, but if you just keep moving down through the side menu, you will end up selecting the Settings icon and can get where you need to go. All the Autoplay settings are under the Video tab.
Unfortunately, while Paramount+ will let you turn off “autoplay video,” that setting does not stop previews from autoplaying. Instead of letting you do that, Paramount+ gives you the option of holding down the center button on any preview to enter an “immersive preview mode” where they made the whole plane out of the preview. Frankly, yet another reason to give anything with Paramount’s imprimatur on it a wide berth.
NetflixIf Tubi is the easiest app for managing autoplay annoyances, then Netflix may be the worst. That’s because you can’t do it from the app on your Apple TV.
Instead, you need to head to Netflix in your web browser of choice, where you select your profile icon, followed by Account. From there, you select Edit Settings followed by Playback Settings followed once more by Autoplay Controls. There’s a box called Autoplay Preview While Browsing on All Devices — uncheck that and make sure to save your preference. Autoplay should be just a filthy memory the next time you access Netflix on your Apple TV.
Peacock and Disney PlusI’m lumping these two services together because they put their autoplay controls in the exact same place. That’s not to say that the setting is easy to find, though, as both Peacock and Disney do a bang-up job hiding the control where you would least expect to find it.
In either app, go to the screen with your account profiles and click on the edit icon for the one you want to adjust. On Peacock, under Autoplay Preferences, you’ll see a toggle for Autoplay Trailers. For Disney, the Playback and Language Settings section has Background Video and Background Audio toggles; turning off the former takes care of both, while adjusting just the latter means that video previews will play silently.
Does the fact that this setting lives in the user profiles for both Peacock and Disney Plus mean that you’ll have adjust playback controls for each profile in your account? Indeed, it does!
Amazon Prime VideoNear as I can tell, Amazon Prime Video is the rare streaming app that doesn’t autoplay previews as you’re rummaging through its library of shows and movies. At the very least, nothing autoplays when I’m in the app, and whether that’s because of the overall Apple TV settings I’ve adjusted or something with Amazon itself, I’m satisfied with the result.
So well done, Amazon — I take back some, but only some, of the horrible things I’ve said about you.
EveryMac is a site with a comprehensive set of specs for Mac models, current and historic, that’s celebrating an anniversary today:
On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.
Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.
Back in 1995 I worked on a project for MacUser magazine called the Mac Catalog, which was a FileMaker-based spec database much like EveryMac’s. I was the person who brought the Mac Catalog to the web for the first time, in fact! The Mac Catalog died along with MacUser, but it makes me happy to see that EveryMac has survived.
If that fact makes you happy, too, you can become an EveryMac supporter.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple’s price hikes and our buying plans, our beta OS strategies, dealing with subscriptions, and Meta’s new glasses fees.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple hikes prices, Dan goes down a rabbit hole, Moltz is holding confessional and Lex rightfully self-promotes.
Go to the podcast page.
Joseph Cox at 404Media reports on a hole in Hide My Email’s security:
A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.
This information originates with Tyler Murphy, who runs EasyOptOuts, a service that aims to help you remove your private information from the web. Cox says he confirmed the issue by creating a new Hide My Email address and providing it to Murphy, who returned the associated private iCloud email in about five minutes.
According to Murphy, he reported the vulnerability—the full details of which neither he nor 404 are disclosing—to Apple a year ago, and as of the end of May, the company said a security update was due “in the coming weeks”, though it still had not been patched as of the story’s publication.
While it’s hard to determine without the exact details how serious this vulnerability is, Murphy and Cox’s demo and Apple’s response do suggest that it is of concern for those relying on the feature, which is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ service.
The company recently announced that it would be shifting all new anonymous addresses for both Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple to a single subdomain, a move that some critics say would make it easier for services to block using those addresses specifically. Previously, that would have required blocking all icloud.com addresses, which would obviously be untenable.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
On Monday Apple released 26.5.2 software updates for its platforms that don’t follow the company’s usual pattern, suggesting some interesting things about how it reacts to releasing security fixes.
The key is right at the top of Apple’s document about the issue:
This update delivers security fixes that were first made available in the iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 betas.
In other words, the security fixes in 26.5.2 are based on the security fixes that were rolled into the 26.6 betas, the first of which was released publicly on May 26. That means that everyone in the security world, including bad actors, has had more than a month to analyze all of Apple’s forthcoming fixes—which still haven’t rolled out to the broad user base because 26.6 is still in beta.
With 26.5.2, Apple has decided not to wait for the entirety of 26.6 to ship to get its included security fixes out into the world. Now everyone can update to 26.5.2—and Apple recommends it—and take advantage of those security fixes immediately.
These days, reporting on security issues immediately brings up the topic of AI—on both sides. Apple says it uses frontier models to find and discover issues on its platforms, but of course, AI can also be used to analyze the changes in a beta release and deduce what bugs it’s fixing. In the AI era, the lifecycle of a beta OS release may end up being longer than Apple is willing to wait to roll out fixes.
Of course, individual bugs aren’t exploits. According to Apple, attackers need to chain multiple bugs together to create a functional exploit. Each closed bug reduces the overall attack opportunity, but Apple says none of the bugs fixed in 26.5.2 have been used in any attacks, nor was 26.5.2 released in response to any emergent security issue.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple raised prices! Is this a shocking move, or were Apple products just sneakily affordable before? (And can it be both?) We also parse Mark Gurman’s reports on Apple skipping over may M6 chips to go directly to M7.
Go to the podcast page.
We live in a modern, jet-set, hyper-fast world! When we want to buy something online, boom, zoom, we use our fingerprint or face to approve the transaction, so we can grab the next Segway outta here! We don’t have time to enter a credit card! And can we trust a webpage form? Pfeh!
All right, calm down, 1950s inner voice, it’s not that bad. Most of our transactions involving a payment card or other sensitive data can be safely handled over a secure web connection. Apple Pay in Safari is the highest standard, of course, because the payment process involves encrypted elements, and your card number isn’t disclosed to the merchant. The Wallet app in iOS and the Wallet features in iPadOS and macOS further let us automate the entry of numbers and identifiers on pages we trust.
That’s all for automated commerce. What about other scenarios where you need to provide information to someone, often a friend or a local business, in order to transfer money or conduct a transaction? How can you be sure no one else is snooping in?
Make a callVoice is still one of the most secure means of providing data. The landline wired and cellular wireless networks may be fertile ground for government agencies, but if you need to read a credit-card number or provide a PIN, a call is often the safest way to do so. By voice, you can always have the other person verify details that you believe only they know, or you can verify details to them for the same.
One ringy-dingy. (Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash)Because we live in a cyberpunk dystopian future, I do have to add a proviso. AI-generated voices have been convincing for a couple of years now—long enough that you shouldn’t trust an incoming call from someone you think you know, and certainly not from a bank, credit-card company, or other financial institution. I mean, I wrote “How To Avoid AI Voice Impersonation and Similar Scams” in January 2024! I assume the state-of-the-art scam is even better.
(The biggest takeaway is analog, too. Set a family password that you demand from a family member who calls asking for money or to do some weird phone or computer set of instructions.1)
Unless recorded, voice calls also lack persistence, making them impossible to recover later. A real-time Bob needs to be either between Alice and Carol or doing an AI impression of Alice or Carol.
Use secure messagingI could make the argument that using secure messaging carries even less risk than a voice call if you’ve had an ongoing messaging conversation with someone, so you know it’s really them. Are unsecured text messages being intercepted willy-nilly?2 No, but there is also something about sending plain text all over the cellular networks that gives me the willies, nillies aside.
Look for a lock and the label Encrypted for RCS; iMessage is always encrypted, or it won’t work. (Lower image: Apple)Secure messaging systems include:
- iMessage: While iMessage has seen exploits, they’re government-grade ones. Its secure end-to-end infrastructure is creaky, but unbroken. There’s an extra detail I’ll mention below.
- RCS with encryption: Between Apple Messages on iOS 26.5 or later and an Android device with RCS encryption support, you have a similar level of end-to-end protection. Make sure you see RCS encryption in the text field, or it’s just plain text. You can also use RCS encryption between two capable Android devices—as if!
- Signal: The Signal app and ecosystem have the best end-to-end encryption, as it implements some of the most modern approaches to protecting older messages and current conversations available so far.
The extra note on iMessage is complicated. Briefly, if you use Messages in iCloud, an encryption key to retrieve those messages is included in an iCloud-based iPhone or iPad backup. With access to your Apple Account, someone could potentially retrieve your stored messages. However, if you enable iCloud’s Advanced Data Protection, the backup is encrypted and requires endpoint decryption using one of your devices, protecting the Messages in iCloud encryption key. This should be a worry only if someone manages to obtain your Apple Account, can activate a second factor, and the information you passed via Messages is so sensitive that someone would hunt to uncover it.
Avoid using SMS or MMS text messages (unencrypted plain text), unencrypted RCS (in-transit/at-rest encryption), or other messaging systems where you’re not sure how they handle data protection. WhatsApp can be used if you either have backups disabled or have enabled end-to-end encrypted backups.
Don’t use most collaborative toolsI know that I spend a lot of time in shared documents, whether Google Docs, Notes, Pages, or more esoteric apps or web apps. Most lack the highest level of protection. Shared Pages and Numbers files on iCloud Drive, as well as Google Docs, are encrypted in transit and at rest, and granting shared access is relatively easy (very easy in Google Docs). For iCloud Drive documents, this is true even with Advanced Data Protection enabled.
I’d be dubious about pasting my driver’s license or credit-card information into any of them that are shared with someone else. Ditto, don’t take a picture of your payment card or driver’s license and share it via a Shared Album in Photos, as it has the same issue.
There are two notable (heh) exceptions: if you and the other party or parties to a shared Notes entry or an iCloud Shared Photo Library all have Advanced Data Protection enabled, end-to-end encryption is used.
Consider the riskAs with all decisions around privacy, consider how at risk you and your data are, including voice as data. In most cases, ensuring a baseline level of encryption can be enough. Even when the app or server can “see” your unscrambled information, the transport between your device and the server and another person’s device is encrypted. Someone would have to break into the server to sniff data. If stored on the server, the baseline state would be encrypted at rest; however, the server operator would manage those encryption keys.
For peace of mind, if not strictly necessary, I’d encourage you to consider using end-to-end encryption when you can. It’s so easily available. For someone to crack your connection, they would need to obtain one of your devices and be able to unlock it. Otherwise, the path between you and someone else is effectively impregnable.
For further readingI cover message security extensively in my book Take Control of FaceTime and Messages, which I recently updated to include the beta release of RCS encryption for Apple-to-Android communication.
For more on Wallet, I wrote an entire book on that seemingly simple app and set of features, Take Control of Apple Wallet. The book arose from the frustrations of finding where things in Wallet (and outside Wallet but related to it) lived.
On the security side of things, Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices includes detailed advice on the ins and outs of physical security: how to ensure someone with access to your hardware can’t reach your data.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- This will also deter family members from asking you for money if you don’t give them the password. ↩
- If so, who is Willy? ↩
My thanks to Mojave Paint for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Mojave Paint is a new macOS image editor for power users that will feel really familiar (in the best possible way). If you use layers, masks, channels, selections, adjustments and filters all in the same editing session, Mojave Paint might be for you.
There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint. Make pixel art. Clean up document scans. Design a flyer. Create App Store screenshots. Crop and resize photos. Do some basic photo retouching. Remove a background.
Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s. Yes, it’s retro—but it’s also practical, since hard-edged 1x pixel graphics are high contrast and communicate precision.
Mojave Paint is available in the Mac App Store as a free download. That’s the limited version, but it’s only $9.99 to fully unlock all the features.
Smart home reporter Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge reports that parent company Assa Abloy has folded Level, which it acquired in 2024, into its Kwikset brand and removed the company’s founders:
The Verge obtained exclusive details from a person familiar with the restructuring who requested anonymity as they were part of the layoffs. They shared an audio recording of a meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, informed the staff that their positions had been eliminated, effective immediately, as “a part of a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A LinkedIn post from a now-former employee corroborates the layoffs.
As an owner and daily user of three Level locks, this news is certainly worrying. An Assa Abloy spokesperson told The Verge that the company will “continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware” but given that the majority of the engineering team seems to also be out, there are certainly questions around it.
On the upside, all of Level’s products now support Matter, which means that at least basic functionality ought to continue working for some time to come. But this is still potentially a disappointing move for a unique product.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis is encouraged by the interface improvements Apple is making in macOS 27, but points out that there’s still one huge issue from last year that needs to be resolved, namely forcing all Mac icons to be trapped inside a single, uniform shape:
Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.
It’s clear that some people within Apple recognize that the transition to Liquid Glass introduced mistakes. They also appear to have the authority to fix those mistakes. Refinements to Apple’s own icons in Golden Gate are a welcome course correction, as is the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider. It’s time to correct the mistake of banning icon shapes as well.
Kafasis makes the important point that uniform shapes make it more difficult for users, especially those with vision issues including color deficiency, to differentiate between icons. He also references an argument from TidBITS’s Adam Engst that the uniformity sabotages Apple’s own clear and tinted icon formats.
Apple, let the Mac app icons be free.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
An Apple laptop media event.Perhaps lost a bit amid the Apple price hikes of Thursday was this surprising bit of news from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman regarding the future of Apple silicon Macs:
[Apple] plans to debut a base M6 processor as early as this year for entry-level Macs, according to people with knowledge of the matter. But in a first, the company will skip higher-end versions of that chip, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.
Apple instead aims to introduce its next Pro and Max chips with more advanced computing and graphics power in 2027 as part of a new M7 generation, according to the people.
According to Gurman, Apple has decided to shift gears in order to fast-track the tech in the M7 chips, which is better suited to “meet growing demand for on-device AI capabilities and more graphics-intensive software.” In other words, Apple looked at its chip roadmap and felt it didn’t want to wait for M7 and didn’t want to bother shipping M6 Pro and Max.
As weird as this seems, I’m actually encouraged by Apple’s willingness to change its chip and product plans in order to better serve the technical needs of its customers. If Apple has a chance to push its advantage when it comes to on-device AI processing, it should do so, even if it means ripping up plans and calling an audible.
Of course, this decision has knock-on effects. For example, Gurman’s been reporting for ages about Apple’s forthcoming MacBook Pro models with OLED touchscreens—but the chips they were meant to ship with, the M6 Pro and M6 Max, have just been cancelled! So… now what?
On Friday, Gurman let the other shoe drop, reporting that Apple will release those systems with M5 chips “between late this year and early next year”, with M7 to follow:
Apple is already conducting advanced testing of the follow-up models with M7 Pro and M7 Max chips, according to the people. Those laptop models are planned for as early as the end of 2027. Apple is also planning a Mac Studio refresh with M7 Max and M7 Ultra chips in 2028.
Releasing new models with familiar chips is probably not ideal, but if the alternative is delaying the OLED MacBook Pro until late 2027, I can see why Apple would choose to go ahead and roll out a new and improved MacBook Pro powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The laptop is apparently just about ready, so there’s no sense waiting. The weirdness of it launching with an old chip is just collateral damage from Apple’s larger decision to be more aggressive when it comes to its high-end chip plans.
Say this about Tim Cook: he always follows through. After telling the Wall Street Journal last week that Apple would have to raise prices thanks to the ravages of the memory market, the company today did just that. The Verge, among others, have the full breakdown.
What’s interesting is the manner in which they did so. Today’s prices apply across several product lines, most prominently the Mac and iPad, but also the Apple TV and HomePod. The increases vary, but they affect both low-end devices—the MacBook Neo, whose starting price jumps $100 to $6991—and the high-end—the Vision Pro which, yes, it seems, can get more expensive, now starting at $3699.
If there’s a winner here, it’s probably the full-size HomePod, which rose just $50–back to the same price it was when Apple released the first-generation of the product eight years ago. Losers include the highest-end Macs, with maxed-out MacBook Pros jumping $1800 and a top-of-the-line Mac Studio increasing by a whopping $4200. But that’s not shocking, as those are all fully loaded with RAM and storage.
I also have to wonder if they purposefully did this price increase during Amazon’s Prime Day sales, knowing that would at least give customers a chance to snag devices at discounts before these changes ripple all the way down the supply chain.
Not every product line was hit today, though: unchanged for the moment are the prices for Apple’s most prominent device, the iPhone, as well as the Apple Watch. Those are due for a refresh in September—it seems likely at higher prices or, as Jason speculated last week, dropping the low-end configurations, but at this point, who knows? We’ll find out in just a few months, when the most expensive iPhone ever arrives, and is probably even pricier than we’re thinking now.
- For a brief, shining moment, it seemed like the company might some day get to a $499 version, but alas. ↩
The Apple II makes its public debut at a landmark event in the history of personal computers, and Steve Jobs truly comes into his own.
Go to the podcast page.
A result from the Describe a Shortcut feature in macOS 27.Since the very beginning, it’s been clear that computers provide incredible power to those who know how to use them to get work done. The challenge has always been how small the group of “those who know how to use them” has been.
The Apple II included support for BASIC, a simplified programming language that was intended to let new computer users write programs. “In my opinion, the real thing [the Apple II] is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer,” a young Steve Jobs told the New Yorker in 1977. The first computer programs I wrote were in BASIC.
There was also the Logo language, which helped introduce beginners to programming concepts through the manipulation of a virtual robot called a “turtle.” In the ’80s, HyperCard tried to broaden the programming community through its use of HyperTalk, another language designed to speak to beginners.
The (still!) current examples of this on the Mac are AppleScript, which used a format based on English-language sentence structure; and Automator and Shortcuts, two automation tools designed to create flow-chart-based programs.
The goal is always the same: To give regular people the ability to harness the power of computers. And we’ve never, ever been closer to the goal than we are today.
No, I’m not talking about vibe coding apps, mostly because that requires a level of focus and detail that most “regular people” are not going to want to provide. Show a civilian Xcode and watch how their eyes instantly glaze over.
I’m talking about Shortcuts—specifically, Apple’s Describe a Shortcut feature in the forthcoming macOS 27, iOS 27, and iPadOS 27.
This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.
A look inside a shortcut created by Describe a Shortcut.Yes, there are lots of limitations. Describe a Shortcut doesn’t work with third-party apps, only Apple’s own stuff (at least, for now). It can sometimes get confused, especially with complex queries. And it has an interesting tendency to kick things to the Use Model action—why am I not surprised that an AI model likes to build Shortcuts that themselves use AI models?
But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical. And perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.
I was also impressed with the fact that Shortcuts created with this method are… just Shortcuts. With one click, you’re looking at the actual Shortcut blocks that the feature has assembled for you. You can edit them as you see fit. They’re not special in any way, other than that they were built with an actual English-language sentence, not a line of code that resembles one superficially.
I’m sure that future developments will make it even easier for us to tell our devices what to do. But this particular advance feels especially big to me, like we’ve crossed some invisible line of demarcation. We are entering the era where the computers program themselves—and, for the most part, are able to understand what we’re asking them to do.
My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.
Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates—Bill Gates, of all people!—to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.
The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had been folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.
1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Our thoughts on Valve’s Steam Machine pricing, the third-party camera apps we actually use, whether we wait for tech sales before buying, and if being the “tech person” inspires others or just makes them defer to us.
Go to the podcast page.
This week we discuss post-CEO job opportunities for Tim Cook, new TVs and our beta experiences or lack thereof.
Go to the podcast page.
Jason returns to John Gruber’s podcast for a look back at WWDC 2026, and a look ahead to Designed in California, Jason and Myke Hurley’s upcoming 50-episode Apple history podcast.
Go to the podcast page.
In the spirit of the Summer of Fun (and Apple history Kickstarters), John Siracusa joins us to discuss when Apple was forced to replace the Classic Mac OS. Also, John Ternus gives some love to Apple’s designers and Tim Cook says prices are going up!
Go to the podcast page.
I stumbled on this post via Bluesky, in which Jason Hazeley was utterly baffled by this section of a printed book:
The movement takes the place of a scherzo and is mainly constructed [of] the welcome datacompordinary major scale with the four lower notes shifted a semitone upward.
In the photo of the book passage, (presumably) Hazeley’s finger is pointing at the phrase “welcome datacompordinary major scale.” He wrote, “Absolutely stumped. Have never seen this term, can find no definition anywhere, and can’t parse it.”
Fortunately, Jacob Haller saw the post and pointed out that he wrote about it back in 2004:
Some Mac third party keyboards used to (or maybe still do for all I know) have a little feature where if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type ‘welcome datacomp’. Here’s a nice little rant by someone who got caught by this.
That linked post is from 1994. In it, Chris Tate describes being baffled by a third-party ADB (the predecessor to USB) keyboard:
This past weekend, while trying to get some text-editing work done, I had to leave the computer alone for a while. Upon returning, I found to my horror that the text “welcome datacomp” had been inserted into the text I was editing. I was certain that I hadn’t typed it, and my wife verified that she hadn’t, either. A quick survey showed that the “clipboard” (the repository for information being manipulated via cut/paste operations) wasn’t the source of the offending text.
That story includes a cameo from John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app, who had apparently been contacted by numerous people assuming it was a virus:
Yes, we have heard of this. It’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.
My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details. Someone finding it in a printed book in 2026 just shows you how the weird tech quirks of the past can just keep echoing long after they’ve gone.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
When Amazon Prime Day gets underway this Tuesday (June 23), it will be the first time in nearly a decade that I’m not involved in some tech site’s effort to go all out with coverage around the online retailer’s multiday sales event. In recent years, my home base on the West Coast has meant late-night shifts posting about deals, updating constantly shifting sales prices and otherwise pointing out discounted doodads to readers. But none of that’s happening this year, after I was unceremoniously laid off a few months ago.
Being unemployed stinks for a number of reasons. Missing out on Amazon Prime Day coverage isn’t one of them.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good deal, and certainly helping your readers save some money on something they’re looking for falls well within the remit of a consumer technology writer. But few of the offers you’ll see on Amazon Prime Day qualify as good deals. And whatever bargains that are to be found are generally lost in the firehose of inconsequential price cuts on second-rate merch. Amazon Prime Day has become the living embodiment of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, to the point where if Oscar Wilde were alive, he’d be pointing at his computer monitor like he was in the Leonardo DiCaprio meme.
And yet, you wouldn’t know this by perusing the majority of tech websites this week, which will spend the next few days turning themselves into an extended, unpaid advertisement for Amazon’s sales event. As I write this sentence a few days ahead of Prime Day’s actual kickoff, some sites are already touting the deals you can snap up right now. And I guarantee you that once Prime Day wraps up on June 26, you will see stories about the Prime Day deals you can still get. Why, it’s almost as if Prime Day is a made-up construct and prices on goods routinely fluctuate!
Look, I don’t begrudge websites getting in on this Prime Day racket, particularly any websites that might want to employ me at any point in the future. The fact of the matter is, websites gotta make money somehow, and if one of those ways turns out to be affiliate revenue—i.e. the percentage of money a site can collect when you click through a link to an online retailer—more power to them. But the downside to that is a lot of deal alerts on items that aren’t really bargains at all, so much as they’re Amazon trying to offload merchandise to make way for the next product cycle.
Why you should sit out Prime DayWith all the noise surrounding Amazon Prime Day, it’s going to be tempting to head over to that site and load up your virtual cart with all manner of marked-down gizmos. While I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, my humble suggestion would be to… maybe not do that? I don’t know the particulars of your current life situation well enough to be handing out blanket advice. Maybe you really need a new robot vacuum cleaner, in which case, hey, this is your time to shine.
But for most of us, Amazon Prime Day is probably something best viewed at a distance with our eyes shielded to prevent permanent damage. Here’s why:
- Amazon has sales all the damned time: To the extent that Prime Day has ever been something to get hyped up for, it’s been diluted by the fact that Amazon is just going to turn around and have an identical sale a few months from now. For the last few years, Amazon has held Prime Deal Days in October, and that’s followed up shortly by the usual round of price cuts for Black Friday and holiday shopping. The price cuts you’re seeing now will likely return in short order.
- A lot of the discounted items are clearance sales by another name: Prices on some Apple gear will drop this week — in fact, some things like AirPods and Apple Watches may already be available at a notable discount. But that’s because Apple likely will be rolling out new versions of those devices in the fall, and Amazon doesn’t want a lot of outdated inventory on hand. Hey, if you want a pair of AirPods Pro 3 for less than what you’d normally pay and don’t mind missing out on the new features Apple is rumored to be adding to the next-gen model, go ahead and click that Buy button with my best wishes. Just be aware as to why the price might be that low.
- Do you really feel like giving Amazon more of your money?: Jeff Bezos may not be involved in the day-to-day operations at Amazon, but he’s still the executive chairman of the company; more to the point, he profits handsomely from Amazon’s ongoing success. And whether it’s throwing a hey-look-at-me wedding last year or running a major American newspaper into the ground or bankrolling documentaries lauding the First Lady, he’s not really putting that wealth to good use. You may disagree, in which case, load up on those discounted Ring doorbells and Echo Dots to your heart’s content, but I try to send as little money to the real-life version of LuthorCorp as possible.
Oh, you’re ignoring me? Well, at least do thisAs good as these reasons are to give Prime Day a pass, I know that some people reading this are already making a beeline toward Amazon. Fair enough — just follow a couple of good practices to get through this shopping event with a minimum of fuss and/or muss.
- DO use a price comparison tool: Make sure that whatever deal you’re seeing on Amazon is actually a good deal by turning to the price-comparison tool of your choice. For me, that’s CamelCamelCamel, where you can enter an Amazon product number1 into the site’s search field, and you can see how a product’s price has been trending — including whether it’s hit an all-time low.
- DO look for coverage that treats Prime Day skeptically: When it comes to Prime Day, less is more. I tend to find the most helpful articles are the ones that are more selective in their approach to Amazon’s sale, as they acknowledge that most of the deals on offer are pretty crummy and really only highlight worthwhile picks. I tend to find that the Wirecutter site of The New York Times handles this sort of thing pretty well. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed several articles to Wirecutter as a freelance writer, though I’ve never been a part of any Prime Day coverage with that site.)
- DON’T go on a shopping spree. You see something you want that happens to be on sale at a good price? Great, pick it up. Maybe add a second item to your cart if it also fills a need. Anything more than that? No sir — down that path lies madness. Amazon is counting on you to get deal crazy and take a lot of smart speakers off its hands. Don’t give it the satisfaction.
I’m never going to see Prime Day pop up on my calendar without getting a sad, faraway look in my eye. But that doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way. Like many things in life, Prime Day is best dealt with in small doses, if at all. Together, we can get through this thing.
- An Amazon product number is the combination of numbers and letters that appears in the URL for a listed product. For example, the 14.2-inch 2025 MacBook Pro M5 has an Amazon product number of “B0FWD623D1.” ↩
Years ago, in the era between the introduction of the iPhone and the modern period of widespread cellular coverage, my wife and I were driving with our quite young children across the vast, unexplored expanse of north-central Pennsylvania, en route to a family wedding. We had plotted out the route and knew where we were going: Eagles Mere, a tiny, former luxury resort town once at the end of a railway line. The town used to attract well-known actors, as well as New York City denizens, who would escape the summer heat and polio outbreaks back in the city.
As we tootled along, chatting with the kids and keeping them occupied, we suddenly went off the grid. We were still on a state highway, not yet turned to a smaller road, and yet there was no coverage. We figuratively slapped ourselves in the head. Had we gotten AAA maps or printed out whatever the technology was of the day—did MapQuest even still exist? No. We relied on having continuous cellular service. Readers, we did not wind up in the forest for a week, discovered by rescuers clad in bark and branches, feeding the children non-toxic berries. But we did learn a lesson.
Eagles Mere used to be a fancy place; it remains beautiful.Always have a map that doesn’t require cellular access! I mean, duh, of course, but we had been lulled in our coastal urban elitism to expect service, service, everywhere!
Of course, it wasn’t long after that Google introduced a download option; Apple added one for its Maps app a full decade later.1 Downloading a map lets you access nearly everything you need while off the cellular grid, in an area where you don’t have service, when you have just a trickle of data, or when data access is metered and high-cost.
The usual provisos apply: something could go wrong, you might not have access to your iPhone or iPad, the map might be missing details you need, and so on. If you want a belt to go with your suspenders, consider printing out a paper map! Yes, paper still exists.
Common offline featuresIn both Google and Apple’s mapping apps—say that five times fast—a Download button should appear whenever you search by a name, like a park, business, or city. Otherwise, you have to hunt a bit, as I’ll explain below. Downloadable maps may require from about 150 MB to over 1 GB of storage, depending on the area you select and the amount of detail Apple or Google downloads for that selection.
Search on a place name, and you can immediately download an offline map.The settings for both apps are quite similar: tap your profile picture in either app, then tap Offline Maps; in Google Maps, tap the gear icon. Now you can change preferences:
- Downloads (Apple)/Download preferences (Google): Opt whether to download only over Wi-Fi or over both Wi-Fi and cellular.
- Automatic Updates (Apple)/Auto-update offline maps (Google): When enabled, maps are periodically refreshed.
- Optimize Storage (Apple): The app automatically purges maps you haven’t used “in a while.”
- Sync with Apple Watch (iPhone only): You can also push offline maps to your Apple Watch, which has a lot less storage, but, really, how much are you keeping on it, anyway?
- Only Use Offline Maps (Apple): This forces the use of offline maps even when you have an Internet connection, which is useful when you are in one of the bandwidth scenarios above: low throughput or expensive usage-based service. Google automatically switches to an offline map when there’s low throughput available, or you have no connection.
Offline maps have remarkably similar settings between Apple Maps and Google Maps.Download from Apple MapsIf you search for a city name and there’s an exact best result, a Download button appears in the search result. I’ve also found that if Maps isn’t certain the match is correct, you may have to tap the city link, and then a Download button will appear. Enter a business name, tap the link that corresponds to the firm you want, and you can then tap the more (…) icon and choose Download Map. This also works for street addresses.
If you aren’t offered a Download button, you can use the menu to choose Download Map (left), and then refine your selection.In all of the above cases, Maps shows you a portrait selection by default on an iPhone and a landscape one on an iPad. Adjust the area shape, and pinch and expand to zoom in or out, then tap Download. The estimated map download size appears above the Cancel and Download buttons.
Manage your offline data by tapping your profile picture and tapping Offline Maps. You’ll see all the stored maps, can delete them, and control settings. Tap a map, and you can then tap Rename, change the included area, or tap Delete Map. In the main Offline Maps view, tap Download New Map (iOS/iPadOS 26) or Add Offline Map (iOS/iPadOS 27) to search for a location and then immediately have the area-selection view appear.
Download from Google MapsSearch for a city name and tap a result. You may have to swipe left in the button bar to see the “Download offline map” link; tap it. If you’re viewing a map, tap your profile picture, then tap “Offline maps.” Tap “Select your own map,” then zoom in or out on the current map area; tap Download when you have the selection you want.
From your profile picture, tap “Offline maps” to view the list of available maps. Tap a map and tap Delete or Update, or tap the Edit (pencil) icon to rename it. From the main view, you can also tap the More (…) button to the right of a map to update, rename, or delete. You can’t change the selected area, however.
Print a goldarned map outHaving a physical map may seem like something from the early 2000s, so long ago few living souls remember it, but it’s an extra backup against calamity. With a color inkjet printer, you can squeeze a fair amount of detail into a letter-sized or A4 page.
Apple Maps in macOS lets you print maps with directions that are probably adequate.Printing directions via Apple Maps in macOS Tahoe worked surprisingly well. It was like the good old days, but better, offering multiple pages of maps and step-by-step directions. You just get a standard print dialog, with no details to tweak. Google Maps on maps.google.com has a print mode, but it’s lackluster, with no step-by-step directions. In Safari, the preview and printed output were incorrect.
Postscript: Where she’s going, there are no Offline MapsOf course, right after I wrote this, my older went off on a hike and came back…complaining about the poor performance of Offline Maps in Apple Maps. She was in a not-terribly-remote area in the mountains, about 90 minutes away, with intermittent cellular access. She had downloaded the map before she left, thinking it was successful. But even with no cell access or with the Offline Maps forced-use option enabled, she couldn’t get the offline map to work. Fortunately, the trail was well-signed and full of people, and there was no real chance of getting lost.
Back in Seattle, examining Offline Maps, these out-of-area maps she downloaded showed up as 0 KB. We tried to download the map again, but Apple Maps wouldn’t let us use the trailhead as a landmark. We found a nearby place and tried to download. The progress circle showed that a download was first underway, then complete, yet the download was again 0 KB. This happened repeatedly. More bizarrely, the offline map couldn’t be deleted. I attempted to replicate on my iPhone, where everything worked without error, including using the trailhead as the place name—a Download button appeared as expected.
We didn’t test Google Maps for comparison, since her hike was over, but it’s another reason to download and check that your offline maps are up to date and valid before departing.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- This came long after the semi-disastrous Apple Maps launch and early years that led many people—my spouse included—to swear off it. ↩
Mojave Paint is a new macOS image editor. If you use layers, masks, channels, selections, adjustments and filters all in the same editing session, Mojave Paint might be for you. If you loved using Photoshop but don’t love today’s Adobe, Mojave Paint might be for you.
There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint:
- Make pixel art
- Clean up document scans
- Design a flyer
- Create App Store screenshots
- Crop and resize photos
- Do some basic photo retouching
- Remove a background.
Here’s what Mojave Paint doesn’t do:
- Stick AI features into every corner of the product
Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s.
Mojave Paint is available in the Mac App Store as a free download. That’s the limited version, but it’s only $9.99 to fully unlock all the features.
Basic Apple Guy has a rundown of the new icons in Golden Gate compared to their Tahoe predecessors:
The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.
There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.
It’s not just Golden Gate: upon installing the beta, I immediately noticed the improvement on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 as well. The changes are mostly pretty subtle and, without having the side-by-side comparison, they’re hard to define. But if I had to chalk it up to one element, it would be “sharper.” Look at the edges on Books or the popsicle sticks on the App Store, for example: they are less fuzzy than the 26 version, by far.
Apple’s screens have always been among the best in the business, and given how great the Retina (and up) displays are, it feels in retrospect like a tremendous flaw on the part of the 26 year updates to make have prominently blurry/fuzzy/diffused icons on screens renowned for their sharpness.
But again, I return to the point that even very subtle changes can tremendously improve the experience and just make the icons feel better. That’s good design.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad and tracker blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And with the new Apple TV Ad Blocking feature in v5.1, it extends the powerful Safari, YouTube and App ad blocking protection to your Apple TV; allowing you to:
- Block ads in your favourite streaming apps
- Stop hidden in-app trackers
- Speed up your internet
- See what has been blocked
So, join the community of over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
In an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook announced that Apple will be raising the prices on its products1 as a result of high prices for memory and storage worldwide:
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”….
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
Cook called the current supply situation, driven by wild buying in the AI industry, “a hundred-year flood,” and that he had “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
I do wonder how Apple will raise prices. An informal guess is that a lot of cheaper base configurations will vanish, that new models will start at higher prices, that Apple’s rumored OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models will set all-time high starting prices, and that Apple will do everything it can to keep a lid on the prices of its base models across the board. The big question is, will the MacBook Neo jump up in price, and if so, by how much?
- That’s an Apple News+ link. Here’s the web version. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And with the new App Ad Blocking feature in v5.0, it extends the powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking protection to all apps including:
- News apps
- Social media
- Games
- Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox
So, join the community of over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website
Apple has shown some immersive sports events, including NBA All-Star weekend, after the fact. But live streaming immersive video hasn’t happened yet.After much anticipation, it’s finally happening. On Thursday Apple and Charter Communications announced that “a selection of Los Angeles Lakers matchups” will be streamed live and immersive to the Vision Pro. Charter:
With Apple Immersive, a remarkable storytelling format available on Vision Pro, Lakers fans will feel like they are sitting courtside for those games. Live games, available via streams of up to 150 Mbps, will be accessible to authenticated Spectrum SportsNet subscribers, as well as Spectrum Internet customers, via the Spectrum SportsNet app in the Lakers’ territory. The game replay and highlights in Apple Immersive will also be available on demand via the Spectrum SportsNet app across the Spectrum footprint and on the NBA App for national and international fans.
Since the very first Vision Pro demos showed a third baseman’s throw to first go wide of the bag at Fenway Park, it’s been clear that immersive video could really transform the sports experience. I have no idea what it feels like to sit courtside at an NBA game—though I did sit courtside at a few Cal women’s basketball games last winter!—but I am looking forward to trying it out.
The first game will be streaming by early next year. Games will be captured using the new URSA Cine Immersive Live cameras from Blackmagic.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I was there on that early October day 14 years ago when Apple—led on stage by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall—rolled out iOS 5, the iPhone 4S, and one of the most important iOS features ever, Siri. (Steve Jobs wasn’t there, an empty seat left for him in the front row. He died the next day.)
Siri was the first true “voice assistant,” a voice-driven interface that Jobs clearly thought would be a huge part of the future of how we use our devices. He legendarily called Siri’s co-founder 24 straight days to express his desire to buy the app and add it to iOS.
While Apple got there first, competitors followed. In some ways, it’s the contrary example to what Apple normally does: Instead of entering a category late and perfecting it, Apple entered this category first and found itself limited by those early decisions. The company has been struggling to make Siri better for more than a decade now, and it’s generally perceived as being a feature that fails to live up to Apple’s brand promise.
The shift to modern AI-driven technology is an opportunity for Apple to revamp Siri, but the company has struggled to get a smarter version of Siri out the door. While the original version of Siri was more of a novelty, with every passing year, it becomes more critical to Apple’s future—and its troubling state becomes more of a red flag about the future of all of Apple’s products.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Whether color e-ink displays feel compelling or like a fad, our impressions of OpenAI’s Sora and text-to-video tech, how we manage Mac menu bar icons, and whether we’ll use the new resizable Slide Over feature in iPadOS 26.1 and for what purpose.
Go to the podcast page.
Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica reports about how Elon Musk’s satellite broadband ambitions are clashing with Apple’s current strategy:
Apple is partnering with satellite company Globalstar for the iPhone’s emergency SOS feature. The service is free to iPhone users, at least for now. Apple declined a pitch from [Elon] Musk, who reportedly sought a $5 billion payment from the iPhone maker in exchange for an 18-month exclusivity deal.
There’s some internal frustration at Apple about Globalstar’s limited capabilities compared to Starlink, according to a May report by The Information. The concerns are that the Globalstar network is “outdated, slow, and limited in what features it can support compared with offerings from SpaceX and others.”
Brodkin’s piece is a good deep dive into the issues here. With SpaceX’s purchase of spectrum from EchoStar, and SpaceX’s enormous advantage in launching satellites (the entire Starlink business is built on SpaceX’s fleet of cheap, reusable rockets), it may be tough for competitors to keep up. Which has an impact on Apple’s strategy when it comes to providing access outside of traditional cellular networks.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My iPhone is orange.
I mean, really orange. Not “brown but if you hold it in a certain light, it kind of looks orange if you squint.” That in and of itself is a cause for celebration, as it finally brings some much-needed fun to Apple’s pro phone lineup. Pros like color too, you know? And for the ones that don’t there are perfectly respectable options of traditional silver or subdued blue. But the orange phone, well, you can’t forget the orange phone is orange, even when looking at it straight on where the orange frame limns the display with a constant halo.
The iPhone 17 Pro marks the most significant redesign of Apple’s pro phone lineup since its introduction with the 11 Pro. Sure, over time the phone has gotten a little larger, traded out the notch for the dynamic island, and added a few additional buttons. But the 17 Pro’s two-tone back and—sigh—iconic plateau make this phone instantly identifiable.
Also, the orange.
The color seems to have been enabled by the change in construction for this model, which eschews the previous titanium frame (first introduced in the iPhone 15 Pro to replace the original pro models’ stainless steel frames) in favor of an aluminum unibody. Along with the phone’s incremental size increase—it’s a fraction of a millimeter bigger in every direction—it also means somewhat more weight: at 7.27 ounces, it’s slightly heavier than its predecessor’s 7.03 oz. But, it should be noted, it’s exactly the same weight as the iPhone 14 Pro, back before the switch to titanium.
To help mitigate that heavier weight, Apple’s also slightly changed the physical shape of the phone. The edges, especially on the back of the case, are more rounded, lacking the sharper delineation between earlier generation’s metal frames and back glass. That glass is not wholly absent here, as it’s a necessity for enabling wireless charging. Apple’s carved out a panel from the rear case and popped in a slab of its Ceramic Shield material1. Interestingly, that material has the side effect of making the Apple logo look practically invisible in some light—speaking of things you have to squint to see.
There’s been some of the usual foofaraw around whether the phone scratches more easily than its predecessor, and I’ve seen comments from acquaintances who’ve nicked theirs already. After more than two weeks, mine has not suffered any ill effects, despite both being dropped more than once and simply existing in a household with a maverick three-year-old. I do, however, tend to keep it in my pocket by itself, or occasionally with my AirPods Pro 2 case. If my previous iPhones are any indication, it will likely acquire some dings and scratches by the time I turn it in next year, though I’m hoping that Ceramic Shield 2 lives up to its promise, as my 16 Pro’s screen had some significant scratches by the end.
The additional space in the design also helps Apple pack in more battery, which the company says can keep the iPhone 17 Pro going for up to 33 hours of video playback (the Pro Max tacks an extra 6 hours onto that). That’s up from just 27 hours of rated life on the 16 Pro, and in my entirely anecdotal experience over the last two weeks, I’ve rarely had my automation for low power mode, which turns on at 40%, kick in. Towards the end of my 16 Pro’s tenure, it was getting down under 20% most days. But a phone’s battery life is always better at the beginning of its lifespan, so it’s hard to judge the effect over the long term.
Better charging support in the 17 Pro also means that you can theoretically charge this phone to 50 percent of capacity in just 20 minutes—though with the caveat that you’ll need a 40W adapter like Apple’s new model. (A MagSafe Charger with a 30W or better adapter will get you to 50 percent in 30 minutes.) I haven’t bothered upgrading my chargers as I rarely am fussed about mid-day charging, but if you need to charge and go, that’s a plus.
All in all, the phone is a pleasure to hold, and—in my opinion—looks great too.2 I’d hoped the addition of the plateau stretching the width of the back would make it less wobbly on a table and while it is somewhat reduced, it hasn’t been eliminated, thanks to the fact that lenses themselves are still raised above the plateau. I’d love to see Apple figure a way to deal with that in the future, but I’ll accept for now that this is just a fact of life in current smartphone design.
Plus, did I mention it’s orange?
Performance artApple loves to tout the performance of its Pro phones, and unsurprisingly the 17 Pro is no exception. The A19 Pro is the most powerful chip the company’s ever produced, even if its CPU performance improvements are predictably incremental.
Its GPU fares somewhat better on benchmarks—but how does that translate into real world performance? I admit that I don’t find myself often taxing the graphical capabilities of my iPhone—perhaps I’m simply not pro enough. I did play a few minutes of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and it looked good enough, if not quite up to par with my PlayStation 5. I caught a few slowdowns and glitches here and there, but nothing that impacted playability.3
Apple also touts its addition of “Neural Accelerators” to the A19 Pro’s GPU cores. The implications of that are still not quite clear; while it should boost some artificial intelligence applications, it’s unclear as to whether it’s the kind of thing that the average user is going to notice. I’ve seen reports that this enables “matrix multiplication” or “matmul” acceleration, which does seem like it has some possible ramifications for AI, but again, it’s a bit above my head.
One other major change aids performance on the 17 Pro: its new cooling system, designed around a vapor chamber, a first for the iPhone. Here’s how Apple describes the tech:
Deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro, allowing it to operate at even higher performance levels. The heat is carried into the forged aluminum unibody, where it is distributed evenly through the system, managing power and surface temperatures to deliver incredible performance while remaining comfortable to hold.
That’s a lot of promise, especially as my experiences with the 16 Pro often led it to getting warm enough that I could use it as a heating pad. In my admittedly short time with the 17 Pro, I’ve found it to generally remain cooler. I was impressed during the setup process, which is usually intensive enough to make the phone quite warm, the 17 Pro remained pretty cool to the touch. Since then, I’ve encountered a couple times when it seemed to heat up4, but it hasn’t been nearly as frequent as with the 16 Pro. Even playing Assassin’s Creed, as I mentioned, the phone was only slightly warm, perfectly comfortable in the hands. Apparently that vapor chamber is doing its job!
Tricameral legislatureLike the 16 Pro before it, the iPhone 17 Pro has three rear lenses, which Apple has extrapolated to five different “cameras” in various levels of zoom, ranging from the .5x ultrawide to the 8x telephoto. This is enabled by the fact that all three rear cameras are now 48 megapixel sensors, thus enabling the company to provide different crops that simulate the 2x and 8x zoom levels.
The upgraded 48MP telephoto camera means that 4x shots capture more than the old 5x mode on the iPhone 16 Pro’s 12MP camera. Sensor-cropped images at 8x also look pretty good.Look, I’m not a camera person. I’m the Joe Average camera user: I like to snap a shot and not worry about settings. I enjoy having different zoom options because it gives me more choice about how to frame something, but I’m generally a “hit it and quit it” person. Does the 17 Pro take very nice pictures? It does! Can I, at a glance, tell the difference between photos taken with it and the 16 Pro or 15 Pro or 14 Pro…not really? This probably says more about my capabilities as a photographer than anything else.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/iphone17pro-dualcapture.mp4You can probably find something more fun to use dual capture for.As long as we’re talking camera features, though, it is worth noting that all of Apple’s latest phones, including the 17 Pro, add a couple of new capabilities. The first is a dual capture mode that lets you record video from both the front- and rear-facing cameras at the same time. It’s available by tapping the “settings” icon in the top right of the camera app while in Video mode (yes, it’s only a video feature, just in case you were hoping for dual still photos for some reason). If you find yourself using it a lot, you can pin that icon to overlay for quick access by going to Settings > Camera > Indicators.
Once you turn it on, you get a FaceTime-like interface with the front-facing camera in a little picture-in-picture window. A few notes: while you can change the optical zoom of the rear-facing camera, you can’t zoom or crop the front-facing camera in this mode—the Center Stage feature tries to keep you in frame and can expand to take in more than one person, but you don’t have manual control. Also you can’t swap which camera is where; if you tap the button to flip to the front-facing camera for the main shot, the picture-in-picture window disappears.
As in FaceTime, however, you can drag your thumbnail image around the screen to any of the corners. Keep in mind, however, that since the dual camera mode is “baked in” to the final result, whatever adjustments you make will be reflected in the video itself. That also means that you can’t move, edit, or even get rid of the picture-in-picture video after the fact.
Landscape selfies in portrait orientation? Unpossible!While I appreciate this feature, I haven’t used it very much. I thought it might come in handy when recording my kid doing stuff, but it turns out I’m generally less interested in preserving my reaction. I imagine those creating video content on their phones will be happy to have this in their toolbox, though.
As long as we’re talking about the front-facing camera, it gets some new tricks on the iPhone 17 line too—and they’re kind of brilliant. Thanks to the use of a square sensor, you no longer have to turn the phone into landscape orientation to take a landscape selfie. What? Even parsing that sentence makes my brain hurt. It’s a bit like the first time I used Live Text to select text from an image: something that has been essentially impossible since the origin of the technology has suddenly been upended.
There’s also a control to zoom in or out if you wanted to take a selfie with a wider angle than the default crop. Apple’s also taken it one step further by integrating the same Center Stage technology in use on most of its other devices’ front-facing cameras. If the camera detects more than one person, it will widen the shot automatically to include them. As someone who generally ends up taking group selfies by virtue of having of a) the newest phone and b) the longest arms, this makes my life noticeably better. While I haven’t had many opportunities yet to try this out, I’m looking forward to it being a less awkward experience than it used to be. Or at least, feeling less like I’m about to drop my phone.
Once you go pro…Thanks in part to the addition of the iPhone Air to the lineup5, the iPhone 17 Pro starts at $100 more than the 16 Pro did. But, for that extra $100 you get twice as much storage as the base iPhone 16 Pro—256GB compared to 128GB. As someone who had finally hit the limit of a 128GB phone, I was planning to go up to 256GB anyway, but it’s disappointing to lose that $999 price point.
Still, the iPhone 17 Pro is not the base level iPhone. You pay more because you get more. That gap has narrowed a bit this year, as the 17 finally gets a ProMotion always-on display and the same new front-facing camera, and the new iPhone Air offers an entirely different proposition of thinness and lightness in exchange for fewer cameras and lower battery life. But the 17 Pro still boasts that telephoto lens, better thermal system, and more powerful chip. Not to mention true “pro” features like ProRes RAW, Genlock, and support for USB3—though, if you don’t know what most of those are, they probably aren’t for you.
So do most people need an iPhone 17 Pro? Probably not! But for those that are happy to spend more to get more, the option is there. Some people always want the best there is, and Apple is more than happy to oblige. For the rest, the iPhone 17—or, if you want a light, thin phone, the iPhone Air—will probably suffice.
Then again, neither of them come in orange…
- Not, it should be noted, the new Ceramic Shield 2 material used on the phone’s front, which promises 3 times better scratch resistance. ↩
- It is funny that it almost blends in on my red/orange couch. ↩
- At least nothing that impacted playability more than the frustration of using the touchscreen controls. ↩
- Most notably on the occasions that I accidentally triggered the camera while in my pocket, leading the phone to work very hard to figure out how to adjust its camera exposure for, you know, the inside of someone’s pocket. This feels like a thing that maybe Apple could design a machine learning system for—realizing when you’re in someone’s pocket and disabling Camera Control. ↩
- And maybe a little something rhyming with the Imperial research planet Scarif? ↩
This week we discuss Apple leadership, whether or not Tim Cook loves Donald Trump and our glorious headset future.
Go to the podcast page.
The more I think about the iPhone Air, the more I think back to the introduction of the MacBook Air back in 2008. I used the word “compromise” ten times in my review of that first lightweight Mac laptop.
If the story of the MacBook Air is a story about compromise, the decision about whether the MacBook Air is a product worth having can be answered by one question: How much are you willing to compromise?
And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
This year’s selection of iPhones offers users a ridiculous amount of choice. The iPhone 17 has gained numerous features previously limited to the high-end iPhone Pro line. The iPhone 17 Pro has powerful new cameras and a new unibody look, including a spectacular Cosmic Orange color option. Back in 2008, the low-end MacBook and high-end MacBook Pro held similar positions.
Just like back then, an interloper has arrived that completely breaks up the high-end/low-end dynamic. The iPhone Air is priced in the middle, but doesn’t quite fit there. It’s an iPhone that doesn’t share the design priorities of other iPhones. It’s designed for people who also have different priorities.
There are dozens of obvious reasons to buy an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro instead of the iPhone Air. But when I hold the Air between my thumb and index finger and feel its weight and thinness, I begin to wonder how much those reasons matter.
Listed among our assetsThe iPhone Air feels great. It’s light (5.8 ounces/165 grams, compared to 7.3 ounces/206 grams for the iPhone 17 Pro and 6.2 ounces/177 grams for the iPhone 17). That weight seems even lighter because it’s distributed over a wider surface area than those other models, owing to the Air’s 6.5-inch diagonal screen.
It’s a screen size that’s larger than all but the iPhone 17 Pro Max, so it’s not really fair to say that the iPhone Air is small. It’s small in some dimensions and surprisingly large in others. This is a wider and taller phone than I’m used to, and it took me a little while to adapt.
Every time I pick up the iPhone Air, I notice how thin and light it feels. After a week’s usage, I switched to the iPhone 17 Pro and was struck by how different that phone felt: thick and heavy, like a TV remote control or something. And, to my surprise, the screen seemed small. I’ve always shied away from large iPhones, but maybe those large screens aren’t so bad when they’re attached to lightweight phones? I found myself missing the iPhone Air’s larger screen when I switched to the 17 Pro.
I used the iPhone Air exclusively without a case, and I endorse the school of thought that there’s not a lot of point to using it if you’re going to put a case on it. A case diminishes the unique feature of the Air, which is how thin and light it is. If you can’t imagine using an iPhone without a case, don’t even consider the iPhone Air. (As someone who generally does not use his iPhone with a case, it doesn’t bother me at all.)
During my week of primary use, I gradually figured out grips that made the iPhone Air feel safe in my hands. It’s thin, but wedging those titanium rails between my thumb and opposing fingers kept it safe. I also found pressing my index finger up against the bottom of the plateau on the phone’s back created a pretty good bit of leverage. After a few days, it all became muscle memory, and I stopped worrying about it.
Most of the time when I leave the house to run or walk the dog, I don’t bother taking my iPhone and just use a pair of AirPods playing podcasts from my Apple Watch. I started doing this because I hated bringing my iPhone with me in my pocket, where it would wiggle around and sometimes even begin to swing like a pendulum as I ran. Walking with the iPhone Air in my pocket felt a lot less obtrusive, perhaps because of the lighter weight, perhaps because it’s wider and therefore has less room to wiggle. In general, I enjoyed having a wider, thinner phone in my pocket instead of a narrower, thicker one.
Finally, the camera. I know that the iPhone Air’s camera system is intended to be listed among the device’s most severe compromises, and I don’t disagree with that assessment overall. But I will say this: the single 48MP camera on the iPhone Air is the best single camera Apple has ever made. While its lack of companion cameras limits the versatility of this device, the main camera (which can bin those 48MP together to create a more nuanced 12MP image, a super-resolution 24MP image, or—yes—can be tasks with capturing a single 48MP image) is very good. It’s worth being said.
And now, the compromisesHold the iPhone Air in your hand, and it’s easy to become so intoxicated that you forget all the things you’re foregoing.
The single camera means there’s no telephoto camera, like on the iPhone 17 Pro, which offers an excellent 4x zoom with 8x digital crop this year. There’s also no ultra-wide camera, which offers an expansive view and macro mode, like on all the iPhone 17 models. You give up a lot of flexibility when you go down to a single camera. Just this weekend, I was using an iPhone 17 Pro on a trip to the country and used that phone’s zoom camera to capture lots of interesting wildlife. With the iPhone Air’s camera, many of those images would’ve lacked an impact.
The iPhone Air also has less battery capacity than other iPhones. Apple rates it at 27 hours of video playback, versus 33 hours on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17. If you need to squeeze every hour out of your iPhone’s internal battery, taking a 20 percent cut is not going to work for you. However, for some use cases, it’s not a big deal: I am rarely away from charging opportunities for my iPhone for a long period of time, and when I am, I frequently carry a battery with me. I doubt the iPhone Air would really change that behavior appreciably. (I like that Apple offers a MagSafe battery pack, which allows you to use the iPhone Air in its thin and light mode whenever possible, and then weighs you down a little when you need some extra life. Better than carrying all that extra battery around 100% of the time.)
They have many names but are basically just black and white.In a year where Apple seems to have gotten the message and introduced Cosmic Orange, the most interesting iPhone Pro color ever, the iPhone Air’s color palette is quite muted. There’s Space Black, and then three shades of white (Sky Blue, Cloud White, Light Gold). My Light Gold model is more gold than silver around the edges if you look really close, but I read it as silver until I really, really looked. The back glass similarly reads as white, but I’m sure it’s a yellow off-white. I don’t mind the iPhone Air being black or white, really, but it’s funny that choosing one means foregoing some fun colors that have finally extended across the rest of the product line.
Apple has generously bestowed the latest and greatest iPhone processor, the A19 Pro, on the iPhone Air. But it’s not quite that simple. The iPhone Air’s A19 Pro has one fewer GPU core than the one on the iPhone 17 Pro. The iPhone Air also lacks the thermal management updates that Apple rolled into the iPhone 17 Pro, so the back of the phone can get noticeably hot right up by the plateau into which most of its brains are tucked. Once those brains get too hot, the system has to cool them off by throttling the processor, reducing performance.
In other words, this phone has a fast processor, but it’ll heat up and slow down in extended work far more than the comparable iPhone 17 Pro. If you’re someone who pushes your iPhone hard, especially when playing games, this phone is not going to give you the best performance.
In short, the iPhone Air is not for you if you have severe battery demands, want maximum camera zoom flexibility, need to maximize processor performance, or want to flash a flashy color. In every case, the iPhone 17 Pro is a better bet.
A view of what’s next?In 2017, Apple released the iPhone X, which was possibly the iPhone’s biggest step forward technologically since the original. We’ve been living in the wake of the iPhone X ever since: it brought us OLED and Face ID and also created a split between high-end and low-end models that has persisted since then. It pushed the standard iPhone price up to a thousand dollars for the first time.
And yet time marches on, and yesterday’s cutting-edge technology becomes today’s bog-standard features—this year, Apple brought always-on displays with ProMotion to the low-end iPhones. To stay in the high-tech game, you always need a fresh supply of new designs and innovations.
The iPhone Air marks the biggest change to the iPhone line since the iPhone X. It prioritizes thinness and lightness above all else. It uses a larger screen to create volume beneath which Apple can tuck enough battery to cross some invisible threshold of viability.
Most interestingly, Apple has adapted its signature camera bump, now extended to a full “iconic plateau,” to be the place where all the assorted computery bits of a phone are hidden. There’s only one camera on the iPhone Air, but the rest of that space is packed full of technology. Since Apple has changed its terminology, I guess I can’t call this a “computer bump,” but what about “processor plateau?”
Again, the memories of the MacBook Air keep rushing back. Apple’s goal there was to make a thin and light laptop, and along the way, it learned to pack the bottom mostly with battery and leave just enough space for an ever-smaller chunk of computing power. To get the physics to work out, it measured thinness from the front edge and then allowed it to grow thicker as it reached the back, very much the equivalent of offering a thin phone with an appreciable plateau at the other end.
You know how the MacBook Air story went. It was impractical at first, full of those compromises, but as Apple iterated from generation to generation, the compromises dropped away. The MacBook Air became Apple’s most popular laptop, but more than that, the innovations and priorities in the MacBook Air pointed the way forward for all Mac laptops, and really, almost all laptops of any kind.
I’m not saying the iPhone Air will follow quite the same trajectory, but it’s not hard to imagine that the difficult engineering decisions made to fulfill the iPhone Air’s design goals might spur innovation that drives all iPhones to be thinner and lighter and even to tuck most of their brainpower up in that brain bulge.
Still, that’s all about tomorrow. What about today?
Today, the iPhone Air feels like no other iPhone ever made. It’s just so appealing. But it’s got so many qualities that are simply disqualifying for so many use cases. If it were the only iPhone Apple sold, it would be a disaster. But it’s one of five new iPhones introduced in 2025, so it can afford to be what it is and see if it can find an audience.
No, the iPhone Air doesn’t make the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro feel like the past. Those phones still feel like the present.
But the iPhone Air feels like the future.
Myke tries Tahoe, ICEBlock gets blocked, and Apple toggles from Vision Pro to glasses.
Go to the podcast page.
Slide Over lets you hide apps off the side of the iPad screen. Again.Monday’s second beta for iPadOS 26.1 includes two highly requested changes from iPad users (including us) that were absent in this summer’s iPadOS 26 beta cycle: a return of Slide Over and the addition of USB microphone gain control.
Slide Over is backIn throwing out iPadOS’s old multitasking interface, Apple also chucked out a simple multitasking feature that it turns out was maybe a bit more beloved than anyone expected. Slide Over, one of the iPad’s original “multitasking” features, let you stash a single window off to the side of your iPad, so you could work full-screen on different tasks and still have quick access to information in another app. As I wrote in my iPadOS 26 review:
The loss of Slide Over, however, strikes me as an oversight on Apple’s part. It turns out that a lot of people use Slide Over as a simple way to keep an app hanging around for quick access, a very simple form of multitasking, and multi-window mode is overkill for this use case. I understand why Apple killed Slide Over: it was very easy for novice users to accidentally enable the mode and pretty non-trivial to deactivate it. (Perhaps Apple should consider a new approach that lets users dock an app off the side of the screen, as you can with a picture-in-picture window.)
In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, Slide Over is now an explicit part of the new multi-window multitasking view. To enable it, open a window and resize it so that the three “stoplight” buttons appear, tap and hold on the green one, and choose Add to Slide Over. Or choose Move to Left (or Right) Slide Over from the Window menu. Or type option-globe, left or right. All of those will work.
When Slide Over is invoked, the current window will be resized and stuck in the corner. You can grab the top of it and slide it off-screen, and it’ll vanish—only to reappear when you swipe your finger from off the side of the screen back on. You can stick the window on either side, and it’ll hang out there, regardless of whether you’re using full-screen windows or have a bunch of windows. You can even resize the Slide Over window when it’s on screen, and it’ll stay that size—unlike the old implementation.
Like Split View (which was reincarnated as two tiled side-by-side windows in multi-window mode), Slide Over only works in multi-window mode—but if you prefer to use your iPad apps at full size, you can just keep doing that even in multi-window mode. Nobody’s going to force you to make those windows smaller.
Slide Over only supports one app per display, so while you can only position one window on your main iPad display, if you use an external display, you can position a different app on that one.
Gain control for local captureLoud microphones can now be quieted down.An issue with iPadOS 26’s new support for local recordings of camera and microphones was that you couldn’t adjust the gain on USB microphones, leading to some serious overmodulation on hot mics. In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, the local capture control in Control Center now includes a gain control. In our testing, this cured the issue involving the notoriously hot Audio-Technica ATR microphone popular with podcasters as a low-cost, portable option.
So in short: with its first major update to iPadOS 26, it appears that Apple has addressed two of the most glaring issues with its new feature list. I’m choosing to view that as a very encouraging sign.
Do you want to block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac — not just in Safari?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
The new App Ad Blocking feature in Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 builds upon our powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking, extending protection to:
- News apps
- Social media
- Games
- Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox
All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?
Six Colors subscriber Tod was out of luck a few weeks ago, when he wrote me:
How is my dad supposed to pair a Bluetooth mouse to his iMac without a working mouse of any sort? We can get to the Bluetooth pairing screen using Spotlight, and the mouse is visible, but we can’t figure out how to press the Connect button with just a USB keyboard.
By the time I’d connected, Tod’s brother had gone off to collect some peripherals, and they were able to complete the process.
My immediate reaction was: Just press Tab or Shift-Tab. Had I tried this? No. When I did, I discovered my muscle memory had… what’s the opposite of atrophied? It was like a ghost limb, a ghost Tab/Shift-Tab sequence that didn’t work.
After some diligent research, including posts that had the wrong information, I discovered that all you need to do is press Control-Fn (or Globe)-F7. (See “A functional afternote” near the bottom of this article for more on that key sequence.) Using that keystroke toggles the option in System Settings > Keyboard for “Keyboard navigation,” thus restoring my ghost muscle memory to reality.
I think it’s worth digging deeper into cases in which you need an alternative to a mouse or a keyboard to complete operations.
The mouse that roarsI was present at a very awkward moment in 1992 between Apple’s then CEO, John Sculley, and a product manager for a software package. I was the “course manager” at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine. My job entailed a mix of keeping 100 Mac IIfx’s and lots of other gear running, and working with the education director (my friend Charles) to design curriculum. People visited to take multi-day courses on cutting-edge equipment.1
During an invitational event, which tech industry and artistic luminaries attended, Sculley was there and getting some hands-on training with Atex Renaissance, a desktop-publishing application Kodak was developing to compete against QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker. Honestly, he was a very nice man to deal with, even when I was a lowly stiff. However, he took umbrage at one point—when a Kodak product manager was helping him use Atex.
Kodak Person: Just type Command-K and it will format the text.
Sculley: How do I do that with a mouse?
Kodak person: You can’t. The keyboard is better.
[Pause]
Sculley: No, it isn’t.
You could feel the frost in the air. Apple has been mouse-forward since even before the Macintosh, starting with the Lisa. Over 40-plus years of development, the mouse has almost always been a first-class citizen.
Sometimes—don’t tell Mr. Sculley—a mouse is worse. This is particularly the case for toggle states and repetitive actions that you can rapid-fire to more easily press, press, press on a keyboard.
If you want to know all the Mac keyboard shortcuts you can use, Apple maintains a convenient reference page that I have conveniently managed to avoid knowing existed until now. The list starts with things I imagine most of us have burnt into our fingers, and couldn’t speak the actual sequence required, like Command-grave accent (`) for rotating through open windows in the foreground app, or Command-Option-H for hiding all windows of all apps except the current foreground one.
It moves on to some more obscure ones, including using the power button with modifier keys, sometimes only available on keyboards that lack Touch ID. For instance, you can restart your Mac from a Touch ID-less keyboard by pressing either: Control–Command–Power button (don’t prompt to save unsaved documents) or Control–Option–Command–Power button (do prompt, just like Apple > Restart).2
You can elevate the keyboard even further through an Accessibility setting.
Key to successFull Keyboard Access is yet another accessibility feature that offers specific benefits for individuals who cannot easily use a point-and-click device or are unable to use one at all, as well as general benefits for everyone who prefers an alternative to movement-based input. Enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Motor > Keyboard.
Enable Full Keyboard Access to let your fingers do the navigating.Once enabled, the thing you’ll notice most prominently is that you can tab through switches, buttons, and other fields that typically require clicking. As you press Tab or Shift-Tab, the focus moves through interface elements. Use the Space bar to select, and Control-Tab/Control-Shift-Tab to move among items that you can’t navigate through using the arrow keys.
You get some bonus modifier-key commands, too, using the Tab key uniquely as a modifier like you would Control or Option:
With Full Keyboard Access, you can use Application Chooser to select among running apps.* Tab-W: Show a list of available windows in the current app. * Tab-F: Search for items in the current view. * Tab-A: Open the Application Chooser.
To view the full range of special commands, press Tab-H. You can customize the appearance and behavior by clicking the “i” info icon to the right of the Full Keyboard Access switch.
We put the fun in function keysMany Mac users tend only to use function keys to control the features printed on them by Apple and third-party Mac keyboard makers, like increasing or decreasing volume or brightness.
To use a function key like F7 (labeled with a rewind symbol and F7 on Apple and third-party Mac keyboards) as an F7 key, you also have to press the Function key, typically labeled fn (in lowercase like that). On some Apple keyboards, it’s instead the symbol of a globe, possibly with fn in tiny type below it.
You can change that default, however, if you use function keys enough or prefer them to the Mac-specific features. Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Click Function Keys and enable “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.”
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- What I always say about Kodak is that the company’s digital products and strategy were 10 years ahead of their time in 1992. Then, by 2002, they were somehow 10 years behind. An amazing feat to pull off. ↩
- Apple seemingly has an error in this keystroke description, stating it shuts down your Mac, equivalent to Apple > Restart, instead of restarting your Mac. ↩
We dive into the aftermath of the Jimmy Kimmel affair and the strange balance between TV networks and local affiliates. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Streaming price hikes, Prime Video’s future, and David Letterman’s streaming strategy.]
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Clic for Sonos for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Clic for Sonos is the fastest native Sonos client for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and visionOS. It’s easy to get set up and get going, whether you’re playing to a single device or grouping multiple speakers together.
Clic for Sonos offers deep integration with native Apple technologies, with support for Widgets, Live Activities, Shortcuts, a Mac Menu Bar app, and support for Control Center. It works with your Sonos library, Apple Music, Spotify, Plex, Tidal, and TuneIn, and supports lossless and Dolby Atmos. And Scenes can now play music, so it’s one tap to group, set volume and play a playlist.
Try it for yourself and you’ll see. Six Colors readers can get one year for just $9.99 (30% off) or lifetime updates for $30 (50% off). Go to clic.dance/sixcolors for all the details.
So, I guess I’m going to need to keep writing this piece.
Say what you will about Apple’s decision this week to remove from the App Store the ICEBlock app that provided a way for people to crowd source the appearance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their neighborhood. Is it good? Is it bad?1 One thing it isn’t is surprising.
We’ve been here before, so many times, since the beginning of this current administration. And I expect we’ll be returning to it for at least as long as the current administration is in power, maybe more. So let me repeat the maxim we should all be living by: do not expect a moral stand from a corporation.
ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron (who, it should be noted, has taken criticism from security experts over some of his claims about the app), made a strong statement about the removal, saying “Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move.”2
Look, we had this discussion when Tim Cook ponied up $1 million to the inauguration fund and showed up. We had this discussion when Apple changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico in Apple Maps. We had it when he gave the president the silly trophy and promised more investment in American manufacturing. We had it a couple weeks ago when he went to the state dinner in the UK.
This is not to say that they never take moral stands. Every company is, after all, comprised of people, and every group of people has its breaking point. Take the repeated criticism from Microsoft employees of the company’s stance on providing services to the Israeli military. That did finally elicit some change from the company. Even Apple has taken a stand in the past against government overreach, perhaps most notably perhaps during the San Bernardino incident in 2016 where the company refused to help the FBI create a backdoor to access the iPhone of a suspected shooter.
This one, frankly, was a loser for Apple to fight. Not least of all because there was a recent shooting that allegedly targeted agents of that federal agency. True or not, it’s easy for the administration to point to that incident and argue that an app could be used to facilitate violence.3 But, come on, this is the App Store: Apple regularly rejects and removes apps for capricious reasons about design and branding. Something this contentious? It simply doesn’t want the heat.
Some might argue that Apple is insulated from danger by its size. But in some ways, that scale makes it more vulnerable. It makes it a bigger target for entities like the government, who can deliver even more damage to its bottom line than pretty much any bloc of committed consumers. Apple does not want to go to war with the government. Especially this government.
And, let’s not forget, that when we’re talking as many customers as Apple has, it is inevitable that some percentage of them—some not insignificant percentage—is actually going to agree with a decision like this.
Pressure is what moves the needle, and I’m sorry, but expounding on social media or podcasts or even, frankly, articles on websites about how wrong these decisions are doesn’t cut it. We’ve seen what does work: pressure from employees, to a certain extent, but more than anything, money. Specifically, money lost. When ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel, it reported saw a massive number of cancellations of Disney+ (even if those exact numbers are in doubt, it seems clear that it was a lot). You want to make a difference? You’re going to have to put your money where your mouth is, uncomfortable as it may be.
But even then, even if the company does “the right thing,” it won’t be a decision taken from a moral standpoint. It will be practical. Mercenary. Because that is what is demanded by this technological/capitalist terror we’ve devised for ourselves.4 That’s the rules of the game. Them’s the breaks. When Apple made the decision to stand firm in the San Bernardino case, it did so not because it was the right thing to do, but because its business reputation relies on its claims of privacy and security.
As several commentators have pointed out, Apple removed a similar app called HKmap.live during the Hong Kong democracy protests in 2019 under pressure from the Chinese government. Should we worry that the U.S. government is now being uttered in the same breath as the Chinese government?
I mean, yes.
None of this is to defend Tim Cook or Apple.5 It’s merely to point out they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do by the rules of the game they are playing. Corporations in our capitalist system are not incentivized to act morally. We cheer the company when it takes action that we find laudable because its interests intersecting with our own, but those moments are not born of virtue, they’re just…serendipity.
John Gruber has, for many years, made a point of Apple’s priorities: “Apple first, users second, developers last.”. Most often that’s used to illustrate the company’s seeming disregard for developers, the very people who help bolster their business, but it’s important not to lose sight of the top of that list: Apple first.
Frankly, there’s a reason Apple is spending far more time and energy decrying the Digital Markets Act in Europe than it is fighting authoritarian decisions in the U.S., and it’s not about the political alignment of the company’s leaders. It’s about money.
Look, I’m not saying “don’t be a fan of corporations”…I’m saying we probably should have never been a fan of corporations. We let them entangle our pocketbooks and our psyches to their own enrichment instead of a relationship that should have been kept strictly transactional.
Do not expect corporations to be your proxy in the fight against authoritarianism. They are, simply put, not designed for it. They are machines designed to return profit to shareholders and that means they fundamentally rely on a stability that you’re not going to get from making waves. You will always be disappointed.
- Yeah, it’s bad. I mean, even the Cato Institute—the Cato Institute—published a commentary back in July saying “[ICEBlock developer’s] Joshua Aaron’s creativity and public minded spirit is admirable.” ↩
- He ain’t wrong. ↩
- Never mind the reality, of course, that those agents were targeted at an ICE facility that probably could be found on any map. Which of course means the next logical authoritarian step is for the administration to demand tech companies start removing government building locations from their mapping software. 😬 ↩
- Proponents will tell you that capitalism means the best solution wins. But that’s not strictly true. The American implementation of capitalism has entirely eschewed the moral axis theorized by father of capitalism, Adam Smith for an entirely quantitative model. Meaning what wins is not the best solution, but the most cost-effective. Capitalistic success in America is a Bezos chart. ↩
- Meanwhile, other tech CEOs are out here spewing actual, overt racism. ↩
It’s been a busy few weeks around here, what with Apple’s latest platform updates and new iPhones, but I finally have time to catch my breath and talk about the most important of topics: the Apple Vision Pro.
We’ve already established that the Vision Pro is a “whoa” device that can be a great place to watch a movie, chat with friends, or even just browse the web for a while.
But most of us probably don’t spend the majority of our days entertaining ourselves—more’s the pity. And hey, this is a product with “Pro” in its name, for all of Apple’s various definitions of what exactly that word means. If the Apple Vision Pro is going to have some staying power, if it’s going to fit into my daily life, then it needs to help me get things done.
So, I’ve tried using the Vision Pro for a variety of work tasks over the past few months. I’ve written in it. I’ve revised. I’ve even edited a podcast. I’ve put it through its paces. I’ve tried to get things done. And while it does offer some capabilities that you won’t find anywhere else, that emphasis on “tried” has all too often been well-earned.
Immersion therapyIf there’s a singular advantage to the Vision Pro over any other device offered by Apple, it’s the ability to escape your surroundings. Working in an immersive environment like Joshua Tree or Bora Bora1 can help you get a fresh new perspective on your task and even let you block out distractions and focus more on what you’re doing. Heck, I edited a podcast on Jupiter.
Podcasts in spaaaaaaaace!I really do love the immersive environments; it’s the number one thing that brings me back to the Vision Pro. But even they aren’t all upside. They can feel a bit static after a while—one reason that I’m intrigued about Jason’s visionOS 26 theory that the Jupiter environment, where there is actually a passage of time, might be a tech demo for more advanced environments in the future.
There’s also the matter of why there aren’t more. I’m not sure how difficult it is to create environments, but they feel like such a big selling point of the Vision Pro that whatever time and money Apple is spending on them isn’t enough. Once you’ve cycled through all the environments—and I’m not counting the various “light” filters, which are clever, but not especially compelling—the novelty starts to wear off. Sorry, we’re humans and we crave novelty! Making environments themselves more dynamic would certainly be one way to address this, but I feel like we should have another half dozen options by now—or, of course, the ability to bring those third-party environments out of their apps.
Immersion also has some inherent challenges in the everyday environment. For example, writing is thirsty work. Usually, I’ve got a cup of tea or a glass of water or a can of seltzer on my desk. Trying to find that in an immersive environment is a painstaking matter at best, a disaster waiting to happen at worst. Yes, you can dial back the immersion, but doing that every time you want to take a drink is a bit ridiculous. It’d be nice if there were some sort of passthrough, not unlike what the Vision Pro already does for keyboards and—with more mixed results—your iPhone. Even then, drinking in a Vision Pro requires a degree of precision, lest you knock your glass into the headset itself. Call me picky, but I really prefer not spilling hot tea all over myself.
Why are things so heavy in the future?The Vision Pro is heavy. You know this. I know this. Every single piece ever written about the Vision Pro makes this known. Despite Apple’s best attempts to mitigate the weight with a variety of straps and clever engineering, it’s kind of unavoidable. Even when I feel like I’ve had it set up well—and I swear, I don’t touch the straps!—it’s a total crapshoot whether it feels comfortable the next time I put it on. I suspect this is as much about me—am I tired? Did I sleep well last night? Am I slouching or sitting up?—as it is about the persnickety nature of the fit.
But the fact remains that wearing it for any length of time, as I’m likely to do when editing a podcast or writing, is tough. Your face starts to hurt. And after your face starts to hurt, you start wondering if that pain is worth the tradeoff you’re making. Maybe it’d be better to just go back to your Mac or iPad. And sometimes, I have to admit, it’s a relief to pull it off and just look at my Studio Display.
Alas, the only real solution for this is for Apple to make a lighter version. Unfortunately, we may be waiting a while: recent reports suggest that work on a lighter version has been postponed to focus on smart glasses.
The right toolsBut if there’s one thing holding me back more than any other from working on the Vision Pro, it’s the tools. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof.
In some ways, the current state of the Vision Pro reminds me of the very earliest days of the iPad, when “doing work” meant you had to either find new apps that took the places of those you used on your Mac or come up with clever workarounds to make your workflows function.
Let’s take an example: Dropbox. I’ve used the cloud storage app for years on my Macs and other devices to share files between devices as well as with several of my collaborators. But there’s no Dropbox app on the Apple Vision Pro. If I even just want to look at one of my files in Dropbox, that means using the web interface. And if I need to edit it? Get out of here. I’m not going to download a file to my Vision Pro, alter it, and reupload it. The whole point of Dropbox is the integration with the rest of the file system. Even a bare bones app that just unlocked the ability to access Dropbox in the Files app would go a long way to making life easier.
Likewise, I rely on Google Sheets for several organizational tasks, especially related to podcasts. But not only is there no app version of Google Sheets, either—not that it’s such a great app on iPhone or iPad, to be honest—but the web version also doesn’t work very well: it’s very slow, it’s difficult to click on controls, and sometimes editing doesn’t work. That means I can’t even do certain simple administrative tasks on the Vision Pro, like update our rundown sheet for Clockwise.
These are basic productivity tools and thus perhaps the most egregious examples. Personally, I don’t understand why third-party developers who are clearly not going to spend the time to develop a native visionOS version of their app don’t simply enable the iPad versions of their apps on Vision Pro to provide at least some functionality. And I don’t want to excuse Apple here, either: most of its own apps aren’t visionOS native, and some aren’t available at all. I’m looking at you, Preview.
visionOS is a case of making do with the tools you have, even if they’re not the tools you want.Other existing apps that I rely on haven’t made the jump either. I’m hardly surprised that there’s no BBEdit or MarsEdit for Vision Pro—it’s not like they’re on iOS or iPadOS either—but there is a surprising dearth of text editing apps with Markdown support native to visionOS. Runestone is one of the few, and while it’s a very nice app, it’s not what I use on other platforms, so it means adapting my workflow. Image editing software doesn’t fare much better. For both of these, you can turn to iPad versions, which are fine, but they are limited in a variety of ways, not least of all the restrictions in window size that don’t let you take full advantage of the Vision Pro’s huge real estate.
The podcasting end of things is even more of a non-starter. At the risk of stating the obvious, I don’t think you’d even want to record a podcast using the Vision Pro: there’s no real way to connect an external microphone, and even if you could, you’d probably just risk smashing your face into it. Then you’d have to figure out how to use headphones. And after all of that, well, then you could deal with the total lack of software tools, from Rogue Amoeba’s excellent audio apps down to the command line apps I use to line up my audio tracks. Editing doesn’t fare much better; you won’t find Logic Pro or Ferrite in visionOS’s App Store, either in native Vision Pro form or iPadOS versions.
So, for my aforementioned podcast editing experiment, I ended up having to rely on Mac Virtual Display. Which, don’t get me wrong, is great. Blowing Logic up to full screen and having it hover there in a wide or ultrawide window that’s far bigger than my Studio Display is genuinely useful when dealing with that app and its manifold buttons, sliders, and widgets. But it’s also a tacit admission of failure that I have to basically fall back to the Mac. If all I needed was a larger display, then I could just buy a larger display. And if all the Vision Pro was providing that kind of experience, then aren’t the rest of its capabilities just overkill?
All play and no workAgain, I’m brought back to those early days of the iPad. It took that device a long time to outgrow its humble beginnings and reach parity with the Mac—some would argue until this very fall, more than 15 years after its debut. Good news: having finally put the old “can you get work done on an iPad” chestnut to bed, it’s time to move on to “can you get work done on the Vision Pro.”
Look, if I need someplace to get distracted watching classic Star Trek episodes on a tiny television while sitting on the beach, well, you have my number, Vision Pro. Just don’t ask me to fill out that spreadsheet. Despite its ambition and how much it can do, the Vision Pro still feels like it has a way to go when it comes to the fine art of getting work done.
- Great on a chilly day, believe me. ↩
Amazon’s new hardware rollouts, the health tech we use, our favorite third-party apps, and Google’s new home ecosystem.
Go to the podcast page.
The side of my head does look like that!If visionOS and the Vision Pro are all about charting a course to the future of wearable devices in front of our eyes, Apple needs to keep pushing toward that future at every opportunity. Fortunately, visionOS keeps moving forward, with several substantial feature improvements that have rolled out in updates over the past year-plus.
The ultimate fate of Apple’s vision products remains unclear. I have to assume that the long-term goal is a pair of lightweight glasses that we can use to overlay software on top of our world. Everything between now and then is about developing the technology to make that possible. And with visionOS 26, Apple is doing what it needs to be doing: iterating, making everything better, and building out an entirely new operating system one block at a time.
Better Spatial PersonasApple had already taken its most uncanny launch feature (the dead-eyed Personas) and made it shine with a software update. It could have considered it a solved problem, but it didn’t.
Instead, visionOS throws away the improved Personas entirely and replaces them with even better versions. The new Persona engine makes these digital replicas of their users look real in a way that the previous versions did not. Part of the trick is that more of the head is now captured when you’re setting up a Persona—which means that as a Persona turns its head to the side (or you move around), the Persona still looks like a person and not a face hanging off the front of a mannequin head like cheese on a pizza.
I’d say that Personas have exited the Uncanny Valley, but that’s not really true—the old update got them out of the valley. But these are better, more expressive and human. Hair and complexion are improved, and there are more customization options for glasses. I absolutely despised the original implementation of Personas on visionOS, but Personas version 3.0 is excellent.
Maybe it’s the fact that they look better when you see the side of the head now, but Apple has chucked the idea of personas as two-dimensional objects, at least for FaceTime calls. They’re Spatial by default now, your friends can just drop down in your space or whatever virtual environment you’re in. It was already a good experience, and now it’s even better. I do occasional calls with my tech journalist friends who have Vision Pros, and it’s like we’re hanging out in person. There’s really nothing like it, and it just got way better in visionOS 26.
Unfortunately, while beards look better on visionOS 26, they still limit a Persona’s mouth movement.
Geographic persistence and widgetsI can attach widgets in my laundry area, and they’ll stay there!In the long run, assuming AR glasses are a thing (which is what we’re all assuming here, because that’s why this whole project exists), you’ll want to be able to place a virtual item somewhere and have it still be there when you come back to it later. You know, like actual items in actual reality.
In previous versions of visionOS, there was basically none of that persistence across reboots. If the Vision Pro shut down (this happened to me most frequently during long breaks between sessions, where it would shut down to preserve battery), all windows were closed. You could set up a whole careful world of windows and objects, but they were all temporary, so why bother?
visionOS 26 addresses that. Now you can leave items in one place and they’ll appear when you enter that space, even if the Vision Pro has rebooted or shut down in the interim. Windows are always where you left them. It’s great for short-term reusability, and a must if you take the long view. Now I can place a virtual object like a TV set from the Sandwich app Television and stick it on a table, and know that the next time I come back to that location, it’ll be there. (And you can always press and hold the Digital Crown to gather all your windows in front of you, in case you left your Safari window in another room.)
A big beneficiary of geographic persistence is the new ability for visionOS to use widgets from other apps. Widgets have spread across all of Apple’s other platforms, but this is their first appearance on visionOS, and they’re a great fit.
visionOS lets you place widgets on physical surfaces like walls, where they’ll remain anchored. (You can actually do this with just about any visionOS window so that you can snap a window to a wall, ceiling or floor and it’ll stick there.)
In visionOS 2, I tried a bunch of different widgets from apps like Widgetsmith and Windora, but their lack of persistence made me just give up on using them. Now that shouldn’t be a problem. To add a widget, you open the new Widgets app and then browse through a list of widgets offered by various apps, including both Apple’s and those from third parties.
I was able to pop a couple of widgets onto the wall in my bedroom, right above the TV, and refer to them while watching a movie. They were the Clock widget from Apple and a weather widget I built for myself using JavaScript in Scriptable that worked just fine as a widget on visionOS, docked to the wall.
The new Photos widgets are interesting—you can attach a panorama to a large widget and stick it on a wall, making it look like a window, very much in the same style as the visionOS app Windora. Unfortunately, when I tried it, the panoramas were so zoomed in that most of what I wanted to see wasn’t visible. I also couldn’t really make the window very large. I wish there were more ways to adjust panoramas, within reason. Other photo widgets featuring spatial images were a bit uncanny, popping out of the frame and moving whenever I moved my head. My best luck came in sticking plain old flat pictures into widgets on walls.
Environments in a holding patternImmersive Environments (the desktop wallpaper of visionOS) are another favorite visionOS feature of mine. While it’s clear that Environments are on Apple’s mind in visionOS 26, the direction things are going is anything but clear.
There’s one new Environment in visionOS 26: Jupiter. This environment places you on the tiny moon Amalthea, looking out at the solar system’s largest planet. Previous environments have been more or less static—a swaying palm tree here, a stray rain shower there—but Jupiter is much more interactive. You can enter Control Center and adjust the time of day (in other words, the amount of Jupiter’s face that’s in sunlight) and the speed at which time passes. Embedded in all of this is the suggestion that future Environments may be more customizable.
Jupiter is spectacular to look at and play with. As a tech demo, it’s outstanding. But like the previous space-based Environment on the surface of the Moon, I found the Jupiter environment tough to work from. I love space stuff more than the average person, but I don’t enjoy working there.
While I’m glad that Apple is apparently investing in figuring out what an Environment should be when it grows up, I also have to admit that I’m disappointed in the lack of progress on any other front. Jupiter is the only new Environment added in visionOS 26, and it wasn’t that big of a list to begin with.
What’s worse, there are some really fun environments built into third-party apps that remain entirely locked into those apps rather than being able to be used globally. Recently, Disney+ added the creepy Alien: Earth containment room as an environment, and HBO Max added a Harry Potter-themed environment. Previous environments have included Star Wars, Avengers, and Game of Thrones-themed ones. But if you want to hang out and check your email atop Avengers Tower, you can’t. It’s only available in the Disney+ app.
I don’t get it. As with so much of visionOS 26, Apple has left me wanting more. A lot more.
Spatial scenes for everyoneIn a welcome sign of rapid iteration, Apple has thrown out last year’s algorithm that turned flat photos into remarkably good 3-D ones, and replaced it with the same multi-layered spatial scenes that it’s featuring in effects in the other 26 operating systems.
The result is an image that doesn’t just look 3-D, but which adds more of a perspective change when you move your head toward the image or from side to side. It can’t reveal information that’s not really there, of course—there’s some smudgy generative filling going on in the background—but the effect is still impressive.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/tpk360hb.mp4Total Party Kill in 360.I also got to live out an alternate life as an extreme sports enthusiast by watching some Insta360 footage directly on my Vision Pro, courtesy of visionOS 26’s new support for extremely wide field-of-view video formats from 180- and 360-degree cameras from the likes of Insta360 and GoPro. I took some 360 footage I shot myself (of people playing Dungeons and Dragons at a table, and not an adventurer parachuting into snowy backcountry—c’mon, this is me!). After opening the file in Files, visionOS asked if I wanted to convert it to a more Apple-friendly format, and began playing the video immersively. Just like that, I was standing atop a table surrounded by D&D players.
Spatial browsingThere’s a new Spatial Browsing mode in Safari that answers the question, “What if Safari Reader, but in three dimensions?” When you enable Spatial Browsing, spatial environments drop away, the browser window resizes itself, and is surrounded by a gray backdrop. On pages where Safari Reader isn’t supported, it’ll look like a normal webpage. On pages with Reader support, they’ll be displayed in Reader format, with a little floating window off to the side offering an Apple Intelligence summary.
As you scroll across images in this mode, Safari will automatically use Apple’s new spatial image processing to convert them into 3-D images. It feels a little weird that Apple is altering images on other people’s websites. For news sites featuring stories about current events stories it can be a little disconcerting.
The very nature of visionOS makes me perfectly happy to witness Apple deploying a few wacky features and asking us, “Is this a thing?” I’m not sure Spatial browsing is really a thing. I think I’d rather just have Safari Reader and maybe the option to convert any image I’m looking at into a 3-D one.
The rest is visionaryThere are a bunch of other features hiding at the edges of visionOS 26 that deserve a mention.
A new “look to scroll” feature frees you up from needing to make hand gestures in order to scroll content in apps like Mail and Safari. It’s a little awkward, since I also look to read, which makes me very aware that I’m looking at words I’m not reading yet in order to scroll the page so I can see more words to read. In general, I don’t mind using a couple of fingers to scroll, but I don’t mind having another, less obtrusive option.
Apple has added passthrough support for more devices, notably iPhones and game controllers. This is important when you want to see something—like your hands, or a keyboard or laptop—in an immersive environment. The new feature worked spottily for me, sometimes exposing my iPhone—and with a new auto-unlock feature, making my iPhone much more usable when I’ve got the Vision Pro on—but other times exposing the edge while the screen itself was invisible. Frustrating. I’d also love it if Apple would add pass-through support for keyboards other than its own.
While native visionOS apps are best, the ability to use iPadOS apps in visionOS is a major boost to productivity. Unfortunately, visionOS’s iPad app support is stuck in a previous era. As of iPadOS 26, iPad app windows can be resized to any sort of shape when in multi-window mode—but visionOS still forces you to use them in a locked portrait or landscape aspect ratio. This needs to be addressed, as resizing iPad apps would make them fit in much better on visionOS.
visionOS 26 is looking to the future by adding support for consensual viewing of items when two people are using Vision Pro in the same room. Right now, it’s awfully unlikely that you and a friend are going to bring your combined $7000 in Vision Pro hardware together just to watch a movie or play checkers, but as more people get devices like this, you’ll need the ability to share widgets and objects and whatever in person, not just remotely. Apple has presumably implemented this feature by combining its existing SharePlay technology with the same stuff that powers geographic persistence.
At an Apple demo back in June, I was able to manipulate a shared 3-D model of an astronaut in a space suit in collaboration with an Apple representative who was wearing his own Vision Pro, and we walked around it and gestured to it as if it were a real thing, because we both saw the very same VR object. I don’t know if I’ll use this feature any time soon, but it shows how Apple continues to build out features that it’ll need in its AR platform of the future.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet gotten a chance to try one of the visionOS 26 features that excites me a lot: support for hand controllers, namely the PlayStation VR 2 Sense controller. I’ve felt strongly for a while that Apple needs to expand what’s possible on Vision Pro by adding support for games. No, the $3500 Vision Pro is never going to be a game console, but by far the weakest thing about the platform is a lack of content—and there are plenty of VR games out there that could make the platform more appealing, especially if more affordable versions are coming eventually. I hope Apple adds this promised feature to visionOS 26 soon.
Forward to the futurevisionOS 26 shows that Apple isn’t asleep at the switch when it comes to developing features for its newest platform. If this thing is heading somewhere, it needs to keep showing forward progress, and I feel that progress with this update. Widgets and broad support for geographical persistence are important points of growth.
But the pace of change is sometimes frustrating. Apple has made great strides with some of its best features, like Spatial Personas, while others seem to be moving more slowly. The new Jupiter Environment is technically impressive, but the feature needs more attention.
As always with visionOS, it comes back to the long game. As long as Apple keeps pushing forward and building out its AR platform of the future, I’ll be confident that the company is on the right track. visionOS 26 offers robust evidence that the work remains ongoing, but the to-do list remains a mile long.
Myke framed by Final Cut Camera on an iPhone.A bit lost in the hubbub around the announcement of the M4 iPad Pro back in May 2024 was Apple’s announcement of Final Cut Pro 2.0 for iPad and the accompanying Final Cut Camera app.
I know it was a bit lost because I used both of those apps last week to record the YouTube version of the Upgrade podcast and when I mentioned it to a bunch of people, they all seemed… surprised? I guess this one didn’t land, or at least didn’t land beyond a smaller group of video-oriented people.
So, in the interest of reminding you: the Final Cut Pro for iPad/Final Cut Camera thing (note to Apple: you couldn’t give this system a clever brand name?) is pretty amazing. You can connect up to four iPhones to an iPad running Final Cut Pro and use the iPhones as remote cameras to record a live event, adjusting settings on the fly and ending up with a full-resolution multicam project ready to be edited.
Myke Hurley and I were in Memphis for the St. Jude Podcastathon and needed to record Upgrade in person before we checked out and headed to our respective homes. Setting up an audio recording in a hotel room is easy, but recording video adds a bit of complexity. Last year, I used a 360-degree camera to shoot our episode, but not only was the result ugly, it also took hours of file conversion and uploading to get something usable.
Then I thought about using iPhones on tripods1 with Final Cut Camera. Given that it was new iPhone season, we knew we’d have plenty of iPhones, and I made sure we had three iPhone-compatible tripods. I figured we’d connect three iPhones to my iPad Pro, which I’d keep next to me to make sure everything was working properly. The system uses Wi-Fi direct for transfers (i.e., the devices talk to one another directly), so you don’t need to have a fast Wi-Fi network… which is good, because our hotel didn’t.
After moving around a lot of hotel furniture to try and get proper angles for a shot of me, a shot of Myke, and a two-shot of us both, we connected the iPhones to my iPad. While two of them connected immediately, the third iPhone wouldn’t connect no matter what we tried. We rebooted things, we disconnected and reconnected from both sides… nothing worked.
In the end, we decided to just use the iPad itself as a third camera. We didn’t have a tripod that fit it, so I put my suitcase on top of Myke’s bed, perched the iPad Pro on top of that, started the recording, and hoped for the best.2
The result of the shoot was a three-camera multicam clip ready for editing. (Shown here in Final Cut Pro for Mac.)It turned out pretty well, all things considered. (The video settings of the cameras were mismatched, which I’m kicking myself about now—that’s my fault. I forgot to change the iPad’s capture settings as I had for the two phones.) I stopped our recording when we ended the regular show, and by the time we were done with the members-only portion of the audio podcast, the full-quality video files had streamed from the iPhones to the iPad.
When that was done, Myke used AirDrop to send me the audio files from our microphones. When I got to the Memphis airport, I sat in my favorite spot, ordered a drink, and got to editing.
Having our individual audio files helped this process a lot: With a glance at the waveform, I could tell which one of us was talking at any given moment. That meant that I could judge, entirely from the waveforms, whether I should be using a single-camera view or if there was enough back-and-forth that I should be using the two-shot.
Final Cut’s Multicam Clip feature made switching easy. On the timeline, it appears as a single clip, but you can bring up a view displaying all the different angles and tap to switch between them. Taps are immediately reflected on the timeline as cuts, which you can, of course, undo or switch as needed.
The edit went so smoothly that the entire 107-minute-long podcast was edited before I was halfway to Dallas. (I had expected that I’d need to export the project and edit it on my MacBook Pro, but I didn’t.)
Connectivity glitches aside, the entire process worked remarkably well. The next time I’m recording video of an in-person event, I’ll be sure to bring an old iPhone or two and possibly invest in more iPhone tripods.
- I used one of these, which is cheap but does the trick. Your mileage may vary. ↩
- It worked, though the iPad’s framing wasn’t ideal so I had to crop it later. And if something had gone wrong during the shoot, I had no way to know. (Fortunately the shooting iPhones save their video clips locally, so if there had been a disaster, we would’ve had a fallback.) ↩
We talk bags, notebooks and upgrade complaints and get mad at streaming services.
Go to the podcast page.
Jason’s spent a week with the iPhone Air and Myke’s been using his iPhone 17 Pro, so it’s time to discuss deeper thoughts about this year’s models. Also: internal chatbot chat, Intel investments, and miniature Macs!
Go to the podcast page.
If you use Sonos hardware you deserve the best. Clic for Sonos is the fastest native Sonos client for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Vision Pro. There’s no lag, just seamless Sonos playback. It’s easy to get set up, giving you smooth control, whether you’re playing to a single device or grouping multiple speakers together.
Clic for Sonos offers deep integration with native Apple technologies, with support for Widgets, Live Activities, Shortcuts, a Mac Menu Bar app, and support for Control Center. It works with your Sonos library, Apple Music, Spotify, Plex, Tidal, and TuneIn, and supports lossless and Dolby Atmos. And Scenes can now play music, so it’s one tap to group, set volume and play a playlist.
Try it for yourself and you’ll see. Six Colors readers can get one year for just $9.99 (30% off) or lifetime updates for $30 (50% off). Go to clic.dance/sixcolors for all the details.
No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.
I ranted about the joy of passkeys and some of their limitations a few weeks ago, and that prompted a question from Six Colors member Ampsonic1, a naturally occurring and renewable source of excellent queries:
Can you use 1Password to store a passkey for an Apple Account?
Unfortunately, you can’t yet! Apple uses a unique process to generate the passkey for an Apple Account—it’s generated on device, the only time I am aware of this ever happens for a passkey. This makes it uniquely the only passkey that requires an Apple device to generate or use.2 It doesn’t even show up in Passwords, because it’s a different kind of beast.
Answered.
But, oh, there is more to talk about.
I have been reluctant to recommend 1Password or any password manager to hold your passkeys unless you regularly use non-Apple devices or are absolutely all in on 1Password (or another ecosystem) to the near exclusion of Passwords and iCloud Keychain as your password manager and sync solution.
The reason had two components: utility and portability.
- It’s very useful to have integrated support for passkey filling across all your Apple devices with zero extra effort. This is true with third-party password managers, but because I started using passkeys with built-in support, I was invested in it.
- You couldn’t yet move passkeys across ecosystems, so unless a site or app supported creating multiple passkeys for your account, you were stuck, unless you went through a rigamarole to disable and re-enable the passkey.3
You can choose which password manager to use to store a passkey. (I’ve got 1Password 7 and 8 active for… reasons.)Suppose you could easily copy passkeys among password-management ecosystems, eliminating the second point? In that case, the first point matters much less. Fortunately, we are on the verge of this major change! Along with portability, introduced in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26 Tahoe, comes a few other passkey (and password) improvements. Apple didn’t document any of these in its release notes for the operating systems because they all require third-party buy-in, which is already starting to happen.
Bringing passkeys in line with passwords and raising them higherI think passkeys are the bee’s knees, so anything that makes them easier to adopt is a great move in my book, as it will make everyone’s lives easier and their identities more secure. At WWDC 2025, Apple’s Andrew Abosh presented changes that are now in production releases to smooth the passkey wheels further.
Three of these are at the website end and require websites to make changes in their authentication software to take advantage. First, sites can now offer a streamlined sign-up process that Apple devices will pick up on, making it easy to generate a passkey as to accept a password recommendation from Passwords (or third-party password managers). Second, a website can push updates to your registered account—like if you change your email address—to the password manager so that those details associated with your passkey remain in sync. Third, there’s now an automatic upgrade workflow that lets a website prompt you to shift from password to passkey.4
But the particular issue above, portability, was addressed at timestamp 19:11 in the session.5 This standard has been in the works for a few years, and the FIDO Alliance—the group that has been moving us towards a “password-free” future, seriously—released a spec last October, then celebrated Apple’s news in June of this year.
You can see this in action with the latest operating system updates (step-by-step instructions next). When you use export in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or Tahoe, you’re prompted for a destination app instead of relying on the old method, which was an unencrypted comma-separated value (CSV) file. The dialog notes, “Your items are securely transferred to the app you choose.”
So that’s that. But what about 1Password? Let’s walk through the export process.
Import and export a passkey in the most secure wayThe only bad news about the above is that the major password-manager developers haven’t all updated their systems yet to support this FIDO standard as implemented by Apple:
- 1Password has no information about a timeline for adoption. (I sent a query.)
- Bitwarden is ready to go as of its new release on September 23, the day I started writing this column!
- Dashlane also added support around the same time. Timing is everything.
I’ll walk you through exporting from the Passwords app in iOS 26:6
- Open Passwords.
- Tap the more … button and choose Export Data to Another App.
- Select entries and tap Continue.
- Acknowledge the truth of what Apple tells you about exporting passwords and tap Continue.
- Choose an applicable app, such as Bitwarden. Tap Continue.
- Apple alerts you that these password entries will be exported to the third-party password manager. Tap Continue in “App Name.”
- In that app, follow the steps to complete. In Bitwarden, you tap Continue to import the entries.
You first select password entries, which can include passkeys or passwords or both, then confirm your intention to proceed to export.You choose a destination among available apps, then confirm you want to export to that app.I would have shown you Tahoe, instead, because it has better selection tools for choosing entries first; then you export them. However, there is a bug either in Tahoe or Bitwarden, as I cannot get the app to appear as a choice. Here are the steps, nonetheless, for when this works in the near future:
- Launch Passwords.
- Select entries with passkeys (or other passwords) to export.
- Choose Export Selected Item to App.
- Authenticate with Touch ID or your account password. (iOS and iPadOS don’t prompt you for this authentication.)
- Select a Destination app and click Continue. (This is where Tahoe fails me.)
- Confirm the export by clicking Continue in “App Name.”
- Complete the import in the other password manager.
This process copies the passkey without moving it. Passkeys don’t need to be refreshed, since only your devices possess and sync the private keys required for your part of the authentication. Unless your equipment was compromised, the passkey could last forever.
Update: Unfortunately, I initially answered the question at the head of this question incorrectly. I had a false memory of receiving a prompt to create a passkey for my Apple Account; that is not how it works. For now and possibly forever, Apple Account passkeys are locked to devices and cannot be exported. Thanks to an alert reader for pointing this out!
Update: Dashlane and Bitwarden now both support passkey export. Still no update from 1Password.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- Did you know members have a direct feed into my brain…er, question queue? See the bottom of this post. ↩
- Because this is a device-based key, it is stored in Secure Enclave, making portability impossible. Apple may never allow third parties to manage an Apple Account passkey. ↩
- On sites that allow multiple passkeys, it can be as easy as clicking another plus sign and choosing the correct password manager to store the second key. ↩
- These features are based on standards, although Apple is the first to adopt them as far as I can tell. Eventually, other browser makers, password managers, and operating systems should adopt them, and you will be able to have this experience on any device and in any ecosystem. ↩
- Apple developer Ricky Mondello also noted on August 18, probably in response to my column, that this feature was coming. ↩
- Apple has not yet included this information in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or Tahoe support pages. ↩
My thanks to Quip for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground. Quip takes a very different approach.
Quip is a supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, designed to feel like a natural extension of the OS. It gives you full control over your clipboard history, syncs seamlessly across devices with iCloud, and introduces Super Shortcuts—a built-in text expansion system that lets you paste signatures, links, or entire snippets anywhere with a quick trigger.
But what really makes Quip unique is Quip Intelligence: secure, on-device AI that keeps your clipboard clean and useful. It fixes broken links, removes tracking junk, normalizes messy formatting, cleans up code blocks, avoids duplicates, and learns from you—all in real time, right on your device.
Whether you’re managing projects, writing code, or just copying links, Quip makes your clipboard fast, searchable, and surprisingly powerful.
You can try Quip free on the App Store or learn more at bzgapps.com/quip.
Imagine an orange phone at Dodger Stadium. (Apple TV+)Surprise! Last Friday, Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball broadcast of the Giants and the Dodgers featured multiple shots taken on an iPhone 17 Pro. On the final Friday night of the season, the company will repeat the feat during tonight’s Tigers-Red Sox game (7 pm ET).
According to Apple, four iPhone 17 Pros will be positioned at Fenway Park — in the Green Monster, the home dugout, and roaming the stands. In contrast to the secrecy of last week, the Tigers-Red Sox game will feature a bug in the corner of the screen that shows off the shots that are coming from an iPhone.
Is it a self-promotional gimmick? Sure, but Apple is paying a lot of money for MLB rights. Also, it’s not as if the company hasn’t pushed its MLB telecasts in a bunch of different ways. The Friday Night Baseball broadcasts look great, and have featured loads of helmet and body cams, a cinematic depth-of-field camera, and even in-stadium drone shots. Apple has probably earned at least one night of iPhone Pro product integration.
Unfortunately, even though the iPhone is capable of shooting 4K video and beyond, the ones in Apple’s MLB broadcasts will be locked to 1080p at 60 frames per second, because stadium broadcast infrastructures just haven’t caught up with the 4K world. The iPhones will be running the Blackmagic Camera app, allowing iPads back in the production trailer to control exposure and white balance settings remotely. They’ll also be attached to the just-announced Blackmagic Camera Pro Dock, which integrates all the different connections needed to fit them into the production and make them just another broadcast camera.
Apple says that one advantage of using iPhones rather than traditional broadcast cameras is that they’re small enough to fit in places like the corners of dugouts and less intimidating for candid fan shots, since we’re all used to looking at smartphone cameras. (Maybe not on tripods attached to Blackmagic Camera Pro Docks, but it’s still a fairly small footprint.)
According to Apple, Major League Baseball even attached its little holographic “validation” stickers to the iPhones used in last Friday’s broadcast from Dodger Stadium, signifying that they were the first iPhones used to broadcast an MLB game. (Apple didn’t say, but I assume one of those phones will be sent to the Hall of Fame?)
This is the fourth year of Apple TV+’s Friday-night doubleheader. Some reports have suggested the partnership might be ending after this season, but the latest one I’ve seen suggests that Apple TV+ would be continuing on Friday nights. When all that gets resolved, we’ll see if this was a last hurrah or the start of something new.
In an unsigned post on Apple Newsroom, Apple has poured out its heart about the EU’s Digital Markets Act:
It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.
Tell us how you really feel, Apple.
There’s a lot to unpack in this post, and it runs the gamut from concerns that seem reasonably well-founded—Apple potentially have to comply with third party companies requesting the full content of a user’s notifications—to claims that are more than a little ridiculous: “For instance, the changes to app marketplaces are making iOS look more like Android — and that reduces choice.”1
Yes, you heard it here: Apple says that the iPhone are essentially identical to Android.
Look, the DMA is a far-reaching piece of legislation that’s intended to increase competition by knocking down the kind of barriers that keep these enormous tech companies insulated from competition. It’s also a byzantine and tortuous set of regulations created by people who don’t necessarily understand the way technology works and the implications of their actions. Both are true!
Threading the needle of “things Apple really should be doing to improve interoperability and competition” and “things that might have unforeseen consequences that actually fly in the face of the EU’s intentions” is a tricky proposition, and the mechanisms in place to challenge the rulings are, admittedly, restrictive.
What neither the EU nor Apple really want to admit here is that dealing with companies at this size is a matter of partnership and compromise. Government entities might be the only ones capable of wielding a stick big enough to make Apple sit up and actually make changes—and it is actively making those changes in the EU, which is not only to Apple’s credit but also proves that regulation can work—but ultimately getting the most out of something like the DMA requires both sides to operate in good faith, which seems to be lacking here.
- “For the first time, pornography apps are available on iPhone”. Ah, yes, remember the good old days when it was impossible for people to get porn on their iPhones? 🙄 ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My HomePod, open to the world.One of my original HomePods died last year of a sudden illness. It was survived by its fellow stereo pair. So a friend gave me her own lonely surviving HomePod, and the mismatched couple let the music play on for a little while. But then my other original HomePod died—also suddenly, same symptoms—leaving my friend’s HomePod tragically alone and my back bedroom studio silent.
That’s when another friend recommended Nic’s Fix, a one-man operation in the Seattle area that’s devoted to repairing HomePods. I sent my recently deceased HomePod to Nic, who seems to have mastered the disassembly and reassembly of HomePods—it’s tricky stuff!—and has cataloged the entire litany of reasons they die.
Nic fixed my HomePod live on YouTube, and it’s back in working order, reunited with its stereo pair. He says no HomePod repair exceeds $90, so it seemed like a pretty good deal rather than going out and finding a new pair of smart speakers. Especially since I know that I can fix the other one if it dies, too.
Some other cool things about Nic’s service: He provides a one-year warranty, he’ll clean or even re-color your HomePod’s mesh while he’s at it, and he repairs and replaces obviously worn or tired parts when he spots them. Among others who have used his services are Dan Moren (whose HomePod was a victim of Death Farts), John Siracusa (like mine, no power), and Steve and Allison Sheridan (no power). Allison also interviewed Nic on her podcast.
What can I say? If you have an original HomePod and don’t want to say goodbye, I recommend Nic’s service.
iPhone sales are important! That’s about as obvious as a dog-bites-man statement can get.
This year, early reports suggest sales of the iPhone 17 might be a little better than expected, but there’s no accompanying surge for the iPhone Air. What does it all mean?!
On one level, not a lot: Apple’s still going to sell a zillion iPhones, in the end. The profits will roll on. But if you’re a sicko like me (and I will remind you that you are reading this column at a site devoted to Apple-related minutiae), you are probably interested in the details.
They’re meaningful for a few reasons: If Apple’s expectations don’t match reality, it suggests the company doesn’t fully understand its own customers. If one model really kills it, it potentially impacts overall iPhone revenue (for better or for worse). And perhaps most importantly for most iPhone users: How the world reacts to iPhone models affects Apple’s plans for future iPhone models.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Our interest in Meta’s new AR Display glasses, views on iPhone scratch concerns, when we choose to repair vs. replace devices, and the existential question posed by iPhone Air’s allure.
Go to the podcast page.
One of the first things I did when I got the new iPhones into Six Colors global HQ was to get the iPhone 17 Pro Max up and running and run Geekbench 6. (I know there are a lot of Geekbench scores out there, but I like to run my own, just because.) Because I’m curious about the pace of Apple silicon innovation.
The A19 Pro chip in the iPhone 17 Pro is presumably using the next generation of CPU and GPU cores that will also appear later this year or early next year in the M5 processor. So it’s not just a view into how the chips have progressed for the iPhone, but also an indication about where gains will be made in the next generation of Macs.
In terms of CPU, the step from A18 Pro to A19 Pro seems smaller than normal, though there may be extenuating circumstances. Single-core performance in Geekbench only increased 3% in my preliminary tests, which is the lowest gain I’ve seen in years. Multi-core performance, on the other hand, went up by 9%—much better, even if it’s a less impressive gain than any in the last four generations.
One of the tricky things in judging raw performance on an Apple silicon chip is that it’s not a single thing, but a collection of things. The A19 Pro chip on my iPhone Pro Max has six CPU cores, only two of which are high-powered “performance cores.” The other four are power-efficient “efficiency cores,” a name that implies unimpressive cores designed for the weakest of tasks.
But over the last few years, Apple has really improved its efficiency cores. Efficiency cores may not help a device conquer the most brutal processing tasks, but the faster they are, the less likely it is that the big, bad performance cores need to be kicked into gear. The more work that can be done on efficiency cores, the better—but that work is often invisible to things like benchmarks that seek to measure maximum performance.
It’s rare to see the percentage improvement of single-core scores and multi-core scores as divergent as they are this generation. I suspect what I’m seeing is the added power of four improved efficiency cores contributing to a high multi-core score, even if the performance cores on the A19 Pro aren’t a spectacular leap forward.
If you’ve been following the progress of Apple silicon the last few years, this shouldn’t be too unexpected. From generation to generation, Apple shows love to specific parts of their chips while leaving other parts alone. Some years, it’s a revamped Neural Engine (this year with the A19 Pro, in fact) or an upgraded GPU core design. Other years, it’s all about the CPUs. It varies, and the net result is forward progress over time—but not necessarily in every area, every year.
Speaking of which, this year’s GPU scores are way up.
This is the biggest increase in the overall GPU Compute score in six generations, and even longer if you divide the score by the number of GPU cores available. The A19 Pro generates Geekbench GPU Compute scores 65 percent faster than the A17 Pro of just two years ago, with the same core count. It’s been an impressive couple of years on the GPU front.
What does this augur for the M5 processor? You never know if Apple has a trick up its sleeve, and the M5 will have an innovation not integrated into the A19 Pro, but it sure looks like the trend this year is a more efficient CPU and a big boost to the GPU. The addition of AI accelerators on the GPU and the updates to the Neural Engine also suggest to me that these new chips will do really well on AI benchmarks.
Also, for the record, these numbers don’t really change the numbers much if we’re talking about if Apple used an A-series processor in a low-cost MacBook. Either the A18 Pro or A19 Pro could be used to power a MacBook that would match the M3 in single-core and surpass the M1 in multi-core and GPU.
As always, there’s much more to come at Six Colors as we dig into these iPhones and also await the arrival of the M5 chip, whenever that happens!
We reconvene to discuss our new phones, the upcoming foldable iPhone and changing the name of the podcast.
Go to the podcast page.
Vision Pro goes to the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall this fall.Apple has announced another round of Immersive films for the Vision Pro, including Monday’s premiere of “Tour De Force” from CANAL+ and MotoGP.
“Tour De Force” is a half-hour film about French motorcycle racer Johann Zarco competing for a historic win at the French Grand Prix at Le Mans. It was announced back in June and is the first film shot with Blackmagic’s new URSA Cine Immersive camera, which lets companies that aren’t Apple create films in Apple’s Immersive format.
I watched “Tour De Force” this afternoon and came away impressed. It certainly doesn’t seem like a step down from Apple’s production values, and CANAL+ obviously had access to multiple Blackmagic cameras, which gives the doc an expansiveness that some of Apple’s productions have lacked. (“Tour De Force” also has better luck in its subject than it did with its bull-riding short, which ended in about two seconds of failure. Zarco and his team have better luck!) I’m looking forward to many more Immersive projects now that the Blackmagic camera is out in the world.
This fall, Apple’s also releasing an Immersive and spatial presentation from the BBC Proms, letting viewers get up close with the hands of pianist Lukas Sternath as he performs Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor with the BBC Symphony Orchestry at the Royal Albert Hall. There’s also a documentary coming in October set in a rainforest in tropical Australia; a film called “Experience Paris” that celebrates French culture (also due this fall); a K-pop documentary about the band CORTIS; and a new episode of Apple’s adventure series Elevated.
Launching in December is a new series, World of Red Bull, that does not feature partying twentysomethings powering down a can on their way to the next club, but extreme athletes in extreme situations. The series begins with an episode about backcountry skiing in British Columbia and will be followed by an episode next year about big-wave surfing in Tahiti.
Also coming next year is a climate doc, due next spring, featuring CNN journalist Bill Weir on a scientific expedition to find emperor penguins in Antarctica.
To recap:
- Today: “Tour de Force”
- October: “Julaymba” (Australian rainforest documentary), Elevated: Maine (Oct. 3)
- Fall: “A Night at the BBC Proms”, “Experience Paris”, “CORTIS”
- December: World of Red Bull: “Backcountry Skiing”
- 2026: World of Red Bull: “Big-Wave Surfing”; “Journey to Antarctica to Find Emperor Penguins” (Spring)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It is perhaps not surprising that my spouse and I raised a Jeopardy! fan. Our older child, halfway through college, not only loves the show but has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of geography, transit systems, musical instruments, and much more. Or should I write encyclopaedic, as they are spending this current term in London on a study abroad program? That plays into the story.
If you have followed my career, you will know both that I won two episodes of Jeopardy! (just like Dan Moren) and that I have a nearly obsessive interest in ways to enable remote access to and control of your Mac and other devices when you are outside your local network. I have, in the past, even written an entire ebook on the topic.
London, Jeopardy!, and remote access and control all intersect when I received a text from said child late in the evening, their time. The system we use (and updated) is a good solution for any locally recorded or stored media files.
Who is Rube Goldberg? We would also have accepted Heath RobinsonIt surprises people who haven’t watched Jeopardy! for years that it was not available on a streaming platform, only over-the-air (OTA).1 This was for a funky reason: it’s a syndicated program, just like a lot of talk shows and game shows have been. They don’t make their money selling the rights to air the program, like production companies and studios do with broadcast or streaming services. Rather, the shows bring in the big bucks through a combination of local and national advertising, a decent portion of which flows back to the syndicated programs’ creators.2
Once a show aired, that was it—unless you caught it as a re-run, recorded it to a DVR, or found a pirated version online, you could never watch it again. Jeopardy! was ephemeral in its nature, anyway, except if you appeared on it. (Yes, I still have my DVR-recorded digital files of my appearances!)
I say was because, as of the week of September 8, you can watch Jeopardy! on Peacock, Hulu, and the horrible set of words “Hulu on Disney+” the day after the episodes air in syndication. It took until 2025 for the money from next-day streaming—carved out years ago—to be good enough to risk annoying stations syndicating the program.3
However, I set up an OTA DVR system many years ago that still does the trick—and lets me skip commercials. I record Jeopardy! as follows:
- An antenna mounted on our roof
- An HDHomeRun TV tuner, a networked TV tuner, plugged into that antenna
- Channels DVR Server, a software DVR that is compatible with HDHomeRun and other products, and also allows remote access
We capture Jeopardy! from over-the-air broadcasts to watch later.As a result, I have HD-quality recordings of Jeopardy! that we can watch at our leisure. And when our older returned to college last year, I figured out a missing piece in our setup that let them watch from Boston.
What is “Back to Back to My Mac”?When Apple released Back to My Mac in 2007, I was overjoyed. When I traveled for conferences, I carried a laptop—but remember the low-capacity hard drives we had in those days. I regularly would need a file I hadn’t brought, or even need to use an app on my machine, back at my office.4
There were third-party offerings, like Timbutku Pro, but they were designed for corporate environments. They didn’t cut through what had quickly become the typical configuration for home Internet service providers (ISPs): using NAT. Network Address Translation allowed a gateway (often a Wi-Fi router or broadband modem) to create a local area network (LAN) using addresses drawn from a private pool. These private addresses were reserved from the public Internet and could not be routed. As such, they could be reused.
A gateway uses a public IP address on the Internet (wide area network or WAN) side, either as a broadband modem or assigned by that modem. The gateway employs DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to assign private addresses on the local network. Devices on the LAN talk to each other using their private addresses. When they need to reach out to the Internet, the NAT software creates a mapping of their private address to the public one, allowing traffic to flow.
NAT is just this simple! (Image via Wikimedia by Michael Bakni, CC-BY-SA 4.0)But what about traffic inward, such as running a server or, say, accessing a Mac’s screen remotely? That requires setting up fixed pairings of ports—essentially a sub-address on an IP address—to the public IP address and a private one. This punch-through setup varies for every router, and, in the past, often didn’t work at all—or at least not reliably. It’s a little better in recent years.
Some people were further bedeviled by a “double NAT.” This nesting problem happens when your ISP doesn’t let you install your own gateway. So the broadband modem hands a private address to the gateway you’re using, which, using its own NAT software, creates a nested, distinct private network for your devices. This works fine for outbound traffic, but usually fails without a lot of effort for inbound.
Back to My Mac mostly worked—double NAT could defeat it, but not always. It wasn’t perfectly reliable, as the service would sometimes die on a Mac for whatever reason and not revive itself, a sticky problem when you couldn’t restart it because…you needed remote access to do such a thing.5
With Back to My Mac enabled and working, you could effectively have a tunnel back to your office, with shared volumes on the Mac and its screen available for connection. Apple discontinued Back to My Mac in 2019. However, by that time, a number of companies had developed robust screen-sharing and remote-volume-access packages, such as Screens and Splashtop. These require installing client software, and have a range of prices from “free with limits” to “only a corporate IT person needs this set of features at this expensive per-seat price.”6
These tools don’t fit every need, however. For what you generally need, you have to pay a fee that’s about $25 to $60 per year for a single user or a couple of devices. And you are subject to the limitations and choices of the company’s tools.
What if you could have broader network and service access to your local machines, pay as little as nothing in many cases, and use whatever software you wanted? This is where my favorite product of 2024 kicks in: Tailscale.
Who is a surprisingly successful Canadian company?Tailscale has a very straightforward offering: an extension of a virtual private network (VPN), which securely tunnels traffic between two points.7 You use a VPN to protect your data from ne’er-do-wells sniffing for open traffic at a coffee shop or on unprotected networks.8. A VPN service creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and a data center, obviating most interlopers; corporate VPNs go from your device to inside the corporate network.
Some whimsy in naming: Tailscale lets you “roll” to get new random word combinations for human-readable machine names within its ts.net domain.Tailscale uses VPN technology, but instead of popping you out elsewhere on the Internet, it essentially creates a VPN LAN—a central, routable, networked space that all your devices connect to. This pool is reachable from the public Internet, so you can connect when your devices are out and about without any calisthenics. Tailscale built its system with end-to-end encryption, so only the endpoint VPN clients—not the company—have access to the encryption secrets used to secure sessions.
Any resource you could access while on the same network as your devices can be reached via the Tailscale connection. The company has done a lot of clever work to bypass NAT limitations, too, so even the most bizarre configuration won’t defeat two-way connections. The only real limitation is that Bonjour traffic doesn’t pass over Tailscale for quite technical reasons. (Bonjour is a multicast, broadcast protocol that doesn’t work within the parameters of the Tailscale approach.)
Because of the lack of Bonjour, you have to do a slight amount of work to find the addresses assigned by Tailscale to the machines connected to your pool. The Tailscale software on each connected device lets you see the IP address and name of that device, plus all the other connected devices’ names. If you want to connect to a Mac with file-sharing enabled, you just choose Go > Connect to Server in the Finder and paste that IP address in; the same works with screen sharing in the Screen Sharing app. (I wrote a much more detailed look at Tailscale over at TidBITS last year, with step-by-step setup instructions. Folks in the comments offered some great insight about further uses and configurations.)
Tailscale’s system menu shows provides connection details, as well as the names of other devices connected to the VPN LAN.From the Tailscale dashboard, you can see what domain names and IP addresses are assigned to specific attached devices.“Hey, Glenn, you promised this would explain setting up remote streaming for Jeopardy! Get to the point!”
Ok, ok! So Tailscale offers both clients for end users and API-based integration. The people who make Channels built a Tailscale client into their Channels DVR server. Once I had an account set up, I turned on the Tailscale client within Channels DVR and approved the connection at the Tailscale administrative console. I sent an invitation via Tailscale to my kid, who installed the Tailscale client on their laptop, and I approved them as part of my group. They could then use a browser to connect to the home DVR server and stream their favorite trivia program at will.
Channels DVR embeds a Tailscale client within itself.The problem that got us on the phone a few days ago, however, was that the intervening network steps seemed to be slowing streaming to a crawl—under 1 Mbps, despite their dorm network showing nearly 70 Mbps downstream. Channels doesn’t allow downloads of programs via the browser, so we set up an additional connection through their iPhone, went through the approvals for that, and they were able to plug in the Tailscale IP address for the Channels DVR server, make a connection, and download the show, which they can AirPlay from their phone to their laptop to watch on the “big” screen.
While this is a specific case, you can use Tailscale more broadly with any home streaming resource, like Plex, files on network-attached storage (NAS) systems, or even Apple’s funky Home Sharing system found in the TV app on a Mac. Any file, screen, or network resource you need becomes fully accessible.
You can also use Tailscale as a VPN to your home network, which can make resources (like country-locked streaming services) available without paying for a separate VPN service. The easiest way is through an Apple TV.
When I was out of the country earlier this year for a few weeks, I was able to use Tailscale to “keep in touch” with material I needed from my home computer, access U.S.-only services, and, yes, stream Jeopardy!
There has to be a catch, right? It’s the price. It’s free! Free if you’re using it for personal use and using a non-corporate email account. The company has a simple definition of what personal means: “In this scenario, your Tailscale account is owned by you solely for your own personal use.” Free accounts can have up to three users and 100 devices.
If you need a greater range of personal access or four or five users, a $5 per month Personal Plus package provides that. For commercial uses, most of us almost certainly don’t need more than the $6 per user per month Starter offering.
And, now, back to our program. Ken, I’ll take Nattering Network Nonsense for $600, please.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- A limited number of back episodes were available for a while on some streaming services. ↩
- In fact, Jeopardy!‘s producing company, Sony Pictures Television, sued its national advertising partner, CBS, over advertising revenue just last year. ↩
- In 2028, when current licensing deals end, Sony could opt to stream same day. ↩
- For about 15 years, I shared offices with other freelancers, and had a desktop Mac in my office with lots of hard drives attached that I would also want to access from home when I wasn’t at work. ↩
- At one point, many of us running servers remotely had the most ridiculous thing. The Sophisticated Circuits’ PowerKey Pro was a power strip that you could plug into a phone line, such as one you already used for a fax machine. (I’m not going to explain a fax machine.) It could listen to Touch-tones (not going to explain that, either) that it interpreted as commands, including to cycle power on a given outlet. ↩
- TeamViewer charges high fees compared to other companies to use its commercial version, but offers a non-commercial option for personal use. However, the company decides in an unknown fashion what it considers “commercial” use and starts displaying warnings and cuts you off when it decides you’ve used it that way. I don’t like it. ↩
- One of the most successful and fastest-growing tech companies in Canada. ↩
- Nearly all network traffic to and from your devices is secured via encrypted tunnels, and some uses end-to-end encryption, like iMessage. However, the domain names of sites you visit and other data can leak, and there remain some apps and Web sites that stubbornly avoid encryption, for whatever reason. ↩
Reunited in Memphis, Jason and Myke discuss iPhone and AirPods Pro first impressions, phone transfer troubles, MacBook rumors, and St. Jude shenanigans.
Go to the podcast page.
Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground. Quip takes a very different approach.
Quip is a supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, designed to feel like a natural extension of the OS. It gives you full control over your clipboard history, syncs seamlessly across devices with iCloud, and introduces Super Shortcuts—a built-in text expansion system that lets you paste signatures, links, or entire snippets anywhere with a quick trigger.
But what really makes Quip unique is Quip Intelligence: secure, on-device AI that keeps your clipboard clean and useful. It fixes broken links, removes tracking junk, normalizes messy formatting, cleans up code blocks, avoids duplicates, and learns from you—all in real time, right on your device.
Whether you’re managing projects, writing code, or just copying links, Quip makes your clipboard fast, searchable, and surprisingly powerful.
You can try Quip free on the App Store or learn more at bzgapps.com/quip.
E-reader accessibility is anything but consistent. You might find a font size adjustment, but no high-contrast or dark mode settings. And screen readers, where they exist, don’t rival those available for computers and smartphones. Even where devices offer these features, many books don’t fully take advantage of them.
Michael Kozlowski of Good e-Reader says Amazon is beefing up its accessible offerings, including accessibility information on book pages and software enhancements:
Kindle Assistive Reader is… fully available in the update that was released a couple of days ago. It will essentially convert any Kindle book into an audiobook, utilizing an advanced text-to-speech system that sounds natural.
Publishers, too, have accessibility on their minds:
Publishers have been prioritizing the submission of e-books to Amazon that include accessibility features. According to Publishers Weekly, “The move comes as publishers face increasing legal pressure to make digital content accessible, positioning accessible publishing as both a competitive advantage and a necessity as new laws such as the European Accessibility Act and expanded digital accessibility requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act drive industry momentum toward universal accessibility.”
It’s important to note that this feature is an on-device accessibility system, which differentiates it from approaches that generate audiobooks for sale using artificial voices.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to ListenLater.net for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
ListenLater.net is a clever idea—it turns your reading list into a podcast playlist. I collect longer articles throughout the week that I just don’t have time to dive into at the moment—and they often get lost in the shuffle. But I never lose track of my podcast queue. This is where ListenLater.net makes it easy: It turns articles into episodes of a podcast, so your reading list can be automatically transformed into a podcast in your queue. It all works via email, so you just share any article you want via your browser’s share sheet to your ListenLater.net email address. (This means you can also forward any email to Listen Later, even ones with attachments, and it will translate the whole thing into spoken audio.)
Listen Later uses some really high quality AI voices to read your audio. They’re really excellent narrators, and you can choose from numerous voice options. You can also have Listen Later auto-translate articles in other languages into your chosen language.
Head over to ListenLater.net and start your free trial today.
Relay’s seventh annual live telethon for St. Jude took place on Friday from noon to midnight Eastern time. I was one of six co-hosts(!) this year. You can watch some or all of the archived stream!
Give it a try and donate!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The possibility of David Ellison buying Warner Bros. Discovery to add to his collection, the threat and promise of spread-out sports rights, sponsorships that might become forbidden fruit, Netflix live boxing success, TV picks, and your letters!
Go to the podcast page.
Our iPhone buying decisions, which Apple product we would change colors, how often we manage storage space, and our current headphone situation.
Go to the podcast page.
Dan and Moltz discuss what they’re looking forward to on Friday and general reaction to Apple’s new operating systems.
Go to the podcast page.
In macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple has updated how it manages encryption keys in FileVault, the feature that protects your Mac’s data volume by encrypting it. Users with existing choices won’t be immediately impacted, but eventually everyone will need to use the new approach—which I think is an improvement. But if you rely on Apple to hold on to your Recovery Key for you, it’s time to start considering a new strategy.
The modern version of FileVault first appeared way back in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. (The first version of FileVault only encrypted your Home directory.) Today’s FileVault provides both boot protection and disk protection: you have to enter an account password before the operating system loads, and passing that stage unlocks an encryption key that provides access to the otherwise fully locked-down startup volume’s contents.
When you set up FileVault, macOS generates a Recovery Key for you. Normally, you decrypt the disk by logging in with your password, but if the portion of your drive containing login data becomes corrupted, the Recovery Key is the only alternate path to decrypting your data. This is a really rare failure, but if it happens, there needs to be an alternate path to recovery. That’s the Recovery Key.
Previously, you had two choices for how to store that key: You could view it once, ever, and be sure to write it down (or more properly, stick it in a password manager). Or you could opt to use iCloud escrow, where the key was stored as part of your data on Apple’s servers without strong security—anyone with Apple Account access could retrieve it from a locked Mac. Apple has changed the iCloud option in Tahoe, boosting security and changing how it’s accessed, which I am sure it did for better overall security and privacy.
However, this change means you are much more responsible for managing a critical recovery component with FileVault active. There’s some nuance to this, as I discuss ahead.
Encrypt the whole thingPeople used to be paranoid about someone stealing the contents of their hard disk drive. Maybe it was a fear of actual theft—someone stealing a computer from a business or home—but the big bugbear was you leaving a laptop behind or having it stolen from you while out and about. Only truly endangered or overworried people thought a criminal or government agent would enter their home and try to siphon their data—and, sometimes, that did occur!
The solution to this, in part, is full-disk encryption (FDE), where your entire drive is encrypted. This requires cleverness: some kind of post-boot but pre-full-operating-session mode had to be developed where a disk could be mounted and encrypted the first time, and then prompt for a key and be decrypted on subsequent boots and restarts.1
Encrypting an entire drive could be incredibly slow. However, this tedious operation typically happened once. After the entire drive’s contents were first encrypted, reading and decrypting or writing and encrypting provided a speed hit, but not much. (Spinning hard drives were already so slow that it was hard to notice the difference.) Some drive manufacturers even built FDE into their hardware, which sped things up until chip makers built encryption circuits into their CPUs, at which point operating systems could handle the whole thing speedily. Add the shift to SSDs into the mix, and fully encrypted drives read and write nearly as fast as fully exposed ones.
Ultimately, Apple decided to encrypt its computers’ startup drives all the time, first with the T2 Security Chip for later Intel models, and then as part of all M-series Apple silicon Macs. FileVault for those models is a boot-protection system; the encryption comes free and cannot be disabled.2
A Potemkin Village of a startup screenOn Apple silicon Macs, FileVault offers operating-system-based FDE with a clever twist. With FileVault enabled, you no longer start up into macOS—it might seem that way, but that’s not what happens! Instead, the low-level boot process presents a screen that looks exactly like the login window—the macOS startup screen. When you enter your account password, the boot program validates it against a special data store, then unlocks your user data volume and boots the system seamlessly.3
Here’s how it works:
In Sequoia, you can turn FileVault on or off, but the key is unavailable after it’s displayed once.1. When setting up FileVault at System Settings > Privacy & Security > FileVault, you might be asked to deem which accounts are available when starting up, and be prompted to enter the password. For each account, that password is used to wrap the encryption key for the volume, and then the cryptographically protected version of the password is cached in the recovery partition. (You may still be asked this today; it has to do with a very tweaky secure token issue.) 2. The next time you restart, now with FileVault enabled, you can only log in with an account that was set up with FileVault—those are the only ones that will be listed—though that might be all of your accounts. Once you choose an account and enter its password, the next stage takes place. 3. The boot process’s FileVault component validates the password against its cache. It uses that to unlock the encryption key for the startup volume, passing that along with authentication for the macOS account to the primary macOS system.
This hidden and mildly complicated handoff just works—until it doesn’t. The data that the boot partition accesses can be erased or its data corrupted. Who knows why! Or, more improbably, you have forgotten the password for any account that would let you log in—perhaps you hadn’t used that Mac for a while and failed to make a note in a password manager of the account’s password. But then you would find yourself without a way to unlock your startup volume.4
Apple prepared for that by creating something called the FileVault Recovery Key. This special key can unlock the drive’s encryption key when all else fails. But how can you ensure you always have that Recovery Key?
When setting up FileVault, you used to be presented with two choices:5
- View the Recovery Key, write it down, and keep it safe. It’s never presented again.6 (But as long as you can log in, you can toggle FileVault and get a new key.)7
- Use your iCloud account to store the key in escrow. However, the key is not end-to-end encrypted, so there was always the slight potential that the key could be recovered by anyone who gains access to your Apple Account and unlocks that escrow.
Neither choice was great; I always opted for the first. Apple apparently now agrees, perhaps because we are in a time of heightened government and criminal exfiltration of private data, often without warrants or judicial oversight, even in democratic nations. The company hasn’t said this, but I can read the writing on the wall.
Now the key can be shown after it’s first created, which makes it easier to retrieve it without cycling FileVault off and on to regenerate the Recovery Key. And, instead of using basic Apple Account encryption, protected just by a password, the Recovery Key is now stored in your end-to-end encrypted iCloud Keychain and accessible via the Passwords app.
The loss of Apple Account-based iCloud escrow means that you have to pay more attention to where the Recovery Key is stored. If your password can’t unlock your Mac, you can’t just log into your Apple Account: you need access to another trusted device, if using iCloud Keychain; or you need to have written down or stored the Recovery Key in a password manager that you can reach.
Keep it secret, keep it safeIn Tahoe, click Show to display the Recovery Key at will.I was surprised in updating Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices for Tahoe (see below) to find FileVault’s interface had changed! It had been static for years. Once I scratched at the surface, I saw what Apple had done:
- Your previous choices are preserved. If you wrote the key down or used iCloud escrow, this remains in place.
- If you are setting up a new Mac, reinstalling macOS, or disabling and re-enabling FileVault, you must use the new method.
Tahoe lets you display your FileVault Recovery Key at any time after creation. I can show you this key because I’ve changed it since.In Tahoe, when the key is generated, it’s not shown and then discarded. Rather, it remains permanently available. Just click the Show button and use Touch ID or enter your account password, and it’s displayed again.
You can also find the Recovery Key in Passwords. With iCloud Keychain enabled, you can access it from other devices. At this writing, Passwords in macOS shows a complete entry with details including the Mac’s serial number (blurred for privacy in figure), while Passwords in iOS and iPadOS has a rudimentary entry that identifies it as a new Recovery Key password type but lacks identifying details—it contains only the Recovery Key.
If you have iCloud Keychain enabled, your Mac creates a fleshed-out entry for the Recovery Key that is synced securely among your devices.I don’t believe this new approach provides any less security. If someone approached your unlocked Mac or another of your devices, they would still require your fingerprint for Touch ID, face for Face ID, or knowledge of the password used to start up the computer or device in the first place. Sheer proximity doesn’t let them magically extract your FileVault Recovery Key.
I appreciate that you can now recover the key without turning FileVault off and on, as well as access it from other devices with the protection of end-to-end encryption. This makes the whole approach friendlier, if boot protection could be described that way.
But it also puts key retention more fully in your court. If you formerly used iCloud escrow storage and turn FileVault off and back on, or are required to after a reinstallation, take special care that the Recovery Key is either in iCloud Keychain, in another pasword manager, or even written down securely and in a safe or other secure area. In any case, ensure you can access the key if your Mac won’t let you start up into your account.
For further readingMy book Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices explains FileVault in great depth, along with a lot of other highly useful information for keeping your iPhones, iPads, and Macs secure when in your possession or not, as well as protecting your passcode and passwords. A new edition came out just days ago with updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26!
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Update: I discovered through a post by software developer Jeff Johnson after this column was published that Apple had added iCloud Keychain syncing! This isn’t noted in documentation, nor did I (nor colleagues I consulted) see the startup screenshot Jeff did. This column now incorporates that information. Thanks, Jeff!
- Of course, when you make backups, those are created from the unencrypted files, so your backups have to be protected separately. This can include setting an encryption key, something you can easily do with Time Machine—but then store that encryption key somewhere secure. ↩
- Look, I am sure there is some horrible deep-dive way to turn off decryption, but let’s pretend there isn’t, as there’s no reason for a regular user to ever do that. ↩
- When Apple split the system files and data files from a startup volume into two separate partitions several versions ago, it made the system files immutable and cryptographically protected. It no longer needed to protect those files further with FileVault. So only your data volume needs to be—and is—encrypted, including any account-related information. ↩
- If you have FileVault disabled, when your Mac starts up, it unlocks the startup volume without any additional account protection. (It’s still encrypted, but only via a key based on your Mac’s hardware identifier—helpful if your SSD chip is separated from your Mac, but only then.) The login window you see then is just the normal macOS session starter. ↩
- As of this writing, Apple’s updated Tahoe support page for FileVault contains out-of-date information that doesn’t match the Tahoe release version. ↩
- Many forms of encryption that rely on a key have a system generate the key but then store a cryptographically transformed—or “hashed”—version of it, so that the original key isn’t retained with the encrypted data. To unlock the encryption, the original key must be presented, which is then transformed and matches the stored hash. Apple used to throw away the Recovery Key for that reason. ↩
- You can check whether the Recovery Key you have stored for your Mac is valid by entering
sudo fdesetup validaterecoveryat the command line, pressing Return, entering your account password, and pasting in the key. If it’s accurately stored, you seetrue; otherwise,false. ↩
Apple’s new operating systems have arrived and we’ve got thoughts about iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and more. We also catch up on what we’ve learned since last week’s Apple Event.
Go to the podcast page.
After a pretty big overhaul a few years back with watchOS 10 and a more modest update in watchOS 11, I’d describe this year’s update—now numbered 26, after the upcoming year, like the rest of Apple’s platforms—as more focused.
Sure, there’s a new Liquid Glass design that aligns with the rest of the company’s platforms, but the vast majority of big new features focus on a single app—Workout—which gets not only its own UI overhaul, but also a big new Apple Intelligence feature, Workout Buddy.
watchOS 26 isn’t without its tweaks and enhancements, though how much they help you may depend more on which Apple Watch you’ve got, as well as the ins and outs of how you use your watch every day. And, of course, there are a few features debuting across Apple’s platforms this year that show up on the Apple Watch too.
Through the looking glassLike the rest of Apple’s platforms this year, watchOS 26 gets a new Liquid Glass look. You’ll see this most prominently on the Photos watchface, where the numerals of the digital clock are now refractive. It’s a look. I’m not sure I love it on the Apple Watch, but bear in mind that my daily watch, on which I installed the beta, is a Series 7 with a screen that lacks the nicer wide-angle OLED display of the Series 10 and later, so your mileage may vary.
Crouching numbers, hidden time.Given the size of the numerals on the screen, I sometimes found them harder to read when against a bright or varied background. My usual watchface is a rotating set of photos of my wife and kid, which can have a lot of fine detail—I made a separate Photos face with landscape pictures, which ended up faring better (and definitely had cooler layering effects for the numerals).1
You’ll also see the new look in other places throughout the OS, such as notifications, the Smart Stack, and Control Center. Apps like Music and Podcasts pick it up too, though it’s pretty subtle (not something you can always say about the design on other platforms). Even the numeric keypad you use to unlock your Apple Watch has gotten a sheen of glass.
Besides in the Photos face, you’ll see Liquid Glass most prominently in watchOS 26’s system UI elements.As with all of Liquid Glass, one of the challenges is that it can seem somewhat distracting: for a stated goal of getting the UI “out of your way,” it all too often seems to yell “Look! Look how cool I am!” And on the watch, where the UI is rarely overlaying actual content, I have questions about how much that stated goal really applies.
For all of that, Liquid Glass is generally less prominent on the Apple Watch, given the more limited screen size and content. The transparency also seems to have been toned down throughout the beta process, which has ended up with a more modest set of options here. And if you don’t like it for the clock on the Photos watchface, good news: you can easily switch the tint to any color you like.
Workout, buddy?Sometimes it feels a bit like Apple has one of those machines they pick lottery balls from, and every year it picks a ball to decide which app is going to be lavished with attention. This year it’s Workout’s turn. Not only does it get a big new Apple Intelligence-powered feature, Workout Buddy, but it gets an extensive redesign that reminds me of the overhauls seen by Fitness and Weather back in watchOS 10.
The interface for Workout has been redesigned to a more watchOS 10-style.The stacked “cards” of workouts have been replaced by a full-screen model, though you can still cycle through the available options by using the Digital Crown or by swiping up and down. Rather than burying functions behind one of those three-dotted More buttons, as it previously did, Apple’s now divided them up into several different icons at the corners of the interface: in the top left you’ll find options to customize your workout view; in the top right, options for your workout such as goals or routes; in the bottom left, media options; and in the bottom right, notification settings, including Workout Buddy. And of course, there’s a big button right in the middle to start your workout.
While I may not be a die-hard exercise fanatic, I have long used the outdoor walk and outdoor cycling workouts, and lately I’ve been trying to run more regularly with the Nike Run Club app, so let’s say I dabble. I like some of the new features, in particular the ability to have a workout start playing a certain playlist—and keep in mind, that this is specific to a type of workout. You can have it start playing your running playlist for outdoor runs, or your podcast queue—or nothing—for outdoor walks. It can choose music it thinks is appropriate for the workout you’re doing or you can specify the audio you want. And, in the latter case, you’re not limited to Music—media from the Apple Podcasts app is also available, as is audio from third-party apps that support the requisite API.
I do think the different types of workouts require a few more taps than they used to, but I appreciate that you can create and store different workouts and then launch any of those at a tap, whether distance-, time-, or calorie-based, as well as more complicated workouts like intervals, pacers, or race routes.
Workout Buddy lets you choose from three voices…none of which are real people.And then there’s Workout Buddy. This feature compiles and analyzes fitness data from your previous workouts, compares them to your current workout, and then gives you feedback using one of three synthesized voices.2
Look, I may be a bit biased: as I said above, I’ve been using the Nike Run Club to get back into running recently, and it offers Guided Runs recorded by a real live human coach.3 I’m going to say, flat out, that a synthetic voice that keeps you updated on your progress is no substitute at all for a real person. While a human coach can offer thoughts and even emotional support, Workout Buddy is far more focused on metrics. It peppers those with occasional bits of encouragement, it’s true, but overall it’s closer to a spoken notification—there’s no soul there. Sorry, robots. You’re not quite ready to dream of electric sheep yet.
That said, I don’t want to discount that some people may find value in it. Perhaps it will help you avoid looking at your watch to see how far you’ve gone. Perhaps those little bits of encouragement are all you need. And, as always, Apple’s feature could be an on-ramp for people who might otherwise never try something like this, and could prompt them to check out other options.
But there are some limitations to the feature that might also impact people: for one, it requires an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone to be near your Apple Watch during use, so you’ll need at least an iPhone 15 Pro or later in order to use it. It also means you’ll have to carry your iPhone with you on your workout, which might be a non-starter for some folks. (Personally, I prefer to run with just my Apple Watch and AirPods Pro.)
Stacked rosterStarting in watchOS 10, the Smart Stack redesigned one of the main aspects of the Apple Watch experience. No longer were you limited to either small complications on the watchface or a full-blown watch app.4 Instead, you could scroll down to view a variety of widgets that apps could offer, including Live Activities that showed up when appropriate.
The Smart Stack hint for the Camera Remote is subtle, but then you have to tap again to actually use it.In general, I’m a fan of the Smart Stack widgets. For me, they strike a nice balance of providing more detailed information than a complication without having to launch a whole app. watchOS 26 adds a few small improvements to the Smart Stack to try and make it more useful.
First, there are Smart Stack hints. These take the form of a little icon that pops up when watchOS detects you doing something where you might want to open an app. For example, if you open the Camera app on your iPhone, you’ll see a little icon prompting you to open Camera Remote on your Watch—no sound, no haptic, just an unobtrusive icon.
But here’s the first headscratcher. Tapping that icon does not open the Camera Remote. Instead, it scrolls you down into the Smart Stack to a full widget that you can tap to open the Camera Remote. I suppose that this is in line with it being a gentle hint, but it feels as if I’m being prompted to do a thing; it shouldn’t take two taps to do it.
The next frustration is that, in my time so far with the watchOS 26, the Camera Remote is the one Smart Stack hint that I’ve gotten to appear reliably. (I did encounter the Backtrack hint while I was traveling with a bad cell network, but not at a time and place where it was particularly useful.) Apple says that the system uses “improved prediction algorithms that fuse on-device data and trends from your daily routine” to surface suggestions, but so far, I guess I don’t do anything regularly for the system to provide hints.
Glory be, you can finally configure the three-up widget style that Weather and other apps use with just the data you want.The other tweak to the Smart Stack is equally small, but more welcome: some widgets with multiple types of data on them are now more configurable. The prime example here is the Weather widget, which defaults to three gauges showing temperature, wind speed, and air quality. Personally, I rarely care about windspeed, but I do care about the UV index; now I can just swap that in, rather than having to add an entirely separate Weather widget for it. The Home widget similarly lets you choose a specific accessory or scene.
I’m not sure how many other widgets take advantage of this particular format and thus will offer these configurations, but even just offering it in the Weather widget is a tangible improvement for me.
Written on your watchfaceTwo new watch faces each offer some different looks: Flow ranges from almost illegible (left) to kind of fun (right), whereas Exactograph goes from busy (left) to…uh….what (right)?As with most years, Apple’s rolled out a few new watch faces with watchOS 26. While they were shown off in conjunction with the newly announced Series 11, they’re available on earlier watches as well.
Flow offers a colored blob that floats around behind Liquid Glass numerals. This is…not my favorite, not least of all because I find the default typeface (styled “I”) nigh indecipherable at times; the other option (cleverly named “II”) is better. It’s a bit like a lava lamp. It offers configurable colors, and the option to have the colors in the background or in the numbers themselves, but no complications.
Exactograph is the other end of the spectrum: a busy multi-dial face that turns seconds, minutes, and hours into three concentric circles of tickmarks. It’s a bit intense, and then it gets more weird if you tap on it, at which point it explodes either the second hand or the second and minute hand wayyy out, as though the smaller circles are gears traversing their circumference. It’s an odd one, but certainly eye-catching. You can choose from the exploded or non-exploded views in a variety of color palettes, plus there’s room for four complications around the edge.
There are two additional watchfaces available to specific models: the Ultras get a Waypoint face that shows nearby points of interest, and the Hermès watches get the Hermès Faubourg Party, with whimsical animated characters. Having neither of these models, I can’t speak to them personally.
It’s at this point become rote to be disappointed in Apple not opening up watchfaces to third parties. The company has at least updated some older watchfaces to support the ticking second hand in always-on mode enabled by the latest displays, which is something, but hope for the ability to make our own watchfaces continues to be a pipe dream for now.
Four score and seven sleeps agoDid I get an A+ on sleeping?One feature coming to iOS 26 was announced as part of the new Apple Watch Series 11/Ultra 3/Apple Watch SE debuts, but it actually works on watches going back to the Series 6: Sleep Scores. Taking a further step in the realm of sleep tracking, this feature lets you know about the quality of your sleep on a 0-100 scale.
While I do have some questions about the utility of a 100-point score (“Hey Jim, how are you?” “Not great, Bob. I only slept a 57 last night. You?” “I got a 62, Jim. Eat it!”), the broader rankings—Very Low, Low, OK, High, and Excellent—do at least provide a good snapshot. I also appreciate that it breaks out what contributes to the score, including duration, your relative bedtime, and the quantity and length of interruptions ot your sleep.
Moreover, the score is based on information that’s already been collected if you wear your watch for sleep tracking, which means that you can see a retroactive history of your sleep score; I was able to see some of mine going back to my last bout of sleep-tracking in February 2024.
The information is available both as part of the Sleep app on the Watch and on the Health app on your iPhone or iPad.
Bits and bobsIn addition to a few of the features available across several Apple platforms this year—Call Screening and Hold Assist in the Apple Watch, Live Translation and backgrounds in Messages—there are a handful of other features that come to the Apple Watch.
Note to self: story checks out.After a decade of absence, Notes finally comes to the Apple Watch. You can view existing notes, add a new note with Siri or via the keyboard, and trash or pin notes. But while you can interact with certain elements—most significantly checking off checklist items—you can’t edit the content of your notes. That’s probably fine since pecking out changes in the onscreen keyboard would be a pain.
There’s a new gesture, Wrist Flick, which lets you quickly dismiss a notification or mute calls. It’s a handy feature for those times you can’t tap the watch—like when invariably I get texts while washing dishes—but it’s only available on the Series 9 and later (not including the SE) and the Ultra 2.
For those absolute monsters who don’t mute their Apple Watch, a new automatic volume adjustment feature promises to detect the noise level of your environment and tweak your watch’s volume so that you don’t get a loud DING when you’re someplace quiet. Or you could just leave your watch on silent like a good person.
Apple added another health feature alongside its recent watch announcements: Hypertension alerts. Not unlike the way Apple does sleep apnea detection, this feature will work over time, tracking your blood vessels’ response to your heartbeat and using an algorithm that Apple has developed based on its health studies. If it detects evidence correlated with hypertension, it can let the wearer know and suggest they take their blood pressure and consult a medical professional. The feature, which is pending FDA clearance, works on the Series 9/Ultra 2 and later. It’ll also require 30 days’ worth of data, so no chance of testing this out quite yet.
Even Apple has realized that the watchface situation has gotten overwhelming, so it’s reorganized the Face Gallery (which you see when you add a new watchface) into categories, including new, health and fitness, photos, clean, data-rich, and more.
For users of Live Listen, you can now view a live transcript of what’s being heard right on your Apple Watch, including the ability to jump back ten seconds if you missed something. It’s an impressive piece of technology, hopefully helpful to those who need it.
If a watch ain’t brokeWhile this year’s Apple Watch update might be on the smaller side, there are definitely things to like about it. Liquid Glass feels more tasteful here than on some of Apple’s other platforms, and it’s simply not as prominent.
Unfortunately, this year’s biggest feature, Workout Buddy, is something that may put off more users than it entices, but as always, it will be interesting to see how the general populace reacts to it.
But the smaller features sprinkled through the platform might end up being the most meaningful. Between Smart Stack improvements, the appearance of Notes, and the new Sleep Score feature, there are a lot of targeted improvements that users will appreciate.
Not every year needs to be a blockbuster revision of everything that comes before. Sometimes quality of life improvements are worth it just for that: improving your life’s quality. And for a device that often goes everywhere with people, which they wear right on their body, improving the quality of life can have a meaningful impact.
- Interestingly, the closest precursor to the Liquid Glass design is the “soap bubble” like numerals of the handwashing timer that Apple added back during the height of the pandemic. I wonder if that’s where the idea started… ↩
- If you’re old, like me, you might remember way back when Apple and Nike teamed up to offer a running accessory that included a sensor to go in your shoe and a dongle for your iPod, and occasionally offered pre-recorded nuggets of encouragement from famous athletes. I’d argue even that was better than this, but your mileage may vary. Literally. ↩
- The very upbeat Chris Bennett, who’s been described as “a real life Ted Lasso”. ↩
- The less said about the original watchOS’s “Glances” feature the better probably. ↩
iPadOS 26 is one of the biggest updates in iPad history. There’s a new design that changes the look and feel of the whole interface, yes, but also the introduction of a whole raft of productivity features that lift the iPad closer to the Mac—for those who want to use it that way.
It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode. But via a single tap, it can also transform into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads.
The iPad no longer feels like it’s trying to live up to the promise of being the Future of Computing; with iPadOS 26, it’s more comfortable being itself.
An invasion of glassApple is introducing a new design language across all its operating systems for the ’26 “model year,” and that means iPadOS has picked up a whole new look around the idea of “liquid glass.” Basically, Apple has updated a lot of its controls to match the metaphor of sliding glass overlays that distort the content behind them to provide an effect of depth and the illusion of an actual material. I think it’s probably best on the iPhone, but the metaphor works pretty well on the iPad, too.
At its best, when elements are animating and flowing into and out of different groups with liquid animations, it can be beautiful. In other contexts, the controls can be hard to read because they’re too transparent—though Apple is doing a lot of work to enforce legibility by dimming backgrounds or making controls more opaque as needed. I expect it will evolve over time to smooth things out, but I have found it entirely usable and sometimes even enjoyable.
I have to admit, coloring icons to match your wallpaper can look nice.There’s also a new icon format that spreads across Apple’s operating systems this fall. Going beyond previous attempts at allowing user customization, this approach uses vector graphics in specific layers to create glassy effects (of course), generally attractive dark and light mode icons, a tinted icon style that’s much nicer than the previous attempt, and a new desaturated “glass” icon view.
I think I prefer my icons old-fashioned, but I could see scenarios (wallpapers with very bold, bright colors) where the new approach to icon tinting would tempt even me to switch.
One big side effect of the new OS design is that the developers of your favorite apps are going to spend a lot of their time updating their apps to adopt the new design. And because it’s new, that means there are bugs and quirks and areas where Apple hasn’t properly anticipated the needs of those developers. As a result, third-party apps may look and feel a little weird for a while. There’s also the knock-on effect of developers spending time adopting the new design instead of building new features, so expect your favorite apps to maybe not get as many flashy new features for a little while.
Apple’s goal with this design is to make it look cool to the casual user, and I think it does look pretty cool. Also, in practice, I don’t think it’s particularly affected the usability of iPadOS—things look different, but they pretty much work the same, and that’s comforting.
There’s been a lot of discourse over the summer about this design, and we all owe app developers large amounts of empathy and understanding as they try to figure all of this out. But for the average user, the new design is navigable. You might like it or not, but it’s not going to stop you from using your iPad.
Embracing windows (and the menu bar)iPadOS 26 will be remembered as the update where Apple declared bankruptcy on all its previous attempts to do windowing and multitasking on the iPad, and released an entirely new windowing system that has been unabashedly inspired by the Mac.
In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.
With window power comes window management, like the familiar “stoplight” buttons. You have to tap/click to enlarge them before using them, though.Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was even using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.
There’s a limit to the total number of active windows you can have open at once, but I certainly never felt constrained in my use on a 13-inch iPad Pro, or even on that 27-inch Studio Display. If you’re an inveterate window-keeper-opener, you might feel differently, but it all seemed perfectly normal to me. Apps that have been built for prior forms of iPad windowing work well with the new system.
There are plenty of ways that iPadOS stands ready to assist you with window management, too. Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac. You can click and hold on the green stoplight button (yep, those familiar Mac elements are now part of iPadOS) in any window to be offered a set of tiling options, just as on the Mac. And a full suite of keyboard shortcuts will move windows around, too, from Globe-F to toggle full screen to more esoteric ones like Globe-Control-Right Arrow to tile your window on the right half of the screen.
If you’re not using a keyboard, you can also flick windows with your finger to manage them. Flicking to the top makes them go full screen, and flicking to the sides will tile them on half the screen. Windows remember their previous position and size, so if you drag a window back out from a tiled position, it goes back to its previous state. Double-tapping on the top of the window will also toggle between full screen and a floating window.
Exposé helps with managing windows.And there’s more. Swipe up a little from the bottom (either on your trackpad or with your finger) and Exposé kicks in, showing all your current open windows so you can pick the right one to bring forward. Swipe a little further up and you get access to your home screen, including widgets. (You can also click on the wallpaper to do this.) The windows all slide to the sides of your screen, so you can bring them back with one tap, or swipe up again to hide them entirely. You can also tap on an app in the Dock to bring up all its open windows.
It’s really a flexible set of controls that works well whether you’re using a keyboard and trackpad or your fingers. Not only does this all work well, but it will be instantly familiar to Mac users. After a decade of Apple resisting the Mac as a model for iPad multitasking, it’s finally given in to the obvious: the Mac is great at this, and if Apple can’t come up with something better for the iPad, then it should implement the very best windowing interface in the world. The iPad isn’t becoming the Mac, but it’s built a windowing system that works really well, and that’s thanks to the Mac.
And if you don’t want to use windowing on your iPad? Well, the feature is turned on and off with a single button in Control Center. Just as I use my iPad with the Magic Keyboard only a small portion of the time, I use my iPad in multi-window mode a very similar portion of the time. The rest of the time, it’s in single-window mode and works just fine.
I’ve heard from some fans of Split View and Slide Over, two original iPad multitasking features that have been killed in iPadOS 26. While I understand their frustration, it’s quite easy to tile two windows in iPadOS 26, at which point you’ve basically got Split View.
The loss of Slide Over, however, strikes me as an oversight on Apple’s part. It turns out that a lot of people use Slide Over as a simple way to keep an app hanging around for quick access, a very simple form of multitasking, and multi-window mode is overkill for this use case. I understand why Apple killed Slide Over: it was very easy for novice users to accidentally enable the mode and pretty non-trivial to deactivate it. (Perhaps Apple should consider a new approach that lets users dock an app off the side of the screen, as you can with a picture-in-picture window.)
In iPadOS 26, Apple has also changed the pointer it introduced in 2020. The old primary pointer was circular, and implied a level of precision similar to that of a fingertip. The new pointer is shaped like an arrowhead, similar to the one found on the Mac. The implication here is that iPad apps can receive more precise input when driven by a pointing device, and I don’t mind it. Just as before, the iPad pointer is free to morph into other shapes depending on context—for example, it’s still the existing I-beam cursor when editing text.
Accessing Music options from the menu bar.Speaking of the Mac’s influence on the iPad, it extends beyond windowing to… the menu bar. That’s right, after teasing us with the possibility for four years, Apple has finally decided that apps in multi-window mode can offer a menu bar. It only appears when you’re in multi-window mode, and then only when you activate it by moving the pointer to the top of the screen, swiping down with a finger, or typing Command-shift-slash to search an app’s menus. And it’s centered, which is… not quite Mac-like, but close enough.
Currently, the contents of that menu bar are mostly the things that were previously on offer when you held down the Command key to see what keyboard shortcuts were available, but app developers now have access to an API that lets them offer more complex sets of menu items.
I love this idea. For years, I’ve been using iPad apps that are sometimes almost as dense and full-featured as their Mac equivalents, and frequently find myself baffled about just where a certain feature might be hidden behind an icon, inside a tab, or down at the bottom of a scrollable pane. Organizing functions in menus is another classic Mac feature that really does make sense for complicated software—and even for relatively simple stuff! It just takes a little bit of a mental shift. But within an hour of installing the first iPadOS 26 beta, I found myself invoking a feature of an iPad app from the menu bar.
In fact, I think Apple should go one step further and let users opt to keep the menu bar visible all the time. The status bar items on the top left and right of the screen are basically the same height, so why not? Perhaps in the future, Apple could also give users more control of what appears in the status bar, following its own lead in allowing Control Center items on macOS to be arbitrarily added or removed from the menu bar itself.
Computers doing computer stuffCapturing local audio, at long last.If there’s been a recurring theme in my attempts to use the iPad as a productivity device, it’s been that things that take no thought or time on the Mac often take a great deal of thought, time, and possibly the addition of expensive accessories to accomplish on an iPad, if they can be accomplished at all. There are a bunch of small features in iPadOS 26 that add up to the lowering of numerous barriers that once caused iPad users to stumble when the Mac allowed them to run.
For years, those of us who do audio or video work have lamented that iPads (and iPhones) are unsuitable for a lot of podcasting/video work because they aren’t able to record audio or video locally while also participating in a call over an app like Zoom. In iPadOS 26, Apple has solved the issue by adding support for local background recording.
It’s a relatively simple interface: Choose your input microphone, turn on local recording in Control Center, and your call will be saved when you’re done. It won’t work when you’re not actively using a microphone (and optionally, a camera), so the feature can’t be used for snooping. In all of my testing, it’s worked quite well, though I wish it offered a systemwide gain adjustment. (I found that one popular microphone, the Audio-Technica ATR-2000, was ridiculously overmodulated on iPadOS 26, even though it works fine on the Mac—and there was no way to fix it.) But beyond that, it just works—and means that podcasters can just bring an iPad or iPhone and a USB microphone and get their jobs done.
You can now choose what appears in columns in Files.Ever since the introduction of the Files app, Apple has been slowly tiptoeing toward the idea that some iPad (and iPhone) users might need to manage files in a filesystem the same way that Mac users do. The Files app in iPadOS 26 has been upgraded to feel more, shall we say, Finderesque. As someone who lives in List views, it’s a relief to see that Apple has let the columns in this view be customizable, so I can sort my list by creation or last-modified date, while seeing the type and size of the files, just the way I like it. Files also displays folders with a disclosure triangle, which you can click or tap on to expand and see the contents inside that folder. Again, not a revolutionary idea—but it wasn’t there, and now it is, and that’s progress.
Another huge feature that Mac users take for granted, but wasn’t really a part of iPadOS before, is the ability to open files in specific apps and to set default apps for file types. To assign all your files to a specific app, just select one, choose Get Info, and choose a default from that panel. This, combined with the arrival of the Preview app on the iPad, has really changed how I work. It’s so much easier to double-click on a PDF and then do the same with a Markdown file and get to work, making the “classic” oblique app-centric iPad approach — launch each app, navigate through a bespoke file picker, repeat — feel archaic.
There’s also a major improvement when it comes to long file copies, especially ones happening across a network: they generate a progress window that can be made into a Live Activity, allowing you to leave Files while you keep tabs on the progress of the operation.
This is part of a larger upgrade to iPadOS that allows apps that perform lengthy, finite tasks to do so in the background. Previously, apps with lengthy exports—Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Ferrite Recording Studio are good examples—had to be kept in front until they were done with their jobs. That sort of single-mindedness would never fly on the Mac, where you can always switch to another app while you’re doing an export (or file copy). That ends in iPadOS 26, and the first time I exported a podcast edit from a version of Ferrite that supported this feature was almost magical. What do you mean, I can do more work while the export is happening? It’s so delightful for something so commonplace and frictionless on the Mac to reach that same level of frictionlessness on the iPad.
Shortcuts get smarterThe Use Model action amps up what Shortcuts can do, but there’s still no error handling.With iPadOS, Shortcuts takes a huge leap forward with the introduction of the new Use Model action, which lets you tie in workflows to Apple’s on-device and Private Cloud Compute AI models, as well as ChatGPT itself. Over the summer, the Six Colors staff built several automations using this feature, and while the results can be somewhat random and take some effort to process, they can also enable the creation of workflows that were previously impossible using Apple’s existing tools. Shortcuts also now includes pre-baked Apple Intelligence features, like Writing Tools summaries.
These models will transform some automations. Let me give you an example: When I write on my iPad, I still need to upload images to my server to be displayed along with the article. I built a workflow in Shortcuts to do the job, but given the inscrutable hidden filenames of items in the Photos library, I had to build in a step where I see a preview of my image and give it a filename.
I rebuilt this workflow in iPadOS 26 using Use Model to pass the image to Private Cloud Compute and ask it for two responses: a text description of the contents of the image and an appropriate filename. While I had to add some validation to avoid weird responses, the results were instantaneous: I no longer need to name the files, because Private Cloud Compute does the job perfectly well. Uploading images from my iPad just became much easier, and that’s just my first step.
Of course, relying on cloud-based services can come with some drawbacks. Late in the iPadOS 26 beta cycle, Private Cloud Compute just stopped working with my Shortcut. I was able to resolve the issue by switching to ChatGPT. Later, I was able to switch back, and it worked. Why did it stop working for a few days? Who knows.
This points out a larger issue with Shortcuts in general. If Private Cloud Compute returns an error, there’s nothing I can do about it—Shortcuts doesn’t offer error handling, so I can’t design my shortcuts to switch to ChatGPT if Private Cloud Compute fails. As clever as Shortcuts can be, the app itself should be a lot better and its syntax more capable. In that way, the addition of the Use Model command has just made me more aware of all the ways that Shortcuts feels like it’s frozen in amber.
New apps and updatesThere are a few notable app additions in iPadOS 26. Most notable is probably Preview, a longtime Mac favorite that’s finally making the move to the iPad. I’ve written a lot of this review in multi-window mode with both a text editor and Preview open, and it’s just a pleasure to use compared to using the previous stock choice, Quick Look mode inside the Files app. It feels really good to see a PDF in Files and tap to open it in Preview.
Preview’s a great utility for viewing PDFs and other files, and on the iPad, it gets access to mark-up features that are especially useful to users of the Apple Pencil. I’m sure dedicated PDF marker-uppers have their own preferred apps to do the job, but as a person who very occasionally has to mark up a PDF, the ability to just jump in with the Pencil and start to mark up the document is really nice.
The Journal app, which was introduced by Apple in 2023 but only on the iPhone, has come to the iPad and the Mac this year. I never really used the Journal app on the iPhone, because for me the iPhone is the device I use when I’m out and about—and too busy for something like journal entries. The iPad, on the other hand, fits perfectly in my life for those more laid-back, contemplative moments. I’m glad the app has made the move… but seriously, what took it so long? It took two OS cycles to put an iPhone app on Apple’s other platforms?
This version brings the addition of a Phone app to the iPad for the first time, which is good, since you’ve been able to make or take phone calls (via your iPhone) for a while now, but the interface was deeply weird. The Phone app interface in iPadOS 26 takes some getting used to, but it’s good to have all that stuff in one place, and it’s a good reminder that all of Apple’s devices are pretty good at using your iPhone to make or answer phone calls if you need to.
Big swings for the platformThe new design is one of the least interesting things about iPadOS 26. This is an update that dramatically improves the iPad as a tool to get things done—if you want to do those things. Apple’s new windowing system is great, embracing all the things that make the Mac work without forcing it on people who don’t want it. The improvements to Files, support for local recording, and the new background tasks Live Activity help create an iPad that just feels more ready for professional productivity tasks.
Not everyone wants to use the iPad in a professional productivity context, and that’s fine. But if Apple’s going to keep selling the iPad Pro at prices higher than a MacBook Air and approaching that of a MacBook Pro, with the hardware of those computers inside, it needs its software story to match up. I know it seems hard to believe, but iPadOS 26 may end that narrative once and for all.
macOS 26 Tahoe is two things at once: It’s the broadest and most productivity-focused update for macOS in years, while also taking collateral damage from Apple’s broader design ambitions on its other platforms.
It features the biggest update to Spotlight ever, including direct access to app actions and Apple’s first-ever built-in clipboard manager. Shortcuts adds deep automation support and direct access to AI models, changing the game for many aspects of Mac automation productivity. These are features that will delight Mac users and help them work better.
Unfortunately, they’ll be productive while using a tweaked design that’s not nearly as prominent as it is on the iPhone and iPad, but still has to be labeled as a net loss for the Mac.
My eyes glaze overI’ll cut to the chase: If you’re worried about upgrading to macOS 26 Tahoe because of Apple’s “liquid glass” design, don’t be—it’s mostly a minor reskinning that doesn’t really change how the Mac works, and after a few weeks, you mostly won’t notice it.
The Mac’s look has been updated to fit in with Apple’s new design, but it clearly wasn’t a major priority. Depending on how you feel about “liquid glass,” this could be a good thing—perhaps more focus on the Mac would’ve led to a messier and more disruptive design. It feels a bit like Apple has done just enough to claim that the Mac is a part of the liquid glass revolution, while not actually putting in all the work required on other platforms.
Yes, everywhere you look, there are toolbars with buttons that feature the rounded look of liquid glass. But on the Mac, they’re just lifeless, which is a shame, since toolbars are everywhere in macOS. The buttons on iOS and iPadOS animate when you touch them, quivering like a bowl of Jell-O. They’re translucent, so content slides under them, adding to the glassy effect.
Most Liquid Glass toolbars don’t feel glassy at all.In the Finder, for example, there’s basically none of that. In most places, the toolbars just look like flat light gray ovals separated from a featureless white or gray expanse by a generic drop shadow. Occasionally, when scrolling content underneath the toolbars, they do spring to life and seem to give off the effect Apple wants, but most Mac apps just don’t work that way, since the important content is in the window, not sliding through the toolbar.
Some of the aspects of the liquid glass design are pretty clever: In their ideal form, icons can be grouped in little bubbles that float above the interface, and can even animate as modes change. It’s not a bad idea, because having icons inside bubbles provides them with some depth that a purely flat design can’t offer. I don’t miss having a toolbar full of indifferent glyphs that might do something when I click on them, which has been the state of affairs on macOS for quite some time. In Safari, for example, I think the different collections of toolbar buttons look pretty good. (There’s still no animation to speak of, but maybe that’s all for the best?)
Some apps, like Photos, pick up liquid glass flourishes.Where you most see the new design is, unsurprisingly, in cross-platform Apple apps like Music, Photos, Journal, Phone, and Messages. In Photos, for example, the top toolbar floats without any backing frame, meaning that the buttons all distort the underlying content as it slides by, giving a stronger feeling of them being made of glass. But of course, this approach also means that similarly-colored content sliding under a button can make it illegible. The system tries to maintain legibility by changing the color of the text or the opacity and brightness of the background item to compensate. It mostly succeeds, though changes in the appearance of the buttons can be distracting.
It’s clear that this design was created with specific kinds of apps in mind: iPhone apps full of scrolling content libraries that create the magical sensation that your content is sliding under Apple’s glass controls as you slide your finger on your phone. Unfortunately, the Mac is not the iPhone, and most Mac apps are not media library browsers. They’re often interfaces used to manipulate content and data, and those purposes are ill served by Apple’s design.
I also must point out the hypocrisy of Apple claiming that it’s humbly building a stage that’s a perfect setting for our content. That’s absolutely not what’s happening here: Apple repurposes our content as a decoration for its interfaces, using blurred and distorted versions of our images and words to show off fancy glass interface elements. Sometimes, it works: the feel of a canvas sliding under a bunch of glassy interface elements makes the whole thing feel like a harmonious whole. Other times, it feels like the interface and the content have both been obscured into unusability—and that’s bad.
In day-to-day use, the design issues don’t really affect how I use my Mac. I have found macOS Tahoe to be perfectly usable, and there are moments of beauty separated by long stretches of banality. I’m not sure whether I should be relieved that more of this design was not imported from other platforms, or disappointed that Apple has failed to properly include the Mac in its concept of what next-generation interfaces should look like. Maybe a bit of both.
The icon apocalypse ends in a squircleIn all the major 26-era operating systems, Apple is introducing a new icon design system that’s vector-based and allows icons to be recolored in various modes: default, dark, clear, and tinted. Moving to vectors is great for developers who previously had to render a zillion versions of their icons; the benefit to users is that those icons become more customizable based on your interface preferences. On iPhones and iPads, the “clear” icons really do look a bit like they’re made of glass, though I find their desaturation a little disconcerting. On the Mac, though, they really do just feel flat and colorless.
Unfortunately, Apple has decided to use this moment to unilaterally declare that all icons on the Mac should fit inside the standard square with rounded corners that defines every iPhone and iPad icon and has been adopted by numerous Mac developers as well. Icons of apps that don’t fit within Apple’s designated and approved rounded rectangle are forcibly shrunk down and placed inside a gray roundrect. Since many modern Mac icons attempt to put their own spin on Apple’s format by allowing small portions of their icon to peek out of Apple’s mandated borders, a lot of icons end up looking like boxes sitting atop boxes. It’s ugly and pointless. Developers shouldn’t be punished for adding a tiny bit of personality by painting outside the lines.
In Tahoe, Apple has decided to make folders fun by repurposing one of the Finder’s least-used features, tags. Tags are an organizational system that lets you apply little colored highlights or dots to individual files or folders in the Finder and then search for them. In macOS Tahoe, if you apply a tag to a folder, it doesn’t just get the little colored dot—the folder itself turns that color. You can also now assign a symbol or emoji to a folder, and it’ll appear on the folder icon. Fun!
People have been customizing their Macs for four decades, and for a while during the classic Mac OS era, you could use Labels to color folders, so it’s nice to see a return of this sort of feature. Unfortunately, it’s been shipped unfinished: You can tag files, too, but they don’t pick up color in any way. If you drag a folder into the Dock, it appears as a completely generic folder icon—no color, no symbol or emoji. There’s also no support for color if you drag a folder into the Finder’s sidebar. I don’t understand how you build a feature like this and then just ignore what folders look like in the Dock. What a waste.
A new direction for the menu barEver since the very beginning, the menu bar has been a defining characteristic of the Mac interface. In macOS Tahoe, the menu bar has never been more flexible—or, strangely, more invisible.
Let’s start with the design: Apple has (once again) decided that the menu bar should be transparent. By default, the menu bar in Tahoe has no definition—it simply shows your wallpaper, with text and icons overlaid. It’s a place without being a place. There’s no there there. (This feels like a decision made by the same people who added the option for the menu bar to hide when you’re not using it, and created the iPad’s new optional drop-down menu bar.)
A menu bar with a transparent background would seem to be a readability nightmare, but I have to admit that after using it for a few weeks, I have never had any issues. macOS dynamically makes the text and icons white or black based on what’s behind, and I think it may also dim or brighten the background picture if it needs to provide a little more contrast. Whatever it’s doing, it’s been good enough for my use. My Mac feels a little more expansive and open without a solid bar at the top of the screen. (Fortunately, Apple has included a “Show menu bar background” setting if you’d prefer to define the geography of your Mac a bit more clearly.)
You can now add multiple Control Center drop-downs with customizable icons and support for third-party apps.In other big menu bar news, after adding Control Center to the Mac in Big Sur, Apple has completely revamped that system in Tahoe. These changes suggest we’re entering a new era in terms of how items on the right side of the menu bar will look and function.
With Tahoe, Apple is adding the ability for third-party apps to create items in Control Center the same way they can on iOS and iPadOS. It has also put a Mac spin on the multi-page Control Center design of iOS and iPadOS: you can add custom pages of controls to the menu bar, each with its own icon. To do this, click Control Center and click Edit Controls. A plus symbol appears in the menu bar, and if you click on it, it’ll prompt you to choose an icon and then add controls. All controls can also be placed directly in the menu bar.
Put this all together, and it sure feels like Apple is building a new vision of how the menu bar works, with old-school Menu Extras joined by individual controls as well as user-created submenus full of controls. I don’t expect that Apple will deprecate the old-school Menu Extras approach to apps putting items in the menu bar any time soon, but it feels like the company is making its preference clear: that third-party apps should create Controls that can be run either in the menu bar or Control Center.
It makes a lot of sense, especially given how crowded the menu bar can get, especially on laptops with notched displays. There are a bunch of utilities such as Bartender that have long provided users with control over the menu bar, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most traditional menu bar items disappear in the next few years, replaced by Controls.
Volume and brightness status changes now appear out of the Control Center.As a part of the revamping of Control Center, Apple is also changing the style of some of its heads-up visual alerts—for volume and brightness changes—which previously appeared dead center on the screen. Now, when you adjust your Mac’s volume or brightness, you’ll briefly see a Control appear just below the menu bar in the right corner, along with the particular menu bar icon that contains that control being highlighted. It’s a little disconcerting, as someone who has used OS X for 25 years, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.
Speaking of menu bar innovations, Apple has also extended its suite of Continuity features that allow events on your iPhone to appear on your Mac, with Live Activities. When a Live Activity spawns on an iPhone that’s nearby and linked to your Mac, the bit of it that would appear on the Dynamic Island also appears in your menu bar. And if you click, you’ll see the larger Live Activity widget that appears on the Lock Screen, or if you tap and hold on the Dynamic Island.
An iPhone live activity in my menu bar.In Tahoe, I was able to see the San Francisco Giants score in my menu bar courtesy of the Apple Sports app. And when the score changed—a moment when a Live Activity will vibrate your phone or Apple Watch—the larger widget briefly expanded, indicating to me that something big had just happened. I really like this feature a lot, but I admit that it made me wonder what a Mac-specific Live Activity feature would look like. I know a lot of its functionality can be replicated by other means, but having a simple menu bar entry that could auto-expand when something important happened, using the same style as Live Activities, might be a nice thing for Apple to provide to Mac apps in the future.
All told, if you were worried that Apple making the menu bar transparent in Tahoe was a sign that it wants it to fade away, I have good news: Apple has actually been hard at work making the menu bar more interesting than it’s been in years.
Shortcuts gains automation powers and AI accessShortcuts can automate the running of shortcuts (this one moves files I download), and integrates with Apple Intelligence.Shortcuts on the Mac now supports automations, a feature previously available only on iOS and iPadOS. As on those other platforms, you can now set Mac workflows to run at a particular time of day, in reaction to an alarm, when receiving an email or message, when connecting to specific Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth devices, when connecting to a Display or activating Stage Manager, when opening or closing an app, at a certain battery threshold, when connected to power, and when activating or deactivating a Focus Mode.
Those all have their uses, but the Mac has some special automation types of its own: when a specific folder is modified, when a file is modified, or when an external drive (a specific one, or any!) connects or disconnects. This enables a bunch of new automation possibilities previously only supported on the Mac by an ancient feature called Folder Actions, which only a maniac would attempt to connect to Shortcuts. (Yes, you can also use a utility such as Hazel to automate many tasks involving changes to your Mac, but I am a fan of giving Mac users more power in the base operating system.)
The automation triggers are pretty broad. I have a longstanding automation that reprocesses Southwest Airlines calendar files that appear in my Downloads folder, which means I needed to set up an automation that triggers every single time any file is added to that very busy folder. It’s trivial to add a Filter Files block to weed out all files that don’t match my criteria, but I’m a little surprised that Apple hasn’t built those filters into the top-level trigger. Still, I was able to move my automation over from Hazel in a few minutes.
There’s an awful lot of opportunity for very simple automations that can change your Mac automatically when events occur. I wired up a workflow that toggles my Mac from light mode into dark mode to a specific focus mode in about 30 seconds. I should be able to run an automation that detects which desk I’m using and adjusts a bunch of settings accordingly.
My shortcuts can now do things like describe images.Another huge leap forward for Shortcuts is the new Use Model action, which lets you tie in workflows to Apple’s on-device and Private Cloud Compute AI models, as well as ChatGPT itself. The Six Colors staff has already built several automations using this feature, and while the results can be somewhat random and take some effort to process, they can also enable the creation of workflows that were previously impossible using Apple’s existing tools. Shortcuts also now includes pre-baked Apple Intelligence features, like Writing Tools summaries.
Otherwise, the Shortcuts app doesn’t seem improved at all. This is unfortunate. This app is the core of automation across all of Apple’s platforms—and it should be adding new features that aid workflow builders. (Every time I realize I’m going to have to build a set of if/else-if tests in Shortcuts, I begin pondering using another tool instead.) Instead, it seems to be adrift.
Spotlight powers up and the clipboard travels in timeThis year, Spotlight turns 20 years old. In the beginning, it was a simple search engine for files on your Mac, but over the years, Apple has upgraded it with various abilities, making it a quick app launcher, internet search engine, calculator, and dictionary, among other features.
But I have to say that this year’s Spotlight update is probably the most consequential of any of them. Back 20 years ago, LaunchBar was my go-to utility because it combined Spotlight’s features with dozens more. Over the years, as Spotlight has improved, I’ve invariably gone back to LaunchBar. So take this as the immense compliment it is: I may never go back to LaunchBar after using Spotlight in macOS Tahoe.
The new Spotlight goes beyond the single default search box, though it is still pretty effective in quickly finding a file or launching an app. Now there are four separate filters you can use for Spotlight: Apps, Files, Actions, and Clipboard. If you click on Apps (or type Command-1 after typing Command-Space), you’ll see a browsable list of apps (including iPhone apps, if you’re using iPhone Mirroring) that’s basically the replacement for the now-deprecated Launchpad. It also appears, standalone, as the new “Apps” app in the Applications folder.
Files (Command-2) will similarly let you search a filtered view of just files, and will offer some suggestions even if you don’t type anything, and provides a set of filters that let you focus on files that certain apps can open. For example, when I clicked on the BBEdit filter, I saw a bunch of recently edited text files on my Mac, including the one I used to write this story.
Actions (Command-3) offers a catalog of system and app actions, as well as Shortcuts workflows, that you can run directly from Spotlight. These are powered by Apple’s App Intents framework as well as a new “run from search” option in Spotlight. To run an action, select it and press Return, then use the tab key to move around and fill in the blanks. Apple suggests you use this for simple tasks like sending a quick email or text message, but as more apps (and Shortcuts workflows) appear, there’s an opportunity for this to become a really quick way to execute commands, entirely from the keyboard, without even needing to open the relevant app.
Clipboard (Command-4) is a bit different from the previous items, in that clipboard items don’t seem to show up in default searches. This is, instead, Apple’s attempt to add a clipboard manager to macOS for the very first time. When you copy something to the clipboard, it’s not discarded when you copy something else! Instead, it’s stored for up to eight hours and accessible from the Clipboard view in Spotlight. Just select an item from the history and it’ll be immediately placed on your clipboard or pasted right where you’re typing. Simply scroll back through time to find that thing you copied a few hours ago.
Clipboard managers have been around on the Mac for years, and Apple’s is pretty bare bones—but it’s still huge that the company has embraced this concept. And to be honest, Spotlight has all I need out of a clipboard manager. If you need more control over clipboard storage or want fancier features, there are plenty of apps like Pastebot out there that will always provide more functionality than what Apple does. My only personal issue with this feature is that it’s now two keystrokes away—something I solved by programming Keyboard Maestro to type Command-Space Command-4 every time I type my old LaunchBar clipboard history shortcut, Command-. (But really, Apple should probably let users wire all four of these filters to their own keyboard shortcuts.)
Spotlight remembers more than your clipboard, too. If you invoke Spotlight and press the up arrow, you can scroll backward through your previous Spotlight searches. This is a feature very much reminiscent of the command-line history in Terminal, and it’s a good one. Why reformulate that old query when you can just… press the arrow key a few times and get it back?
A new Quick Keys feature lets you assign actions to specific strings, to make them faster to access. It’s a great idea, but any item should be able to have keys assigned, not just Actions, and those assignments should work in the main Spotlight search area, too. Right now, it’s too limited, but it’s a good start.
There are also new “slash commands” that let you quickly filter searches. Type /pdf and then press return, and your search is automatically limited to PDFs. I got it to work with Word and text files, too. It’s a nice idea, but it needs to go further: I’ve got loads of Markdown files, disk images, and even zip archives on my Mac, and it won’t let me filter for them, but I can filter for Pages documents?
Apple says it has added the ability to search popular websites from Spotlight, which would be very useful since I used LaunchBar to quickly search Wikipedia, IMDB, and other sites directly. Unfortunately, searching for something by typing IMDB and pressing tab, then entering a search query… just opened that search query on YouTube in Safari. I expect better. Search results should appear in Spotlight, so I can choose a result and open it directly. And, yes, I’d like many more options.
Here’s a funny one: For years now, you’ve been able to type Command-? (which is technically Command-Shift-slash) to search the contents of the menus of the app you’re currently in. You can still do that, of course—and it works on the iPad now too!—but those menus are also searchable from a keyboard shortcut you might have more committed to muscle memory, namely Spotlight’s. In practice, it’s a lot messier to search in Spotlight, since it returns all sorts of results, but if you can never remember Command-?, you will be rewarded anyway.
Apple has also added a new API that will allow cloud storage platforms like Dropbox to offer their content directly in Spotlight, which might eliminate the current disparity I find when searching for content that’s on my Mac versus what’s in my Dropbox account. I look forward to testing this, if and when third-party file provider apps adopt this feature.
In short, this is a huge step forward for Spotlight. Yes, some rough edges need a little bit of refinement and attention, but after 20 years, Spotlight really has gone from being a simple search tool to a powerful utility to quickly access information and perform tasks.
Little changes everywhereAs always, there are lots of small updates and tweaks throughout the operating system. The Phone app comes to macOS for the first time in Tahoe, providing a locus for answering and placing calls via your associated iPhone. You could do that before, but those features never felt like they had a place to call their own on macOS, and now they do.
There are a few major Accessibility extensions. For years, I used my laptop on the bus commuting to and from San Francisco, or at least I’d use it as long as I could until I started to feel sick, closed the lid, and stared out the window. Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues, which it added to iOS last year, are now available on macOS as well. The feature puts little dots on your screen, and they use your laptop’s accelerometers to react to your motion. The dots move up and down when things are slowing down or speeding up, and pan right or left when you’re turning. The idea is that your inner ear has more visual feedback of your motion, so you’re less likely to feel queasy. It works for me!
People with vision issues will also be excited about the addition of the Magnifier app, which has been on iOS for a while. It might seem counterintuitive to use Magnifier with a Mac, but the use case is actually to use it with Continuity Camera. You can place an iPhone facing outward and then use your Mac to zoom in on what the iPhone sees, which can be great for people with vision limitations.
Another app making its debut on Mac (and iPad) is Journal, which Apple brought out only for iPhone in 2023. I have no idea why it took nearly two years for this app to make it to Apple’s other devices, but the iPad and Mac both seem like better devices for journaling than my iPhone! Apple has added some sharing features so that your Mac (and iPad) has access to some of the personal data that the iPhone uses to suggest journaling opportunities.
The Music app has gotten an interface overhaul, replacing the old playback controller at the top of the window, a part of the app since the earliest days of iTunes, with an iOS-style floating window at the bottom of the screen. The new controller feels cramped and can get partially obscured by content sliding behind it. Time information and scrubbing controls are hidden until you move the pointer over the interface, and the volume controls are hidden behind a button and require an extra click to use. I don’t like it.
Moving interaction items to the bottom of the screen has become a reflex for Apple, I guess, given that it places them within reach on iPhones. I don’t see how it helps on the Mac at all. Meanwhile, AirPlay playback is still pretty unreliable. I don’t know what’s going on in Music land, but as someone who uses the Mac Music app every single day, it doesn’t feel like progress.
Two steps forward, one step backDon’t get distracted by all the talk about the new “liquid glass” design. Yes, macOS Tahoe looks a little bit different, but it works pretty much the same as ever, and the new design flourishes are not as dramatic as they are on Apple’s other platforms. I got used to most of it in less than a week.
What you should consider, though, are the ways that macOS Tahoe offers new power features for Mac users. The new Spotlight features, including clipboard history, are huge. Shortcuts automations and access to AI models open up all sorts of new possibilities. The new Control Center suggests that Apple has figured out how to embrace menu bar management for the first time. If you use an array of third-party utilities, you may be unmoved by all of those improvements, but I firmly believe that macOS is stronger when you don’t have to add on a bunch of extra stuff in order to get it to work the way a power user might want it to work.
I admit that it’s a little weird to have mixed feelings about macOS Tahoe. The features added to the operating system this year are a strong sign that there are people at Apple who really understand how people want to use the Mac to get things done. On its own, the situation would lead me to be quite encouraged. But the invasion of Apple’s new design system seems haphazardly and inconsistently implemented, not adding a whole lot and sometimes just making everything murky and confusing.
Back in the mid-2010s, it felt like the Mac was forgotten by Apple. Today, it feels like it’s being given a lot more attention—but maybe a little too much, in the wrong areas? It’s a weird time to be a Mac user, because the Mac truly is an adjunct to Apple’s major business of the iPhone—but it’s also the platform that Apple itself uses to build all of its other stuff, so there are no bigger Mac users than the rank and file at Apple.
I’m choosing to be positive here. macOS Tahoe is a great update for Mac productivity, the best in many years. As for the rest of it, I could take it or leave it—but I suppose all of us are obliged to take it.
iOS 26! It feels like just last year we were here discussing iOS 18. How time flies.
After a year that saw the debut of Apple Intelligence and the subsequent controversy over the features that it didn’t manage to ship, Apple seems to have taken a different tack with iOS 26. In addition to the expansive new Liquid Glass design that spans all of its platforms, Apple has largely focused on smaller, “quality of life” improvements rather than marquee new features.
That’s not a bad thing, either—these are often the types of things that Apple does best, and which actually make a meaningful impact on the lives of their customers: saving them time waiting on hold on the phone, helping them avoid dealing with spam, and improving their driving experience.
It’s also worth noting that almost all of the iOS 26 features that Apple demoed during its WWDC keynote this year are available in this initial version. (The exception seems to be the Digital ID feature that lets you use your U.S. Passport to make an ID in the Wallet app, which Apple says is still forthcoming in a future update.) Most of it has been there since the earliest beta builds this summer, showing that Apple really is trying not to get over its own skis.
While this update is probably going to be most remembered for its Liquid Glass overhaul—a redesign that feels more than a little ill-conceived—there are definitely things to like in iOS 26. Let’s dive in.
Liquid Glass half-full or half-empty?Apple’s new design language, dubbed Liquid Glass, applies across all its platforms, but unsurprisingly, it feels most at home on the iPhone and iPad. That’s in part because of the touch interface; the literal hands-on nature makes the feel responsive and more like physical things that you’re interacting with. For example, dragging the new magnifying loupe across the screen, watching the way it magnifies and distorts text and images as it passes over them—this interaction has always been unique to iOS for practical reasons, but the way it feels here doesn’t have a direct analogue on other platforms.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ios26-publicbeta-loupe2.mp4Perhaps the truest “liquid glass” interaction, in that the loupe when it moves back and forth deforms like a water droplet.Controls now overlay content rather than sitting in designated toolbars or areas of the screen reserved for those controls, and are rendered in transparent glass that refracts and distorts the colors of whatever passes behind it. That’s impressive but also, at times, distracting: sometimes you see a distortion of text from what you’re reading within the UI, which is odd. Or, when scrolling past content that goes abruptly from light to dark, the buttons might similarly flip appearance from, say, black icons to white icons in a way that can feel jarring.
Let’s break Liquid Glass up into its component parts and take the latter first.
“Glass” is the overall look of these updates, and it’s everywhere. Transparent, frosted, distorting. In some places it looks quite cool, such as in the edge distortion when you’re swiping up on the lock screen. But elsewhere, it seems to me that glass may not be quite the right material for the job. The Glass House might be architecturally impressive, but it’s not particularly practical.
It’s also a definite philosophical choice, and one that’s going to engender some criticism—much of it well-deserved. Apple has argued that it’s about getting controls out of the way, but is that really what’s happening here? It’s hard to argue that having a transparent button sitting right on top of your email is helping that email be more prominent. To take this argument to its logical conclusion, why is the keyboard not fully transparent glass over our content?
Apple has designed extensive rules to try and minimize some of the most distracting impacts of Liquid Glass. For example, if you’re viewing black-on-white content and suddenly scroll past a darker image, the UI widgets will only flip from light to dark mode based on the speed of your scrolling: scroll past it quickly and they won’t flip; it’s only if you slow down or stop with the widgets over the image that they’ll shift into dark mode.
While clever, this also feels remarkably over-engineered to work around the fundamental nature of these devices. It’s a little reminiscent of the old apocryphal story about how the American space industry spent years and millions of dollars designing a pen that could write in space while the Soviets used a pencil.1 Perhaps they should have used a design that doesn’t require adjusting its look on the fly.
If the “Glass” is about the new look, the “Liquid” part of the moniker is more about the feel of this design. The way the aforementioned loupe moves, or how controls animate—dividing up and reintegrating, in a fashion that’s clearly building on what Apple first did with the Dynamic Island. Tap the Select button in the Library view in Photos, and you’ll watch the buttons bounce and morph into new controls. It’s eye-catching, to be sure, and does do a nice job of subtly making you aware of how the UI is changing, but it’s applied inconsistently—why does going into a mailbox in Mail show the Edit button morph into Select and … buttons, but tapping the Select button here does…nothing?—and after the fifteenth time, the animations are less novel and more distracting. It brings to mind the Genie effect of the earliest days of Mac OS X (and still there to this day!): impressive to see what the device can do, but to be turned off at the earliest opportunity.
No doubt Liquid Glass will continue to be refined. Some parts of it have already shifted during this summer’s betas: Control Center seems in better shape in the final shipping version than it did earlier on. But the biggest challenge is that Apple is never going to be able to test transparency with every single possible background, and as hard as it’s worked to design systems that can adapt on the fly, the end result is often distracting and sometimes unsightly.
iOS 26’s new popover menu makes it easier to find the option you want, rather than having to endlessly scroll.The redesign is more than skin deep, however. Apple has rethought the way some of its most fundamental interactions work. For example, the increasingly long horizontal popover menus that hid options behind an interminable scroll have morphed into a dual-stage design. Tapping and holding on the screen brings up a popover with a few common options, but it now doesn’t make you scroll; instead, there’s an arrow indicating more options. Tap that, and you’ll get a big pop-up panel of all the available commands in a much easier-to-read and use format. As someone who frequently finds himself swiping through a very long list to find the one command I want (and somehow, it’s always the last one), this is a tangible improvement.
It would be nice if that first menu were more customizable, though. Apple does try to detect contextually what items should be at the top of the list, but it would be nice to be able to pin something to the top or add a custom shortcut to the list. And although the menu varies from app to app, some of the organizational choices are puzzling. In the Safari screenshot above, I’m not sure why Writing Tools is visible. After all, I’m looking at uneditable text on a web page. Am I rewriting the web now? This feels less like a choice focused on user needs and more like a reflexive promotion for Apple’s AI tools.
Other system-level features have been expanded as well. For example, while you used to be able to swipe from the left side of the screen to go back or up a level in a hierarchy, that gesture now works when swiping anywhere on the screen, making it both more discoverable and easier to use.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ios26-publicbeta-lockscreen-glass2.mp4You paid for the whole lock screen, but you’ll only need the edge!The design changes also extend to the look and feel of app icons, which are now built with transparent layers. Interestingly, if developers adopted the design changes to better support iOS 18’s “tinted” theme, their icons already get some of the benefits baked in. That tinted theme has been expanded with both light and dark options, and there’s also a new clear theme that turns all your app icons ghostly, which is a great way of testing your muscle memory for where you put your apps. I’m not sure it’s for me—everything looks a bit too same-y—but it is definitely a look, and I’m equally certain there will be folks who love it.
As with any change this sweeping, it’s always going to take some time to adjust. There are some who will decry this as change for change’s sake, but as undesirable as that might be, the countervailing argument is that you shouldn’t keep things the same just because it’s the way they’ve always been. My experience with Liquid Glass has had its ups and downs, with interactions that feel both interesting and dynamic to those that are downright frustrating. Much of design is highly subjective, and it will be interesting to see how the general public reacts to something that so far has been the province of early adopters and developers.
Lock stepAfter the last few years of Lock Screen customization options, this year’s additions are more muted, and mostly in step with updating the look for Liquid Glass.
The biggest addition—literally—is the new clock, which can expand to fit the empty space on your screen. If you have a rotating set of lock screen photos, it will dynamically adjust for each one, trying not to obscure people’s faces; in the customization screen, you can manually adjust the size of the clock, but I haven’t been able to figure out what that actually does in the photo shuffle mode—it still changes dynamically.
I don’t always love the way that the big clock interacts with pictures of people. I’m definitely not the best photographer, so I’m not always framing my shots ideally, and the photo shuffle algorithm seems agnostic to how good my pictures are, so I definitely still end up with the clock running into people’s faces, or uneven backgrounds that make the clock’s glass effect look a little more muddled. Is it possible to make a good-looking lock screen? Absolutely. But if you, like me, leave it to the system, then the results are mixed.
The clock on the lock screen now dynamically adjusts from very, very large to what used to be normal.I’m also happy to say that one of my favorite features of last year—the rainbow-hued clock available in some lock screen styles, like Live Photo—still exists—you just have to change the clock style to solid rather than glass in order to see it.
There’s also now an option to move the widgets that used to sit below the clock all the way to the bottom of the screen, right above the notification stack, so as to not block the subject of your photo. I kind of prefer this location—I find it easier to tap a widget and open the app if I want, and I find the data from them don’t get as lost.
Your Lock Screen photos can also be more dynamic now, with the addition of spatial scenes. That’s a feature imported from the Apple Vision Pro where iOS will apply a three-dimensional effect to an image, animating depth as you move the phone around. How effective that is varies from photo to photo, although it feels less compelling here than viewing true spatial scenes on a Vision Pro; the animation of the spatial versions is sometimes a little jerky, and some people with motion sensitivity might find them off-putting. As with the lock screen images, Apple’s attempts to identify what makes a “good” spatial scene can be hit or miss: I’ve ended up with some odd results at times.
Speaking of images that move, the lock screen also now has an animated artwork option for music apps—note that I said “apps” not “the Music app” since it’s an API available to developers of third-party apps. But it will need adoption from the producers of albums in order to take full effect. When it shows up, it takes over the entire lock screen rather than being constrained within a little album square. It’s an interesting approach, although one that you may not notice depending on how often you actually visit the lock screen while music is playing. So, while it’s a cool idea, I’m not sure it does much for me. Maybe it’s time to commission some animated artwork for the Six Colors podcast?
Point and shootI’d venture a guess that Camera is the most used app on the iPhone, though I’ve got no real numbers to back that up. But given the amount of time Apple has spent upgrading the camera hardware on the iPhone over the years, I feel pretty confident in my assessment.
As a result, redesigning the Camera app—hot on the heels of last year’s redesign of Photos—is a bold choice. But it’s not surprising that the company’s alterations here are focused on the minimal, reinforcing the way that most people already use the app. (And if anybody’s got the metrics to know how people use its apps, it’s obviously Apple.)
For example, controls for more advanced features like aperture, exposure, and photographic styles are now buried in a separate menu, available by tapping a button at the top of the screen or by swiping up from the bottom. Given that I’ve definitely ended up in these controls by accident over the years—and I suspect I’m not alone—that’s not a bad thing.
The simplified Camera interface makes it easier to point, shoot, and get out.Likewise, what used to be an at times overwhelming carousel of modes—panorama, portrait, photo, video, slo-mo, time lapse, etc.—has now been visually reduced, by default, to just the two most popular: photo and video. The others are still there if you scroll left or right, but you’re less likely to accidentally find yourself shooting spatial video at a lower resolution when you don’t mean to. Similarly, those resolution and format choices are also now squirreled away behind a separate button, there if you need them without being omnipresent.
The redesign reflects the fact that most people want to get in, snap a picture or shoot a video, and get out. Not to mention that Apple has spent a lot of time designing its phones so that they take great photos without having to tweak those details. Those advanced features are still there—and, arguably, more accessible using something like the Camera Control button on the latest iPhones—and for those who long for more than Apple’s Camera app offers, there are an assortment of popular and powerful third-party camera apps to fill in the gaps.
The counterargument, of course, is that by hiding those features away, they are less discoverable. This is the eternal battle in interfaces, especially in someplace as constrained as an iPhone screen. In other places, Apple has done its part to pop up hints about features you might not see at first glance, including here in the Camera app. Personally, I think this redesign walks a solid line—the new interface is not so different from the old that I had any trouble with it, and I appreciate that there are fewer distractions, though I do wonder if it might be beneficial to offer an option to pin a frequently used mode or two for those who want to get to panoramas or portraits, for example, without trying to remember where to swipe.
There are also a couple of AirPods-related features in Camera: first, if you’ve got the latest models with H2 chips, the microphones should be improved. Apple touts them as “studio quality”, a meaningless qualifier that could mean anything from “suitable for a recording studio” to “you can use these in your studio apartment,” but at least it doesn’t sound like you’re in a wind tunnel anymore. In one of my test calls, my wife was genuinely impressed when I asked, at the end, how I’d sounded. “I wouldn’t have known you were on your AirPods if you hadn’t told me.”
And you can now use the AirPods’s stem controls to take a picture or start recording a video: handy for people using a selfie stick or tripod, or even just a quick way to snap a group photo (as long as you don’t mind having an AirPod in your ear in said photo). Bear in mind, this is a feature you’ll have to turn on in Settings under your AirPods, though it does let you choose between a simple press or a press-and-hold.
Calling cardsAn update to the Phone app? Are we sure iOS 26 doesn’t stand for 1926? People knock the Phone app, but, well, I still make phone calls.2 In addition to a couple of handy features, there are also some substantial design changes afoot.
The new filtering menu in Phone works hand in hand with call screening and spam filtering features. But I seem to be stuck with that badge counting my missed calls. Stressful!A redesign strikes again! The new Unified view pins your favorites to the top, then shows you your recent calls, missed calls, and voicemails all in a single very long list on the Calls tab, with separate tabs for Contacts and the Keypad. Some might not care for this approach, but I find it kind of a no-brainer. It did encourage me to pare my Favorites list down a bit to the one line of people I actually call as well as finally update their contact pictures to the more recent poster format. I don’t mind having voicemails mixed in; I don’t get very many. But if you hate this new interface, don’t worry: Apple will let you switch back.
Unquestionably good is the new set of Filtering features available in the menu at the top right. By default, this includes options to view just Missed calls or Voicemails, but there’s also now, praise the heavens, a Spam section for calls that are recognized as such. Apple’s using a combination of carrier tagging (those calls that you’ve seen flagged as “Spam Risk”) and its own analysis. You can manually mark a call as spam by swiping left on it in your recents list and choosing Block and Report Spam.
The real challenge, as always, is the calls that fall in between your contacts and out-and-out spam. For this there’s the new Screen Unknown Callers feature. You might remember that Apple previously added a Silence Unknown Callers feature in iOS 13 that would mute calls from numbers that weren’t recognized—with the challenge that if you got a call from a doctor’s office, tradesperson, or even food delivery, you might not see it. That was followed by Live Voicemail in iOS 17, which helped somewhat mitigate the issue, but Screen Unknown Callers goes a step further: when activated, which you can do in the Phone app or in Settings > Phone, callers not in your contacts will be greeted with a robotic message and asked to provide more information before the call rings through. You can also choose to leave unknown calls totally silenced, or turn screening off entirely to have all calls ring your phone.
There’s a separate but connected feature in iOS 26 called Call Filtering. Once you turn this on, you’ll see an Unknown Callers category in the filter list in Phone. From there, you can choose to mark the numbers as known, at which point they will ring through—without having to be added to your contact list, which is nice. However, I’m not sure how you move a number back to “unknown” if you accidentally mark it as known—you can delete it from the list or block it, but I’m not sure what to do if you want to simply move it back to the “Unknown Callers” section. You can also choose to have calls detected as spam by your carrier simply not ring at all, which seems like a real no-brainer.
One criticism: my filter icon has a badge listing the number of unknown calls, a rather high 324. There’s no option to mark them all as read, meaning I’m apparently stuck with that badge forever? I don’t love it.
Overall, I’ve got mixed feelings about the Screen Unknown Callers feature. On the one hand, it will undeniably help weed out potentially spam calls. On the other, some part of my upbringing makes me feel embarrassed about the idea that someone—especially a likely underpaid person in a service industry—is going to have to justify their call to a robot. I’ve gotten calls from AI assistants from my dentist’s office recently, and frankly…I just hang up. I’m not going to spend my time chatting with a computer, and I don’t blame anybody else for feeling the same. That said, I have turned it on, though I haven’t actually encountered it much in use.
Along similar lines, Apple’s also added a feature called Hold Assist that automates the oft-annoying task of waiting on hold. I did get a chance to try this out during the beta period, and it worked fine except for one caveat. The idea behind the feature is that when you’re put on hold with some cheesy hold music or deafening silence, you can trigger this feature and be notified when somebody comes back on the line.
In my experience, however, one problem I encountered was that it registered the occasional recorded messaged while I was on hold with the Massachusetts Department of Revenue—”Your call is important to us!” or “Did you know you can go to our website?”—as a human coming back, and notified me, leaving me to scramble for the phone only to find that I wasn’t talking to a live person after all. My understanding is that the feature should be able to distinguish between a regular recorded message and a human, but that was not my experience at the time—I haven’t yet had the need to put the feature through its paces in the shipping build.
Just browsingSafari’s reduced interface hides its commands in a plethora of pop-up menus, which leads to some oddities like two Share buttons.While Safari may not have gotten quite the expansive overhaul of some of Apple’s other built-in apps this year, it’s still gotten a bit of a revamp. And as another of Apple’s most popular apps, even small changes here have a tendency to reverberate.
Apple’s taken a variety of stabs at UI minimalism in Safari over the years, both on iOS and macOS. Often those first, more substantial changes, get dialed back. In iOS 26, these changes aren’t quite as radical, but they’re more than just a coat of Liquid Glass. Gone is the longstanding toolbar with its back/forward arrows, Share icon, bookmarks, and tab menus beneath a location bar. In its place, by default, is a more reduced UI with a back button3, location bar, and the now seemingly ubiquitous “More” button denoted with three dots.
You’ll find many of the previous controls under that More button, including both bookmark and tab management, as well as Share. But some controls are still accessed by tapping on the icon in the location bar—including Reader mode, if available, translation, extension management, and so on—and others are instead squirreled away under a long press on the location bar, including closing tabs, tab groups, and…another Share button. The button so nice they included it twice!
As with the Phone app you can, if you so wish, revert back to classic Safari—either with the location bar at the top or bottom. In a few weeks of usage, I’ve elected to stay with Apple’s new design, though I still struggle to remember whether the control I want is accessed via the location bar or the More button. Or…both? At least some common gestures, like swiping left and right on the location bars to switch tabs or flicking upwards on the URL to see your tab overview, have remained.
I never really felt like the old toolbar style was getting in the way of my content, so I’m not sure if this change is anything but an attempt to mix things up. And given that the UI still hovers a little bit above the bottom of the screen, causing any text or content behind it to fade, I’m not sure that it actually adds any more usable real estate.
Overall, I’ve largely gotten used to the look, though at times the effects of a non-uniform website background on Liquid Glass can lead to disparate effects like one pop-up menu being a light color while another is dark.
Beyond the design changes, most of Safari’s other updates are under the hood. One notable change: developers of web extensions don’t need to use Xcode or even a Mac anymore; they can just upload their extensions to the App Store in a ZIP file. Hopefully, that’s another step closer to some of the myriad extensions out there making their way to Safari, though the jury will remain out. And any web page can be opened as a full web app from the home screen now, rather than just essentially being a bookmark.
Let’s get visual…visualApple Intelligence may have been the big news in iOS 18, but this year its new features are somewhat more muted. While the capabilities that didn’t end up shipping in 2025—Personal Context and a smarter Siri among them—are still expected to arrive next year, Apple has with this initial iOS 26 release focused on some smaller capabilities, like integrating ChatGPT into Image Playground, the ability to combine two emoji in Genmoji, and summaries of voicemails. It’s also brought back summaries for notifications with more granular controls over what kinds of apps you want it to apply to—plus more stringent warnings about the fact that said notifications may be inaccurate, which certainly raises questions about their ultimate utility. Having used those for some time, I can’t say if they’re significantly improved—we’ll have to wait until the next brouhaha.
Perhaps the most significant of these Apple Intelligence-powered features in iOS 26, though, is an expansion of the Visual Intelligence feature launched last year. Instead of being confined to pictures taken with the camera, Visual Intelligence in iOS 26 now offers the same capabilities with screenshots. In fact, the feature is built right into the existing screenshot interface, so now whenever you squeeze the sleep/wake button and volume up button to take a picture of what’s on your screen, you’ll see two new controls at the bottom: Ask and Image Search.
Story checks out.The former lets you ask ChatGPT questions about the image, while the latter brings up Google results. You can even highlight a portion of the image by running your finger over it if you only want to search on a subset of the picture. (I’ve found myself accidentally triggering that feature on occasion while trying to crop an image, which is annoying.)
This is all a shot over the bow of Google’s longstanding Lens feature, with a dash of AI thrown in. I’ve barely used Visual Intelligence on my iPhone 16 Pro since its debut; to date, the screenshot integration hasn’t been enough to get me to change my ways, but it does open up some new possibilities for extracting information from your screen, in the same way that Live Text has done.
Speaking of Live Text, in case answers from two different tech giants aren’t enough, Apple is also using a bit of that same machine learning technology to pull out relevant details from the image, whether it be a URL or a calendar event and present them in a little floating lozenge at the bottom of the screen. That can be handy, though it’s also at the whims of whatever information is captured in the screenshot.
It is a little odd that Visual Intelligence is offered in two different places with two different interfaces, but given there is a distinction between screenshots and taking photos, perhaps that’s not as jarring as it seems at first blush.
Bits and bobsAs with any major platform update, there’s simply too much to cover absolutely everything. Here, then, are a few other features that I’ve noticed in my time with iOS 26.
The Battery section of Settings has been redone, providing a quick glance at when you last charged or, if your phone is plugged in, how long until it’s charged. The main graph now shows your battery usage to your average daily usage—including in the app-by-app breakdown—rather than providing the somewhat less useful hour-over-hour view. I do find some of the visuals a little silly: an orange exclamation point letting me know that I’ve used an app more than usual when it’s an app I only occasionally launch seems overly alarmist.
There’s also a new Adaptive Power mode that supposedly helps prolong battery life if you’re using more than usual by toning down some things like display brightness. I’ve had this active for some time, and I don’t know that I’ve seen a marked difference.
As on the iPad, you can record your audio locally on the iPhone with the new Local Capture feature, whether it’s via the built-in mic, AirPods, or a USB-C microphone (not to mention a new audio input picker that lets you choose which mic you want to use). While it still needs controls for audio input volume—some mics, including my ATR-2100x, which I would be most likely to use with this feature, are distorted because they’re simply too loud—this does make it feasible to record a podcast on your iPhone. I honestly never thought I’d see the day, but it’s here. Mostly.
AirPods can also now have a Pause Media When Falling Asleep option. I like the idea in principle, but I find it a bit too eager. I wish there were a way to adjust the threshold or to opt out of certain apps. For example, when I’m traveling I sometimes sleep with white noise (usually from Dark Noise), and I find that when the audio is paused it wakes me up. I’m not sure what algorithm it’s using to figure out when I’m asleep but it’s not right for me, I guess.
Notes may not support writing in native Markdown, but it does now let you import and export from the format. That includes any images that you’ve embedded in the note, which is handy. Despite being a Markdown fan, I’m not sure I’m likely to use this feature…I like Markdown because I want to write in it for the web, not have to take the extra step to export. But it’s nice that there’s at least an easy and accessible way to get your data in and out of the Notes app.
The Passwords app adds a history of changes you’ve made to passwords (only, of course, for changes since installing iOS 26). That’s a nice feature because I have definitely ended up not realizing I’ve already got a password and then reset it. In fact, in one of my favorite moves, it will even tell you when it created a password for a site, even if that password may not have actually gotten submitted—something that’s happened to me more than a few times.
Photos gets its toolbar back, mostly. There are now Library and Collections views rather than the unified version we got in iOS 18. Personally, I miss the ability to hide sections of the Collections view, but at least it maintains the rest of its customization options. It also gets the aforementioned feature to turn images into Spatial Scenes, though as above, your mileage will probably vary depending on how cool or off-putting you think that feature is.
Remember how even iTunes had the ability to crossfade between songs maybe twenty years ago? Well, Music‘s new AutoMix feature takes that to eleven by trying to actually find the perfect DJ-style moment to segue into the next song. This feature is downright odd and, I think, way too aggressive.4 I’ve heard it slowing down a song for like thirty seconds to match beats with the following song. As a novelty, it’s kind of fascinating, but I think a lot of people are going to be annoyed with it tweaking their favorite songs. There’s also a new feature that lets you pin favorites to the top of your library, whether it’s a song, album, playlist, or artist; that’s a welcome addition to the app.
Can’t remember the name of that café you stopped at on your most recent road trip? If you opt into the new Visited Places feature in Maps, you can search or scroll through places you visited—even by category or city. All the information is stored privately and securely, so nobody else can see it, not even Apple, and you can easily remove items from the list (or correct erroneous ones). It’s also a great way to retroactively build a guide of places for a trip you’ve taken. There’s also a Preferred Routes feature that supposedly learns about how you make regular trips, but as someone who works from home, I don’t expect to get too much use out of this.5
I don’t generally use alarms, so an adjustable snooze time in the Clock app doesn’t really do much for me, but I know some people will be excited, so here you go. However, this does come with one interface criticism about the redesigned alarm display on the lock screen, which now has equally sized Stop and Snooze buttons, leading to the possibility of sleep-addled people hitting the wrong button.
I order plenty of stuff on the internet, so I’ve used Wallet‘s new Apple Intelligence-powered tracking of orders a few times now. I’ve had mixed results with it automatically adding orders, but I do appreciate that there’s a little banner that appears in your mail message if an order is detected, and prompts you to add it to Wallet. Beyond that, though, it feels kind of half-done. For one thing, it seems to include items like orders for picking up food and digital orders which is comprehensive, if not always useful. More annoyingly, though, while Wallet does show a carrier and tracking number in the entry in Wallet, you can’t tap through to see actual tracking details. Honestly, it seems a little disingenuous to call it “Order Tracking.” I’m not really sure what the point is. This probably won’t lure anybody away from their third-party tracking apps…yet.
Hallelujah, you can now select the text inside a bubble in Messages. I know it’s not the flashiest improvement, but it’s always seemed absurd that this was an all-or-nothing proposition. I mean, you can copy just some text out of an image these days, for heaven’s sake. A small but very meaningful improvement.
Last, but hardly least, CarPlay gets a handful of new features, including the new Liquid Glass design, a smaller call notification, tapbacks in Messages, and Widgets. I really want to like widgets but two things hold me back: first, my CarPlay screen is very small and can only show one widget at once, and second, I’ve struggled to figure out which widgets are actually useful while I’m driving. Most of the time I really do just want my map and whatever media is playing. Maybe on a bigger screen they’d be more compelling. I was a little worried that tapbacks would encourage too much interaction with the screens, but having now used it, I find it pretty seamless, and certainly easier than trying to reply.
A qualified updateSome years have bigger updates, some more modest. iOS 26 definitely feels like the former, especially given the new design, but peel that away and you have mostly a bunch of smaller updates. Having used it for a few months, I don’t think I’m in “ringing endorsement” territory for Liquid Glass—there are far too many places where things are just a bit off, like you’re seeing your phone through a fun-house mirror. That said, it’s also not a phonepocalypse to run from in fear. I’ve largely acclimated to the changes, and I expect most users will as well. It’s pretty rare for iPhone owners not to update their phones, and I honestly just don’t expect a huge rash of people sticking with iOS 18 because they’re that upset.
The other question going into this year’s update was Apple Intelligence, an issue that Apple mostly seems to have sidestepped in iOS 26. Yes, there are new Shortcuts actions and the expansion of Visual Intelligence, and yes, the company seems determined to remind you that its AI-powered features are there, but if you don’t want them, you can more or less ignore them and just go on about your life.6
As always, some features are going to require buy-in from third parties to really show off what they can do. Speaking of AI, the ability for developers to integrate Apple’s own models into their apps has tremendous potential, but we’re not going to get a great picture of that for a little while yet. Likewise, some of Liquid Glass’s ultimate impact will depend on how much other apps embrace that—and given how many of them have their own cross-platform branding/style (WhatsApp, Netflix, Slack, Discord, etc.)—it may not have quite the far-reaching effect that Apple hopes.
Overall, iOS 26’s quality of life improvements are what are likely to resonate the most, and there’s something here for most of us. Who wants to be stuck on hold, or get spam calls and messages, after all? How about the ability to talk with people in different languages, or remember that place you went to six months ago? Who isn’t glad to have the ability to record a podcast on their phone? (Is that just me? It might be just me.)
And it’s important to remember that one of the most essential qualities of software is its dynamism: like life, its only constant is change. Unlike the phone you buy, which will look and feel the way it does until you move on to the next one, the software experience is malleable. Ultimately, it’s what our devices can enable us to do, how they make our lives easier, that will be more important to our daily lives than what color buttons are (or aren’t).
- As I said, apocryphal, though, like many myths of its ilk, it’s just too good a metaphor to discard wholesale. ↩
- Largely to my mom, my wife, and my best friend from college who doesn’t really do texts. Hi Brian. ↩
- A forward button does appear next to it if you go back, however. ↩
- At one point I had The Fratellis’ “Flathead” segue kind of seamlessly into “Down Under” by Men at Work, and I’m trying to imagine the DJ who would give that a go. ↩
- I have enjoyed its eager attempts to tell me the best five-minute route home from the grocery store. Yes, I know. ↩
- Insofar as that’s possible with AI these days. ↩
Imagine turning your reading list into a listening playlist. With ListenLater.net, your favorite reads become accessible as engaging podcasts in your preferred podcast app.
Have you ever found an intriguing article but lacked the time to read it? Whether commuting, exercising, or relaxing, ListenLater.net makes it easy. Just email the article’s URL and ListenLater converts it into a lifelike podcast episode. You’ll be immersed in the experience as if listening to a real person.
But it doesn’t stop at articles. ListenLater also enhances your email experience. Forward any email and ListenLater transforms its content into a personalized podcast episode—perfect for newsletters, lengthy reads, and PDFs.
Concerned about language barriers? ListenLater offers multilingual translation and narration. Select your preferred language and enjoy a vast array of content, all available to your ears.
Embrace convenience and versatility with ListenLater. Visit ListenLater.net to start your free trial today. Redefine how you consume information, one podcast at a time.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
And with the new App Ad Blocking feature in v5.0, it extends the powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking protection to all apps including News apps, Social media, Games and other browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
So, join the community of over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Cory Doctorow wrote a column for Locus about the exact difference between exciting AI stories and AI horror stories:
I was writing an article and I wanted to cite something I’d heard an expert say on a podcast. I couldn’t remember which expert, nor even which podcast. So I downloaded Whisper, threw 30 or 40 hours’ worth of podcasts I’d recently listened to at it, and then, a couple hours later, searched the text until I found the episode, along with timecode for the relevant passage. I was able to call up the audio and review it and match it to the transcript, correct a few small errors, and paste it into my essay….
Hearst’s King Features, who published the [AI-generated] “Summer Reading Guide,” replaced 30 interns, 10 newsroom journalists, and an entire fact-checking department with one freelancer….
There’s a bit of automation theory jargon that I absolutely adore: “centaurs” and “reverse-centaurs.” A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace. That would be [Hearst freelancer Marco] Buscaglia: who was given an assignment to do the work of 50 or more people, on a short timescale, and a shoestring budget.
I think this is exactly right. AI working for us is great. Us working for AI is a horror story.
[Via Doctorow’s own mind-expanding Plura-list newsletter.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
(leonov.o / Shutterstock.com)I had a thought while I was watching the latest iPhone launch event—other than, “This is what I’m doing with my free time?”—and it’s that iPhones are basically cars. It finally did it. The real Project Titan was the iPhones Apple made along the way.
Ben Thompson wrote a piece on Stratechery where he was inspired by the “sugar water” Steve Jobs story, but I feel like we’re in beep-beep, vroom-vroom town for sure.
Every fall, we get a new model, and there’s always a debate about whether or not it’s a significant update or if there’s a new body style. Even though the iPhone 17 Pro is a totally new design, it maintains an overall appearance that’s evolutionary. There are also certain invisible updates in materials and processes that engineers are proud of but aren’t always apparent to buyers. It bonds the ceramic coating on at the factory, etc.
They’re still big changes, and Apple’s marketing team uses a lot of words for them, but it’s like expecting the general public to watch unveilings to get info on breakthroughs in adaptive dampers.
On a less savory note, Apple is also like an automaker in that we have big debates about how and where the products are manufactured. Where the jobs are and who can take credit for them, and economic investment. These conversations have recently been with people in very high places, where Tim Cook talks about all the good Apple does for America. It brings to mind the famous misquote of Charles Wilson:
Senator Hendrickson: Well now, I am interested to know whether if a situation did arise where you had to make a decision which was extremely adverse to the interests of your stock and General Motors Corp. or any of these other companies, or extremely adverse to the company, in the interests of the United States Government, could you make that decision?
Mr. Wilson: Yes, sir; I could. I cannot conceive of one because, for years, I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable.”
Apple even gets into anti-union shenanigans and regulatory capture, just like a real car company!
It even has a whole suite of financial services to help lower the barrier to iPhone sales, like the financial incentives offered for cars. With the iPhone Upgrade Program, you’re basically leasing.
Let’s look at what’s on the showroom floor:
- iPhone 16e is a decontented older mid-size SUV. Its backup camera is a lot worse. It offers a lower starting price and can be used to talk people into considering spending a little more for the iPhone 17.
- iPhone 17 is a mid-size SUV. You can haul your stuff and use it for work or personal needs. No one’s going to think negatively about you owning one.
- iPhone Air is a luxury compact electric car. It doesn’t have great range, and isn’t as practical, but it’s smart-looking and well-appointed. These buyers want to stand out a little.
- iPhone 17 Pro is the luxury full-size SUV. It can do anything, but it’s expensive and huge. Almost no one will use all the features it offers, but it’s comforting to know they’re there in case they suddenly need them.
Naturally, this means the general public treats smartphone buying like they treat car buying. Some people want the newest, fastest ones. Some people think the old, smaller ones were better. People will buy specific models just because they come in a certain color. Others don’t care about any of the details as long as it has cargo space and isn’t “too expensive.” Maybe the kid will get the old one because they’re going off to college.
I’m not saying that makes the iPhone bad, or that a lack of excitement is a sign of failure. It’s simply a mature commodity. Just as with cars, there will always be people who want the latest and the greatest. Either because they want the best, or they want the status.
Back in 2007-2011, the iPhone was breaking new ground in capability; in what was functionally possible with software that worked on a global, mobile internet. Today, the smartphone has been integrated into all of our lives as a commonplace thing. We live in a market saturated with devices that are as capable as new devices, even if they are objectively worse.
Apple might engineer the best, most efficient, most refined updates to the iPhone hardware, but there’s no functional difference to explain to buyers how Apple is revolutionizing what the customers are capable of doing.
Both Ben Thompson and Jason Snell highlight Apple’s inability to produce compelling AI software that can enhance what customers can do with new iPhones. I largely agree—it doesn’t have to be LLM chatbots, but Apple hasn’t offered any alternative ideas for improving everyday quality of life.
Apple could have put 512 neural cores in the A19 chip, and it wouldn’t really matter, because Apple can’t tell us how buying a phone with that chip would improve our lives other than generic benchmarking. They have the fastest lap time around the Nürburgring, but no one has a Nürburgring at home.
I hope people enjoy their current cars/iPhones if they choose to buy or lease one. And if you don’t choose to get one, I wouldn’t feel too bad about not being overwhelmed with excitement. The next time you need one, you’ll get one, and it’ll be the culmination of all the best tech you missed. Think of all the tech that’s trickled down in both cars and phones over the years. Just like that.
If you’re pumped, and you have your preorder up, and your Apple stickers on your rear windshield, then good for you. You’ll get the best car Apple has made yet.
It was an expensive day. It’s always an expensive day. New iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods Pro made their debut, and this means that on September 19, many of us will be taking delivery of new Apple stuff. (The larger-than-normal credit-card bill comes later.)
Just because Apple’s selling lots of new stuff doesn’t mean you need to buy it all. (Who needs four new iPhones every year?!) But when it comes to upgrades, some products really jump out at me as more impressive and intriguing than others.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Big day on Tuesday, as iPhone Days usually are. I think Apple’s big event this year was actually more impressive than it’s been for quite a while, and despite the flurry of leaks and rumors, I still managed to be surprised by several elements. Individual features can leak, but sometimes a full view of the products doesn’t come until Apple has managed to tell its story and explain how they all fit together.
Powered by a good night’s sleep (I scored 98, Excellent!), here are some of my overall thoughts about what we saw on Tuesday:
Resetting the iPhone barNobody with a thirst for novelty is going to get too excited about the base-model iPhone, this year’s iPhone 17. Ever since the iPhone X arrived eight years ago, Apple has followed a pattern in which it offers a pricey, cutting-edge iPhone, as well as a more affordable model that’s built on less cutting-edge tech.
And yet this year’s iPhone 17 upgrades matter, because it’s reset the bar for what features a “regular” iPhone offers. (Let’s not talk about the iPhone 16e.) The base-model iPhone now offers a ProMotion display, taking that price point all the way up to a maximum 120Hz refresh rate, with support for refreshes down to 1Hz and an always-on display.
This is meaningful. Last year, Apple released an absolutely gorgeous ultramarine iPhone 16. I held it in my hand. I wanted it. What stopped me from buying it was that I couldn’t imagine no longer having an always-on display. Maybe other buyers faced a different show-stopper, like ProMotion or camera quality. But those barriers are what force iPhone buyers up the price scale and allow Apple to convert a $799 sale into a $999 or $1099 one.
This year, Apple is more or less abandoning ProMotion and always-on as iPhone Pro differentiators. That means habitual buyers of the lower-end phones will be getting a really substantial improvement when they next update their phones!
Apple has also chosen not to skimp on its new selfie camera, but is putting it in all these flagship models. Again, that’s not a choice it needed to make, but it decided that the new Center Stage camera was worth putting on all of these phones. Similarly, the base iPhone’s ultrawide camera joins its main camera at 48MP, a feature found on the pro phones too. So the big camera difference between the two models really is the lack of a third telephoto lens.
These decisions also help the iPhone Air, which is taking over the slot previously held by the iPhone Plus and iPhone Mini. When the Air was first rumored, it seemed obvious that it would lack access to a bunch of high-end features, but in the end, it’s picked up most iPhone Pro features. The Air understandably has a single camera and lesser battery life, but of course it has the new selfie camera, a ProMotion always-on display, and the like—because they’re de rigueur on iPhones now.
My gut feeling is that this move to consolidate previously pro phone features is a part of the churning of the waters that’s happening as we enter a potentially new era of iPhone designs. The iPhone Air is here, there are rumors of a folding model next year, and then it’s the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, and who knows what might be waiting for us then? The iPhone X ushered in our current era of iPhones; it feels like we’re on the precipice of whatever comes next, and getting the base-model iPhones up to speed is one of the first steps Apple needs to take before it springs forward with new designs and the next generation of cutting-edge features.
Price increases the Apple wayApple doesn’t like to just come out and say, “Welp, prices are higher now.” The company places an inordinate amount of pride into releasing upgraded products at identical price points. But this year, it raised iPhone prices, sort of, kind of.
Start with the iPhone Air, which begins at $999, a slot that was previously occupied by the iPhone Pro and a full $100 more expensive than the iPhone Plus, which it’s replacing in the product line. Apple has converted one of its two base-model phones into a new boutique mid-range model with a fancy design; we’ll see how that works out for them. My gut feeling is that it’ll do better than the iPhone mini or iPhone Plus did, but I don’t know if that’ll be enough to satisfy Apple.
Then there’s the iPhone 17 Pro, which now starts at $1099, up from the $999 starting price introduced with the iPhone X. Apple has gone to great lengths to point out that the $1099 price is the same as the similarly-configured iPhone 16 Pro model last year, because the iPhone 17 Pro has 256GB of base storage, and the iPhone 16 Pro started at 128GB. Yes, of course, this is true, and it allows Apple to claim that it’s not really raising prices, but is just continuing to fill the old slots.
It doesn’t change the fact that the iPhone Pro can’t be bought for less than $1099, though. Some percentage of iPhone 16 Pro buyers probably opted for 128GB of storage, and that’s no longer an option. So it’s literally an increase in the price of admission for the iPhone Pro. But done in a careful, almost generous way? As generous as a $100 price hike can be, anyway.
Apple Watch via satelliteThe addition of satellite connectivity to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is logical. It’s a rugged device sold as being useful on far-off adventures. And yes, you probably will have your iPhone with you too, but who’s to say it’s on your person, and has full battery, when you get into a jam? More safety nets, I say.
While SOS is covered in all eventualities (and Apple has kicked the can again regarding satellite access on older iPhones), the Apple Watch Ultra 3 requires a cellular plan to make texts or send your location via Find My.
It seems weird, but think of it this way: Cellular SOS features are mandated by law. If you’re on Verizon and find yourself in an emergency with no Verizon service, your iPhone or Apple Watch will make an emergency call using another carrier’s cellular network. Nobody is allowed to die because they happened to be using T-Mobile in an area only covered by AT&T.
This means that Emergency SOS Via Satellite is a feature that only works when your device has no cellular connectivity from any carrier.
But texts (and location) are not like that. You can just send them whenever. And Apple has decided that those features are only intended as a fallback to cellular connectivity. In other words, you’re not allowed to not buy a cellular plan for your Ultra 3 and then use it as a free text communicator in the woods. Apple and Globalstar, its satellite partner, are probably quite concerned about not blowing out the data bandwidth on those satellites.
Apple’s camera shell gameIt’s apparent from all the product shots: the iPhone 17 Pro has three cameras, the iPhone 17 two, and the iPhone Air one. But if you listen to Apple, you’ll come away thinking that the iPhone 17 Pro has eight lenses, and the iPhone Air has four! Who are you going to believe, Apple or your eyes?
I get it. It’s marketing. But this continues a trend of Apple slicing its (very good) camera tech in a bunch of different ways in order to make things seem a bit more than they actually are.
Here’s what’s happening: Apple’s put 48 megapixel sensors in every single one of the cameras on its flagship iPhones. This started with the iPhone 14 Pro, and Apple has adjusted it quite a lot over the last few years. Those 48 megapixels can be processed in all sorts of ways. Apple can capture all 48 megapixels, or capture multiple binned 12-megapixel frames that gather more light and fuse them with a larger capture to create an optimal 24 megapixel image, or it can just use the pixels at the very center of the sensor to create a technically-optical “zoom” at a lower-resolution.
These different techniques allow Apple to balance image quality, file size, and the desire of the user to zoom in on scenes. They also allow Apple to market the 4x zoom on the iPhone Pro’s telephoto sensor as going to 8x, since if you go to 4x and then crop the center of the sensor data, you’ve effectively got an 8x optical zoom. Boom, two cameras! And now all three cameras can do it, so three becomes six! Throw in two macro modes and you’ve found how three iPhone 17 Pro cameras become eight, and how one iPhone Air camera becomes “four lenses in your pocket.”
The important thing to know about all of this is not that Apple’s fibbing, but that when Apple states that there are more cameras than appear to be there, it’s implying a level of equivalence of those cameras that doesn’t exist. They have different characteristics—of course they do—because they’re all different aspects of the same sensor.
Fortunately, Apple has designed the Camera app to make you not really worry about all this. You can point and zoom and shoot. But just be aware that one camera really is one camera, not four.
Apple Watch advantages and updatesIt’s logical that Apple wouldn’t announce new features that are designed for unreleased hardware at WWDC. That’s top secret stuff, rolled into the new operating systems only when the new hardware is announced. What’s less logical is when Apple keeps features secret all summer, even though they run on plenty of existing hardware.
I’m sure the announcement of the Apple Watch’s new hypertension alert feature helped bulk up the Apple Watch segment and reinforce its image as an important health device. But that feature also works on Series 9 and 10 and Ultra 2. The new sleep score feature also provided needed fiber to the Apple Watch segment, but it’ll work as far back as Series 6.
I get why Apple does it, but just so we’re clear, you don’t need to buy a new watch to get a sleep score. I got one this morning, courtesy of the watchOS 26 release candidate, which I installed on my Series 10 last night. It’s another feature built on the premise that you sleep with your Apple Watch, so I guess it makes sense that Apple Watch battery life keeps getting longer.
When Apple announced that new hypertension-alert feature, I was struck by what it says about the scale of Apple’s reach and the power of its health efforts. This is a major new health feature that—just like the last one (Sleep Apnea detection)—does not come out of the addition of a new sensor. Instead, Apple is using its health studies, powered by an army of Apple Watch-wearing users, to generate massive amounts of data and use it to find patterns that can indicate potential health issues.
Apple may not be the only actor who can play in this space, but it has enormous advantages stemming from the sheer number of Apple Watches out in the world and its control of hardware and software. And in turn, that scale helps generate a feature that will warn a million people of potential hypertension in the first year—another big number. Scale begets scale.
Prepare for a change in selfie behaviorSelfies matter, and they’re not just for kids. Most of the photos I have taken with my family over the last few years have been from the front-facing camera, because we rarely ask someone else to take our photo! But so many of our selfie gestures are based on tech limitations, and someone at Apple has decided that enough is enough, so Apple redesigned its selfie camera.
The new Center Stage camera is square, wide-angle, and high resolution (18MP), which means you won’t have to change what direction you hold the phone to change orientation. It’ll auto-stabilize, which is great for FaceTime (and also for the new feature that lets you record forward and back cameras simultaneously—because it’ll keep you in frame without you worrying about it). And of course, the Center Stage name means it’s using face detection to automatically zoom in and out depending on who is in the frame.
We’ll see how it all works in practice, but it’s entirely possible that in five years, everyone takes selfies entirely differently, because Apple decided to re-engineer that camera. It makes sense, I think: First, you add a front-facing camera, one of low quality but good enough for video chat. Then everyone embraces the existence of that camera to start taking pictures of themselves. Selfie culture grows, and the cameras get better, but maybe some of the underlying assumptions still stem from the early days? This is another turn of the crank, an attempt to legitimately address a load of selfie issues in one go, and I suspect it’s going to be a winner.
Apple silicon’s endgameWhy don’t they make the entire iPhone out of Apple silicon? Apple is getting there. The iPhone 16e introduced the C1, Apple’s first foray into manufacturing a cellular radio to replace the ones it’s been using from Qualcomm. The iPhone Air uses a somewhat upgraded C1X chip to do the same thing. It’s part of a gradual roll-out that will presumably culminate next year in a next-generation C2 chip powering all of Apple’s flagship phones, thus ending Apple’s relationship with Qualcomm as a hardware supplier. (I’d expect iPads to start using the C1 series this year, and it wouldn’t be a shock if Mac laptops joined the cellular party in the next year or two.)
Also in all new iPhone models is the new N1 chip, Apple’s branding for another chipset where it’s replacing a partner, in this case Broadcom. That chip is packed with Apple’s own radios for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread.
Toss in the A19 and you can see Apple’s future vision pretty clearly: it’s going to build everything it can itself, because when it can connect its custom software with custom hardware, it’s going to generate better products. Power efficiency is a big part of that, obviously. But it’s also about priorities. Broadcom and Qualcomm make parts for a variety of customers—Apple makes them only for itself. If there’s a feature Apple wants, it gets it. If there’s a feature Apple doesn’t want, it never gets built. And Apple knows its multi-year product plans in clear detail, something it’s not going to share with Qualcomm or Broadcom.
It’s the same advantage Apple got when it went from using Intel processors on the Mac to building its own. Now Apple has complete control of where it wants to go in terms of processor and wireless—and can build those products to work together, and work with its operating systems. This is one of those places where Apple just does things differently, and it keeps the company ahead of the crowd.
A sci-fi world comes closerEveryone in the tech industry can see it. It’s right out there, not too far away: Live translation. Apple joins the party this fall with its implementation, which uses AirPods to listen and relay that audio to an iPhone, which uses AI to translate spoken words from one language to another and then plays the translation back in the ears of the AirPods user.
Apple’s video demo is great, if pretty awkward when the iPhone user has to hold up their phone so that their interlocutor can read a translation on the screen. Apple’s second example—two people with their own AirPods and iPhones—is more like the dream. Imagine, for a moment, a world where anyone could speak with anyone else and have their statements automatically translated. It’s magical.
I’m pretty skeptical of how well Apple’s translation feature will work in practice today, but you have to start somewhere. Given how hard Apple, Google, and others are pressing on this feature, it really does seem inevitable. In a few years, the latency will come down, and the AI voice technology will probably be able to entirely erase the original person’s voice from your hearing and replace it with a translation spoken in a dynamic copy of that same voice.
Basically, I am really not sure how practical this stuff is going to be right now, but I can see the outline of where this is going, and it’s really exciting. I’m sure Apple sees that too. But I’m not sure I’m ready to use this translation feature out in the wild.
An iconic plateau to the futureIn introducing the iPhone Air, John Ternus referred to the stretched camera bump on the back of the new iPhones as an “iconic plateau.” Though this moniker is apparently informal—no capital letters—it reminded me of Apple’s tendency to name everything it does, like the Dynamic Island. The Dynamic Island was a creative solution to a physical hardware issue—cutouts in the screen for cameras—that turned unsightly blank spaces into part of a real-time status feature.
The iconic plateau strikes me as a bit similar. The camera bump existed because of the sheer physics of collecting light for camera sensors. But at some point, Apple seems to have looked at it and thought, what if we turn that bump into something more? This year’s iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro stuff more and more additional technology into that space. Most of the iPhone Air’s guts are in there, leaving very little beyond the screen and battery in the rest of the phone.
It actually makes sense, doesn’t it? We want our screens to be big, and batteries are vital. Screens are so large that tucking a little bit of battery behind them makes sense. What’s left? Oh, right, everything else. So all that stuff goes in the plateau, leaving the rest of the phone ultra-slim.
The iPhone Air may be an outlier right now, but I really wonder if it also augurs a future direction for iPhone design in general. Maybe not with designs quite as extreme as the Air, but just as the MacBook Air pointed in the general direction Apple’s laptops went over the next decade, I wonder if this approach—keep the bulk of the device thin and light while stuffing as much tech as possible in the thick part at the top—is informing Apple’s iPhone designs for the rest of this decade.
A victory for the color czarFinally: Welcome, Apple. Seriously. You finally made a pro-level iPhone with a real color. I haven’t seen the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro in person yet, but I’m optimistic that it’s going to mark the first time in a long time that Apple has opted to take one of its top-of-the-line phones and give it a color that isn’t mostly silver or mostly black.
I think I understand why it’s like this. The phone’s primarily made out of an aluminum unibody, and aluminum is easily anodized into all sorts of fun colors. But Apple still had to take the step of actually using a fun color and offering that to iPhone customers.
An orange iPhone Pro. I never thought I’d see the day. Congratulations to whoever is in charge of colors at Apple. You did it. (Now, about these watered-down colors on the iPhone Air…)
Thoughts on Apple’s iPhone colors this year, whether we’d try the new TechWoven cases, if we’re doing any AI-related work on our phones, and whether there’s still room for innovation in the iPhone compared to Apple Watch or AirPods.
Go to the podcast page.
I really enjoyed today’s Stratechery piece by Ben Thompson, which tries to understand how Apple can have an impressive roll-out of some really good new products, and yet it all seems so much quieter than it used to:
I have, for the last several years, noted how, from a Stratechery perspective, iPhone launches just aren’t nearly as big of a deal as they were when I first started. Back then I would spend weeks before the event predicting what Apple would announce, and would spend weeks afterwards breaking down the implications; now I usually dash off an Update that, in recent years, has been dominated by discussions about price and elasticity and Apple’s transition to being a services company.
What was shocking to me, however, was actually watching the event in real time: my group chats and X feed acknowledged that the event was happening, but I had the distinct impression that almost no one was paying much attention, which was not at all the case a decade ago. And, particularly when it comes to tech discussion, you can understand why: by far the biggest thing in tech — and on Stratechery — is AI, and Apple simply isn’t a meaningful player.
The circus was Smartphones for a while, but right now the circus is AI.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Maybe you heard about the Apple event. Or maybe you fell asleep.
Go to the podcast page.
I found myself thinking about satellite connectivity during today’s Apple event, during which the company announced that the Apple Watch Ultra 3 would include the feature. Back when the feature debuted on the iPhone 14 line, Apple said it would remain free for two years. When that period was up, Apple extended free coverage for another year. Which brings us to this year! Will people have to finally start paying?
The Verge’s Jay Peters found the answer:
iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users are getting another year of free access to satellite connectivity features, according to a footnote on Apple’s newsroom posts for the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro. “The free trial will be extended for iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users who have activated their device in a country that supports Apple’s satellite features prior to 12 a.m. PT on September 9, 2025,” Apple says.
Yep, we’re going to keep kicking that can right on down the road—probably forever, at least as far as the Emergency SOS features go—as I said previously, somebody dying because they didn’t pay the fee for satellites would put a real damper on that keynote montage.
However, it is worth noting that while the Apple Watch Ultra 3’s satellite features are likewise free for two years, using the Find My or texting features requires a carrier plan. Moreover, as Apple’s footnote reads: “To send and receive SMS/MMS from cellular models of Apple Watch over satellite, your paired iPhone must be powered on and connected to Wi-Fi or an active cellular network, but your iPhone doesn’t need to be nearby.” So you can’t just rely on your Apple Watch Ultra 3 for all your satellite texting needs, I guess.
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple ever does start directly charging for non-emergency satellite features, but I think it’s going to be a while yet before we find out.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
From the iPhone Air to the iPhone 17 models, from AirPods Pro 3 to the new Apple Watches, we break down all the announcements from the September Apple Media Event!
Go to the podcast page.
Apple crams a lot into its keynotes, but almost as notable is what it chooses not to talk about. Having had some time after today’s “awe-dropping” event announcing the iPhone 17 line, Apple Watch Series 11, and AirPods Pro 3, here are a few things I found out.
The new MagSafe battery is an iPhone Air exclusiveThere were no doubt some shouts of joy when Apple mentioned it had a new version of its MagSafe Battery, but if you want one of those to boost your phone’s longevity, be aware: it’s an iPhone Air exclusive. The key’s in the name “iPhone Air MagSafe Battery”—Apple says it “was created exclusively for iPhone Air” and only the iPhone Air is listed in the Compatibility section. Sorry iPhone 17/17 Pro users, you’re out of luck. (Alas, the same is true of the new iPhone bumper case too.)
FineWoven…lives!Apple introduced new “TechWoven” cases at this year’s event, but Apple’s previous attempt at a premium material, FineWoven, is not only still around, but is included in new products. There’s a brand new set of FineWoven MagSafe wallets in various colors to compliment the latest iPhone models, including a “Fox Orange.”
The iPhone Air is likely using binned chipsImpressive as it is that the new iPhone Air uses the same A19 Pro as the iPhone 17 Pro models, they aren’t quite as good: looking at the specs comparison page will show you that the Air boasts just 5 GPU cores to the 6 cores found on the Pro and Pro Max. Guess you won’t be doing important AI pipeline tasks on your new incredibly thin iPhone, oh well.
Live Translation isn’t just for AirPods Pro 3Apple spent some time talking about the new Live Translation features in AirPods Pro 3 (a feature that’s also available in other forms on the company’s various platforms), but don’t worry, you won’t be left out in the cold if you don’t buy the latest and greatest earbuds. The company’s fine print says “Live Translation with AirPods works on AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation and AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running iOS 26 and later.” You are free to travel about the world.
Apple Watch health feature availabilitiesLikewise, Apple Watch’s new health features—hypertension detection and the sleep score—are available on more than just the company’s latest devices. Hypertension detection works with Apple Watches with S9 and later processors (sorry, owners of the original Apple Watch Ultra), probably using the same sort of machine learning systems that enable the gesture detections. Sleep score appears more broadly available, dating back to the Apple Watch 6 and second-generation Apple Watch SE.
Operating system updates coming soonWhile there was no specific release date for Apple’s platform updates announced during the keynote, the company says iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS 26, and visionOS 26 (and presumably tvOS 26 and the HomePod update) will arrive on Monday, September 15.
Updated at 5:20pm Eastern to clarify that all platform updates are coming on Monday.
Nicole Mitchell of the Glasgow Times reports about a commercial shoot in late August:
Concerns have been raised about “excessive noise” during a recent commercial film shoot.
Merchant City and Trongate Community Council (MCTCC) say they received a complaint from a local resident about the noise and “other disruption” during filming which took place on Cochrane Street from Saturday, August 23 to Wednesday, August 27.
It’s understood the filming was for an Apple advert. A video taken of the shoot and shared by the Glasgow Times showed one actor ‘floating’ down from the roof of a building.
Hmm. An Apple advertisement featuring an actor floating down from the roof while using their iPhone? Seems like that might be promoting a very light iPhone of some sort.
I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later. (Update: Yep, it’s the iPhone Air all right.)
[Via Glasgow’s own James Thomson.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Before the iPhone, Apple took a shot at making the iPod a device that could do more than just play music. Amongst it: playing games.1 If you find yourself feeling nostalgic for that era, you can now revisit those classic games designed for the iPod—it just takes jumping through a few hoops, as Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland reports:
Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein.
The project has recently added the last missing game, Real Soccer 2009, to the archive, so it’s now complete. Apple has in the past revived one of those old games, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath for the rest of them to resurface in the App Store anytime soon.
- Apple cares about games! ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and also blocks all YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads
- search ads
- plus many more
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Like our vestigial appendix, which can sometimes burst and cause us trouble, the origins of “modern” networking date back so far that weird shapes and forms still guide us under the surface as we conduct our cyberspace 3D adventures. Reader Rick wrote in with a question about networking that relates to this:
I have disconnected my MacBook Pro from all external connections (Ethernet cable unplugged, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off). But if I look in Activity Monitor > Network, there are lots of packets in and packets out. How is this possible?
Let us shrink ourselves down, Fantastic Voyage-like (or Innerspace, if that’s more your speed), to look at what’s happening at the network interface level and unpick this seemingly unwanted activity.
Tales from the loopOperating systems derived in some fashion from Unix all have a “loopback” interface as part of their array of network interfaces. This term originated before the Internet, in the context of testing circuits. A loop test literally ensured that a signal would go to the far end of the circuit and return as expected. A failure meant something was wrong.
With the introduction of modems sending signals across phone lines, various loopback tests allowed checking local signals, the line over which data traversed, and the remote modem. As Internet pioneer Jack Haverty wrote in a 2017 post on an Internet Society technical mailing list:
By “looping a line” the NOC [network operations center] operator could determine what was likely to have failed – the modem at either end, the line itself (backhoe attack), or the interface card in the IMPs at either end of the line.1
For networking, a loopback interface lets a device talk to itself. The Unix loopback lets any part of the system, from the lowest level to applications or scripts, communicate via standard Internet networking. Applications may talk to each other this way, for instance, as it’s easier than setting up other kinds of inter-process or inter-application communications.
As with many things, like the digital world starting on January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC, the loopback interface remains a vestige.2
Because your devices talk to themselves constantly, disabling network interfaces will still make it seem as if your hardware is chatting. But you can drill down to make sure that it’s only being solipsistic.
Decoding network trafficUsing DEVONtechnologies’s free Neo Network Utility3 or from the command line, you can see a list of all current connections:
- Launch Neo Network Utility, click the Netstat button, select “Display the state of all current socket connections,” check Hostname resolution, and click Netstat.
- From the command line, enter
netstat -a -p tcp.
Both methods will take a moment because of the time required to look up all the IP addresses and find their corresponding hostnames (the first part of the name that’s local and the domain name).
Network Utility provide a slightly friendly front end to a list of active network connections.You will see way too many results! But it’s good to have a sense of what normal looks like. Among the connections out to the rest of the world, you will see entries like this:
tcp4 0 0 localhost.49330 localhost.64862 ESTABLISHED
That localhost is what you’re looking for. The loopback interface has the IPv4 address of 127.0.0.1 and IPv6 address of 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1, which shortens to just ::1.4 These are mapped to the local hostname of, literally, localhost. When you see that name, it’s a connection from your Mac back to itself, whether by IPv4 or IPv6.
Now, if you disconnect all your network interfaces, you should only see localhost entries. To turn off your connections, the best way is through these steps:
- Go to System Settings > Network.
- Control-click/right-click each interface marked Connected in turn.
- Choose Make Service Inactive. There’s no prompt—it just happens.
Disable network interfaces to stop traffic from entering or leaving your MacAt this point, your network traffic should be shut down. If you re-run netstat above, you would see only localhost or similar loopback address connections.
However, there’s a complicated command-line invocation you can use that’s a bit simpler when you parse the output:
ifconfig | awk '/^[a-z].*: / { iface = $1 } /inet / && iface { print iface, $2 } /^[a-z]/ { iface = $1 }'
Paste the above in and press return, and you get a list of your active network interfaces and the assigned IP addresses. With my setup, including an active VPN via Tailscale, I see:
lo0: 127.0.0.1
en0: 10.0.0.42
en1: 10.0.0.22
utun8: 100.68.251.103
To decipher those, lo0 is the IPv4 loopback address; en0 is “Ethernet 0,” which is actually Ethernet; en1 is the Wi-Fi connection (Wi-Fi pretends to be Ethernet, which is a long story); and utun8 is the tunneling TailScale connection.
After disabling interfaces as described above, you should see just this:
lo0: 127.0.0.1
Your computer is safely murmuring to itself. To enable network interfaces, return to the three steps above and choose Make Service Active.
For further readingYou might be interested in one or more Take Control Books that includes advice on networking, though none is quite as deep a dive as the above: Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices or Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security. (Securing will be updated soon for the new Apple operating systems, and if you purchase the book today, you will receive the new version at no cost.)
If you want to use command-line tools with great facility, consult Joe Kissell’s Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- A backhoe attack is when someone is digging and severs phone wiring—local or potentially carrying thousands of calls—back in the days of the primacy of wireline telephone networks. Backhoes remain the enemy of fiber-optic and other cables. ↩
- Unix officially started its clock at that time. That is known as the “epoch.” Typically in a 32-bit signed integer, the epoch will end on 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. This Y2K38 or “year 2038 problem” needs to be solved. ↩
- A drop-in replacement for Apple’s venerable Network Utility, which was removed from macOS a few years ago. ↩
- How does this shortening work? In IPv6, which uses eight separated 8-bit numbers (each 0 to 255), any entry between colons that’s zero can be omitted. Multiple sets of leading zeros can be omitted (or “compressed“) as well, leading to just an unambiguous
::1. ↩
Now that David Ellison owns Paramount, what’s next? Also, your letters and our TV picks! [Downstream+ subscribers also get: K-Pop Demon Hunters, Wheel & Jeopardy & Sesame Street stream, Apple TV+ price hike, and binging “The Paper.”]
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Footnote Accessories for sponsoring Six Colors this week for the OneSnap.
The OneSnap is a MagSafe-compatible wireless charger that delivers up to 15W of fast power to Qi-enabled devices and even your Apple Watch. Engineered with a soft-touch surface and multi-layer charging protections, OneSnap keeps your devices secure while ensuring consistent performance.
Compact and premium in design, OneSnap is built for travel and includes a convenient travel case to keep everything neatly organized wherever you go.
Learn more and purchase now at OneSnap Wireless Charger | Footnote Accessories Co.
Writing at The Verge (paywalled), Ash Parrish talks to Apple Arcade senior director Alex Rothman about the state of the service. It’s not the most in-depth of interviews, but it’s always interesting when an Apple executive is willing to go on the record. This part in particular jumped out at me:
“By no means are we going all into only IP,” Rothman said. “It’s a broad mix, because we have a broad player base.” And while Rothman understands the criticisms Arcade has faced, he says Apple is invested in Arcade for the long haul. “We care very deeply about games,” he said. “Not just the Arcade team, it’s across the company.” [emphasis added]
I’m sure there are things that Apple likes about Arcade, like having a big backlog of games to point to (Rothman says there are more than 250 now). I’m also interested by Apple working as a publisher to bring together developers and IP holders; that’s a smart use of the company’s clout.
But the idea that Apple cares “very deeply” about games? It’s pretty hard to stomach that after all these years. Arcade feels pretty scattershot to me; I can’t remember the last time I played a game there. Like, I’d wager, many other customers, I get the service for free as part of the Apple One bundle, and I definitely get the feeling that the higher echelons of Apple see it as little more than a “nice to have” value-add. I’d like to be proven wrong, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Google’s antitrust woes (or lack thereof), encounters with buggy apps in betas, camping tech, and how thin is too thin when it comes to technology.
Go to the podcast page.
For more than a decade, we’ve all been wondering why Instagram doesn’t have an iPad app. I’m not sure we ever got a good answer—but earlier this year reports said one was coming, and here we are—on Wednesday Instagram released an app update that supports the iPad:
When designing Instagram for iPad, we wanted to take advantage of the bigger screen to give people more features with fewer taps, while keeping it simple. We’ve made it easier to catch up on your messages and notifications with layouts that display both tabs. When you watch reels, you can expand the comments while the reel stays at full size, making it easy to catch up on the best reactions without missing a moment. It’s the Instagram you love, now with more space to play.
The app update is rolling out globally and works on iPads that support iPadOS 15.1 and later. Instagram says the tablet design will also follow for Android tablets.
While messages, notifications, and reels do feel more expansive on the new app, the standard view still feels… pretty empty. I’m glad the app is fully iPad native now, but it would sure be nice if Instagram considered what might be an elevated tablet experience. (I guess we can stop waiting for the app and start waiting for it to be better instead!)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Well, the good news is, all three hosts are here this time. Two of them are in Lex’s office. One of them is not a nickel.
Go to the podcast page.
Jason and Myke preview what will happen at next week’s Apple event. What form might a thinner iPhone Air take? Will the AirPods Pro come roaring back? Is the Apple Watch Ultra in store for an upgrade? To the winner goes the glory.
Go to the podcast page.
Craig Hockenberry of the Iconfactory on what troubles him about Liquid Glass in macOS Tahoe:
If you’re someone who’s only using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps to get stuff done, changes to your desktop appearance aren’t going to be disruptive. It’s also likely that you’ll appreciate changes that make it look like your phone.
If you’re doing anything more complex than that, your response to change will be much different.
Professionals on the Mac are like truck drivers. Drivers have a cockpit filled with specialized dials, knobs, switches, microwave ovens, refrigerators, and pillows that are absolutely necessary for hauling goods across country. Those of us who are making movies, producing hit songs, building apps, or doing scientific research have our own highly specialized cockpits.
And along comes Alan Dye with his standard cockpit, that is beautiful to look at and fun to use on curvy roads. But also completely wrong for the jobs we’re doing. There’s no air ride seat, microwave oven, or air brake release. His response will be to hide these things that we use all the time behind a hidden menu.
The iPhone has utterly changed Apple’s priorities as a company. It generates, directly or indirectly, most of Apple’s revenue and profit. But it’s also had knock-on effects: The popularity of the iPhone has driven more people to the Mac. The proportion of Mac users who are “using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps” has risen, probably markedly.
The problem, as Hockenberry points out, is that the Mac is also a professional tool designed for people with very specific, technical use cases that go beyond the email-web-messaging trifecta. And it feels to him like Apple’s lack of focus on those users is increasingly problematic for the platform.
So what happens now? In many ways, it makes good financial sense for Apple to steer the Mac in a direction that feels familiar to iPhone users and pleases those casual Mac users. They’re probably the majority of Mac users! But what about the Mac as a platform for professional users, who use the Mac as a truck, not a car?
I don’t know what the answer is, and Hockenberry’s suggestion that it might lead technical users like him to look for an exit from the Mac platform is deeply troubling. Can the Mac ever possibly be both a truck and a car? This year Apple’s introducing a second mode for iPad users who want to manage windowing like a Mac; is this the future fate of the Mac, too?
It would be a sad and darkly funny thing if the Mac becomes the most popular it’s ever been at the expense of the users who kept it alive over the last couple of decades. But what it wouldn’t be is surprising.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Ultimate 3-in-1 Charger for Life on the GoThe OneSnap is a MagSafe-compatible wireless charger that delivers up to 15W of fast power to your Qi-enabled devices—and even your Apple Watch.Simply place your device on the pad for fast, efficient charging with precise magnetic alignment every time.
Engineered with a soft-touch surface and multi-layer charging protections, OneSnap keeps your devices secure while ensuring consistent performance.
Compact and premium in design, OneSnap is built for travel and includes a convenient travel case to keep everything neatly organized wherever you go.
Learn more and purchase now at OneSnap Wireless Charger | Footnote Accessories Co.
The Find My system lets you find lost things and alerts you when you leave something behind. But because devices (things that can contact the Internet) and items (things like AirTags that can transmit Bluetooth signals) are so trackable, it means you have valid concerns when something you own could be followed by someone you don’t know.
My pal Lex Friedman, known to all as a stand-up guy (he does comedy, too), wrote me a few weeks ago with a question on that front:
A few years ago, I bought AirPods Max from Amazon. They were used, like new. They’re great. They’re linked to my Apple ID. It’s wonderful. Except they’re also linked to someone else’s Apple ID. Which I know because iOS constantly warns me that the original owner can see where I live and where I go.
Is there anything I can do to permanently disconnect the old owner from potentially having access to these AirPods?
Indeed, there is! And Lex did it. And it worked. As usual, you can jump ahead if you don’t want to learn the fascinating background and want to skip to the chase. (Lex would read the whole thing.)
An invisible glowing network of location transmissionApple has grown its Find My ecosystem slowly over the years into the current octopus of coverage with which it girdles the world. Initially designed to help track iPhones—lost or stolen, but probably stolen—you can now keep tabs on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. A few years ago, Apple added or improved tracking for audio hardware sold under its name or the Beats brand.
Broadly, Apple labels these things devices: Anything that can connect directly to the Internet to update its location or anything that has a paired relationship with a device that it can relay through to report its location.
Apple also introduced a second kind of thing, which it calls items (as in Find My items): initially AirTags, then followed by Apple-licensed third-party tracking hardware, now available from about two dozen companies, who compete on form factor, battery life, and recharging capability.
To prevent iPhones from being stolen, erased, and reused, Apple added Activation Lock over a decade ago. It later extended it to the iPad, Mac, and Watch. When you disable Find My on a device, this also disables Activation Lock. Activation Lock can be removed remotely, too, by removing the device from your set of Apple hardware in Settings > Your Name (iPhone/iPad), System Settings > Your Name (Mac), or via icloud.com/find.
After the AirTag was introduced, Apple added Find My Lock, which keeps AirTags and third-party Find My items from being reset and used with other devices. Because audio hardware is not exactly a “device” and not exactly an “item,” this lock applies to them, too.
Originally called Pairing Lock, you couldn’t remove this connection unless the item was within Bluetooth range of your paired device. However, Apple updated the AirTag and item firmware, and now you can remove it while you are not within range using the Find My app (iPhone, iPad, or Mac) in the Items tab.
I spy someone named LexLex’s AirPods Max existed in a limbo, neither fully his nor the original owner’s.Lex bought his AirPods Max used. He was able to pair them with his iPhone and see them in his Apple Account. However, their location never appeared for him—and iOS warned him the original owner could see his location.
This happened because the original owner didn’t carry out all the necessary steps before selling. You can pair AirPods 3, AirPods 4 (ANC), AirPods Pro (all models), and AirPods Max with multiple Apple Accounts. However, Apple mentions in a footnote to one of their support documents, “…only the person who turned on the Find My network can see them in the Find My app. You may also get an alert if someone else’s AirPods are traveling with you.”
Lex was not precisely concerned about this, as he didn’t know who the former owner was. But it’s a little bit of a worry, because you don’t really want to have your whereabouts known to a random person, either.
I’d also like to know why the former owner apparently didn’t see a random set of AirPods Max in Find My and remove them—perhaps they never use Find My or have lost access to the Apple device with which the AirPods Max were associated. And the Apple Account. Because the AirPods Max don’t appear in your Apple Account, only in a native Find My app, that’s a possibility.
Fortunately, the solution was easy. It just required Lex trusting that I knew what the heck I was suggesting. That’s what friends are for.
Lex first removed the AirPods Max from his Apple Account by using Find My. Here’s how you do this:
- Go to the Find My app; let’s use the iPhone/iPad version as the example here.
- Tap the Devices button. (Audio hardware appears under that tab.)
- Select your audio device. In my example, that’s my AirPods Pro.
- Swipe to the bottom and tap Remove and confirm to remove.
You use the Find My app’s Devices tab to find audio hardware (left). Select a device, tap Remove, and then you’re warned about what happens next (right).This action removes the Find My Lock, removes the audio device from your Apple Account, and unpairs the device from Bluetooth.
Lex confirmed that the AirPods Max no longer appeared in his Apple Account or in Find My. He followed the normal procedure to pair the headphones again. And, lo and behold, he saw them in Find My! My usual fee ($0.00) applied.
For more readingMy book Take Control of Find My and AirTags covers all the ins and outs of the increasingly baroque but increasingly helpful Find My network and technology. If you’re trying to track your car or find it in a parking lot, keep an eye on baggage in transit, discover where your pet has disappeared to, or need to recover a lost or stolen laptop, the book will help. Plus, tons of information and tips about preventing unwanted tracking, and what to do if you believe someone is tracking you—or attempting to—without your knowledge.
A new edition is coming in a few weeks with updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and watchOS 26. Purchase today, and you will get a free update to the new versions (and all later updates to the same edition).
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
John Scalzi:
For the new release of the Pixel 10 Pro (and the 10 Pro XL, which is mostly the same phone, just larger), Google has introduced something called the “Pro-Res Zoom,” a process by which, once you zoom in with the camera over about 30x zoom, after you’ve snapped the photo, Google will run it through an “AI” processor, not to bring out the details that are actually there, but to make up details that seem reasonable to assume are there, based on whatever processing algorithm Google is currently using. It then outputs the result of this guessing into your phone, alongside the original photo. Sometimes it looks pretty good! Sometimes it does not! But in neither case is what’s being outputted a photo. Rather, you now have a picture, or an illustration, based on a photo. It’s no more a real photo than it would be if someone made a cartoon version of the photo. The verisimilitude at that point is the same.
For the record, the iPhone camera does the same thing, at least to a certain degree, though perhaps not as much as Google is doing here.
One of the great things about smartphones is that they have enormous processing power to bring to bear on constructing a gorgeous photo out of fundamentally limited camera hardware. Our phones take multiple images with different exposure brackets and run them through complex image processing pipelines to make something shot with a tiny sensor look like something shot with a much larger lens.
But this is the trade-off, and the problem with using ML models on photography is, as Scalzi writes, the departure of the image from reality and into the world of illustration. If you take a zoomed-in picture of a strawberry and it ends up turning into an ML-generated gorgeous photorealistic strawberry, does it matter? Maybe not if you’re sharing it to Instagram. But it’s important to remember that what you’re seeing, beyond a certain point, is not reality but a computer’s interpretation of what reality probably looked like.
(That said, the round stop sign in Scalzi’s sample image is… really something.)
Update: DP Review has a bunch of samples.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Quip for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground. Quip takes a very different approach.
Quip is a supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, designed to feel like a natural extension of the OS. It gives you full control over your clipboard history, syncs seamlessly across devices with iCloud, and introduces Super Shortcuts—a built-in text expansion system that lets you paste signatures, links, or entire snippets anywhere with a quick trigger.
But what really makes Quip unique is Quip Intelligence: secure, on-device AI that keeps your clipboard clean and useful. It fixes broken links, removes tracking junk, normalizes messy formatting, cleans up code blocks, avoids duplicates, and learns from you—all in real time, right on your device.
Whether you’re managing projects, writing code, or just copying links, Quip makes your clipboard fast, searchable, and surprisingly powerful.
You can try Quip free on the App Store or learn more at bzgapps.com/quip.
Is the era of tech giants allowing their customers to secure their data coming to an end? We also discuss AltStore picking a fight with Apple, and Apple’s calculated response, rumors of robots, a rumor source’s apology, and the future of Ted Lasso.
Go to the podcast page.
I had a problem. I wanted to put a stray E-Ink device, which I had sort of given up on, back into action. It has a color screen, but my attempts to write out color graphics were coming up empty. I turned to the Internet’s Dr. Drang for help:
A week or so ago, Jason Snell asked if I could help with a problem he was having using the Python Imaging Library (PIL) . He wanted to update his e-ink status board with color images, as he now has the color e-ink display that Dan Moren uses. But he couldn’t get consistent results as he tried to use PIL to change the color of black pixels to different colors in a set of GIF images that were overlaid on his calendar background.
Read on for some adventures in python image handling!
Related: Dr. Drang also wrote a piece about my approach to financial charts, based on my interview with Allison Sheridan last week. I enjoyed reading the judgment of someone far more versed in charting than I am.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Jason was on Allison Sheridan’s CCATP podcast last week to discuss how he creates his Apple financial charts. It’s full of nerdy fun like how he decides when to use a serape chart vs. a bar chart, how he calculates a rolling average, how he gets the data for the charts, and how he gets the charts from Apple Numbers into his website.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.
So, join the community of over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Sobering story from the Washington Post‘s Joseph Menn (paywalled, unfortunately—here’s a BBC article that confirms it) that the United Kingdom’s government has mandated Apple provide a backdoor for access to end-to-end encrypted data in every country, combined with a gag order preventing the company from disclosing this fact to its users:
One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security. The person deemed it shocking that the U.K. government was demanding Apple’s help to spy on non-British users without their governments’ knowledge. A former White House security adviser confirmed the existence of the British order.
While law enforcement has long been able to access encrypted data for which Apple holds the keys, this move would reportedly apply to end-to-end data in which the user holds the keys, such as Apple’s Advanced Data Protection. This law would target end-to-end encrypted data from Google and Meta as well.
This is red alert, five-alarm-fire kind of stuff. Providing a backdoor would be worrying enough for reasons that should be obvious to anybody who knows the barest inkling about technology—to wit, that there exists no mechanism to keep such a tool out of the hands of malicious actors—but the fact that it would apply beyond the UK borders to other countries is a staggering breach of sovereignty. And, moreover, as Menn points out, such a move would no doubt embolden other powers to ask for access to the same capabilities—such as China.1
Furthermore, requiring that Apple not disclose this is a massive violation of individual rights, letting people go on about their lives under the assumption that their data is safe and secure when in fact it is anything but. It’s hard for me to envision how this doesn’t open Apple up to massive liability in the eventuality—inevitable, to my mind—that this backdoor is compromised by those looking to steal data.
As far as we know, this has not yet been enacted, but the Post report says that while Apple can appeal, it cannot delay in its compliance during that appeal. Ironically, the biggest impediment might come in the form of the European Union, as Apple apparently argued that the implementation would undermine the European right to privacy.
Given how secretive all this is, the most troubling part is that we might not know how it shakes out until it’s too late.
- Also, given the current administration of the United States, it is difficult to imagine it would be far behind in supporting the creation of such a backdoor. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Will Carroll returns on Super Bowl week, and we discuss Super Bowl 4K, Tubi, and the enduring power of communal live events. Also: ESPN Flagship and Fox’s streaming play, a new RSN is heard from, Apple and MLS make tweaks, your letters, and TV picks!
Go to the podcast page.
What a wild story. While it’s been rumored that Apple researchers have been working on robots, now those researchers have published their results, including a pretty amazing video.
Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:
A team of robotics researchers at Apple have designed and prototyped a lamp-like robot with lifelike movements, according to a blog post and accompanying video published last month on the Apple Machine Learning Research website. The lamp, which reminds us of the cute Pixar mascot Luxo Jr., may hint at Apple’s future plans.
If we know anything about Apple is that forthcoming products do not show up in research papers and videos before they’re released. But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t intending on using this sort of tech in some specific applications down the road.
Gurman’s original report said that Apple “has developed an advanced table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around, they said.” This sure sounds like it’s related to whatever Gurman’s sources were talking about.
I’m not sure I’d bet on anything like what’s depicted in the video becoming a product anytime soon, but it’s a pretty amazing video nonetheless.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s been a year since the Vision Pro arrived, and its impact on the world has been nearly nonexistent. Is this a surprise? At the time, I wrote that it was “speculative and impractical.” That judgment still stands. The Vision Pro is simultaneously one of the most impressive and impractical products Apple has ever developed. A year on, I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone buy one. It’s a glimpse of a potential future and a developer kit for potential future Apple platforms, but that’s about it.
Since the Vision Pro is a product about the future, let’s talk about the future, then. Where is this thing going, if anywhere? But first, it’s worth also considering how we got here.
It’s better than beforeI’ve got plenty of complaints about how Apple has handled the Vision Pro rollout. There was too much hype for a product like this, it hasn’t produced enough immersive video content despite immersive video being the product’s most eye-popping feature, and in general it has failed to attract enough eager developers ready to build the next big thing.
However, I have to compliment Apple on doggedly improving the product itself. VisionOS offered a bunch of improvements, including new environments, useful new gestures, and keyboard breakthrough. Apple also added spatial personas, which are perhaps the product’s most astounding feature. Personas were, when the product shipped, kind of a disaster. But after a bunch of upgrades and the introduction of free-floating personas in a 3-D space in FaceTime, they’ve gone from being a joke to being brilliant.
Another great feature, Mac Virtual Display, also got a major update with the addition of support for virtual widescreen views that let you use a Mac with an enormous virtual monitor wherever you go.
Over the last year, visionOS has felt like a platform that is moving forward… slowly, but still moving. That’s good, because there’s much more to be done.
What Vision Pro is good atLet’s consider our assets, shall we?
Vision Pro is a tremendous video player. I’ve watched college football games on enormous floating TV screens while in a tiny hotel room. I’ve watched 3-D movies in environments superior to any dimly-lit 3-D screening room. I’ve watched Star Trek episodes playing on a virtual television sitting on a table as if it were a real object. And I’ve watched every single second of immersive video Apple has released.
Of course, all of these things I’ve done alone, not with my family, because Vision Pro is a solo device. That’s just part of the deal, and so for me it’s more of an entertainment device for travel or when I’m home alone, not part of any routine. If you live alone, you may feel differently.
3-D movies can be good. Immersive video is great, though, and has the potential to be a real game-changer. And yet it seems that the existence of devices like the Vision Pro wasn’t the only factor limiting the creation of next-generation video content. Apple and its partners have struggled mightily to generate anything of substance in its 180-degree immersive video format. The addition of cameras like the one from Blackmagic that can shoot immersive video should potentially open things up, but it’s clear that shooting and doing post-production on immersive stuff is just brutally hard, or expensive, or slow, or maybe all of those things.
If there’s a single feature that would actually sell Vision Pros, it would be the creation of some sort of killer immersive video content. It could be a series of recordings of live theater performances, or sporting events, or… I don’t know what else. But I know that a motivated theater fan or sports fan with a comfy bank account wouldn’t think twice about paying $3500 for a device that actually enabled an ongoing series of immersive experiences. None of that stuff exists right now, though. It feels like a series of tech demos, though I really did like Edward Berger’s short immersive film “Submerged”.
I’ve also appreciated Sandwich Video’s experiments with the platform. The Television app is really fun, since it plays videos on augmented-reality TV sets you can place in your environment. I had hoped there would be more apps like this, that allow me to populate my world with things that look like physical objects but are actually just software. (Maybe someday.) And the Theater app is trying to bring a broad spectrum of internet content into a virtual movie theater environment.
Beyond video, I’ve found Vision Pro to be an excellent tool for shifting my own personal context. When I’m feeling frustrated or distracted and need to buckle down and get to work, I have frequently put on the Vision Pro, popped in my AirPods Pro, and dialed in an immersive environment (Joshua Tree is my favorite) so I can work with zero distractions.
I wish there were more productivity options in visionOS—I’m mostly still writing using Markdown in the fairly simple Runestone editor—but it gets the job done, and I can always break out my Mac and use a virtual display while sitting on a bed or couch and getting out of my usual desk routine. (I wrote a good deal of this article sitting on the couch, typing into a MacBook Pro, while inside Joshua Tree.)
And, yes, Mac Virtual Display is a winner. It’s not perfect—the video quality of the Vision Pro display is a little fuzzier than a real Retina Display—but it lets me use my laptop in any context, in any space. Laptops are actually kind of bad for you ergonomically since the keyboard is physically close to the display. In Virtual Display mode, I can float the display higher up, allowing me to view it at a more comfortable angle. And thanks to Universal Control, I can operate visionOS apps from my Mac keyboard and trackpad as well. The new wide and ultrawide settings add even more screen space, which is a huge deal for many users of multiple monitors.
And Vision Pro excels as a remote collaboration tool. While so few people have these devices that it’s hard to test, I’m fortunate to know a few people in my line of work who have bought them. We set up an every-two-weeks meeting inside FaceTime using Spatial Personas, and it is legitimately the next best thing to being there in person. Spatial Personas exist in real space, casting shadows. They’ve got heads and shoulders and arms and hands so that you can see facial expressions and hand gestures. When someone gets up and walks around in real space, their persona does so in virtual space. The audio is perfectly spatial and adds to the effect.
Throw in SharePlay, which also works surprisingly well in this context, and you’ve got the start of a real remote collaboration opportunity for people who work together but are very far apart. And just on a personal level, it’s special to be able to spend time with my far-flung group of friends and feel as if we’re just hanging out and shooting the breeze. That’s a thread for Apple to follow here as it envisions the future of this platform.
I also want to generally cite how good I think visionOS is as a computing platform. This is Apple trying to build an entirely new “spatial computing” metaphor on the back of the work it has done in other areas, and I think it’s a great start. There’s more refinement to be done everywhere, but I legitimately love moving windows around and resizing things, and opening apps in visionOS. It’s delightful. I just wish I was doing more with that. I’ve got a sleek designer hammer; now I need nails.
What I’ve learnedIn the early days of trying out the Vision Pro, I used it a lot. I wrote in my original review that “I have been able to use it for around six hours a day without discomfort.” It’s true! It can be done! But I never use it for marathon sessions anymore. Thanks to the Belkin Head Strap that Apple should’ve included in the original Vision Pro package, I’m at the most comfortable I’ve ever felt inside the Vision Pro. But really, it’s more of a two- or three-hour session at most.
The problem is that I rarely find myself needing to use the Vision Pro. It’s not that I don’t enjoy using it… in fact, every time I put it on, I find myself wanting to give myself additional reasons to keep on using it because it’s so much fun in there! But the impetus to find a safe place to sit, take off my glasses, slip on a VR headset, and jack into cyberspace doesn’t come along that often. There’s enough of a barrier there that it only happens maybe once or twice a week, at most. (This is also true of my poor, neglected Meta Quest headset, which is super fun to use to play games… but which I also use way too rarely.)
This is the current challenge of Vision Pro: It needs to give users reasons to use it, and it needs to have enough of them to keep them using it. Right now, putting on the Vision Pro tends to lead to a short session in which I do the one thing I wanted to do in there, and then I cast about trying to find reasons to stay… and then I give up. I need more reasons to stay—more apps, more experiences, more use cases. And I need reasons to put it on.
What needs to happen nextI have no idea how long this Vision Pro hardware is going to remain current, but I hope Apple keeps pushing its software forward. Once Siri has been upgraded and App Intents support has been added to the package, Apple Intelligence could potentially be a major upgrade to visionOS. I’m surprised how little I use Siri in visionOS, despite the fact that it’s responsive and always understands what I’m saying (since I’m wearing the device I’m talking to).
Virtual environments are a winning part of the Vision Pro experience, and Apple needs to keep pushing on that front. Environments constructed for use inside individual apps should be able to be used anywhere in the OS. (I’d love to write an article while sitting atop Avengers Tower from the Disney+ app, for example.) Apple should also build some more boring environments that might be more conducive to some people’s focus. They can’t all be Bora Bora, folks.
Most obviously, Apple needs to reach out to developers and encourage visionOS as a platform for experimentation. That probably means throwing out the rulebook and doing things like funding the development of apps, supplying free developer kits, and generally investing in the platform if they want it to succeed. I still believe there’s a killer app or two out there to be discovered, but Apple needs to use some of its plentiful financial resources to encourage developers to spend their time on a platform that’s still in its infancy. It’ll be worth it.
I also keep wondering how much more useful the Vision Pro would be if it could run (for example) all iPad apps, all iPhone apps, and maybe even all Mac apps (without an intermediary). The lack of availability of compatible apps is a black eye for the platform, and Apple needs to make greater efforts to get developers on board, even if it’s via compatibility with their existing apps.
On the hardware side, Apple needs to push as hard as it can to get the price of this device down. I couldn’t believe the early rumors that it would cost over $2000, and look at where we ended up. I actually don’t have any complaints about the specs of the existing device—Apple really did spare no expense. The issue is that it’s all so expensive. So Apple needs to figure out what hardware isn’t actually necessary and get the price down above all else. Cutting the price of the Vision Pro in half won’t make it a hit or even a big seller, but every single dollar that gets lopped off the price of a future version will increase the number of devices sold.
Is this the future?Here’s the big question: Does the Vision Pro represent a product that’s on a pathway to the future of computing, or is it a dead end?
The Vision Pro represents something inevitable: At some point, we will wear things over our eyes that annotate the world around us. The Vision Pro is Apple’s first attempt to create a product that will lead in that direction. It’s big, clumsy, and expensive because that’s the best anyone can do right now. That’s okay, so long as this is just the beginning of a longer process of evolution.
I don’t know if Apple’s vision of “spatial computing,” of a multi-windowed gestural interface, will be the final form such a device will take, or if it’ll be more of a voice-guided interface, or if everything will be intuited by an AI who’s tracking your eyes and monitoring your heart rate, or what. I do think it’s a fruitful path to explore for now, but there will probably come a time when Apple has to decide if the spatial computer that does everything an iPad, iPhone, or Mac can do is the same product as the wearable appliance that annotates your world as you walk around in it. That might be two products, or it might be that only one of those is a product people want.
Still, I can’t believe that in 2040, there won’t be something you can optionally wear on your face, like a pair of glasses that will mark up the world, whisper in your ear, listen to your speech, and shoot video of everything around you. The Vision Pro is the first step down that path. Apple needs to keep walking it. Let’s see where it leads.
Weird apps Apple should make, the strangest looking tech we own, what will it take for Vision Pro to go mainstream, and the discontinued tech products we’d revive.
Go to the podcast page.
Over the last couple decades, Apple has solidified its place at the top of the technology world. Dominant products like the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad have made it a household name, which in turn has elevated the profile of even its more modest businesses, like the Mac and the Apple TV.
Apple has gotten the production of its devices down to a science, and while it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t been wildly successful, it seems as though that success should afford it some opportunities to make things that are, well…less successful. (And no, I’m not talking about the Vision Pro.)
Because in that field of super stardom, something has gotten lost: the weird and wacky Apple. The Apple willing to take chances on products that won’t—and maybe never will—set the world on fire, but that might still find a viable home amongst its hundreds of millions of customers. Fortunately, there are some indications that the company may indeed be open to taking some of these chances—possibly even sooner than we think.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Apple on Tuesday took the wraps off a rare brand-new app: Invites. And it’s more like an Evite competitor, not something designed for business meetings. Invites lets you create events to which you can — yes, you guessed it — invite guests, complete with a playlist and a shared photo album. Events can be customized with a background photo.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone that helps users create custom invitations to gather friends and family for any occasion. With Apple Invites, users can create and easily share invitations, RSVP, contribute to Shared Albums, and engage with Apple Music playlists. Starting today, users can download Apple Invites from the App Store, or access it on the web through icloud.com/invites. iCloud+ subscribers can create invitations, and anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.
It’s interesting to note that this app is limited to iCloud+ subscribers—in other words, anyone who is paying Apple at least a little extra for cloud storage.
Invitations come in the form of an iCloud link, sent via Messages, Mail, or by copying the link onto your clipboard. You’ll need to tap through each individual person and choose a format and then send them an invitation manually via a slide-up sheet—it’s a lot more laborious than I expected. Invitations can be accepted by anyone on any platform, and don’t require people to use iCloud or be in the Apple ecosystem.
The app seems perfectly nice, though I do wonder how many people will choose to use a bespoke app over the many other options out there. Also, Apple’s long-term track record with “fun” one-off apps is a little spotty; is this just Clips again? Maybe I’ll send you an invitation for 2028 and we can all meet up then to find out.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I’m a Six Colors Subscriber and someone who likes to draw pictures of data, and Jason Snell kindly asked me if I wanted to have a crack and drawing some additional graphs based on the 2024 Report Card.
The figures Jason makes of his Report Card data are already very good, so there is no point in remaking them just for the sake of it. Instead, I’ll show a few additional views that try to bring out some of the structure in the data.
What kind of structure might we be interested in? We can think of three broad areas: the ordering and distribution of the answers; patterns of non-response to the questions; and the relational structure of answers by question and respondent. Let’s look at each one in turn.
Ordering and DistributionJason presents a view of the average scores for each of the questions, ordering the questions starting with the Mac and the iPhone on down to Developer relations and World impact. When presenting averages by category like this, it’s often useful to order the categories by the average. We can also get a quick sense of how things compare by scaling and centering the scores before plotting them. We calculate the grand mean for all questions together and subtract that number from each respondent’s answer. Then we calculate the standard deviation of the centered scores and divide each score by that number. Now we calculate the average scaled score for each question, and plot that from highest to lowest. Now can see how far away the average for each question is from the overall mean, in standard deviations.
The Mac and Hardware categories do substantially better than average; Vision Pro and Developer Relations substantially worse. If we hadn’t bothered to center and scale the data, but just plotted the means and ordered them, we’d see much the same pattern.
Scaling, centering, and calculating the means does necessarily summarize the data. The Report Card survey is just small enough that we should be able to get a good sense of the entire dataset, though. On the answers side, we can draw a bar chart of the distribution of answers for each question, and organize it into a faceted or “small-multiple” plot. This is a powerful way to see the overall distribition of answers directly.
We also order the facets from highest average score (top left) to lowest (bottom right). This lets us see that lower-scoring categories tend to show less consensus amongst respondents than higher-scoring ones. While Hardware Reliability gets almost uniformly 4s and 5s, it’s not the case that Developer Relations uniformly gets a parallel 2s and 1s. Rather, answers are a bit more spread out.
Patterns of Non-ResponseWhen thinking about why different questions might show different scoring patterns, we naturally ask what is it about the category or topic that would produce a different pattern of answers. The most basic reason is easy to overlook. Respondents are not requied to answer all the questions. Some people might choose not to answer a question because they have no opinion, or because the topic is irrelevant to them. So even in a small survey like this we can in effect have different sub-populations of respondents. Let’s look at which questions are most likely not to be answered.
Everyone has an opinion on Hardware, OS Quality, and the iPhone. But a fifth of respondents have no opinion on the Vision Pro. Almost the same number skipped the TV, home, and societal impact questions. Twenty two of the fifty nine respondents have no views on Developer Relations.
Relational PatternsA survey like this is a table of rows and columns. The rows are the respondents and the columns are the questions. Each cell is a particular respondent’s score for a particular question (which may be missing). We can do a surprising amount with data of this sort. In this case, we can shuffle around both the rows and the columns in a systematic way until both the respondents and the questions are as similar as we can reasonably make them. There are many, many approaches to clustering data in this way. One of my favorite ways to do it for data of this size is to make a “Bertin Plot” of the responses. Named after the French geographer Jacques Bertin and developed in the 1960s, plots like this involve permuting or “seriating” the rows and columns. Bertin’s group originally did this by hand using a matrix of lego-like blocks that could be skewered in the rows and columns.
There is a highly entertaining, and very French video from the early 1970s that motivates and demonstrates the method. Because we have the Internet on computers now, we can pick a method for permuting our table and apply it directly. While much faster, sadly there are no longer any skewers involved. Here is what we get when we apply the method to the Report Card data.
The nice thing about this representation is that by filling in only the “good” scores (4s and 5s), but still showing the “bad” ones (3s and lower), we get a very good sense of how both the questions and groups of respondents hang together. This includes patterns of non-response, too. Things don’t cluster perfectly, of course. This is a heuristic to aid interpretation rather than a law of nature. But it’s still a very a useful way to get an immediate sense of the entire dataset at a glance.
Jess Weatherbed at The Verge has some very interesting breaking news:
The first “Apple approved” porn app for iPhone is rolling out in Europe, via AltStore PAL’s alternative iOS app marketplace. AltStore PAL developer Riley Testut says that Hot Tub, which describes itself as an ad-free “adult content browser,” has made it through Apple’s notarization review for fraud, security threats, and functionality, and will be available for AltStore PAL users in the EU to download starting today.
AltStore and Testut knew exactly what they were doing when they implied an Apple endorsement of this product, presumably based on Apple’s notarization approval of an iOS app. Legally, Apple must notarize apps so long as they are “free of known malware, viruses or other security threats, function as promised and don’t expose users to egregious fraud.” So you can see that Apple’s hands are tied here. Which is why Apple is deeply unhappy with AltStore’s announcement, releasing this PR statement:
We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially kids. This app and others like it will undermine consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem that we have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world. Contrary to the false statements made by the marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our App Store. The truth is that we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by marketplace operators like AltStore and Epic who may not share our concerns for user safety.
But here’s the thing about notarization: Apple has used it in the past, in the EU, for reasons not covered by the above exceptions. It has refused to notarize emulators, and more than once. In the most recent refusal, it cited the use of “Mac operating system software on devices that are not Apple-branded computers.” Which is most definitely cause for all sorts of legal action, but doesn’t actually seem to be covered under the ways Apple is allowed to use notarization in the EU. Notarization is meant to be a straightforward system to protect users from really bad stuff—not another lever for Apple to pull when it wants to prevent anything from getting in the hands of users for any reason.
Which brings us back to Hot Tub. Apple representatives claim that AltStore is lying by asserting that Hot Tub was approved by the company. (Though it’s not great that Apple’s own emails use the phrase, “The following app has been approved for distribution.”) Instead, they claim that Apple’s hands are tied by the European Commission. And yet… the company has used its lever before to protect users from (checking my notes here) emulators of very old Mac models. Seems dangerous.
So which is it? Is notarization a tool Apple can use to bypass all of Europe’s regulations of Apple whenever it feels like preventing users from running MacPaint on an iPad? Or is it something out of Apple’s hands? If Apple chose to exercise its notarization powers to kill the UTM and Mini vMac emulators, but then let Hot Tub through… doesn’t AltStore have a point? It’s hard for Apple to argue its hands are tied if it’s used those hands in the recent past. (I’ve contacted Apple’s PR representatives and asked if they can explain the disparity in policies to me, and I’ll update this story if they reply.)
Once Hot Tub was announced as being a part of AltStore in the EU, an Apple email appeared in journalists’ inboxes decrying the event. This is what Apple has been waiting for all along. It’s an opportunity to portray App Store policies (under assault in the EU and elsewhere) as benevolent and under attack by the forces of evil, including the European Commission, pornographers and child traffickers, and Epic Games. Now it can complain that the European Commission has opened the proverbial floodgates and that any number of disgusting apps will be available to those who choose to download alternative marketplace apps, seek those apps out, and install them.
AltStore knew it would get a rise out of Apple by advertising a porn app as being Apple approved. (And I believe Apple’s guidelines specifically prohibit implied endorsements of alternative marketplaces by Apple, so AltStore may have stepped in it.) At the same time, Apple’s desperately been waiting for the moment it could point at a dangerous app so it can claim that exerting unchecked control over the App Store and taking a financial cut from every transaction is all in the interests of customers.
Like I said, this was inevitable. But I’m not sure AltStore really needed to poke the bear.
We discuss the results of the Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2024 in depth, with our opinions on every category. Also, Apple had another record financial quarter, and there’s a little bit of Rumor Roundup.
Go to the podcast page.
Every year we ask a collection of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people for their opinions about how Apple fared in the year just gone by. You can read our 2024 report card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read the whole thing—all 32,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.
Onward.
The MacHow would you rate how the Mac platform went in 2024? Consider new Mac models, new chips, new macOS versions, and anything else you deem relevant to the platform.
Eric Linder: I have an M1 MacBook Pro, and the M4 looks delicious, but I’m going to wait one more year. I don’t have a vote per se, but I do like that Apple is updating the Mac lineup on a much more regular basis than in previous “times.”
Benjamin Mayo: The M4 chip continues to show Apple’s silicon supremacy, posting impressive year-over-year gains. I was particularly glad to see the M4 Pro chip core configuration pivot away from last year’s weirdness and return to a beefy performance-tuned chip. The Mac mini got its long-deserved time in the sun with a nice update and chassis redesign, alongside decent spec bumps for the iMac and MacBook Pro. Also, a really welcome surprise was the bump to 16 GB RAM as the base spec for all models, including the ‘old but still sold’ M2 and M3 Airs. As far as macOS is concerned, I use iPhone Mirroring a lot and found it to be a stable and enjoyable affair.
Roman Loyola: It sure feels like Apple took the criticism of the base M3 MacBook Pro to heart, and that’s why Apple made the changes it did, but I guess we’ll never know. Regardless, the upgrades were very satisfying.
Glenn Fleishman: Apple keeps ticking over with new processors and models filling out and updating their matrix. Generally, they are delivering solid, often exceptional performance per dollar. In a year with both M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pro updates and M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis in a new form factor, it’s hard to pick too many nits. But I think the iMac is way overdue for a 27-inch model, the Mac Studio lacked a refresh, and I have no idea what the company thinks the Mac Pro is for. I wish I could split Mac into two categories: how well are they keeping things going (such as finally removing the 8 GB low-end configuration), and how well they are introducing new features and form factors that are in demand (like the cuteness but also power and utility of the new Mac mini). I can’t give Apple a five on hardware for those reasons, but I also think macOS is at a point of confusion. The introduction of Apple Intelligence in waves and without having tentpole features that solve problems (across all platforms) is absolutely mystifying. I have new-enough Macs to take advantage of all AI features and I honestly find them mostly useful. Apple even replaced a perfectly good touch-up feature in Photos for macOS with an AI-based one that has worse performance and is in beta. This removed functionality people relied on. However, I’m a huge fan of a probably uncovered set of features I’ve written about in my books: screen mirroring and sharing. It’s dramatically better in every direction. Screen Sharing between Macs now works reliably for me; with iPhones and iPads, there’s a new and better approach; Mac to Apple TV offers more options and is far superior; Mac into videoconferencing, particularly FaceTime, much better; and the iPhone Mirroring app is a big bonus integration. Screen sharing/mirroring are boring areas that some people use intensively and others not at all; Apple’s improvements show that they can pay attention to the little things and provide integrated, upgraded, seamless OS features!
Eric Slivka: The Mac mini redesign is a treat, while the overdue bump to 16GB of memory across the board was very welcome. Otherwise, nice to see the steady chip progression, though some will undoubtedly be disappointed at the higher-end machines skipping the M3 generation. macOS Sequoia has some nice improvements, though it has had a few hiccups along the way, and we’re still waiting on some of the promised features amid Apple’s gradual rollout.
Brett Terpstra: The M4 lineup is top-notch. I’ve been using an M1 Studio for a while now, and moving up to the M4 was a bigger performance leap than I expected. I’m anxious to see the Studio lineup get upgraded, but the M4 Mac mini has an amazing bang/buck ratio, and the M4 MacBook Pro has me very satisfied with my purchase.
Dave Hamilton: Great to see the MacBook Air get the M3 chip and continue to see love from Apple. I also love that the MacBook Air has become the default model for so many people, including professionals. Folks seem to have (finally?) accepted that it’s not only OK to live in a world of dongles, but it’s better because we each get to choose the ports that matter where they matter. Need one thing at your desk but different options when you travel? Great! You’ve got it. Also nice to see the “Pro” machines (iMac and MacBook Pro) get the M4 chip where it’s needed. I’ve (finally?) gotten over the fact that Apple won’t be making iMacs with screens large enough for me to use on a daily basis, but ViewSonic’s soon-to-be-released 27″ 5K Thunderbolt Display is an easy, $799 solution to that problem when paired with the new Mac mini, which is definitely the lede I’ve buried here. That thing is a beast and is the right computer for so many people who work on their Macs at their desks. What a fantastic upgrade!
David Sparks: Apple Silicon Macs remain some of the best hardware Apple is shipping. I’m satisfied with the pace of improvement and the product line as a whole. If, however, I was someone at that top end of the performance curve, I’d be sad. I can’t help but feel there is an alternative universe where the Mac Pro has a chip that is so fast that it comes with a warning label—just not this one.
Lex Friedman: I want every new Mac. Apple is crushing it with the Mac. I can’t believe how great every new Mac is. I feel like a fanboy when I write these words, but seriously, the state of the Mac today is exceptional.
Craig Hockenberry: Here’s the thing: over the years, I’ve become less eager to upgrade my Macs to the latest version of macOS. I’m still using Sonoma on all my Macs and will only move to the new version when I’m forced to by a system requirement (that’s most likely to be Xcode). The main cause for lagging behind is all of the annoyances that come with each new version. I’m really tired of all the new security prompts, odd bugs from incomplete testing, and UI weirdness from designers and developers whose primary focus is iOS. It’s a shame the software is in this state because the Mac hardware has never been better. My MacBook Air is the best computer I have ever owned, and the whole product lineup is great (yes, even with the outrageous incremental costs for storage and memory).
Marco Arment: It’s a great time to be a Mac user. The hardware is the best it has ever been, with nearly every need met with multiple great choices. macOS remains mostly good, due largely to neglect, but that’s better than today’s Apple touching it very much.
Myke Hurley: The M4 was a really nice continued advancement of the power behind the Mac line. We got great laptop updates and a welcome simplification for the MacBook Air. However it would have been nice to get some clarity over the future of the Mac Studio.
Matt Deatherage: The low end sees massive improvements, but the high desktop end seems more than ever like a status item for the one percent.
Kirk McElhearn: A solid year for Macs, with M4 processors across much of the line and the attractive new Mac mini. This said, with the exception of the Mac mini, there’s no real innovation in new Macs; they’re all just upgrades of previous models. Maybe we don’t need anything different? But where is the Mac Pro, and what about a larger iMac? I don’t want one—I’m happy with the 24″—but I know many people who do. The lack of an upgrade to the Studio Display is a bit surprising, and Apple seems to have, once again, given up on caring about displays. The bump to 16 GB on all new Macs at no price increase underscores the fact that this extra memory is not worth $200, and is a reminder that we have been paying this Apple tax for years, since we can’t add RAM to Macs anymore.
Stephen Hackett: As we round out the fourth year of the Apple Silicon Era, the Mac is truly firing on all cylinders. Modern Mac notebooks are incredible; even my new M4 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro runs silently and boasts shockingly good battery life. While I could have never had a notebook-only setup during the Intel days, I’ve done just that for several years with no complaints. The one ding on the hardware front is that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are stuck on M2-based SoCs. It’s clear that the process used for the M3 was a bit of a dead-end and that an M3 Ultra wasn’t in the cards, but Apple’s two high-end desktops using old silicon is a bit embarrassing. On the software front, macOS Sequoia brought my favorite macOS feature in years, which was the iPhone Mirroring. I use it daily to access iPhone-only apps while sitting at my desk. I’m thrilled that Apple continues to find new ways to tighten the integration between the Mac and the iPhone without turning the former into the latter.
Peter Cohen: I’d never have picked the M4 Mac mini to be the MVP, but it’s like the Genie from Aladdin: PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER! (Itty bitty living space.)
Chance Miller: It’s pretty hard to complain about the Mac these days. The new Mac mini is another example of Apple flexing its design muscles in the Apple silicon era. The biggest change of the year, however, was Apple doubling the RAM in the base MacBook Air from 8GB to 16 GB. Bonus points for not raising the price and backdating the change to the M2 configuration as well. My only complaint semi-related to the Mac? We need new external display options. It’s time, Apple.
Brent Simmons: The Current Mac UI design—both in terms of how it works and how it looks—could be improved.
Nick Heer: The farther down you look on the Mac price list in 2024, the better the year was. The new Mac Mini is a tremendous value, as is the Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air. Every Mac sold by Apple now has a (long-overdue) baseline of 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. As prices increase, though, the Mac is more of a mixed bag. The MacBook Air did not get Apple’s latest architecture despite updates to the Mac Mini and iMac, which share the same core parts. The MacBook Pro was updated, but the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, and Apple’s displays were not. MacOS Sequoia is fine. iPhone Screen Mirroring is useful, but Apple Intelligence is a mixed bag. Why is Writing Tools in an easy-to-accidentally-dismiss popover? Notifications are still buggy, and security prompts are out of control.
Federico Viticci: Look, as we’ve established, I can now use my iPad Pro for everything I do and don’t need a Mac in my life. But I think Apple is doing an outstanding job with its Mac lineup, and I’m particularly envious of those who own the new Mac mini, which is small, powerful, and just exceedingly cute. I would give this category five stars; I don’t because Apple still insists on not making touchscreen Macs or more interesting and weird form factors.
Shelly Brisbin: Apple’s Mac updates this year were solid but also satisfying. The ease with which M4 versions of the MacBook Pro and iMac entered the lineup says a lot about how well Apple’s hardware designs can carry forward for multiple years but leave room for the kind of performance improvements enthusiasts expect. The new Mac mini, though fans of the diminutive form factor impatiently anticipated it, was a big hit when it arrived, bringing plenty of power – and value – in a solid hardware package. More M4s are coming in 2025, surely. From a fan’s perspective, I enjoy the gradual, dare I say, thoughtful pace of updates.
Rich Mogull: Between chip updates and the new Mac mini, Apple is firing on all cylinders.
Michael Tsai: The M4 Macs have some virtualization, display, and USB issues, but overall the updates seem seem strong. I’m particularly excited about the MacBook Pro’s nanotexture display. The Mac input devices are finally USB-C, but they got the most minimal of updates, not fixing the Magic Mouse’s charging point or modernizing the globe key’s location on the extended keyboard. Unfortunately, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are still using M2 processors. SSD pricing is still ridiculous, and the software side is still a mess, both in terms of reliability and design. I have not found the Apple Intelligence features very useful. Probably the most exciting things for me in Sequoia are the new Passwords app and the new window management features, though in both cases I prefer third-party solutions.
Dan Moren: Look, the Mac continues to have one of its best runs ever. Apple redesigned the Mac mini (the Mac mini!) for the first time in almost fifteen years, making it even smaller and putting ports on the front—a home run. If the Mac suffers from anything these days, it’s that the hardware seems so good that it’s hard to imagine how Apple can continue to improve it.
Jeff Carlson: The Mac lineup seemed to find a groove and stick to it in 2024. Aside from the smaller size and greater power of the Mac mini, it’s felt like a transition to bigger, later things, especially at the high end. In fact, I’d say Apple has hobbled itself slightly with the M-series processors, particularly from a consumer point of view: the MacBook Pro has an M4, but the Mac Studio and Mac Pro still have an M2. Yes, there are Maxes and Ultras, and likely, the person buying those machines knows the differences, but it’s still not as solid of a pitch as Apple can do. All that said, the Mac remains solid.
Casey Liss: There is nearly nothing to complain about with the Mac — when it comes to regular people, anyway. The new Mac mini is adorable, powerful, and affordable. The laptops remain incredible; the Air is great for most people and, for Apple, affordable. The MacBook Pro is overkill for many, but it remains a truly phenomenal machine. Several years into the Apple Silicon transition, I am still amazed I can have the modern equivalent of iMac Pro performance in a machine that I can easily carry with me, and use without being connected to power for hours. Arguably, the one indisputably great thing to come from Apple Intelligence is the VERY, VERY LONG, OVERDUE increase in RAM across the Mac lineup.
Andy Ihnatko: The Mac lineup feels like an impressive, cohesive “collection” now (to dip back into my “Project Runway” super fandom days). I’m going to single out the Mac Mini for special love. The cheapest ticket to the Mac lineup is a perfect introduction to everything Apple does well.
Howard Oakley: Generally a very good year, with some great highlights, and relatively few gaffes.
James Thomson: The new Mac mini is delightful, though definitely not cheap at higher specs. More niche hardware like the Mac Studio still hasn’t seen any updates in a while.
Adam Engst: The M4 Macs are brilliant.
John Gruber: The Macs that Apple is shipping are better than ever. The most popular Mac models, by far, are the laptops, and both the MacBook Pro and Air lineups had good years, and now, even better, seem to be on regular annual upgrade schedules: MacBook Pros in the fall, MacBook Airs in the spring. I am especially pleased—borderline ecstatic—regarding the new nano-texture (matte) display option now available on MacBook Pros for $150. (They don’t even charge more for the option on the larger 16-inch models.) The only hitch in the lineup is the Macs Apple hasn’t been shipping: the Mac Studio and Mac Pro have remained unchanged since 2023, when the M2 models debuted. My presumption/hunch is they skipped the M3 generation for engineering reasons pertaining to TSMC’s first-generation 3nm process and will be back on track in 2025 with new M4-generation models around WWDC. MacOS 15 Sequoia, like 14 Sonoma and 13 Ventura before it, is a fine release. Reliable and familiar.
Jessica Dennis: One wonders what Apple could have been doing instead of spending person-hours building a bunch of AI stuff that doesn’t seem particularly good or useful into MacOS. Mac hardware quality continues to be excellent, and lucky for me, I fall into one of the well-supported niches (i.e., I buy a new laptop every five years or so, and it’s fine). However, I’ve definitely seen the genuine angst some folks have about product upgrade cycles.
Michael Gartenberg: The Mac has been pretty stable, and that’s not a bad thing; the M series of processors has delivered well for users. Unfortunately, for many users, there’s no reason to upgrade from their M1 or M2 to jump on the latest devices. The new Mac mini is a great device but creates confusion in the line relative to devices like the Studio devices, making it challenging for high-end users to figure out what devices are for them. Apple also finally acknowledges that perhaps 8 GB of RAM isn’t enough for users, which is good because Apple’s prices for both RAM and storage upgrades are absurd. Apple either needs to find a new supplier for memory and storage, make these things upgradeable, or stop gouging customers.
Carolina Milanesi: Apple Silicon continued to be the purchase driver for the Mac. Market share in Enterprise is growing, offering Apple a new opportunity to penetrate a space that has mostly been BYOD in the past. The broad range of price points and computing power offers Apple the ability to have a low entry point and go all the way to a workstation competitor.
Christina Warren: Man. What a great year for the Mac. Four years on, Apple silicon continues to impress. The much-touted Apple Intelligence might be a bust, but it forced Apple to finally give every Mac 16GB of RAM. RAM and storage upgrade pricing continue to be war crimes — but at least every Mac has 16GB of RAM now. The base model M4 Mac mini is one of the most compelling and best-value Apple products we’ve seen, probably since the venerable M1 MacBook Air. I wish it had more storage, but it shows that Apple can actually offer a compelling product priced under the competition for its performance. The MacBook Air would’ve been a push update for me but then Apple had to up the RAM even in the M2 models for the Apple Intelligence launch. I got a great deal on a 13″ M3 with 16GB of RAM for my mom that wipes the floor with anything priced that way in Windows Land — x86 or Qualcomm. The M4 chips look like real winners. I won’t be replacing my maxed-out 2023 14″ M3 Max, but I hope we get a Mac Studio this spring so I can harness some of that power. The Studio and the Mac Pro are the unloved children. But that’s fine. As a desktop devotee, even I’ve accepted that Apple is a notebook company that occasionally makes desktops and, about once a decade, releases a mini PC so compelling that it’ll act as my home server for the next decade. macOS is not as good as it used to be. I hate the new UAC stuff for screen capture, and the settings menu is the worst. But compared to our friends in Windows land (to say nothing of our Linux compatriots, steam notwithstanding) dealing with Recall drama, it’s a good time to be a Mac user. And as Simon Willison noted, Apple Intelligence might be hot garbage (OK, I editorialized the hot garbage bit), but MLX is great. And despite Nvidia being a behemoth, Apple machines are great for doing local AI development. It was just an unbelievable year for the Mac.
Andrew Laurence: The M4 generation looks to be one of leveling up across the product line. More like this, please.
Zac Hall: Good riddance, 8GB RAM. You simply don’t have enough memory to be missed.
Matt Birchler: It might be too bold, but I wonder if the Mac lineup is as good as it’s ever been in Apple’s history. Name a bad computer in the lineup; I don’t think you can. Exciting new form factors would be great to see, and macOS could always improve, but if we don’t call the Mac great right now, then I don’t know when it will be great.
Shahid Kamal Ahmad: The M4 line of chips feels like the first justifiable upgrade opportunity for those who jumped in with the M1. Where the M2 and M3 were decent but still just incremental upgrades, the M4 is a powerhouse. I’m disappointed that the black MacBook Pro is not a true black, but that’s truly petty given that there still doesn’t seem to be any other computer that comes close to offering the Mac’s astonishing quality, performance, and power, not to mention that it still beats everything else for style and convenience. The dark days of the Mac seem to be a fading memory now. Long may this continue.
Allison Sheridan: Who would have thought the Mac mini would lead the excitement for 2024 with the M4 Pro? The other across-the-board advancement was making all entry-level Macs come with 16GB/256GG, which was a win all around.
Brian Mattucci: While the migration to M4 is going as expected, and the Mac Mini redesign is a positive, the long wait for the Mac Studio with the latest Apple silicon continues to feel illogical when the model they’re selling is now two generations behind and will likely be nearly three generations behind by the time they finally update it.
Quinn Nelson: The M4 took everyone by surprise. From its unexpected debut on the iPad to delivering process gains far beyond expectations, it was hands-down Apple’s star of 2024. And the new Mac mini? Seriously—how could you not love it? Adorable!
Paul Kafasis: Mac hardware is really looking good, with frequent updates. MacOS updates have been good, though there’s a lot of churn going on, and features coming in 15.1, 15.2, and beyond, is somewhat bothersome. Can Apple get off of the annual OS update cycle yet?
John Siracusa: The M4 chip series is the best since the M1. The single-core performance and power efficiency are both great, which is important for the low-core-count M-series chips that most people buy. The uncertainty surrounding the “big” desktop Macs and the chips that will power them continues to be a problem, however. I was happy to see the base RAM in Macs increase to 16 GB this year. Call it the Apple Intelligence Dividend. Ironically, this is also the year that Apple’s absurdly high pricing for RAM and storage upgrades—which definitely continued in 2024—has gotten a bit more widespread attention. I’m not sure if it will change anything, but something has to give. Consider the new M4 Mac mini. It’s impossible to build a PC that is as powerful as the base M4 mini for the same amount of money. But as soon as you add any kind of upgrade from the base specs, the M4 mini completely loses its value lead—often by a lot. I’ve calculated that Apple’s storage upgrades are now 6.5x higher than retail market prices for the same size and performance. Ridiculous.
Philip Michaels: The move to Apple silicon continues to pay dividends. It’s probably the smartest thing Apple’s done in years.
Steven Aquino: I feel like the Mac is firing on all cylinders right now, thanks in large part to Apple silicon. While my daily driver machine is a 2019 Retina 4K iMac on Intel—I do have an M2 MacBook Air as well—the value proposition is off the charts, seeing it still going strong nearly 6 years after I bought it.
The iPhoneHow would you rate how the iPhone and iOS platform went in 2024? Consider new hardware, new chips, OS versions, and anything else you deem relevant to the platform.
Paul Kafasis: The iPhone seems strong, and iOS 18 had some good updates. Interestingly, though, this is the first year since 2008 that I didn’t get a new iPhone. The hardware update just wasn’t that compelling to me, in part because my iPhone 15 Pro is Apple Intelligence compatible.
David Sparks: The iPhone is what it needs to be: a solid platform that sells billions of units per year. However, I wish Apple had continued the mini for folks who prefer something smaller. I’d also like to see them take a few more risks with a non-flagship model, which may be the aim of the rumored iPhone Air. But if the rumors are true, it doesn’t sound like a big enough risk to me.
Casey Liss: I could have made a case for a five, but for this year, I think four is more appropriate. While I mostly like the Camera Control, I think it’s too fiddly by half. A few months in, I suspect I would have preferred a dumb shutter button to the fancy touch-sensitive setup that we actually got. I am overjoyed to return to a human-sized phone from the 15 Pro Max I had last year, but even the regular-sized phones are large enough that I didn’t give up my PopSocket—#mykewasright. I’m also getting sick and tired of the Pro phones having absurdly boring colors. Apple, it won’t take away from the other Pro models to have fun colors. Offer the boring ones of today, as well as some fun ones… PLEASE! The non-Pro colors are SO GOOD this year; I’d probably pay a bit more to have that blue in a Pro phone.
Marco Arment: iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 family are almost universally great. My only (minor) complaint is the Camera Control button, an overthought, finicky, error-prone engineering indulgence that actually can be pretty useful, but only once most of its functionality is turned off.
Benjamin Mayo: Apple delivered about as much as you can reasonably expect for an ‘iteration’ year of the iPhone. The base models represent really good value this year, with only a couple of minor details separating them from the Pro lines. I think the Camera Control was a bit of a miss; it’s fine as a shutter button, but all of the gestural stuff feels like a gimmick, given its current implementation. The sheer number of settings to change its behavior is laughable and perhaps speaks to a need for Apple to give it a second look and strip it back to what is really most useful. Apple Intelligence may still be rolling out in a piecemeal fashion, but I find features like the email summaries and improved photo search to meaningfully improve the iOS experience.
Jessica Dennis: The iPhone continues to be solidly Good, if unexciting. Apple may have been shocked that no one was particularly interested in upgrading their phone just for the new Apple Intelligence features, but very few other people were (myself included). I get a new phone annually because of the Apple Upgrade program, and that’s the only reason. For the past couple of years, I haven’t had a use case for a Pro model. And I miss the iPhone Mini so much.
Dave Hamilton: I was stoked that Apple Intelligence essentially forced Apple to make the base model iPhone 16 almost as powerful as the iPhone 16 Pro. This truly gives people options and, of course, allows everyone getting a new iPhone this year to take advantage of Apple Intelligence.
Adam Engst: Having the Action button and Camera Control on all iPhone 16 models is great, but otherwise, the iPhone 16 lineup doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement over previous models. And while I know it’s boring to complain about the lack of a smaller iPhone, I also field non-stop complaints from people who want one and aren’t upgrading from the iPhone SE because of that.
Rich Mogull: The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro are solid updates, and the non-Pro has really stepped up the value proposition. I’m mixed on the new Camera Control; even though I use it a lot for zoom, I still don’t have a good handle on making it work like I want. The response is just a bit off. iOS 18 is a good start, but Apple Intelligence isn’t quite there yet. Maybe in 18.4.
John Gruber: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Nothing has been broke regarding the iPhone lineup, and Apple hasn’t tried to fix anything. This is good. Changes for the sake of change are the surest sign of a company in decline. Stagnation and hubris are concerns for any wildly successful product, but it takes confidence to let great design speak for itself without making facile, unnecessary changes. Camera Control is the big new hardware change in the iPhone 16 generation, and while I’d like to see the actual button improve (I think it’s too hard to press), in practice I make frequent use of it. I spent some time back on an iPhone 15 over the holidays, and I instantly missed having a Camera Control button to launch the Camera app. Kudos to Apple for bringing Camera Control to the entire iPhone 16 lineup, not just the Pro models. iOS 18 is refined, mature, and familiar.
Joe Rosensteel: The hardware is the best iPhone hardware they’ve ever shipped. The software promises Apple is making around Apple Intelligence aren’t compelling, and Apple didn’t deliver on them in 2024. Camera Control is a mess, but it doesn’t impair phone usage. People should really take a step back and think through the headline features because they were anything but. The new, editable Photographic Styles have had a bigger impact on my life than any other 2024 feature.
Michael Gartenberg: Someone at Apple forgot that it’s _under_promise and _over_deliver, not the other way around. iPhone 16 was sold on the basis of Apple Intelligence, which wasn’t present at the launch, it took two releases to bring some of the promised features, and when they failed, Apple removed them as opposed to fixing them. Siri remains far behind Google and Samsung in terms of AI features that actually do something. The good news is iPhone 15 users don’t feel nearly as bad for not getting Apple AI on their devices, and they can use things like Gemini or Copilot for their AI fix. I do give them credit, as they promised a glow effect and delivered on that rather nicely. I am not a fan of the camera button. It feels like it’s in the wrong place, and it’s kind of hard for me to use; the volume button works fine for me. I was kind of baffled when Tim said that email summaries were a game changer for him, making me wonder if he gets very little email or uses some other AI for his email summaries.
Matt Birchler: The iPhone is still the best phone for me, but 2024 definitely felt like an off year to me. I think the iPhone 16 is a good update, but the 16 Pro line is a real miss in my book. I’d actually pay more to get a 16 Pro that didn’t have the Camera Control button because it’s turned into a button that I exclusively use on accident and never on purpose. I still use the Action Button to launch and use my camera because it feels better to me. Also, Apple Intelligence really put a stink on this whole year for the iPhone, as seemingly very few other software features were added, and the few Apple Intelligence features we’ve gotten have arrived later than hoped for and have been almost universally underwhelming.
Andy Ihnatko: The iPhone 16 is the same old dish, prepared with fresh ingredients. That’s all that Apple was prepared to release this year. It’s fine: a solid 3/5. I have to deduct a full point for Apple Intelligence. Most of these features are as squirrelly as everybody should have expected: no more, no less. I expect Apple Intelligence to improve after this first round of users provides a galaxy of training data. But Apple chose to roll these features into the mainstream iPhone OS and promote them as if they were finished features, so I have to factor that in.
Carolina Milanesi: Solid hardware, but Apple Intelligence was a bit of a letdown.
Brian Mattucci: 2024 was all about the slow trickle of Apple Intelligence features of uncertain value. Some features (Image Playground and especially Genmoji) were interesting at first, but they feel like they’re years away from being reliable and useful. I was a big fan of notification summaries at first, but I’ve seen enough errors at this point to no longer trust them. I turned off the mail categorization feature almost immediately. I love the Home Screen and Control Center customization options – they’re the highlights of iOS 18 for me. As for hardware, adding the camera control button makes some sense, though I don’t use any of the features beyond launching the Camera app – it just doesn’t feel precise enough.
Eric Linder: The iPhone is a fully mature product at this point, and sometimes, I struggle to think of new features that might be implemented. One criticism I have is that Apple seems to continue to sell the iPhone 16 line based on the promises of future features (I’m looking at you, not-so-intelligent-Apple-Intelligence). Even when the iPhone 16 was launched, commercials seemed to appear everywhere that used Siri app intents and context awareness, both of which are STILL not available even to iOS 18.3 beta users.
Roman Loyola: I usually upgrade to a Pro Max, but this time, I opted for the 16 Plus, and I’m happy with it. Until I start making “cinema,” I may not get a Pro phone again.
Steven Aquino: The iPhone impresses every year in my eyes. I upgrade it every year not merely for journalism’s sake but because it’s my most important and oft-used computer.
Jeff Carlson: I want to give this a 3.5 because overall, the iPhone is in good shape; the 16 series is good, but despite the technological complexity and ingenuity of the Camera Control on the 16 Pro, in practice, it just doesn’t work as well as it should. It’s too finicky and, most important, often doesn’t do what you expect it to do.
Dr. Drang: The Camera Control is possibly the worst Apple UI device since the hockey puck mouse. There’s a reason no real camera manufacturer recesses their shutter button. Depressing a recessed button is a recipe for both shaking (as you’ve complained about) and tilting. Worse is how the photographic styles shift for seemingly no reason. I know I must be sliding my finger on the button, but I’m trying not to. It’s too sensitive and keeps making changes I don’t want. I should say “kept” instead of “keeps.” I’ve changed the Camera Control to open Magnifier, and I now use the Acton button to open the Camera. It’s much less frustrating.
Dan Moren: The iPhone is great and continues to be great. But this year’s focus on Apple Intelligence is disappointing and sucked a lot of the air out of the room when it came to actual feature improvements that people want. I still use Camera Control, but I think a lot of its extra features, beyond opening/taking pictures and video, are clunky and not useful. It feels a bit like the company is struggling to find opportunities to improve what has become an increasingly mature product category.
Eric Slivka: The iterative updates continue as we wait for some bolder changes from Apple. I love the colors on this year’s standard iPhones but I continue to hope for some better options on the Pro side. I’ve struggled and failed to embrace Camera Control, and even in the second year for Pro users, I’ve not found a lot of value in the Action button. On the software side, Apple Intelligence is obviously the big thing, but we’re only barely dipping our toes into it so far. The verdict is yet to come, but so far, it’s been underwhelming.
Craig Hockenberry: Apple Intelligence is underwhelming, especially with Siri. It also feels like a lot of engineering resources were directed toward features that no one asked for and can’t really trust. But again, the hardware is stellar. And the “intelligence” does have an upside: more memory in our pockets.
Kirk McElhearn: It’s all about Apple Intelligence this year, and limiting these features to only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 models feels like an attempt to force a super cycle, which doesn’t seem to be occurring. I upgraded from an iPhone 14 Pro, and honestly feel that I could have kept my 14 a year longer. I’ve heard from plenty of non-tech people that they simply don’t care about Apple Intelligence, and they see no need to upgrade phones that work just fine.
Shelly Brisbin: Like the Mac, the iPhone platform moved ahead incrementally in 2024 if evaluated year-over-year. But the base on which this year’s updates stand is solid enough to offer tempting upgrades to almost anyone who has kept their phone for more than a year. I feel good about the division of features between Pro and non-Pro phones. If an advanced camera system is irresistible, you can have it. But bringing hardware features like the Action Button and Dynamic Island to the full line of new phones is friendly to all kinds of users. The most disappointing aspect of this year’s phones is Camera Control, which attempts to pack a lot of punch into one hardware button but remains confusing to use. iOS is frankly weighed down by the simultaneously glacial pace, and forcible implementation, of Apple Intelligence. From a business perspective, Apple had to build AI into its platforms this year, and the iPhone is where that’s unavoidably apparent. But there have been bugs and poorly implemented offerings, and despite the emphasis on Apple Intelligence in the ads, it’s unclear to me why a buyer would choose Apple’s version of AI over another. I like the tabby cat playing the guitar that I sent to my friend yesterday, but even he isn’t a killer iPhone app.
Chance Miller: I tried really hard to use the Camera Control to its full potential with all the various swipe and half-press features. The reality is it’s most useful as a way to launch the Camera app and take a picture. Nothing more. Otherwise, the iPhone 16 Pro models are a stellar upgrade. The battery life continues to impress me on a daily basis. The non-Pro phones are more enticing than they’ve ever been. Oh, and RIP FineWoven. I wish Apple had replaced it with something better, but at least it’s dead.
Federico Viticci: It’s been an interesting year in iPhone land for me. After the September event, I purchased an iPhone 16 Pro Max, but my mind kept going to the iPhone 16 Plus. I was fascinated by its color, slimmer form factor, and more affordable overall package. I used the iPhone 16 Plus as my primary phone for two months and loved it, but then something happened: much to my surprise, I realized that I wasn’t taking as many pictures of my dogs, friends, and family as I used to with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. That’s when it hit me. I thought I wouldn’t need all the features of a “pro” phone – and, honestly, since I’m not a professional cinematographer, I really don’t – but in the end, I was missing the 5x camera too much. In my experience with using a 16 Plus, I was able to confirm that, if I wanted, I could live without a ProMotion display. But it was the lack of a third, zoomed camera on the Plus model that ultimately got me. I rely on the 5x lens to take dozens of pictures of my dogs doing something funny or sleeping in a cute way every day, and its absence on the 16 Plus was preventing me from grabbing my phone out of my pocket to save new memories on a daily basis. I’m glad I did this experiment because it also left me with a couple of additional thoughts about the iPhone line. First, if Apple comes out with a completely redesigned, slimmer “iPhone 17 Air” later this year that doesn’t have a 5x camera, I’ll have to begrudgingly pass on it and stick with the 17 Pro Max instead. Second, now more than ever, I truly, fundamentally want Apple to make a foldable phone that expands into a mini-tablet when opened. I don’t care how expensive Apple makes this device. I look at the latest Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and I’m very jealous of its form factor, but I also know that I wouldn’t be able to use Android as the OS for my phone. If it weren’t for the lack of a foldable form factor in Apple’s iPhone lineup, I would give this category five stars. I hope we’ll see some changes on this front within the next couple of years.
Michael Tsai: This is one of those years where the new iPhones seem fine, but I feel no urgency to upgrade from the previous model. The most interesting things to me are Photographic Styles and Camera Control. I’m hoping that the former will eventually let me reduce over-processing . The latter sounded promising but now seems more like the new Touch Bar: over-engineered and less useful than the basic Action button. iOS 18 adds a bunch of useful features.
Brent Simmons: The App Store monopoly continues.
James Thomson: Incremental updates, but still interesting.
Stephen Hackett: By tightly bundling the iPhone, iOS, and the App Store, Apple has made it impossible to untangle the iPhone from Apple’s ongoing legal woes in the European Union and beyond. And by plastering the planet with rainbow-colored Apple Intelligence ads, Apple has wound the iPhone up very tightly with a group of features that weren’t even shipped when the iPhones launched last fall. That puts Apple’s most valued product in a slightly weird spot, but the Report Card demands answers, so let’s start with hardware. The iPhone 16 cycle brought Camera Control, an excellent bit of hardware engineering swamped with confusing software decisions. Learning to swipe, press, and click around the tiny UI can be confusing. With visual intelligence a press-and-hold away, it’s easy to be in the wrong mode entirely if you activate the button as you pull your iPhone out of your pocket. Apple has made it possible to simplify the Camera Control, boiling it down to a basic shutter button, but this requires delving into multiple sections across Settings. The Action button was added to the regular iPhone 16 models in 2024, and the 5x telephoto lens from the 15 Pro Max lives on in both the 16 Pro Max and the 16 Pro. Both are great changes, as is the move to a bolder color palette for the 16. However, 2024 was also the Year of Apple Intelligence. These loosely associated features run across various iPads and all Apple silicon Macs. However, Apple is marketing these features as a core component of its newest iPhones. That’s unfortunate, given how mediocre much of Apple Intelligence has proven to be so far. Apple’s writing tools are good, but nothing exceptional, and the UI is quite cramped on the iPhone. When it comes to image generation, Apple Intelligence shines with Genmoji, which is a genuinely fun feature, but it also falls on its face with Image Playgrounds. The images it creates are far behind the competition, and honestly, a race I wish Apple weren’t running. The company says it has gone to great lengths to build guard rails to keep Image Playgrounds from creating anything offensive or troubling, but it’s not hard to get it to create fictional images depicting some of history’s worst people. At least they look like cartoon characters, which is the best product choice Apple made here. The lack of photorealism may keep Image Playgrounds out of the headlines for making fake news, but Apple’s summarization of notifications has done just the opposite. From screwing up sports scores to re-writing breaking news alerts to say the opposite of the reporting, notifications summaries don’t seem ready for prime time. Apple hasn’t yet shipped the next generation of Siri either, which raises questions about Apple feeling rushed to get these features into the market. If it’s true, it’s an unusual place for Apple to be in, and I hope the company will not make the same mistake again.
Zac Hall: Desert titanium and a dedicated camera button are nice.
Nick Heer: While the flagship Pro model always makes the most noise among the kind of people who read pundits’ report cards about a tech company, the iPhone 16 should not be overlooked. Neither should iOS 18, which, even without considering Apple Intelligence, has solid updates to core apps I use every day and is more customizable. However, iOS remains buggier than I would like. I find interacting with the Dynamic Island and always-on display needlessly difficult, and Apple Intelligence is not very good yet.
Andrew Laurence: This iPhone SE user looks forward to the next iteration of the iPhone’s value entry.
Rosemary Orchard: I love the new camera button, but I feel it needs more automation possibilities
Shahid Kamal Ahmad: Apple’s AI functionality feels like a rushed misstep. Most of us just don’t need what it offers, and the contortions to ring-fence access to OpenAI’s back end feel like the kind of thing Apple did when it apologetically added iTunes to a Motorola handset. Meanwhile, the hardware continues to be elegant, assuming what seems to be the definitive peak form factor for such a device. Incredibly, the 16 Pro Max feels less of a tank than previous models while still offering best-in-class performance and camera quality. After my iPhone mini 13, I didn’t think I’d upgrade. Now that I have, I don’t regret my purchase for a minute. This phone has all the performance required to deliver a class-leading UI responsiveness, and apart from the AI farce, a rollout that surely must be embarrassing for the executive team, it’s a device that does everything I need from a smartphone without ever breaking a sweat. It looks, feels and behaves like a premium product, but one where the UI could likely do with an overhaul to manage all the underlying complexity and features a little better. This complexity manifests in the form of additional buttons. It’s unusual for Apple to move so far away from the austerity of the Ive era, but perhaps with the addition of the camera button, they’ve made the UI more confusing than it needs to be. I keep forgetting that the button is there, and I sometimes activate it by accident, but can never seem to remember to use it when the need arises. This is to be expected, given that I’ve become so accustomed to the UI that’s been working well for so long.
Philip Michaels: Phones are becoming commodities, and whatever will freshen up the platform AI in general and Apple Intelligence ain’t it right now
Christina Warren: This is weird because, on the one hand, this is easily the most underwhelming iPhone Pro update I can recall in years and years. But the base model iPhone and iPhone Plus got some real juice. Apple Intelligence is still vaporware and nearly useless except for the ChatGPT integration, in my opinion, but I’m glad it forced Apple to up the RAM in the non-pro phones. But even though I genuinely have noticed nothing new on my iPhone 16 Pro Max compared to the 15 Pro Max, I think the base iPhone/iPhone Plus upgrades are really strong. It is too bad so many of the “features” of the phones are tied to software that might not land until mid 2025.
Alex Cox: ust when the regular iPhone gets good enough for what most power users would want in a phone, the iPhone Pro is really pulling away from the smartphone pack in terms of actual professional use. Final Cut Camera with multi-camera support came out of left field and landed pleasantly into independent filmmakers’ laps. That said, when one needs to use multiple iPhones on multiple Apple IDs and then allow them to connect to another device running Final Cut Pro, it feels like Apple is trying to take it out of our laps. There needs to be a better way to manage and administer multiple phones as cameras when you’re a three-person company not brimming with enterprise-managed devices.
Allison Sheridan: I’m going 5 again primarily because of the iPhone 16. They brought so many of the top-of-the-line features to the non-Pro phone, allowing people to make very few compromises to get a fantastic phone. Bringing 5X to the 16 Pro gave it feature parity with the Max, so there are no compromises between the two.
Glenn Fleishman: Nothing stands out for me on the hardware side. As noted for macOS, I don’t find that AI serves a need. Siri on the iPhone seems marginally better. I use it a lot and feel like it can do more within iOS, but I still get weird transcription errors that seem like they should be overcome, and it fails to be able to do a lot. It often says, “You need to unlock your phone,” when my iPhone is unlocked already…and then Siri completes the task anyway.
Peter Cohen: The 16 may be “built for Apple Intelligence,” but so what?
Rob Griffiths: So far, at least, Apple AI has been a massive disappointment. I’ve found so little benefit from it that I’ve disabled it. In my work, at least, there’s absolutely no benefit to having it enabled.
John Siracusa: My new iPhone 16 Pro has followed in the footsteps of its recent predecessors by being a bit better than the iPhone it replaced without adding any major regressions. My one frustration is the Camera Control. The button itself is fine, but most third-party case makers accommodated it by cutting a huge hole in the side of their cases, which I find awkward and uncomfortable. Only Apple and a handful of third-party case makers have included a pass-through button for the Camera Control, and none of those cases are to my liking. I hope more case makers offer pass-through buttons in 2025.
Myke Hurley: I think if I were grading without my personal feelings, I would knock this down a bit. But switching from the Pro Max to the Pro this year has been a really lovely change. The new increased size of this phone has made it the perfect sweet spot for me. I am a fan of the Camera Control button, but I think the execution leaves a little to be desired. I think the swiping is too complicated, and the force needed to take photos is too strong. I look forward to this changing over time. I think that there was a lot more conversation in the broader community this year about the regular phone over the pro phone. This would indicate that Apple kinda missed the mark on the overall product mix.
Quinn Nelson: On the one hand, we have the best update to the standard iPhone in years. On the other, we’re stuck with one of the buggiest, most feature-deprived versions of iOS in recent memory.
The iPadHow would you rate how the iPad and iPadOS platform went in 2024? Consider new hardware, new chips, OS versions, and anything else you deem relevant to the platform.
Brian Mattucci: I love my M4 iPad Pro. The screen is beautiful, the thinner design makes it easier to hold, and it feels like a really refined device. As with iOS, the Home Screen and Control Center customization options are wonderful. While there are plenty of ambitious changes I would love to see on iPadOS, the product they’ve delivered is still one that I find essential.
Matt Birchler: After the no-new-hardware year that was 2023, it was refreshing to get updates to almost all iPads in 2024. The new Pros are amazing devices that even got the privilege of introducing the M4 generation of chips; the Air got a boring but fine update, and the Mini got maybe the most subtle update of all. Sadly, software was on the back burner this year as the iPad got almost no new features outside of Apple Intelligence and a couple of minor things iOS also got.
Craig Hockenberry: I still want to run macOS on an iPad. It’s so weird that I take a MacBook on trips when an iPad would be a better choice.
Carolina Milanesi: iPad Pro was a solid upgrade, but some of the issues about software being able to elevate the device to a Mac level remain.
Kirk McElhearn: This year, I upgraded from an M1 iPad Pro to the M4 model, which is a very nice if overpriced iPad. The M2 iPad Airs also look fine, and these two iPads offer Apple Intelligence features for those who care. The iPad mini upgrade seems a bit underwhelming, but Apple has never shown much love to that model.
Federico Viticci: What can I say about the iPad that I haven’t already documented extensively? I love the iPad Pro’s hardware, and I find the M4 iPad Pro a miracle of hardware engineering with no equal in other similar products. In 2024, I chose to go all-in on the 11″ iPad Pro as my only computer; in fact, since the MacPad stopped working a few weeks ago (RIP), I don’t even have a Mac anymore, but I can do everything I need to do on an iPad – that is, after a series of compromises that, unfortunately, continue to be the other side of the coin of the iPad experience. Going into its 15th year (!), the iPad continues to be incredible hardware let down by a lackluster operating system that is neither as intuitive as iOS nor as advanced or flexible as macOS. The iPad is still stuck in the middle, which is exactly what I – and my fellow iPad users – have been saying for years now. I shouldn’t have to come up with expensive hardware-based workarounds to overcome the limitations of a platform that doesn’t want me to use my computer to its full extent. But, despite everything, I persist because no other tablet even comes close to the performance, thinness, and modularity of an iPad Pro.
Dave Hamilton: I’m an iPad mini user (and fan!) and am stoked to see it continuing to get upgrades. That tells me enough people are buying these models to keep some of Apple’s attention. (Is this where we pour one out for the iPhone mini? Dang, I miss that thing!)
Benjamin Mayo: The M4 iPad Pro is undeniably cool. The thinness and compactness of the design is remarkable, and it leaves a lasting impression. The screen is great, and the M4 chip is crazy fast, even in a 5.1mm thin fanless tablet form factor. That product is a momentous achievement. Unfortunately, iPadOS remains woefully underdeveloped. At the very least, I appreciated that the iPad software got the iOS 18 home screen customization features at the same time as the iPhone did, rather than it being a year behind as has happened in the past.
Dan Moren: The iPad’s frustrations are eternal. Although the hardware is fantastic, the software feels increasingly left behind, limited, and, at times, downright clunky. Stage Manager hasn’t fixed the multitasking issue, and the lack of modern audio support continues to keep me from doing my full job there. It’s probably time they let us run macOS or, at the very least, virtualize it.
Chance Miller: As usual, you can break the iPad category down into two parts: hardware and software. The new iPad Pro is the most visually impressive product Apple has released in years. I mean, who had Apple comparing the thinness of an iPad Pro to an iPod nano on their bingo card? Software-wise, the iPad continues to falter. iPadOS 18 added nothing new to the experience and Stage Manager feels like abandonware at this point. It’s a real bummer because I’d love to use the iPad Pro more often, especially with the new Magic Keyboard, which rights a lot of what was wrong with the last model.
Nick Heer: I still find the iPad-and-accessories lineup confusing, but it is in much better shape this year than last. Apple introducing the M4 chip in an iPad first, and not a Mac, is one of those twists I still find hard to believe, but it happened! I promise!
Michael Tsai: This seemed to be the year where a lot of people accepted that the software is what it is. If you love iPadOS, the hardware for running it is now better than ever. If not, no matter how much potential there may be, it’s time to stop waiting for Pro to happen in the way that you want and just use a Mac.
David Sparks: My same answer as every year: Solid hardware with too conservative operating system and software.
Rosemary Orchard: Nothing whelmed nor underwhelmed me.
Marco Arment: Apple finally updated the iPad lineup, and it has all of the strengths and weaknesses it has always had: great hardware with amazing computational power that’s almost impossible to utilize because of software limitations.
Shahid Kamal Ahmad: I have the latest iPad Pro Max. I’d have given it a higher mark had the OS been able to use the power of the device better, but as has been heard by many notable commentators, it’s just not there yet; the hardware power continues to massively outpace any progress in delivering that power to the user in a way that suits the iPad without compromising its accessibility. While this is going to be a tough nut for Apple to crack, if they want to sell more devices, they’re going to have to make the iPad more useful.
Michael Gartenberg: The iPad is the iPad. At the lower ends, they’re still the best for content consumption, at the high end, the Pro OLED models do deliver the best way to watch Severance on a mobile device. It’s a hard sell for creators to spend the money on a tricked-out iPad with Magic Keyboard when a cheaper MacBook will do the job better for most people.
Aleen Simms: The iPad’s hardware is unparalleled, but iPadOS still feels like a failed experiment. The iPads Pro are such stellar pieces of hardware, but the inflexibility of the operating system hamstrings them. I know that many people use iPads to great effect, but most people are unwilling or unable to put in the effort it takes to create workarounds—or they don’t even know that workarounds are possible.
Lex Friedman: The iPad product line is confusing. I bought an Air to replace an old Pro. I should have bought a Pro ONLY because Face ID on the iPad is so much better. But iPad Pros are ridiculously expensive. The iPad is great! But the product lines are too much.
James Thomson: I genuinely couldn’t remember if there had been new iPads this year. Great hardware that continues to remain underutilized by the software.
Brent Simmons: The App Store monopoly continues on iPad, too.
Joe Rosensteel: I don’t find this platform compelling, and it’s mostly the fault of iPadOS.
Shelly Brisbin: The new iPad Pro is great, as is the iPad Air, which adopts tech from the previous Pro. I’m thoroughly happy with my 13-inch Air. I’m not the first to point out iPadOS’ continuing limitations. The better the hardware becomes, the more glaring the software problems become. And it seems there’s little appetite or corporate support for making big changes to the platform.
Zac Hall: An even thinner design and optional nanotexture define this generation for me.
Quinn Nelson: iPadOS continues to be a “love it or hate it” experience, but the M4 iPad Pro, with its stunning OLED display, feels like a sci-fi-level feat of engineering.
Steven Aquino: I was gifted a 13″ M4 iPad Pro (with Magic Keyboard) for my birthday in September. The hardware, most especially the OLED display, is stunning. As to software, although iPadOS does exactly what I need it to do, there’s no question the pace of improvement needs to pick up.
John Gruber: The iPad hardware story is excellent. iPad Pros got the M4 chips months ahead of the Mac and now have an excellent nano-texture display option. (Please, Apple: bring nano-texture to the iPhone. Take my money.) The iPad Air got a fine update to the M2 chip in May. And the iPad Mini got its first update since 2021, and thus continues to be a product in Apple’s lineup. But iPadOS still strikes me like the no-man’s-land platform: nowhere near as capable productivity-wise as a Mac; nowhere near as portable or as conceptually simple as an iPhone. I made a concerted effort not to use my iPad for anything but long-form reading in recent months. I find myself noticeably more productive for it. To me, it’s like trying to work with my hands while wearing mittens.
Eric Slivka: The iPad Pro, with its incredibly thin form factor, OLED, cutting-edge M4 chip, and landscape front camera, received a great update. The iPad Air also received a solid upgrade, and the long-in-the-tooth iPad mini received its Apple Intelligence upgrade. However, I would still love to see Apple do more on the software side to take advantage of the iPad’s power and screen size.
Andy Ihnatko: There has been little progress with the OS or hardware. But we finally got a new iPad Mini, and my heart is full!
Rich Mogull: The M4 iPad Pro is a marvel. The new iPad Mini is… well… maybe next time. I’d rate it a solid 4.5, so I rounded up.
Stephen Hackett: There’s little to say about the iPad this year that hasn’t been said. The M4 iPad Pro pushes the ole “Wow, this iPad hardware can do so much more than iPadOS will let it” adage to the stratosphere. It’s powerful and thin, with an amazing screen, but it’s still just an iPad. The new Magic Keyboard looks fantastic, but it’s still hooked up to iPad apps. I’ve settled into equilibrium with this in my usage. My iPad mini is a great tablet for what I use it for: YouTube, TV shows, podcasts, and reading. I may hop into Slack or scroll through my mentions on social media, but I’m just no longer interested in turning the iPad into a computer I can or want to use for work. Zooming out, the overall iPad family is still messy in places. Thankfully, the 9th-gen iPad has been sent out to pasture, meaning all iPads finally use the modern gesture system for control. All iPads basically look the same, but there are still numerous differences as you move up and down the product line. The fact that Apple’s iPad keyboard page has a huge dropdown for a user to pick which iPad they have so the website can show them compatible models is not great, but Apple has been making progress. The current line of Apple Pencils is pretty straightforward, and having two models of iPad Air makes a lot of sense. I hope that the company keeps working to restore sense to the iPad hardware line while, at the same time, making iPadOS more capable for those who want to use their iPads more than they can today.
Christina Warren: I hope we get a good iPad update in 2025 because I need to buy one for my mom, and I’m annoyed the iPad Air doesn’t ship with 256GB standard, raising the price the $700. The 2024 updates to the iPad Pro were tempting but I kept my 2022 11” iPad Pro because I don’t want to buy a new keyboard or Apple Pencil. And my M2 is still so powerful, given the software is utterly anemic. The problem with the iPad, or at least the iPad Pro, continues to be iPad OS. It just isn’t as robust as I would like for something that costs more than a MacBook Air. And the MacBook Air now has 16GB of RAM standard. And that’s before you have the price for the pencil and keyboard. If you’re going to tout the importance of the form factor, don’t nerf what I can do with it. It’s especially annoying when you can run many iPad apps on the Mac and use your iPad as a second display with touch support on the same Mac. So I continue to be mad that I can’t run VS Code or something like it on my iPad. And that my web browser on my $1000+ tablet cannot even run real web apps super well. The iPad Air is probably the ideal iPad for the middle-of-the-road user, though I think a 256GB 10th gen iPad is probably just fine too. I forgot Apple even updated the iPad mini this year. I think Apple did, too.
Adam Engst: At least Apple released new iPads after a year off, but they don’t change the game at all. I’ve basically stopped using the iPad at this point, and none of the new models give me any reason to rethink that. Performance isn’t the problem.
Myke Hurley: I am no longer going to grade the iPad on the disappointment of iPadOS. I have accepted the iPad for what it is rather than what I want it to be. The new M4 iPad Pro is everything I wanted. I use the 11-inch as my main device at home, and I love everything about it. The OLED screen is fantastic, and it is so thin and light—it’s a joy to use.
John Siracusa: The M4 is a great iPad chip, but the highlight of the year for me was the Tandem OLED display on the new iPad Pro. I use my iPad as a tiny TV most of the time, and OLED displays provide the best picture quality available today. It’s been an amazing upgrade for me, even if it seems like I’m “wasting” that M4 by using it to watch videos for hours on end. Oh yeah, and they updated the camera placement, improved the Apple Pencil, and made all the Pro iPads even thinner. It seems like the rest of the world is not as excited as I am about the new iPad Pro. That may have something to do with the (continuing) limited and confusing nature of iPadOS. But for me, the new M4 iPad Pro is the best iPad ever.
Paul Kafasis: The hardware updates were good, but I hoped to see more from the new Mini. I’d been waiting to upgrade to a new Mini, but the minor update meant I bailed on that idea.
Casey Liss: While I don’t regret buying a new iPad Pro in 2022… I kind of regret it. The 2024 iPad Pros are really stunning—a phenomenal OLED screen in a case that cannot possibly be that thin. They’re such a joy to hold, and I want one despite having absolutely zero need for one. The Mini was my iPad of choice for many years, but I’ve squeezed it out by the combination of my phone getting ever-larger and the incredible utility the Magic Keyboard brings to my iPad Pro.
Jessica Dennis: I pretty much only buy the iPad Mini, and Apple put out a new one in 2024, so I bought it. I like that it’s purple. I was upgrading from a 5th-generation iPad Mini, and other than being snappier (and having TouchID on the power button instead of a button below the screen), I don’t feel like I gained a whole lot. I am not surprised that Regular People suffer from Apple Pencil Confusion — even I had to go back and check which one(s) would work with my new iPad when I was deciding that I didn’t really need one anyway.
Alex Cox: The tale as old as time is that iPadOS can’t keep up with the hardware in the iPad. This year, the design of the hardware doesn’t match the internals. Yes, the new form factor and screen options are great, but even the new Magic Keyboard for iPad feels like a mediocre upgrade after four years. The promise of the iPad’s modularity still doesn’t pay off.
Eric Linder: I have purchased almost every iPad model since its debut, and I will likely continue to do so. I absolutely love it, and use it every day. But it is such a shame that the hardware improvements are so far out of alignment with its software. One thing I love about Apple is that so often, they underpromise and over-deliver. But with iPad OS, the opposite is the case. They hyped up Stage Manager so much, and I recall the excitement that fellow Apple geeks like Federico Viticci shared with the community. It shipped broken, which is somewhat forgivable, but what is not forgivable is that two years later, it seems like Apple has completely forgotten about it. This does not bode well for the future of iPadOS. Whereas iOS continues to build and iterate on most of its features, it seems like iPadOS is just throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, and sadly, not much is sticking.
Allison Sheridan: It was a solid year for iPad. The M4 coming to the iPad Pro before the Macs was interesting, while moving the camera to the landscape side was probably a bigger improvement to the user experience. The iPad Air got a modest improvement going to M2 and remains a solid choice. Even the iPad mini finally got an update.
Gui Rambo: The fact that after all these years the iPad is still using the exact same foundations as iOS, including its multitasking model, is just baffling. We have iPads with Apple’s most powerful CPU cores that can’t have Final Cut Pro export a video in the background due to these stupid limitations.
WearablesHow would you rate Apple’s performance in Wearables overall in 2024? Consider the Apple Watch, Vision Pro, AirPods, and anything else you deem appropriate.
Charles Arthur: The Vision Pro has been a calamity. What it needed was content, and what it also needed was app support. Apple hasn’t done the first, and alienated developers so badly in other areas that it didn’t get the second – Netflix and YouTube being the obvious objectors. If you can’t charm the two biggest content platforms to be on your device, then you are already fighting with one, perhaps both, hands behind your back. The lack of immersive sports content is significant. The Vision Pro will never take off without it.
Joe Rosensteel: The Apple Watch is pretty stagnant and has feature regressions thanks to the ongoing patent dispute. The Vision Pro really whiffed. I was filled with ennui when the guy conducting my Vision Pro demo noted how sharp and readable the text was and how it could be used for work… A sentiment I didn’t share at all, and really underscored that people at Apple didn’t really know how to make a $3500 science fiction gadget exciting.
Casey Liss: The addition of medical-grade hearing aid functionality to the AirPods Pro is Apple at its best. The AirPods Pro remain possibly my favorite Apple product of all time. I use them on and off all day, every single day. However, the utterly preposterous AirPods Max “refresh” is borderline insulting for fans of that device. I am not a fan of it and yet here I am grumbling about it. (Apple Watch specific stuff follows)I would never have guessed, when working on my 2023 Report Card, that I’d be here working on my 2024 Report Card, still discussing the Masimo lawsuit. It is rather absurd that Apple, a company with effectively infinite resources, hasn’t fixed this problem. Throw money at it in terms of licensing, or just buy Masimo outright. Do something. The Ultra wasn’t bumped in any way this year, which was disappointing. Before the September event, I had assumed I was going to buy myself an Ultra 3 as my new watch. The lack of hardware updates — other than an admittedly hot black case — convinced me to go with a Series 10 instead. I like my Series 10, and I am pleased it’s thinner than my prior Series 8, but it’s otherwise more of the same. The one large difference for me is the addition of fast charging, which is a surprising quality of life improvement — especially if you sleep track. Sigh—what to make of the Vision Pro? I preordered one, and collected it on launch day. It is, without exception, the coolest piece of technology I own. It is unlike anything I had previously experienced, and as I’ve said many times, using a Vision Pro is strapping the future onto your face today. As I write this, today a fortnightly chat with your beloved editor (and three others) is scheduled. These hangouts — which are “just” FaceTime calls — are so uncanny. Those of us who can make any given call will sit, using our Spatial Personas, in the circle the Vision Pro software puts us in, and chitchat. Something about having that presence makes it feel like so much more than the handful of monthly FaceTime calls I have with friends — including one of the others on this fortnightly call. A FaceTime call with my friend James feels like a phone conversation with video. A Spatial FaceTime call with James, Jason, and others… that feels like hanging out. I could make a strong argument that if you and your friends can convince yourselves to spend the absurd amount of money for a Vision Pro, Spatial FaceTime calls are worth it alone. But the killer app for the Vision Pro — if you ever leave your house to do work — is definitely Mac Virtual Display. Just before the end of the year, Apple came out with a second version of MVD, and holy smokes, it’s incredible. My at-home setup is three 5K monitors because, well, I have problems. While my 13″ M3 Max MacBook Pro lets me take all the power of a desktop out of the house, it very much does not let me take all the screen real estate. Well, it didn’t, anyway. Now it does. In fact, the Ultrawide mode on MVD is too wide. A problem that I never thought I’d have. If we can only normalize wearing them, my portable computing life will improve vastly. I have used my Vision Pro at our local library, but I always do so in a study room, because I’m too embarrassed to do so in the throngs of everyone in the main areas. I’m writing this post at a local Wegmans, and I’m doing so without my AVP, because I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The Vision Pro is incredible, and every time I strap that stupid thing to my face, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have one and how cool this device is. However, I only have the occasion to do so once a week at most. The Vision Pro is an engineering marvel — easy 5. The Vision Pro is frustrating to use by itself and you look like an idiot when you do so — 2. That makes this section a 4 to me — as an engineer, I can’t get past how impressive it is. The Vision Pro is simultaneously more than I ever expected and a near-total letdown. Doing work in it is nigh impossible outside of MVD. Typing is so painful that I avoid it at all costs. Using Siri is not a substitute for a workable keyboard in visionOS. There’s not enough immersive content, although the pace is quickening and the content is getting ever-better. Ultimately, though, it’s too cool for me to grade any lower.
Shelly Brisbin: Wearables feels like a category poised to evolve in interesting ways, and I’m here for it. 2024 gave us a couple of glimpses: the technology behind the Vision Pro and the adaptation of a pair of earbuds (AirPods Pro) to the task of finding and mitigating some kinds of hearing loss. I’m with those who admire the Vision Pro but are skeptical of its future as a viable product. I wish Apple were more open to the idea of offering developer-focused technology previews that aren’t necessarily ready for primetime. Let the early adopter/pundit class buy them, too, but set expectations about what the Vision Pro is good at. I recently saw how a developer plans to incorporate the Vision Pro into a wheelchair-based navigation assistant. Now that’s innovation!
Marco Arment: Apple Vision Pro was the most disappointing launch I’ve seen from Apple in recent memory, with huge mismatches between the delivered product and consumer priorities and almost no follow-through from Apple to get software or content on the platform. A year after launch, a new owner can still watch the entire catalog of immersive videos during their first evening of taking the Vision Pro home… and then watch some episodes of Severance and still go to bed early.
Lex Friedman: Apple Watch remains good. There isn’t much in the way of new features that I’m excited about on the Watch, but it remains good. I wish it were better at tracking steps on a Treadmill Desk, though. Apple Vision Pro remains a product that I am not at all interested in.
Rich Mogull: The Apple Watch Ultra is getting close to being a true sports watch, but once you hit that category, Garmin still wins out (despite the latest Fenix updates being lackluster). The rest of the line is solid, but there still feels like room for growth.
Eric Slivka: A thinner design for the Series 10 was a welcome change, but otherwise, we didn’t get much in this regard. The black Ultra 2 looks great, but no hardware updates was a disappointment, and we missed out on a rumored SE update as well that sounded like it could have brought some fun colors. I continue to be astonished that Apple hasn’t settled the blood oxygen patent dispute in the U.S. one way or another. Nearly a year in, Vision Pro continues to be a half-baked prototype. AirPods 4 look like a really nice upgrade that has helped modernize and streamline the lineup, but I’m an AirPods Pro user looking forward to a 2025 update on those. AirPods Max simply adopting USB-C and some new colors with no other changes is so sad that it’s hilarious.
Stephen Hackett: Apple continues to kill it when it comes to AirPods. The AirPods 4 (especially with ANC) offers incredible value, while the AirPods Pro 2 continue to become more valuable to users through some remarkable software updates. Using AirPods as a way to take a hearing test or have your hearing augmented means millions of people who didn’t even know they had hearing loss will enjoy more moments with their loved ones in conversation. With the Apple Watch, it’s more of the same good vibes. Detecting falls, car crashes, and possible cardiac issues has saved an untold number of people, and with sleep apnea detection in the newest batch of Apple Watches, users can be notified if their Watches detect a problem. This is some of Apple’s most important work. I took the lack of an Apple Watch Ultra 3 personally, but the Series 10’s thinner and more powerful design almost makes up for it, as long as my bought-it-on-launch-day-like-a-maniac Apple Watch Ultra 1 holds on. 2024 saw the launch of the Vision Pro, and it’s unlike any Apple product launch I can remember. The Vision Pro is an incredible feat of engineering. Just holding the thing feels nice, and the years of work that went into it shows when the screens light up. It is the only AR or VR headset I have worn that hasn’t made me feel sick after a few minutes. The Vision Pro is priced like a computer because Mac-level hardware powers its array of cameras and sensors, screens, audio system, and more. visionOS springs to life on this hardware — after a lengthy boot process — and wraps the user in a world of their own content and apps. The floating windows feel real and stay in place as if they are made of actual frosted glass. The pass-through video feed of the outside world is by no means perfect, but it’s fast to respond to a turn of your head. A simple turn of the Digital Crown has the world fade away, dissolving into any number of landscapes that can help you focus on the task at hand. Sadly, there are just a handful of tasks best suited for spatial computing. Text input can be tedious without a keyboard, the lack of any window management tools mean there’s a lot of fussing about needed if you want to look at more than one application at once. (Stage Manager seems like it was built for this thing.) The App Store is quiet on the Vision Pro. The high price of the device has surely limited its adoption from both the user and developer perspectives. The new nature of the platform means users need to experience the Vision Pro before understanding it. Apple Stores have done a good job at this, but most consumers don’t know what they’d do with a device like this beyond playing games, which isn’t Apple’s strength. There’s no killer app for visionOS yet, and even if there was, you end up back at the price tag.
Nick Heer: On the plus side, Apple Watch Series 10, AirPods 4, and Vision Pro. On the other hand, Apple Watch Ultra New Color, AirPods Max New Colors, and Vision Pro.
Christina Warren: AirPod Pro 2 remains one of the best products Apple has ever released. The OTC hearing aid function is such a huge win for so many people. I don’t understand why the AirPods 4 with noise canceling exist, but that’s not my business. Just buy the AirPod Pro 2s on sale. I regret to inform the world that I bought the USB-C AirPods Max. No one else should do the same. An overpriced product that lost features over four years, got zero improvements, and is now priced even worse compared to the competition. As for Apple Watch, I upgraded this year (and to the Hermes edition at that — the Grand H band got me) after sitting out the Series 9 year and I noticed nothing different — though the screen is larger than my Series 8 and the new Hermes band is amazing. But the lack of the blood ox stuff doesn’t impact me, but it’s a regression I dislike. I hope Apple can return this feature in the future. I did not buy an Apple Vision Pro this year and I do not regret my decision. It was a rare example of restraint on my part. I think it is a terrific tech demo and incredibly well-engineered. This sort of technology at theme park rides or in certain scenarios is jaw-dropping. But I could never convince myself I’d use it enough to not feel bad when it inevitably sat unused on my shelf. I can afford to buy one. But I am sadly not rich enough to be able to buy one and not feel angry about its lack of use. The weight and face pressure are also concerns — I’m glad to see the Belkin strap seems to have improved the fit. The lack of apps, let alone a killer app, outside of watching movies alone, is an indictment of Apple’s developer relations problems as much as it is an indictment of the AVP itself. I can’t help but think Apple’s focus on AR/VR at the expense of things like AI was a mistake, and I’m not convinced we’ll ever see the promise of Apple Vision Pro. Again, incredible tech demo. But I can’t convince myself to buy one and I love to use girl math to make bad decisions. It is what it is.
Myke Hurley: I feel like this was a miss year for the Apple Watch from a hardware perspective – thinner is great, but I want to see more design change! However, watchOS 11 is a really great advancement. I love the enhancements to widgets and the Smart Stack, as well as the inclusion of live activities. The new Photos face is amazing. I love the fact that I get these moments of joy every time I look down at my watch, as it picks a photo to show me from a vacation or a cute photo of my wife. I cannot wait to see photos of my baby on this. The Vision Pro is a real mixed bag. The launch was so exciting, the hardware is so futuristic, and visionOS is overall a good operating system with some good advancements through the year. But the lack of developer support, and the loss of buzz for the product over the year cannot be ignored. I really hope for more, as I believe in the platform. But I could not give it the mark I had hoped for.
Benjamin Mayo: Before this year, I had always assumed noise cancellation would be the AirPod Pro’s differentiating feature. I have a dislike for the feel of the in-ear tips, so I had just accepted I would always be missing out on that. But 2024 brought the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, and it’s amazing. The noise cancellation is incredibly effective given the open-earbud design. Even the non-ANC base model is way better value for money than what Apple previously sold at that price point.
Peter Cohen: The Vision Pro will be a fantastic product when it’s ready to come out of beta in a couple of years.
Federico Viticci: I love my new AirPods 4, and I find the combination of no in-ear tips and basic noise cancellation a fantastic balance of trade-offs and comfort. I didn’t rely on AirPods Pro’s advanced noise cancellation and other audio features that much, so switching to the “simpler” AirPods 4 when they were released was a no-brainer for me. As flawed as the Vision Pro can be (it is, after all, a fancy developer kit with an almost non-existent third-party app ecosystem), I also think it’s an impressive showcase of what Apple can do with hardware and miniaturization if money is not a concern and engineers are free to build whatever they want. I don’t use the Vision Pro on a regular basis, but whenever I do, I’m reminded that visionOS is an exciting long-term prospect for what I hope will eventually be shrunk down to glasses. That, in fact, is the reason why I’m not giving this category 5 stars. I really want to stop using my Meta Ray-Ban glasses, but Apple doesn’t have an alternative that I can purchase today – and worse, it sounds like their version may not be ready for quite some time still. It seems like Apple is, at this point, almost institutionally incapable of releasing a minimum viable product that doesn’t have to be a complete platform with an entire app ecosystem and a major marketing blitz. I just want Apple to make a pair of glasses that combine AirPods, Siri, and a basic camera. I don’t need Apple to make XR glasses that project a computer in front of my eyes today. And I wish the company would understand this – that they would see the interest in “simple” glasses that have speakers, a microphone, and a camera, and release that product this year. I hope they change their minds and can fast-track such a product rather than wait for visionOS to support that kind of form factor years from now.
Brent Simmons: Got new AirPods in 2024 — they won’t stay in my ear. I tried Vision Pro and am not surprised it didn’t sell well, especially at that price.
Kirk McElhearn: The Vision Pro developer kit looks like it is full of innovations, but just doesn’t seem like something I’d want to use. Who wants to wear a computer strapped to their face for a long time? And the price is out of reach for most users. As a proof of concept, it’s interesting, but the mere concept of that device, and the way Apple has promoted it, feels like an episode of Black Mirror.
Michael Gartenberg: Watch seems to have stagnated with some odd choices. Watch 10 has a screen that can do things Watch Ultra can’t, even though Ultra remains the best choice for battery life (and replacing the Rolex Submariner as the watch for desk athletes). The new back titanium is pretty, along with the new titanium bands. AirPods also got a weird upgrade with the new models lacking the hearing aid features that live in the pro models. As someone who listened to his iPod too loud at the turn of the century, I found the hearing features to work pretty well, but they aren’t replacements for OTC hearing aids. The battery life is way too short, and it’s kind of socially awkward to talk to someone when you have earbuds in, needing to explain that you really are listening to them and not tuning them out. I do think there’s a great opportunity for Apple to build a true hearing-first, music-second device for users. It’s clear they have the technology, and this is an area where Apple can really shine with a product to fill a need and make all the other products in that category obsolete. The less said about Vision Pro, the better for Apple. It’s been a long time since Apple took a swing for the fences and struck out. AVP remains a device that should have been called a developer kit or “peek at the future” science experiment, not as an end-user product. It’s an odd case where Apple tried to leapfrog the market and be first but also flawed. AVP doesn’t compete with anything on the market. It’s a device all alone in that space at that price. Apparently it’s great for watching Ted Lasso on your ceiling, according to Tim, but not really useful for much else. Ironically, the sleeper wearable/AI came from Meta, with their collaboration with Ray-Ban. Meta chose a subset of features such as photos/music/messaging/AI that relies on your phone to do the heavy lifting, works reliably well and comes in a form factor that’s actually fashion friendly. It’s the type of device with feature set and partnership that Apple could have and should have done. All the features would tie wonderfully into Apple’s ecosystem. Meta didn’t even haggle over branding—the Ray-Bans just say Ray-Ban. It’s not too late for Apple to do something similar, but I doubt that they would do a product copy if for no other reason than out of pride.
Quinn Nelson: The Vision Pro is expensive and uncomfortable. It’s too heavy, the straps are awful, the software feels primitive and limited, and it lacks the robust first- and third-party app support it desperately needs. Even Mac Virtual Display isn’t polished enough to replace a dedicated desktop monitor. In short, it feels unfinished. But despite all that, it has improved significantly since launch—and I still find myself looking for excuses to use it because every time I put it on, I can’t help but think, “holy crap, this is incredible.”
Andy Ihnatko: The Vision Pro isn’t an embarrassment for Apple; it’s fine. It’s not the breakthrough, paradigm-destroying hit product for 2024 that Apple imagined when they started developing the Vision Pro in earnest in 2016. Unfortunately, the TVA pruned that timeline during the most boring episode of “Loki” ever. Here in Earth-616, the Vision Pro is just a high-end version of one of those VR headsets that nobody really needs.
Jessica Dennis: The newer, thinner Apple Watch is legitimately pretty great (and I’m grateful that I could still use all my existing bands). I was kinda bummed that there was no stainless steel model this year; I had psyched myself up to finally upgrade from aluminum, but I didn’t particularly care for the titanium models, so went with the jet black aluminum after all. I do really love all the ultramarine accessories, though — my phone and phone case are also ultramarine.
Brian Mattucci: I love the new Apple Watch, and have no complaints. I was all set to upgrade to USB-C AirPods Max, but they didn’t change anything else about them so I had to pass. As for Vision Pro, I held off on even trying it for many months, largely due to all of the negative things I heard about it. But then I did the store demo and ended up buying one. I’ve used it nearly every single day since, and I’m very happy with it. I don’t fault Apple for creating an expensive device for early adopters (like me), but I do fault them for not doing enough to allow for a thriving App Store. Rumors of PSVR2 controller support are welcome, but late. I know Vision Pro isn’t primarily for games and that’s not why anyone would buy one at this point, but it adds value to the device and helps people justify the purchase (especially of an eventual more reasonably priced version). While AVP is a weighty device, I don’t find it uncomfortable with the solo loop alone. Everyone’s skull is different, and there are many options out there, but I think it requires a lot of a person to understand how to wear AVP comfortably and people simply aren’t used to it. Other complaints I’ve found don’t really apply to me (FOV) or aren’t that big of a deal to me (glare). Ultimately I think AVP is their best first-gen device ever and I’m excited to see how the next several revisions improve on things. I hope it doesn’t take them years to add folder support though – my home screen is a mess.
Rosemary Orchard: I need an Apple Watch Ultra that fits on my wrist.
Allison Sheridan: The clear winner on wearables this year were the AirPods. Redesigning them to fit more ear shapes caught my eye originally. but noise cancellation in the non-Pros has made them a big draw. The OTC hearing aid features of the Pros is also compelling. Apple Watch was a very modest improvement.
Dr. Drang: AirPods are such a good product that Apple is now adding features I have to turn off. Head gestures seemed like a good idea until I looked both ways before crossing the street when a question was pending.
John Gruber: AirPods 4 with ANC are a terrific update, and AirPods Pro 2, though years-old hardware, saw significant software improvements—most notably, widely acclaimed support for use as certified hearing aids. AirPods continue to exemplify Apple its best. Series 10 watches feature a new display that supports once-per-second updates while in energy-saving always-on mode. So the seconds hand on an analog face can “tick” once per second even when the display isn’t fully on. But Apple only enabled this ticking seconds indicator on two watch faces, both new to WatchOS 11: Flux and Reflections. Setting aside the fact that I personally don’t like either of those faces (Flux in particular seems deliberately obtuse), this is ridiculous. WatchOS 11 offers, by my quick count, at least 33 different watch faces that offer a non-digital seconds hand or indicator. And only two of them support the new 1Hz refresh rate? That’s bullshit. And it wasn’t just a launch thing, because here we are in January and no additional watch faces have been updated to support it. This is not how a serious watchmaker treats its watches. I will admit to caring far more about always-on second hands than most people, but what a waste of a technical breakthrough. Not just most, but every single watch face should have been updated to support ticking seconds. Apple Watch is turning more into a fitness tracker that happens to show the time, and away from serving as a proper watch. Also: no Ultra 3 this year. The year-old Ultra 2 did gain a very nice black titanium color option, but that’s it. Kind of weird for a watch that starts at $800 to skip a year of silicon improvements. Is Vision Pro a hit? No, far from it. But I remain unconvinced that Apple ever had much hope that this first Vision device would sell in much higher quantities than it has. The narrative that it’s a laughably overpriced bust reminds me of the original Macintosh in 1984, whose $2,500 price tag, adjusted for inflation, works out to over $7,500 in today’s dollars. After an initial wave of publicity on launch, the original Macintosh sold so poorly that it was arguably the impetus for John Sculley and Apple’s board to fire Steve Jobs and exile him from the company. Many pundits of the era confidently proclaimed that the entire concept of a GUI was a gimmick with no future. Am I predicting that the Vision platform will have as bright and essential a future ahead of it as the Macintosh did in 1984? No. But I suspect it has a bright and essential future ahead of it. The entire concept and paradigm is so new and different that, like the Macintosh 40 years prior, the product had to ship years before a version could be made at a price that appeals to the mass market, and years before there’s all that much to do using it. But, as it stands, Vision Pro today offers an incredible experience for watching traditional movies and shows, and a breakthrough experience for watching spatial content. If Bang & Olufsen sold this product in a form that only played movies — no “spatial computing” — it would cost $10,000 and some people would consider it well worth the price. Spatial computing feels fun to me, but not very productive. That could change, and I suspect “fun but not productive” is how I would have described trying to work on a Macintosh in 1984 vs. an Apple II. And Vision Pro’s remarkable (and with VisionOS 2, much improved) Mac Virtual Display feature is a highly-productive environment for work. I can’t give Vision Pro an A for 2024, but I foresee A’s in future years.
John Siracusa: At best, the Vision Pro seems like a first step on a long journey. It will require many years of dedication, and perhaps some significant pivots, to turn this platform into a success. After spending a decade and several billion dollars on a car project that never shipped, I hope Apple can muster the resolve to keep plugging away at the Vision Pro. The new AirPods 4 are great for those of us who don’t want our headphones to be shoved into our ear canals. The noise canceling cannot compete with literal earplugs that are the AirPods Pro, but it’s still a nice improvement. The smaller size of both the earbuds and the case are also great. After a brief burst of excitement from the Apple Watch Ultra a few years ago, we appear to be in a holding pattern again as we wait for a more radical redesign of the mainstream Apple watch. The new watches this year were fine, though.
Steven Aquino: Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro all are winners in general. The new Apple Watch’s bigger screen in a lightweight package is lovely, especially after wearing an Ultra for 2 years solely for its big screen. Vision Pro is the most accessible content consumption device I’ve ever used, but it is heavy, and the app story for streaming TV and movies feels thin other than TV+ and Disney+.
Matt Birchler: The Apple Watch seems to be coasting along, which isn’t terrible, but it seems like that product is approaching its effective final form, while AirPods continue to get really good software updates that make them more valuable over time (except for AirPods Max, of course). The Vision Pro really drops this category down, as it does have some devotees, but they seem to be a huge minority of purchasers. There was chatter after the Vision Pro’s unveiling at WWDC 2023 that it sucked the energy out of the LLM “fad” that was just getting off the ground, but at the end of 2024 I think it’s clear that the Vision Pro is far more niche and unexciting than we thought it would be nearly one year into its time on the market.
Aleen Simms: I’m glad they released the Vision Pro, but it still feels like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist (for most people). I’m interested to see where Apple decides to take it over the next several iterations, assuming they continue product development. A convenient, glasses-like wearable could be a major accessibility boon for a lot of people.
Michael Tsai: The AirPods 4 seem good. AirPods Max remains a product in Apple’s lineup. Apple no longer offers software updates for my watch, and I’m waiting for a new Apple Watch SE, which hasn’t been announced yet. Apple Vision Pro is technically impressive, but it increasingly seems like Apple built the wrong thing. Those engineering resources would have been much better spent improving Apple’s other platforms.
Chance Miller: The AirPods Pro 2, despite being over two years old, are the standout wearable product of the year. The new hearing health features will go down as one of Apple’s most important releases of all time. Apple Vision Pro gets a lot more hate than it deserves. I’ve had very few if any, technological experiences as magical as interacting with it. Apple has work to do if it wants Apple Vision Pro (or whatever “Vision” product comes next) to truly become the future of computing. The good news is that I think Apple is taking the feedback in stride and will continue to perfect the spatial computing experience in years to come. The Apple Watch Series 11 is the first Apple Watch that feels like it sits flat on my wrist. It’s a subtle change, but one I notice every day.
Andrew Laurence: Barely one year into the Vision Pro’s product life, I it feels like the early days of the Apple Watch — also introduced with a set of features that showed a puzzling lack of vision. Over time, the Watch found its market of utility, and apps sprung up around it. We’ll see if the same happens with Vision Pro. Meanwhile… is Vision Pro, like Apple Intelligence, a case of organizational FOMO leaking out to product? I, for one, have zero interest in “strap something to my face” computing. Might Apple Watch’s greatest impact be a generational change in product naming? Since the Watch, Apple’s wholly new products and services have followed its naming convention of “Apple Product”, with “Product” being a generic category word. Since then, Cisco retired “AnyConnect” for “Cisco Secure Client”; Dell retired years of brand equity for the same convention of “Dell Product.” Is “Ford Truck” next? AirPods Pro 2 continues to be my most consistently superlative purchase in some years.
Carolina Milanesi: Apple Watch has become a cornerstone of the ecosystem for many users and a device that is keeping users in the ecosystem, as competition on the phone side is growing in Android both on form factor and AI.
Paul Kafasis: AirPods updates have been great. Apple Watch, well, they really need to fix their patent situation. Vision Pro… God, so much hype, and it sure seems like a pretty big flop. From all I can see, even those people who were excited about it are finding themselves not using it.
Alex Cox: Apple Vision Pro is the most influential hardware I’ve ever used, and I don’t have anyone to else to use it with, make things with it, or even demo it unless they’re willing to sit for forty minutes to make sure the guest mode calibration works. Apple is getting in the way of letting AVP grow, and not just because of the price. Until there’s developer access to more APIs and more accessibility to dev kits, I don’t think there will be anything interesting made for AVP that isn’t a big-budget immersive video partially funded by Apple.
David Sparks: The Vision Pro deserves better than its current reputation as a pundit punching bag. While everyone’s busy dunking on Apple’s spatial computing experiment, I’m regularly strapping it on and using it for work and entertainment. It’s definitely first-generation, but there’s something genuinely compelling here. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Adam Engst: The big story in 2024 for wearables is the AirPods Pro 2 and their hearing health and hearing aid capabilities. Those have the potential to be life-changing for many people. Otherwise, it’s hard to get excited about the changes to the Apple Watch Series 10. The Vision Pro is impressive technology that completely misses the mark in terms of being useful and affordable.
Dan Moren: The AirPods Pro 2’s Hearing Aid feature is probably the biggest announcement in all of Apple’s wearables lines this year. It’s truly impressive, even if it’s not something that everybody’s going to use. But this is where Apple’s Health initiatives shine: solving actual problems people have and doing so in a way that’s accessible to the masses. I find the Vision Pro fascinating, but have spent so little time with one that I can’t offer more than that. I hope the next one’s cheaper.
Dave Hamilton: The hearing features added to AirPods Pro 2 are a HUGE game-changer in my world. The active earplugs feature works so well that these have replaced my custom-fit musicians’ earplugs as my default earplugs for concerts. As for Vision Pro, I’m eager to see where Apple takes it, but it’s obviously just a public beta at this point of some very cool, extremely overpriced tech.
James Thomson: The Vision Pro is a fantastically impressive technological achievement that no normal person should actually buy. The hearing aid functionality for the AirPods Pro could genuinely change lives.
Craig Hockenberry: I have largely ignored the Vision Pro, and it appears I am not alone. I still don’t see a reason to put the thing on my head for hours each day.
Michael E. Cohen: I have a Vision Pro and really like it, but mostly as the best widescreen and 3D video-watching experience I’ve ever experienced. The device needs more apps, especially the kind of apps only Apple can provide that demonstrate to other developers both the device’s unique (and sometimes less obvious) capabilities and the best ways to make those capabilities accessible to users.
HomeHow would you rate Apple’s overall performance in Home technology in 2024? Consider HomeKit, the Home app, Matter, overall strategy and anything else you deem appropriate.
Rosemary Orchard: I love the support of Matter. But feel more progress needs to be made.
Lex Friedman: The Home app is ugly. Home app integrations in Control Center are useful but inflexible.
Dave Hamilton: Attending CES the past two years, I saw a marked shift in how much Matter mattered to vendors. (I had to do it.) Last year, everyone was stoked to tell me they had added Matter support to their various widgets. This year, it was mentioned as an afterthought, “Oh, and yes, we’ll support Matter if and when that becomes important to our customers.”
Myke Hurley: The new Control Center actions I can add have saved Apple’s Home efforts for me this year. Outside of that, I am not sure of anything else I could focus on. I hope for a 5/5 next year, though.
Michael Gartenberg: The digital home is a mess, and Apple is doing its best to tame it in an Apple way. No one is doing a better job but no one is doing a great job either for consumers to implement.
Steven Aquino: As an Apple user, I love the idea of HomeKit. The smart home makes tasks like turning lights on and off more accessible. What frustrates me, however, is its unreliability. I see “No Response” statuses way more often than I’d like, and it sullies the overall experience.
Christina Warren: I don’t understand why Apple continues to pretend to invest in this area. Pro tip: use Home Assistant, the excellent open-source project that will let all your IoT stuff talk to one another using whatever you want — rather than trying to get HomeKit to do what it claims it is going to do.
John Gruber: I can’t name one improvement to HomeKit or anything Home-related in 2024, and this is a platform sorely in need of many improvements. Fingers crossed for 2025, though. I know there are talented people on that team, and they have to be up to something.
Adam Engst: Did anything happen in 2024?
Eric Slivka: 2025 sounds like it might be the year of the home for Apple, so 2024 didn’t see very much. The HomePod family managed only to replace the Space Gray mini with a Midnight one. HomeKit remains finicky at times, and I’m not sure Matter has helped much.
David Sparks: This year, Apple made many nice quality-of-life improvements, including better Matter support, control center widgets, and (in my experience) more platform stability. There’s room for improvement, and I am interested in Apple possibly making its own accessories. But overall, I think Apple moved the needle in a positive direction.
Casey Liss: The following is what I wrote for the 2024 report card. Word for word. Every word of it remains true, except now I’m using Home Assistant instead of Homebridge. I bumped my rating from 2 → 1 because, holy smokes, can we get some forward progress here, please? Same as it ever was. HomeKit is unreliable and doesn’t work with enough devices. It pains me that I have to run Homebridge. That’s not necessarily Apple’s fault, but it’s also not not Apple’s fault. Matter seems to be a total nothingburger. Same story: not their fault, but not not their fault. Though I’ve never owned a HomePod, I’ve heard continual grumbling of them failing. No thanks.
Michael Tsai: My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music. This year, I dipped my toes into the Matter ecosystem. I was pleased to find that it all “just worked,” though the automation options are a bit limited, and I still don’t like the Home app.
Paul Kafasis: Someday, the Home app and smart home controls will be better. They are still not this year, though! I have assorted Shortcuts to do things, and they seem to have gotten slower.
Rich Mogull: As a 20-year home automation enthusiast with over 100 connected devices and a lot of automation code, I have historically rated this lower, but the combo of the Home app and Siri just gets the job done these days. I have no issues connecting what I need to and making it do what I want. A better Siri could easily bump this to a 5.
Shelly Brisbin: Make the Home app better. It’s still awful.
Matt Birchler: I scored this right down the middle because I don’t recall Apple doing much this year in the home category. However, I do have all of my smart home items in the Home app, and it works pretty well for me. In a post-Matter world, I have my choice of apps to use for this since my devices show up everywhere, but I still gravitate towards Apple’s app.
Craig Hockenberry: If you had told me ten years ago that I’d have a phone app that controlled my 104-year-old home, I’d have laughed. Yet here we are: thanks to HomeKit, lights, heating, entertainment, and even a coffee pot are all seamlessly connected.
Peter Cohen: Does Apple have a Home strategy? Does it really Matter?
John Siracusa: Siri continues to be a boat anchor weighing down the HomePod and other HomeKit accessories. Apple Intelligence hasn’t even come to most home devices and probably won’t until they get hardware upgrades.
Marco Arment: HomeKit continues to mostly work, but the promised world of Matter has still not materialized. The HomePod remains a buggy mess, and there are few signs of effort on either front.
Benjamin Mayo: Apple kinda skipped this year as far as the smart home is concerned, so it’s hard to really pass judgment positively or negatively. I was disappointed by the lack of any Apple Intelligence strategy for the HomePod, though.
Chance Miller: With the continued rollout of Matter, I expected a bigger upgrade to the Home app and HomeKit ecosystem in 2024. That didn’t happen. Apple has already lost so much of this market to other companies, but I’m hoping to see a renewed focus in 2025 with new hardware products and much-needed improvements to the Home app.
Stephen Hackett: HomeKit continues to hum along, working better and better each year. The ecosystem continues to expand; if Matter ever really arrives, which ecosystem a particular product supports will become a moot question. Rumors are swirling about Apple entering new markets, with cameras, locks, and even smart screens a possibility for 2025 or later. We will have to judge those offerings if/when they arrive, but I’m fascinated to see what Apple would bring to the table.
Federico Viticci: My entire apartment is wired to HomeKit, but I don’t love HomeKit because I’m tired of purchasing third-party hardware that doesn’t have the same degree of quality control that Apple typically brings to the table. I’m intrigued by the idea of Apple finally waking up and making a HomePod with a screen that could potentially serve as a flexible, interactive home hub. That’s a first step, and I hope it won’t disappoint. Seriously, though: I just would love for Apple to make routers again.
Andrew Laurence: This technology enthusiast has yet to embrace Home or any of the “smart” home generations. All I hear about it is janky futzing and interoperability issues. These sound like problems, not solutions. Call me when it achieves the “Spouse acceptance factor” that TiVo had in 2000.
Quinn Nelson: Another year, another bare-minimum effort from Apple to make any meaningful strides in the smart home space—beyond some obligatory Matter point updates. Apple Intelligence should play a key role in the home ecosystem, but the necessary software and hardware just aren’t there yet. Honestly, it feels like we’re still a few years away from Apple finally recommitting to the platform that needs it the most.
Rob Griffiths: The Home app is a dreadful piece of software. Although I’m fairly technical, I still find it confusing, and the layout and home screen design are abysmal.
Joe Rosensteel: I have experienced many bugs with Home. Even after I switched to the new home architecture, the tvOS 18.0 beta broke, and Apple TVs could not be used as a home hub for a few months. I replaced a bunch of WeMo smart plugs with Eve Energy smart plugs for no good reason other than WeMo just got flakey. There is no forward progress on the Home app, which remains a clunky pain in the butt. I still can’t add or remove seasonal devices (like smart plugs for my Christmas decorations) without it freaking out. I have Siri tell me it can’t turn on a scene from my Watch, but it can from my iPhone. It’s just a pervasive irritation that works often enough that I don’t rip it all out.
Jeff Carlson: Still a mess, even though some of that is outside of Apple’s control. But come on, it’s been like this for years. Maybe 2025 will be the Year of Matter or whatever. I’ll save this comment for next year’s survey.
James Thomson: How long have I been giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that this will be the year they turn around their Home strategy?
Zac Hall: Home is a category that remains in the Six Colors Report Card lineup.
Allison Sheridan: I continue to be disappointed in the Home app itself. The interface isn’t getting less baffling than it ever was, even for a seasoned user. Scenes vs. Automations continue to break my brain. “One of your devices didn’t respond” is a message that could use a slight improvement; WHICH ONE??? The only good news I see on this front is that at CES, Matter was all the rage, causing vendors to proudly display compatibility with HomeKit.
Charles Arthur: Never improves. The commands haven’t changed: being able to put an IF statement in would make such a difference. (Yes, you can do it with Shortcuts if you have the patience, but who does? Why should you have to divert out of the Home app, which has Actions, to Shortcuts?)
Dr. Drang: I like my new HomePods mini, but Siri still hampers their value.
Carolina Milanesi: Does Apple even care anymore?
Glenn Fleishman: I’m giving Home a low rating because, despite improvements to the Home app across platforms, including the important issue of granting guests access, it’s still a bloody mess of an interface. I’ve added several smart things to my network in recent months: a lock, outlet switches to control lights, a porch HomeKit bulb, more cameras, a doorbell cam, and a thermostat in a guest room—the management process is not wonderful. It’s inflexible, things break, and the connections among devices feel fragile. Apple hasn’t managed to convince many more manufacturers to buy into HomeKit, which means the set of supported options hasn’t grown much, particularly in the doorbell market. Automations remain limited and frustrating about what you can use as triggers and linking activities. For instance, I’d like to set my porchlight to go on for some time in the evening to early morning but also have it turn on when someone approaches the house other times, then turn off within minutes after that if it’s not within the period it should be continuously on. It cannot be done (to my knowledge, testing, and inquiry). I feel like some X10 systems of many years gone by had greater configuration options than I can achieve in some cases with Home. Even setting up a simple “away on vacation” setting requires lots of grouping and programming, and I am unable to see how I could set up random on/off times, which are usual to simulate people at home. (Some third-party apps for HomeKit-connected outlets and lamps offer these features.)The new sharing feature, too, doesn’t let me share lights—only locks, alarms, etc. So someone can’t housesit and be able to access the house’s lights and such without a full invitation. I’d like Apple to put in a lot of rethink about Home in general and come up with something dramatically better that fits the quantity and utility of what HomeKit is good for.
Apple TVHow would you rate how the Apple TV hardware and tvOS software platform went in 2024? Consider anything you deem relevant to the platform. (Do not address the Apple TV+ streaming service.)
Matt Birchler: After a few years of tvOS updates making the platform more annoying and more clearly an advertising platform for the shows Apple thinks I should watch more than what I am currently watching, it was nice for tvOS not to move further down this road in 2024. However, I recently used Google TV for a few weeks and was shocked to find numerous features that I greatly preferred on that platform. I really do hope Apple is looking at competitors and finding the good stuff they can adopt in their box.
Rich Mogull: There is not a single other privacy-preserving device for the streaming age. Not one. And the Apple TV works well and looks and sounds better than nearly anything else.
Joe Rosensteel: Apple really isn’t making any progress on tvOS. I use my Apple TV every day, and it is the only set-top box I would recommend to people, but that doesn’t mean Apple perfected the form. Things are more or less in the same state they were in at the end of 2023 when the Home app was updated with that sidebar that mostly can’t be customized. We still don’t have a unified Home and TV app experience. We don’t have anything for live entertainment short of sports notifications. We don’t have any kind of firm policy on pause screen ads (see the YouTube screensaver controversy from 2024). Apple hasn’t enticed anyone new to add support for the jog wheel they introduced on the remote in 2021.
James Thomson: Hardware not updated since 2022, software feels like it barely changes each year, and yet still the best streaming device to buy.
Allison Sheridan: Nothing went wrong but it’s been two years since they’ve changed the hardware.
Steven Aquino: The Apple TV box is laughably over-engineered for what it mainly does: stream content. I appreciate the horsepower, to be sure, but the point stands. Software-wise, I’m still holding my breath for tvOS to have its iOS 7 moment. The grid of icons UI is good in some ways, but on a screen as large as a television’s, there is a lot of untapped potential. Widgets, etc.
Chance Miller: The hardware feels as uninspired as ever, but the Apple TV is still the best streaming set-top box. Everything else is a poorly designed, ad-ridden mess. The Apple TV app could sure use some love, though.
Quinn Nelson: Little was done, but little was needed.
Benjamin Mayo: A minor year for the Apple TV box with no new hardware in sight. However, tvOS 18 did include a handful of niceties, like automatic subtitles and a much better Enhance Dialogue algorithm.
Casey Liss: The Apple TV remains a product in Apple’s lineup. I am an Apple TV apologist and superfan. Other than a couple of Nintendo consoles, it’s the only thing that’s connected to my TV. We watch live TV using the wonderful Channels app. We watch movies and shows on Plex, the infuriating Apple TV app, and Disney+. My wife and I do our exercise using a couple of apps on the Apple TV. It’s is our TV, for all intents and purposes. However, our Apple TV HD is getting really long in the tooth, and though we only use it on rare occasions, it’s still getting pretty painful. It’s our third-tier Apple TV, and I’m anxiously awaiting the time when we can upgrade the main one, and thus trickle our 4K first-gen down and retire the HD. We haven’t really had any noteworthy changes to tvOS in… years? While on the one side, I’m not sure what I’m really seeking; on the other side, it feels like Apple has mostly forgotten that tvOS exists.
John Siracusa: I continue to be frustrated with the poor quality of many of the streaming video apps I use on Apple TV, both in terms of bugs and interface design. Is that Apple’s fault? Maybe only to the extent that these apps are using standard Apple frameworks for things like video playback. But Apple also isn’t exactly leading by example when it comes to user-centric design. TV apps everywhere continue to prioritize the needs of the streaming service over my needs as a viewer. I want to continue watching my show. They want to shove a bunch of new content in my face while making the show I was just watching as difficult to find as possible. And they don’t seem to care if they lose my place or fail to track my progress. And heaven forbid I go back to refresh my memory by watching a scene from an earlier episode. Now my current place in the series is apparently impossible for modern technology to discern.
Craig Hockenberry: The only thing I hate about Apple TV is how every damn service has its own weird user interface. Still, the Apple TV is the best general-purpose entertainment device for the post-cable world.
Michael Gartenberg: It feels like Apple TV has not only gone back to being a hobby but a hobby that you started investing a lot of money in and got bored with. I’d give it a lower score, but the Snoopy screensaver is cute.
Rosemary Orchard: Still using my Apple TV from last year?!
Paul Kafasis: I’m a big fan of the Apple TV. I’m willing to pay a premium over other hardware to get an ad-free, upscale experience. That said, I’d like to see some new hardware here.
Michael Tsai: Nothing much happened this year, though I like the new feature of automatically showing subtitles when you rewind a bit. I still don’t like the software or the remote.
Lex Friedman: My cable company discontinued its support for Cable Cards, so I switched to its cable-over-streaming offer. However, this functionality works only on iOS, Fire Tablets, and Apple TV. So, I’m now reliant on Apple TV to watch cable TV, which I use almost exclusively to watch NFL games. It works just fine.
Marco Arment: Apple TV continues to be a product in Apple’s lineup.
Andrew Laurence: Nearly all our TV viewing goes through our Apple TV 4K. In the “streaming box” category, Apple competes at 5-10x the cost of its popular rivals. As a middle-aged technology nerd, I value its user experience and privacy stance. My college-aged kids are content with the built-in TV apps or a $25 stick from Roku or Amazon. Apple TV can play more roles than just a streaming box; is the whole, in fact, greater than the sum of its parts?
Myke Hurley: Steady.
Adam Engst: I appreciate that Apple has finally improved its photo screensavers, but why does the Portraits screensaver, which works like the iPhone Lock Screen/Apple Watch Photos face, ruin every photo by displaying the time over it?
Eric Slivka: No new Apple TV hardware for the second year in a row, and only minor tvOS updates leave us wanting as we await the home revolution of 2025. I would still like to see a cheaper stick-style Apple TV option.
John Gruber: I’m a very happy daily (well, nightly) Apple TV user. But what exactly improved or changed in 2024? Anything? It may well be fair to say the current hardware — Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen, which shipped in November 2022 — is fine, and this is a hardware platform that only needs updates every 3 or 4 years, but we’re grading what happened in 2024. Also: I feel like Apple has never yet made a truly great remote control for this platform.
Christina Warren: Apple obviously cares a lot about Apple TV+. It seems to care a lot less about tvOS and the Apple TV hardware. Another year, more lack of updates on hardware or significant updates on software and a price delta between other boxes that doesn’t improve. Especially since Apple has good TV+ apps on Roku, Fire TV and Google TV — not to mention stuff for TV makers like LG and Samsung.
Jeff Carlson: Apple TV still doesn’t feel like it’s changed a whole lot, but I still swear by it because it’s not the crapware that every other vendor creates.
Stephen Hackett: For the 2023 Report Card, I wrote, “The Apple TV hardware has been so overpriced and overpowered for so long that it feels like I’m wasting everyone’s time by mentioning it again.” I also said, “tvOS continues to feel trapped between Apple’s vision for the platform and what it can work out with streaming giants like Netflix.” Yup.
Carolina Milanesi: Nothing to see here – no pun intended!
Andy Ihnatko: Until Apple decides to give Apple TV a mission beyond “run streaming apps and generally be invisible,” it’s a solid 3 out of 5 by its nature. I’m giving it a 4 because of the new Snoopy screensavers.
Glenn Fleishman: I still find tvOS’s UI primitive, but I use it for about 95% of my video watching across many apps, and it generally serves the purpose. Feels stale compared to other options and sometimes frustrating in terms of scrubs and basic rewind/fast forwarding. This may be a function of app implementation, such as how YouTube stinks and others don’t.
ServicesHow would you rate Apple’s performance in services in 2024? Consider the App Store (from a consumer perspective), Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Fitness+, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Card, Apple Pay, AppleCare, and anything else you deem appropriate.
Brian Mattucci: I’m thrilled that Apple Music Classical finally got CarPlay support, but it’s still missing on Mac and AVP.
Michael Tsai: iMessage and Siri still work poorly for me. Apple Pay and the rest of iCloud are OK. The other services don’t interest me except that their existence seems to be warping Apple’s product design decisions.
Craig Hockenberry: I’m not a fan of how pitching services has become part of the modern Apple software experience. When I check my stock portfolio, I don’t need to be reminded of Apple News+.
Carolina Milanesi: The Apple TV+ lineup remained strong, and the sports win is important for Apple, especially in light of Vision Pro. I have some concerns around Apple Card and savings as Apple looks for a new partner.
Matt Deatherage: Barely noticed any improvements, didn’t notice any regressions.
Chance Miller: The prices for all of Apple’s services remained the same in 2024 while the quality of each continued to improve. Apple Arcade continues to be underrated, and I’ve found myself opening Apple News on a surprisingly regular basis. In particular, the election coverage in the Apple News app was top-notch. Apple Music excels in a world where Spotify continues to combine music, podcasts, videos, and other junk into a single interface.
Kirk McElhearn: Still only 5GB based storage for iCloud, which means a lot of people don’t back up their iPhones. This is unconscionable these days and borders on forced bundling, requiring users to pay for extra storage. Even if it’s only a dollar a month, the mere fact that users have to enter into a regular transaction with Apple seems monopolistic. There should be options to use other services to back up the device. I have the basic Apple One subscription, and it only comes with 50 GB of storage, so I have to pay another $3 a month to get enough. This all feels like Apple is nickel and diming people.
Matt Birchler: Much like the home category, I am struggling to think of anything notable Apple did in services this year, and I guess I think they’re mostly fine.
Steven Aquino: I wish Apple would revisit the Apple TV branding to make it clearer. There’s the box and the streaming service, but I’d bet most people associate “Apple TV” with TV+ instead of the box. The TV app adds more complexity and confusion in terms of naming.
Brent Simmons: Most of the services I’ve tried work okay, but I’m annoyed by all the advertising for them.
Paul Kafasis: I think Apple is spread too thin, and a whole lot of these items are distractions that aren’t worth their time.
Lex Friedman: Apple TV+ and Apple Music remain very good. Apple Fitness and Apple News remain fine. Apple Pay is wonderful. iCloud storage is still an issue in 2025. C’mon, Apple.
David Sparks: I understand how important services are to Apple and Wall Street. I simultaneously fear how much building services revenue now enters the equation for new products. Also, the free iCloud tear of 5GB was first announced in 2011. That was 14 years ago. As a point of reference, the human genome project took 13 years.
Dan Moren: I use almost all of Apple’s services, and they are fine. But very few of them make me want to stand up and cheer. It’s eye-rolling that the company still hasn’t upgraded that 5GB base iCloud tier.
Myke Hurley: The content! It continues to be great. There are always Apple TV+ shows in my favorites of the year, and this one was no different. Slow Horses, Bad Monkey. Great work.
Benjamin Mayo: Apple didn’t make a big deal about the personalized ‘New’ tab in Apple Music, but it makes a big difference. The app feels a lot more vibrant and alive, with rolling recommendations and suggestions relevant to individual music tastes. It filled a big gap in the Apple Music offering.
Philip Michaels: If Apple silicon was the smartest move Apple did in years, then setting up a bunch of services with recurring revenue that tapped into all those installed devices was the second smartest
Jessica Dennis: I still love a fair amount of Apple TV+ content, and sometimes Apple News+ comes in handy. I’m an Apple One Premier subscriber, and luckily for Apple, I have not sat down to do the math and come to the conclusion that it’s probably not really worth it for me.
Shelly Brisbin: Apple offers enough services now that it’s hard to craft an overall narrative. Some, like Apple Music and iCloud, are great. Apple News+, which I want to love because I believe in a news environment where multiple platforms and ways of staying informed can thrive, hasn’t taken hold or made a compelling case for its own unique value. Also, on the negative side of the ledger, a recent issue with a subscription purchased through TV+ left me stuck in a limbo of automated prompts, with no easy way to contact a human. This is an issue plenty of people face, but Apple tends to get more of a pass than other companies, it seems to me. There’s no Genius Bar for services issues.
Rich Mogull: We are an Apple One family. The storage expansion solved my biggest gripe. News is my go-to news app, and across the family, we make heavy use of all of the services except Apple Arcade. The privacy features of iCloud, like Private Relay and Hide My Email, are underrated. Passwords and Keychain sync are borderline disruptive.
Marco Arment: Apple TV+ is the flashy star of the services, reliably delivering great new shows and seasons. iCloud and the service infrastructure remain the quiet heroes, working reliably behind the scenes to make everything else work so we don’t notice. But a massive chunk of “services” revenue comes from inconvenient truths that Apple wishes we wouldn’t pay attention to. Look at these nice TV shows!
Michael Gartenberg: Most services are somewhat stagnant, which is why we see all sorts of bundles that bring services into users’ hands they wouldn’t necessarily buy, like Apple News. I was particularly disappointed that there’s a song on Apple Music called “Let’s Go Bomb Tel-Aviv.” I expect more from Apple.
Michael E. Cohen: The plethora of services offered can sometimes be overwhelming to navigate or even understand. That said, I have had little problem accessing and using many of them.
Roman Loyola: I guess I should stop waiting for Apple to increase the free base storage amount.
Stephen Hackett: All in all, Apple is doing a good job with its various Services. TV+ is home to some of the best storytelling, and Fitness+ is inspiring and fun. iCloud syncs data more reliably than ever. Apple Arcade has become home to many rebooted classic iOS games, while Apple Podcasts has made the industry more accessible than ever. There are still sore spots, but none of them are new. iCloud’s storage tiers are stingy and oddly spaced out, and the ads in News+ continue to spoil an otherwise solid experience.
Charles Arthur: TV+ has been disappointing. Slow Horses is the standout series. Most else is indifferent and uninteresting.
Glenn Fleishman: Everything worked for me this year!
Christina Warren: My continued line about Apple Services is that they are not best in class in any area. But the ubiquity and the way they work with Apple products keeps me paying. But in my mind, there isn’t an Apple service that is best in class in any way, and what I ultimately pay for is the convenience. I will give the new Passwords app a shoutout because I think it can replace a 1Password or Bitwarden or LastPass subscription for many families. I still pay for 1Password, and I’ll continue to, but for most people in the Apple ecosystem, I think Passwords is good enough. So that’s a bright spot. Everything else. Meh. It’s fine. But I wouldn’t call any of them best in class.
Andrew Laurence: In the name of all that is holy, Siri and Apple Music’s default for “play this song” to be the most recent release version in my library needs to be stopped. If I say, “Play the song Born to Run,” the original 1975 release is the only correct answer.
John Siracusa: Apple really needs to give some attention to the client apps for its “lesser” services on its “lesser” platforms. The Music app on macOS is in desperate need of some love, and iCloud Drive in the Finder is still maddeningly inconsistent and buggy.
Howard Oakley: Apple’s ‘curating’ of the App Store remains lamentably poor and isn’t improving.
John Gruber: TV+ is far from the biggest streaming service, but I’d argue adamantly that it has by far the highest batting average for quality content. Movies are still a weakness: “Wolfs” should have been great but was mediocre and forgettable. And that was TV+’s best movie of the year. But TV+ series continue to excel: Slow Horses had another crackerjack season, For All Mankind finished a good fourth season, and new shows like Dark Matter, Bad Monkey, and Presumed Innocent were all strong. TV+ is also a great streaming platform for small kids. iCloud, especially with iCloud Plus, remains secure, fast, and reliable. It enables so much seamless continuity (hence Apple’s “Continuity” umbrella brand for those features) across devices. But here we are again, with me repeating the same gripe from previous years: it’s miserly that Apple is still offering only a mere 5 GB of storage at the free tier and has left the paid-tier storage allotments unchanged forever. I wonder how many zillions of iPhone users out there don’t have device backups because they only have a free iCloud account with 5 GB? The Apple One bundle is a good deal, but the free iCloud tier should be genuinely useful for backing up a modern iPhone. And paid Plus tiers should now offer more storage than they do.
Brett Terpstra: I really enjoy Apple TV+ shows, but I have moved away from Apple for news and music. There are just better services out there. I appreciate Apple Pay and my Apple Card, but the only changes in that area this year that I know of were APY decreases on Savings accounts.
James Thomson: AppleTV+ programming continued to be a highlight in an otherwise lackluster—or, at best, stagnant—set of service offerings.
Allison Sheridan: Apple TV+ is knocking it out of the park on show content. Developers can now confidently include iCloud syncing in their apps, making a seamless and delightful experience for users. Fitness+ continues to add new workouts, and the interface improvements make it easier to get to your saved workouts.
Casey Liss: We. Still. Get. 5GB. Of. Storage. For. Free. On. iCloud. Apple services are mostly good on the surface. Fitness+ is great, although (like the Vision Pro) I wish more content got added more frequently. Apple TV+ continues to fire on all cylinders — as I write this, I just finished Shrinking season 2, and I am counting the days to Severance season 2. Apple Music is pretty good, but annoying issues with the app on all platforms wear me down. Any time music just doesn’t play — without any sort of error messaging, naturally — I get just a bit more frustrated. Thankfully, Spotify has worked hard to enshittify their app recently, so I am not feeling the longing I once did for a return to the land of the green and black. I know services are printing money for Apple, but the value for money for consumers is bad and getting worse. We should have had more iCloud storage years ago — especially at lower tiers. Every time I see a NEARLY FORTY DOLLAR bill for AppleOne, I die a little inside. Which means I’m dying a little inside twelve times a year.
Nick Heer: As Apple’s services business grows, it begins to do things that feel uncharacteristic but are increasingly commonplace. Partnering with Taboola is one example. Flaky client software is another. Also, remember how lots of people were locked out of their Apple IDs in April, and we still have no idea why?
Dr. Drang: I’ve been very pleased with Fitness+, which surprised me. I do wish it would get smarter about the kinds of workouts I tend to use and stop showing me stuff I don’t care about. I guess I should bite the bullet and build up a library so I don’t have to hunt.
Rosemary Orchard: Puzzles, etc., are still not available outside of America!!!
Quinn Nelson: Apple TV+ continues to stand out as the shining beacon of excellence in an otherwise neglected lineup of services.
Federico Viticci: I switched from Apple Music to Spotify last year, so the only Apple services we use in our household now are iCloud storage with family sharing and Apple TV+. I love Apple TV+, but they should make a native app for Android so that I can watch their TV shows on my Lenovo media tablet. As for iCloud, I use it for Shortcuts, app integrations, and basic iCloud Drive storage, but I don’t trust it for work-related assets because it’s so damn slow. For whatever reason, with Dropbox, I can upload heavy video files in seconds, thanks to my fiber connection, but with iCloud, I have to wait a full day for those assets to sync across devices. iCloud Drive needs more controls and tools for people who work with files and share them with other people.
Reliability of Apple HardwareHow would you rate the overall reliability of Apple’s hardware in 2024? Were things better, worse, or pretty much the same in terms of the hardware working the way you expected? Were there issues? Consider anything you deem appropriate.
Benjamin Mayo: Stellar year as far as reliability goes. I can’t recall any scandal at all, which is perhaps a first.
Matt Birchler: It’s amazing how reliable and consistent Apple hardware is. The iPhone, especially, is made at a scale where basically no other product in the world matches, and it still releases on time and at very high quality without fail.
Paul Kafasis: Apple hardware has been great for me.
Marco Arment: We live in a golden era of Apple hardware reliability that’s so good that it’s easily taken for granted. No other consumer tech company executes at this level of hardware reliability.
Chance Miller: Another year without any major complaints in this category is a victory for everyone.
Rob Griffiths: Despite the foibles with software, I’ve only had one hardware problem in recent memory (a new Studio had a bad motherboard).
Michael Tsai: My most recent hardware has been working well this year. My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro’s internal SSD partially failed. The Mac is out of AppleCare, and the SSD is non-replaceable, so now it can only be used with an external SSD, which is inconvenient for a portable computer and somewhat unreliable (with sleep, etc.). This would be worse with an Apple Silicon–based MacBook Pro because, for security reasons, they no longer support booting from external storage when the internal storage isn’t working. Without being able to replace the SSD, the whole Mac would be dead.
Kirk McElhearn: I haven’t had any hardware issues on any of my Apple devices this year.
Dan Moren: Hardware reliability has been solid for the last few years. I can’t remember the last time I had a hardware problem that was not caused by actual damage. (Sorry, MacBook Air screen.)
Jessica Dennis: All my Apple hardware has been pretty much rock solid.
Howard Oakley: Hardware problems remain surprisingly uncommon, as far as I’m aware.
Christina Warren: I got my mom a 16GB M3 MacBook Air for Christmas, replacing a 2018 Retina MacBook Air — a laptop that, in 2018, had 8GB of RAM and that I paid extra to get it with 256GB SSD. Her new model fortunately got the Apple Intelligence-led RAM upgrade, even if 256GB of base storage is abhorrent in 2024. Anyway, the reason I mention this is that I was reminded of just how bad Apple’s laptops were 6 years ago. Butterfly keyboards. Chips that required loud fans to cool if they were in thin chassis. Performance that frankly peaked in 2015. I spent $1400 on that 2018 MacBook Air and it was never a good performer (we didn’t have any reliability issues except for a minor hiccup last year that made me learn the ridiculous requirements for rescuing a Mac that won’t boot post macOS 11) and I’ve felt angry about that basically the whole time she owned it. When the MBA got a RAM upgrade and Best Buy had a loss-leader price for Black Friday, I jumped at the chance to upgrade her and I feel like this is going to be an excellent laptop. It’s really a testament to the work Apple has done since 2020 or 2021 to re-earn their trust, at least as far as laptops go. My iPads, iPhones, AirPods, Apple Watches, and other devices have all had a good year as far as reliability goes.
Federico Viticci: I have never had an Apple product fail on me, hardware-wise, in the 16 years I’ve been covering the company. If there’s one area where Apple is leagues ahead of its competition, I think it’s hardware manufacturing and overall experience.
John Gruber: No news remains great news in this category.
Stephen Hackett: Apple has long been a leader in hardware reliability. Now, with the company publishing repair guides and making parts available to end-users and small shops, users have more options than ever when something goes wrong.
Carolina Milanesi: I have had some issues with the iPhone and AirPods, but nothing critical.
Michael E. Cohen: None of my many Apple devices had reliability issues this year.
Brian Mattucci: Touch ID is still mostly a miss for me on the Mac, even after upgrading to the USB-C keyboard.
SoftwareHow would you rate the overall quality of Apple’s operating system software in 2024? Were things better, worse, or pretty much the same in terms of the operating systems working as expected? Where there issues? How would you rate the overall quality of Apple’s apps, including bundled apps and apps it sells separately, in 2024? Consider anything you deem appropriate.
John Siracusa: Apple really needs to shift the balance between new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. Today’s Apple vastly undervalues the process of “polishing” existing features. There needs to be way, way more of it, especially on macOS.
Craig Hockenberry: I never tell my wife about upcoming changes in Apple software. I’ve found it’s a good way to get an unfiltered opinion about new things, both good and bad. Let’s just say there was a string of expletives regarding the changes to Photos on iOS. I’m seeing a trend towards complexity in Apple software. The recent changes in Mail categorization made no sense to me—and they were enabled by default! I had a similar reaction to Focus modes, but at least that wasn’t forced upon me. It feels like the designers and developers at Apple know their products too well. I’m sure a lot of these changes feel important to the folks working on them, but to someone who’s not following the products so closely, it’s just a series of confounding hurdles.
Dave Hamilton: I wish Apple would focus more on reliability and less on changing features that have just been integrated into our workflows. I appreciate that they don’t want to stagnate, but wholesale changes to what might seem like minor features (I’m looking at you, Safari’s “Add to Dock” functionality) can be massively disruptive to one’s workflow.
Brett Terpstra: I love Sequoia. It doesn’t have groundbreaking features, but it was a painless upgrade that broke very few apps, and the minor improvements have been really nice. It’s kind of the same story on iOS. It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s reliable and has appreciated touches.
Dan Moren: Apple Intelligence: There’s a weird sort of reality distortion field operating here. Never has Apple spent more time on features that seem important strategically but actually feel mostly like things people don’t care about or won’t use. I’m not a generative AI naysayer, but Apple’s features here are uninspiring and lackluster. The biggest thing they rolled out on this front was Private Cloud Compute which is truly impressive technology with, so far, very little to merit its use.
Chance Miller: Apple lowered the bar for software quality in its race to ship Apple Intelligence features. There are genuinely useful Apple Intelligence features, like in-line summaries in the Mail app, but botched features like notification summaries are a plague on the overall experience. The new icon tinting and Home Screen customization options in iOS 18 are great. It’s easy to dunk on some of the uglier creations on social media, but I’m glad Apple has removed the guardrails to let people do what they want with their phones.
Joe Rosensteel: Apple has been slipping on software quality for a while, but with the focus on Apple Intelligence, the quality control has really suffered. We can’t even point to Apple Intelligence and say, “It was all worth it so we could have this” because all the Apple Intelligence software isn’t just buggy but poorly conceived from the outset.
Casey Liss: Literally the same thing I wrote about software reliability in 2023: New shiny continues to trump reliability. It’s not awful, but it’s not great. Same as it ever was. New this year, Apple Intelligence and Image Playgrounds are mostly a dud. It was clearly a feature done while Apple was on its heels — a way to say, “We can do that too! Look!” I actually mostly like the notification summaries, but every time I try to have fun with Image Playground, it ends up being a frustrating failure.
Myke Hurley: Apple Intelligence has been a thorn in the side this year. There are features that I do like, but the overall sentiment is not good for many valid reasons. I like Notification Summaries, but I know they are okay at best. For me, though, Image Playground was a mistake. They should have been able to see this, and it should not have shipped. It’s a bad version of something that isn’t great to begin with.
Michael Tsai: The software quality slide continues. The same old bugs are still there. Finder views still don’t update or reveal properly, and external drives still don’t mount reliably. macOS Sequoia brought new problems, particularly related to storage. Now, it’s sometimes impossible to unmount drives cleanly. Time Machine deleted lots of my old backups unnecessarily and had trouble completing new backups. Third-party backup utilities are also having trouble, as Sequoia broke ASR’s ability to create bootable backups. Multiple of my Macs now have regular kernel panics, which never happened before. There are a variety of new networking issues. Safari often stops working under heavy load, so, though it’s still my default browser, I’m increasingly incorporating Chrome and Firefox. I wish that, instead of focusing on Apple Intelligence, Apple had focused on improving the quality of the OS and on improving the design of Music and the other media/services apps.
Rob Griffiths: Both are just sort of “meh.” Nothing earth-shattering, long-standing bugs remain, and the Mac continues its horrendous slide toward the iOS UI.
Howard Oakley: Although OS and apps have been generally good, there have been some moments, such as the serious bugs in macOS 15.0 that had to be corrected early and the failure to progress other apps. Perhaps most disappointing is Apple’s lack of insight into what’s important to users: for example, macOS virtualization on Apple silicon continues to omit any support for App Store apps. While I understand the internal conflicts behind that (over authorization), I find it hard to believe that Apple wasn’t aware of them before it even launched virtualization. Yet, after enabling iCloud access in Sequoia, it has still not done anything about enabling App Store apps, which greatly reduces the value of virtualization for many.
Paul Kafasis: As I said, can Apple get off the annual OS update cycle yet? Given the new features in .x releases in the past couple of years, it’s clear that even they don’t believe in it at present. We don’t need new OSes every year, and Apple can’t actually provide them every 12 months. Slow it down—it’s really OK.
David Sparks: I continue to be impressed by Apple’s Productivity suite with annual solid, updates. I’m reserving judgment on Apple Intelligence until we see more.
Rich Mogull: I have a lot of devices, and they have all been quite stable.
Andrew Laurence: The Apple Intelligence rollout has been a FOMO-fueled own goal. The incremental feature rollout belies the aggressive advertising, the hoisted petard of notification summaries, the doesn’t-pass-the-red-face “beta” excuse, and the unknown timeline of fulfilling the 2024 WWDC announcements. As I type this, the lying eyes of Apple Intelligence news summaries are reaching the mockery strata once held by Newton poetry.
Brent Simmons: Hardware quality is far ahead of software quality.
Rosemary Orchard: I wish Apple would not push beta features like Apple Intelligence on everyone. My parents had it without me setting it up and were asking me if they needed a ChatGPT subscription for better Siri!
Christina Warren: Putting the Apple Intelligence of it all aside — I think this was a decent year for Apple’s main platforms. Are there some regressions and annoyances in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia? Absolutely.
Nick Heer: Apple’s computers are lots of things, but, ultimately, they are tools. I would like them to feel more confidence-inspiring. Apple Intelligence flaws are surely going to show up several times here. Setting that aside, I find plenty of bugs in Apple’s operating system, even in core features like window management. There was a wild layout bug in iOS 18’s Now Playing widget that shipped in public versions for two subsequent versions. I feel like there was a time when that would be more embarrassing. Nearly everyone I know was, at some point this year, prompted to use Check In and share their location with their parents; none of us live with our parents. Bugs aside, the introduction of yet more nagging security alerts in MacOS Sequoia continues an unwanted trend. My problematic opinion of the year is that I really like the new Photos app on iOS 18. Also, the new Mail app on iOS. I continue to ask whomever at Apple is available to please fix the Music app on MacOS.
Benjamin Mayo: This year’s Sports app is entirely new, and I think it takes a pretty novel approach to a sports scores interface. The Live Activities on iPhone and Watch highlight the best of Apple ecosystem integration.
Adam Engst: Apple Intelligence is disappointing, particularly given how much Apple has promoted it. If anything, Siri seems to be getting worse instead of better.
Kirk McElhearn: Please, Apple, take a year off from flooding us with new features and fix bugs across all the operating systems. I’m tired of spending time troubleshooting tiny problems. And AppleCare support for this sort of thing has gotten abysmal in recent years. While I didn’t have any such issues this year, over the past few years, I’ve had numerous cases with AppleCare which were escalated to senior advisors, who told me that they would “take ownership of my case” and from whom I never heard back, even after emailing several times. There seems to be little accountability with AppleCare anymore.
Quinn Nelson: OS updates are typically accompanied by new features—not the promise of new features.
Allison Sheridan: Purely from my perspective, macOS Sequoia seems quite a bit more fiddly than previous OSes. Apps crashing, annoying popups about apps wanting local network access, and, of course, the bug in ASR come to mind. That said, I continue to be delighted with the features of Continuity. Features like having all devices share a clipboard, using a phone to scan a document directly into Finder, or being used as a camera are things I haven’t yet begun to take for granted.
Stephen Hackett: Even with the addition of visionOS, Apple was able to move the ball forward across most of its ecosystem in 2024. Apple continues to ship features simultaneously across the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and beyond. Bugs remain, of course, but it’s been a long time since I’ve spent an afternoon troubleshooting something. Starting with the relaunch of Notes in the iOS 9/OS X El Capitan days, Apple has worked consistently on growing its first-party productivity apps into tools that more and more people can rely on at work. Reminders has gone from some sort of digital Hipster PDA with its card-based UI to a full-blown task manager, complete with robust sharing, a Kanban view, and integration with Calendar. Freeform came out of nowhere to take on some serious contenders from third-party developers. Safari is the true favorite child, with features added every cycle. Photos has become robust and even more useful with the launch of family sharing a couple of years ago. My biggest complaint is the lack of consistency across Apple’s apps. Look no further than Apple’s tools for smart searching. Editing a smart list in Reminders is weirdly different than creating a new smart folder in Mail or Notes, and on iOS in particular, Apple teams seem to be working from different guidelines when it comes to design elements. The new Sports app and Journal use gradients and color in fun ways, while much of iOS is still starkly white and blue. Messages is a hodgepodge of ancient message effects and fun, new text effects that operate in different ways in different parts of the app. It’s time for some UI cleanup across the board, even if that makes the Mac user in me a little nervous that the disease that is System Settings would spread.
Jessica Dennis: The Apple Intelligence stuff is just so underwhelming so far. I wanted Image Playground to be like Google’s Emoji Kitchen, and it’s really, really not. Image Playground does both more and less than what I want — I want a crying cactus, which is a mashup of the crying and cactus emojis, and instead, I get a standard boring AI-generated image that looks like all the rest of the AI “art” (let’s not even go there) these days.
John Gruber: Unchanged comment and grade from a year ago: I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or, in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.
Michael E. Cohen: Stuff mostly works. But nothing’s perfect.
Matt Deatherage: Apple Intelligence to date not only doesn’t live up to its potential, it doesn’t live up to the commercials Apple has aired.
Dr. Drang: Apple Intelligence has really hurt Apple’s reputation on both the oversell and underdeliver sides. They advertised features well before they were available, and then when the features arrived, they didn’t have all their parts—a complete inversion of the “old Apple.”
Matt Birchler: I think Apple Intelligence is a mess right now, but the rest of Apple’s operating systems are in pretty good shape, in my view. More updates to iPadOS and tvOS would be great, and parts of Apple’s apps (mostly Shortcuts) can be buggy, but I still use Apple’s platforms and am confident they’re the best ones for me compared to the competition.
Lex Friedman: Image Playground is stupid.
Developer relationsHow would you rate the overall relationship between Apple and its third-party developers this year? Consider anything you deem appropriate.
Casey Liss: Lol. I would give this a -5 if I could. Apple’s monopolistic behavior continues unabated — despite the EU’s efforts to… uh… abate it. Apple completely thumbing its nose at the spirit of the new rules, knowing full well how wrong it is, is deplorable. Even though I don’t concur with many of the EU’s rulings, Apple basically saying, “screw you, I’ll do what I want,” is incredibly off-putting. On a happier, if more schadenfreude-y note, it’s been hilarious watching the Vision Pro App Store colossally fail. Developers have been treated like shit by Apple for the better part of a decade, and Apple is now reaping what it sows. Why would developers do Apple a solid and go on faith this [potentially DOA] platform is going to be worth our time and efforts when everywhere we turn, they’re giving us the middle finger? I did the bare minimum for Callsheet, and I almost regret doing that much. Developer documentation remains a perennial yet solvable problem. It has absolutely gotten better, but it’s still really bad.
Andy Ihnatko: 2024 was just a typical year in which Apple expected developers to be grateful for the lavish bounty that the company has so generously provided them and not make trouble. If Apple treated all of its customers the same way they treated developers — who are also Apple customers — we’d all still be waiting for cut copy and paste on the iPhone.
Chance Miller: I don’t think developers embraced Apple Vision Pro with open arms like Apple had anticipated they would. Whether that’s because it’s a niche product or strained developer relations, I’m not sure. Probably a little bit of both. If Apple wants Vision Pro to mature, this is something that needs to be addressed.
Dan Moren: Apple’s pushback to the DMA is perhaps understandable from a business perspective, but it makes the company look petty and recalcitrant. There’s a decided sense that Apple doesn’t know which way the wind is blowing as regards people’s opinions of Big Tech companies.
John Siracusa: Apple’s continued resistance to the avalanche of new regional regulations being forced upon it is not serving the company well. At a certain point, it behooves Apple to embrace the changes and enthusiastically forge a new, more open path across all markets rather than wasting time and energy fragmenting its products and making things as difficult as possible for everyone involved.
Matt Birchler: Early 2024 was all about Apple fighting the U.S. and EU at every turn to not give up any of the restrictive rules they’ve set around monetizing every cent they can remotely justify. I think Apple’s developers and product people love third party devs, but the business people seem to only think those devs should be thankful Apple permits them at all to work on Apple platforms.
Marco Arment: Developer relations remain needlessly strained. Antagonistic positions and greedy policies from Apple’s executives continue to burn developer goodwill, trust, and enthusiasm that the developer-relations team is trying their hardest to retain, but there’s only so much they can do.
Christina Warren: I was going to give this a three but the more I think about it, I really do think this is an area Apple most desperately needs to have some internal “come to Jesus” discussions. The utter failure of the Vision Pro from a developer perspective, coupled with the drama around not just emulators but also the DMA and alt-app stores, shows that the tension between Apple and their platform devs is in as precarious of a place as I can recall seeing it. To be clear, devs are still building amazing apps for all Apple platforms, and I think Apple platforms have the best software in the world (games notwithstanding), but the ability for developers to make a living off that software gets more difficult all the time. And decisions around areas like In App Purchase and subscriptions for content that should never have a 30% fee associated with Apple (for things like Patreon) feel beyond capricious. I’m glad for apps like Delta and third-party app stores that finally allowed emulators in the proper App Store, but the continuous problems emulator devs have getting their apps and updates into the store continue to be frustrating. Jason said it best when he wrote, “the App Store era must end,” and I co-sign that entire essay. (I wish I had written it; amazing job, Jason.) I’m putting this under developer relations because I really do see this as a developer relations problem. Vision Pro, even more than Apple Watch, shows that developers aren’t just going to show up and build apps for Apple’s new platforms anymore. And I can’t blame them.
Nick Heer: What made me score this lower is Apple’s attitude toward regulators generally. I empathize with the company’s reluctance to make changes demanded by what it surely sees as meddling bureaucrats. But it has been obstinate in ways I think are counterproductive for everyone. For example, despite requirements to change its anti-steering measures in one jurisdiction after another, it is holding onto those policies everywhere else. In the European Union, its compliance measures have turned Apple into its own worst enemy.
Craig Hockenberry: Apple is blowing it with developers. Full stop. Look at the general ambivalence towards Vision Pro as a manifestation of this – a new platform needs developers who are excited and ready to explore a product’s capabilities. This did not happen with the headset. It’s a cumulative thing: a lot of folks went into iPad development with the same enthusiasm they had for the iPhone. Then, they realized that supporting the device was a lot of extra work without a lot of extra revenue. Then Apple Watch came along… same thing. You now have a situation where developers are leery of a new platform. Now, throw in some unsavory maneuvers to avoid regulations that let developers choose their path with customers. The new App Store structures are designed by lawyers and accountants, not folks who create software. It’s no surprise to me that all the developers I know have a growing distrust of Apple. Apple is doing a lot of taking these days and not giving back to the developer community that has helped make its products thrive.
Carolina Milanesi: I feel the negativity of previous years has dissipated somewhat
Alex Cox: I have nothing constructive—I just don’t like watching friends getting fucked over for making things people love.
Benjamin Mayo: They might be doing it by kicking and screaming, but the regulatory pressure is improving the developer ecosystem. For example, retro game emulators like Delta are now available worldwide on the App Store!
Michael Tsai: The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, and bug reporting. Nothing seems to be getting better. This was the second year in a row that Xcode shipped with a showstopper bug for Mac developers. Once again, it was reported during the beta period, but there was no urgency to fix it. The Swift toolchain is still crashy and unreliable. Apple continues to write SwiftUI and SwiftData checks that the frameworks can’t cash.
James Thomson: Apple continued its numerous legal battles with countries around the world to extract its cut of developer sales. It was forced to allow third-party App Stores in the EU, but then used supposedly neutral tools like notarization as de facto App Review, the Core Technology Fee, and surrounding rules to deliberately make them as unappealing as possible to developers. Apple should compete on merit, not threats.
Charles Arthur: Vision Pro. EU DMA and the wrangles over third-party app stores. Enough said.
John Gruber: Fourth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening. The big change globally this year is the Digital Markets Act going into effect in the EU. I stand apart from many in the Cupertino punditry racket in applauding Apple for its compliance efforts. I think it has complied with a terrible law as best it can while protecting its own vision for how its platforms should be designed and work. (And, of course, protecting its own vision for how it should be able to monetize those platforms.) But even I — a guy who thinks Apple has done a remarkable job shipping an enormous amount of work in order to comply with the DMA — can’t and won’t argue that any of Apple’s efforts on the DMA front have repaired or improved its relationship with third-party developers. Despite the situation being largely unchanged, I’ve adjusted my grade on this subject from C to D this year because stagnation is catching up to Apple. More of the same is making matters worse. And I think we saw that with the relative dearth of native app support for Vision Pro. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with a new platform like VisionOS. The best way to generate developer interest in a new platform is to sell a lot of units to a lot of users who are looking for apps to use and games to play. But the best way to sell a lot of hardware units to a lot of users is to have a deep exclusive-to-the-platform ecosystem of both first- and third-party apps and games. With previous new developer platforms, like iOS and Mac OS X, Apple powered through this initial conundrum by attracting developers who just wanted to create awesome new software for an awesome new platform. That enthusiasm was tempered greatly last year for VisionOS, and I think it was a lot more about how developers feel about Apple and the App Store than how they feel about Vision Pro itself.
Howard Oakley: I’ve had no problems, but the App Store and its review process never fail to shock and disappoint.
Rosemary Orchard: They have removed the limited number of requests for each developer (company) per year; however, there are still a large number of APIs without adequate documentation. (One line!!)
Paul Kafasis: Sadly, Apple has been absolutely torching developer goodwill for several years now. App Store policies have not improved. Its malicious compliance with EU laws has been terribly disappointing to see. It knows what’s right, and refuses to do it, because it wants to protect every possible revenue source it has. It doesn’t have to be this way. How much is enough? At what point can a company say “We’ve won, we’re going to do what’s right, not what’s most profitable for the next quarter”? Sadly, probably never.
Brent Simmons: The App Store monopoly continues in most of the world, and where it doesn’t, Apple is still an enormous prick. This shocking level of greed — combined with its obsequious behavior toward the incoming administration — is burning right through the remaining developer goodwill.
Myke Hurley: Easily one of the worst years I have seen from them in a long, long time. And it’s all down to the DMA. Apple’s response to legislation is ridiculous. Using notarization as a way to stop apps from existing, the Core Technology Fee, and countless more dark spots. They should never have gotten to this step, and now they’re here I wish they would give a little more than they are.
Apple’s impact on the worldApple executives claim that the company wants to leave the world a better place, and the company champions numerous causes. How well does Apple live up to its own standards in 2024? Consider anything you deem appropriate, including education and environmental initiatives, commitment to accessibility and diversity, treatment of Apple’s work force, and other political and policy stances.
John Siracusa: While Tim Cook’s donation to Trump may benefit Apple, its employees, and even its customers, it certainly won’t have a positive social impact.
Joe Rosensteel: I’m of two minds when it comes to Apple’s green initiatives. I think they’re great, but they do design systems where the whole thing has to be recycled instead of upgraded or easily repaired. I believe political and policy stances are really where Apple fell short in 2024. Notably with the European Commission and the trials involving the justice department. Like when we all found out how many billion dollars Google pays Apple to be the default search engine. At present, I can’t say I’m optimistic about the direction things are heading in terms of other political and policy decisions.
Jessica Dennis: For a company that pays so much lip service to being green, using so much energy on very underwhelming AI stuff is very hmmmmm. And then, of course, there’s the million bucks Tim Cook sent to the incoming president — I guess he probably had to For Business Reasons, but it’s still gross, and I hate it.
John Gruber: Apple’s efforts on the environmental front continue to strike me as extraordinary. Their accessibility features are so far ahead of the rest of the industry that I don’t even know who’s in second place. On social issues, by staying true to its longstanding, humane, common sense values, Apple’s culture has seemingly remained utterly consistent through a series of tumultuous years in our society at large, during which other companies have ping-ponged first sharply left, and now sharply right. If I stopped there, that would make for an obvious A grade. But: politics. I understand (I think) Tim Cook’s thinking and approach. I wouldn’t want his job, and I genuinely wonder at times who would. Sing-song congratulatory tweets leave a bitter taste, but I’m amenable to the argument that CEOs must play the cards they’ve been dealt, not the cards they’d hoped for. If you have to serve shit sandwiches, serve shit sandwiches — but don’t tell us they taste like pumpkin pie. Tim Cook can’t donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration slush fund when Apple donated a mere $43,200 thousand to Biden’s and expect us to do anything but laugh at the supposed justification that Cook “believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity.” That’s Tim Cook’s hoagie-sized shit sandwich to eat, and it’s disrespectful to pitch us on taking a few bites ourselves to help him get through it. I genuinely believe Cook is doing what’s best for Apple, and that’s quite literally his job. But it was true during the first Trump administration, and already is again in the second, that what’s best for Apple politically is in conflict with what’s best for the country and for the world.
Brent Simmons: Seeking favor with fascists not only helps the fascists — it harms the world.
Steven Aquino: From an accessibility standpoint, the AirPods Pro hearing aid feature has to exemplify Apple’s ethos of making the world a better place. It isn’t perfect, but the salient point is it’s tremendously significant the functionality exists at all. And it doesn’t take into account the continued work Apple did in 2024 to make its devices more accessible to the disability community. As I always say, Apple deserves more laudation in this realm than “gee whiz.”
James Thomson: The push to ship Apple Intelligence has sacrificed a lot of Apple’s engineering focus and moral high ground in the name of boosting the stock price. Aside from many of the features not being in a functional state that should have been shipped to billions of people, Apple had a chance to lead the industry in terms of ethical training data and chose not to, damaging its relationship with the creative professionals who have traditionally been their biggest supporters. And in the end most people do not care about the actual functionality. But hey, the stock price went up.
Marco Arment: Apple’s environmental work is very strong and commendable, but their continued strong presence in and reliance on China remains damaging and strategically limiting, and their explicit support and significant funding of the incoming Trump administration is opportunistic, dangerous, appalling, and spineless.
Howard Oakley: Apple continues to champion several important issues, including the environment and privacy. However, there have been a succession of less glorious moments regarding the latter and a continuing lack of transparency.
Lex Friedman: I continue to be disappointed by Tim Cook’s kowtowing to Trump.
Alex Cox: Apple does exceed the on-the-ground bar that is “better than Meta,” but every year, they seem a little closer to the floor. Aside from all the political antics that the biggest companies in America all but “have” to do, I was most disappointed that there was no mention of how Apple Intelligence will impact their environmental goals. Most data on AI efficiency is all over the place, and I thought they’d have at least some information based on their on-device strategies. I’m no EACC bro, but as someone relatively excited about most LLM developments, it was disappointing that not even Apple felt they could address their energy use.
Allison Sheridan: I was incredibly dismayed that Apple forced all AI developers from San Diego to move to Texas. Imagine being a woman of child-bearing age working in California and having to choose between your career and your health. I was disturbed enough by this to write to Tim Cook to explain what a horrific choice he had made.
Zac Hall: Sometimes Apple reminds you that it is a corporation.
Andy Ihnatko: Normally a solid 4, I’m docking a point this year. Apple’s Intelligence isn’t going to inflict the same degree of damage on the planet as Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft’s AI efforts. However, Apple utilizes those same AI foundries to build and train its models, so they aren’t entirely free of responsibility. I hope Apple’s 2025 Environmental Progress Report is transparent about the impact Apple creates as an AI customer.
Rich Mogull: A 5 for general privacy, especially Advanced Data Protection and their partnering with Citizens Lab. 5 for environmental impact. A 1 for Tim Cook bowing to Trump. A 2 for their soft gloves with China.
Shelly Brisbin: I’ll say here, as I always do, that accessibility, in particular, should be evaluated in terms of technology, utility, and effectiveness at making platforms and software available to all. It’s not about virtue signaling or even being nice for its own sake. So here goes: Apple had a good year when it comes to accessibility. That’s especially noteworthy in the Vision Pro’s varied and clever ways of providing access to a platform whose typical operation relies heavily on the use of eyes and hands. The company continues to tweak deep accessibility features, like this year’s Braille Screen Input updates. And AirPods Pro’s embrace of its identity as an over-the-counter hearing aid should give both users and accessibility advocates within Apple a lot of encouragement to do more.
Paul Kafasis: I think Apple used to be better when it comes to global impact. I think they are now too relentlessly focused on squeezing money out of everyone and everything they can, to the detriment of everyone. They’re still better than most companies. They’re still pushing for environmental improvements, diversity, and more. But overall, they just seem much more money-grubbing to me. Brent Simmons’s post on this is worth a link. I think of it often.
Dr. Drang: Did Tim Cook give more money to the Trump inauguration than to victims of the L.A. fires?
Matt Birchler: I think it’s an overall win, although I don’t like how they treat software developers. It will be interesting to see how they play with the new U.S. administration.
Christina Warren: I’ll be the jerk that says it: I miss the stickers, and I don’t think it was worth the so-called environmental impact. I am glad that FineWoven was killed (and sorry, but you’ll never convince me that the plastic they used for FineWoven was any more environmentally sound than just using the mid-quality leather they used before), but I’m equally annoyed the only way to get an official Apple Watch band in leather that isn’t an older model is by going to Hermes. Call me a selfish jerk (or worse), but I don’t think moves like removing stickers, moving to objectively worse materials for cases and watch bands, and forgoing previously included accessories (like wall chargers) — while still selling and trying to bundle said chargers independently — is the best and most effective way to reduce environmental impact. Or, at the very least, these moves feel like ways to cheap out and raise margins but under the guise of doing it for “environmental impact.” I’m glad Apple cares about sustainability; I wish it could care in a way that didn’t feel like they were using it as an excuse to cut corners and niceties.
Carolina Milanesi: Apple continues to lead in sustainability, privacy, and the latest stand on not ending DEI programs.
Philip Michaels: Given the current state of affairs in our new kleptocracy, I imagine this score will be very different in a year.
Glenn Fleishman: I’m not in love with Apple’s current direction. The mandate to return people to the office seems counter to its environmental aims and discriminatory against employees of varying abilities, some of whom relocated. Apple’s adoption of AI, particularly partnering with OpenAI, seems shortsighted without specific plans in mind, given the impact on power usage.
Michael Gartenberg: Apple’s impact on the world has gotten the attention of the DOJ and the EU, which is not exactly the impact they might have been aiming for, which is probably why Cook sent a $1 million gift to the new administration’s inauguration, including himself in the pantheon of tech CEOs all under scrutiny and all in attendance in Washington hoping the new administration will let them continue to have the impact on the world as they see fit.
Matt Deatherage: if A.I. fits in with Apple’s pledge to be carbon-neutral in five years, they’re not making that well known when a lot of AGI opposition is about how much energy it takes.
Casey Liss: Tim Cook donated $1M to Trump’s inauguration. Apple still relies deeply on China. Apple continues to think it operates above the law. Gross. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about Apple when this is how it behaves. Its move toward carbon neutrality is the only thing that kept this from a 1.
Peter Cohen: Apple lives up to its standards. Tim’s personal ones left me puzzled.
Myke Hurley: Carbon-neutral products are great. I am really happy they are able to do this with more and more. But storm clouds are swirling around: AI, legislation, and more. Apple is too big and too complicated to be a pure good force in the world.
Michael E. Cohen: I’d rank this higher, but Cook is attending Trump’s inauguration, so….
Dan Moren: Apple continues to improve its environmental impact, but as with many of the other big tech companies, it’s feeling an inherent tension between reducing its footprint and increasing its reliance on AI, a technology that seems to be extremely energy voracious. I’d like to hear a little more about that when the company announces its next Apple Intelligence features.
Nick Heer: This could be an essay. Scratch that — this could be several essays. This year, Apple made a big deal about its repairability and environmental bonafides, but it also continued to fight right-to-repair legislation, and we learned data center emissions are likely many times higher than claimed. Apple made contact sharing more private, but enabled by default a feature to remotely analyze users’ photos. I put my complaints about Apple’s European-centric measures in the Developer section, but they could easily go here, too.
Stephen Hackett: The M4 Mac mini is the first carbon-neutral Mac ever made. It comes six years after Apple began using recycled aluminum in its Mac cases. The company continues investing in processes to make our world cleaner. On the social front, things are more complex. Apple continues to support important causes and will continue its DEI efforts, even as other tech companies are rolling them back. However, Tim Cook runs a company with a bigger economic footprint than many countries, and that means that Apple will play ball with the new Trump administration in ways some of its users will find disagreeable. It’s naive to think that a company the size of Apple would do anything else, even if I hope it rubs Tim Cook the wrong way enough to bother him.
Last wordsIf you’d like to leave a comment about anything else, leave it below!
Alex Cox: I think, finally, people are breaking away from feeling like they need to be a super fan of everything Apple does and every policy it has in order to appreciate the things they still do remarkably well.
Eric Linder: This may be a bit meta, but there is something special about Apple that brings about a positive community that is critical at times, but only because of the love of Apple’s platforms and devices. I continue to applaud Apple’s environmental objectives and hope that as they continue to succeed, they really do continue to underpromise and overdeliver, not only with regard to the impact of its products and services but on their positive impact on the world.
Andy Ihnatko: FREE CHARLIE BROWN!
Howard Oakley: In 2024, the high point has been the release of the Mac mini M4, just months before the mini’s 20th birthday. At a time when Apple looked as if it was becoming obsessed with high-end experiments like Vision Pro, and AI, the redesigned mini is convincing many who have stuck with old Macs running High Sierra and Mojave to take the plunge and upgrade. The spirit of 2005 isn’t dead yet.
Chance Miller: Apple’s 2024 leaves us with a lot of unknowns. Will Apple Intelligence live up to the expectations? Will Apple remain committed to Vision Pro? There are looming changes to the App Store in the EU, the DOJ case in the United States, and various other regulatory battles around the world. There’s a lot of uncertainty as we head into the new year, which is rare for a company as established as Apple.
Rosemary Orchard: Developer relations are critical, especially with the integration of AI such as ChatGPT as a focus. Extending this to native iOS integrations (Siri intents please!) would be greatly appreciated.
Allison Sheridan: It’s such a fun time to be an Apple fangirl. The speed and low power consumption of its laptop lineup are unsurpassed in the industry.
Andrew Laurence: Apple’s Enterprise Workflow teams continue to do the Lord’s work. They bridge the gap between a remarkably difficult customer base and internal development priorities in which “the enterprise” is likely an afterthought, if it exists at all. We have become accustomed to new features having little to no available controls, and those that appear seemingly hastily bolted together. Apple is a customer-forward company but has yet to embrace the notion that the end user may not be the customer; that the customer may have primacy over the user, and the user is a risk being managed.
Robert Carter: As I blind Apple user, I am pretty happy with the features that Apple added to accessibility this past year. I hope they will continue to use Apple Intelligence to enhance accessibility.
Craig Hockenberry: WHEN ARE WE GONNA GET BETTER KEY BOARDS
Zac Hall: 2024… not the year that Apple caught up in AI.
Marco Arment: Apple Intelligence summary: Hardware is great; developers enjoy TV; missing vertebrae.
Charles Arthur: The question I’ve really been asking myself towards the end of the year, and the one I want to ask Tim Cook, is: How would we know if Apple was becoming sclerotic? By which I mean that if the organisation has become unwieldy, unwilling to allow change, incapable of letting good ideas percolate rapidly upwards, how could we tell? We keep hearing and seeing how slow change is: it took an age for accessories to all get USB-C. The AirPods Max and the Pro Display XDR have gone years without being touched. Again and again it feels like it takes forever for even the simplest product upgrades to get out of the door. New ideas like the Vision Pro are hopelessly over-engineered, instead of being designed with a buyer in mind, which reminds me badly of the G4 Cube, which people loved as long as they didn’t own it; if they if did, they discovered the limited memory and some, the manufacturing stress cracks. But at least that Apple saw the problem and moved rapidly: the G4 Cube didn’t survive a year. Now it feels like a bad idea gets polished endlessly until it’s good enough to put out, and then is essentially abandoned. I worry about this. Of course, I might be wrong. But my question remains: how could we tell? What distinguishes a sclerotic Apple from one which is functioning fine, but incredibly deliberately?
Kirk McElhearn: I think that 2024 was the year that I finally realized that the Apple of Steve Jobs is truly gone. The Tim Cook bot in interviews and presentations feels like an AI programmed by the marketing department; I get no impression that he really cares about products. At least the pre-recorded product announcements include many more Apple employees, but they all tend to have that same tone. I miss Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller talking about new products with perceivable love for the technology and what it could accomplish. I think Apple is so big right now that they can’t take chances. We grew up with a company that was constantly pushing the envelope, but now, at a time where there aren’t many new hardware features to add to these devices, we have discovered a company that pretends that things are “magical” too often. And you didn’t ask about Apple Intelligence. A half-baked bunch of mainly useless features in an attempt to catch up to a trend that Apple didn’t see coming. None of Apple’s AI features are original, and some, like Image Playground, are just childish. Apple is increasingly out of touch with what people really want to do, it seems, and I don’t see this changing until Tim Cook retires.
Federico Viticci: I’m genuinely curious about what Apple is going to do with Apple Intelligence this year. Their first wave of previously announced AI features still hasn’t fully rolled out, and it’s fairly clear that the company is more or less two years behind its competitors in this space. While OpenAI is launching Tasks and Google is impressing the industry with their latest Gemini models and promising AI agents living in the browser, Apple is…letting you create cute emoji and terrible images that are so 2022, it hurts. That being said, I believe that Apple is aware of the fact that they need to catch up – and fast – and I kind of enjoy the fact that we’re witnessing Apple being an underdog again and having to pull out all the stops to show the world that they can still be relevant in a post-AI society. The company, unlike many AI competitors, has a unique advantage: they make the computers we use and the operating systems they run on. I’m convinced that, long term, Apple’s main competitors won’t be OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta, but Google and Microsoft. The Apple Intelligence features we saw at WWDC last year made for a cute demo; I think 2025 is going to show us a glimpse of what Apple’s true vision for the future of computing and AI is.
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)
This is the tenth year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.
As is only fitting for the survery’s tenth year, I’ve made a few adjustments to the questions I asked:
- I’ve grouped Apple Watch and the new Vision Pro category under the pre-existing Wearables category, and asked panelists to submit votes for all three (but only gave them a single box to write overall commentary about Apple’s wearables efforts).
- I’ve broken the former Software quality category into two separate, connected categories: Apple OS quality and Apple app quality. I felt that the old category tended to cause OS releases to swamp anything else that Apple did during the year in the realm of the many apps it develops alongside its platforms.
- Finally, the old Environmental/Social impact category has been renamed World impact. In my mind, this category represents an opportunity to judge how Apple’s deeds live up to its philosophical words about making the world a better place. Panelists are free to define it however they’d like… and, believe me, they always do.
I received 59 replies (a 75 percent response rate), with the average results as shown below:
Since most of the survey categories are the same as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion. The net changes between 2023 and 2024 are displayed below:
Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and select commentary from the panelists. (You can also read the entirety of panelist commentary—all 32,000 words—if you like.)
MacGrade: A- (average score: 4.2, median score 4, last year: 4.2)
The panel was very positive about the Mac, with many praising Apple’s continued hardware advancements in the Apple Silicon era, nost notably the M4 chip and the redesigned Mac mini. The move to 16GB of RAM as the new baseline for entry-level models was widely welcomed. However, there are lingering concerns about the lack of updates for high-end machines like the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
M4 and more:
- “The M4 chip series is the best since the M1. The single-core performance and power efficiency are both great.” — John Siracusa
- “The move to Apple silicon continues to pay dividends. Probably the smartest thing Apple’s done in years.” — Philip Michaels
- “The Mac lineup seemed to find a groove and stick to it in 2024.” — Jeff Carlson
- “The M4 was a really nice continued advancement of the power behind the Mac line.” — Myke Hurley
- “I am borderline ecstatic regarding the new nano-texture display option on MacBook Pros.” — John Gruber
The Mac mini:
- “The Mac mini got its long-deserved time in the sun with a nice update and chassis redesign.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “The cheapest ticket to the Mac lineup is a perfect introduction to everything Apple does well.” — Andy Ihnatko
- “Who would have thought the Mac mini would be the lead in the excitement for 2024?” — Allison Sheridan
- “The base model M4 Mac mini is one of the most compelling and best value Apple products we’ve seen.” — Christina Warren
High-end Mac frustration:
- “The long wait for the Mac Studio with the latest Apple silicon continues to feel illogical.” — Brian Mattucci
- “The uncertainty surrounding the ‘big’ desktop Macs and the chips that will power them continues to be a problem.” — John Siracusa
- “The only hitch in the lineup: The Mac Studio and Mac Pro remain unchanged since 2023, when the M2 models debuted.” — John Gruber
- “The Mac Studio and the Mac Pro are the unloved children.” — Christina Warren
Apple Intelligence:
- “One wonders what Apple could have been doing instead of spending person-hours on AI stuff that doesn’t seem particularly good or useful.” — Jessica Dennis
- “Apple Intelligence might be a bust, but it forced Apple to finally give every Mac 16GB of RAM.” — Christina Warren
- “I have not found the Apple Intelligence features very useful.” — Michael Tsai
- “MacOS is in a point of confusion. The introduction of Apple Intelligence in waves and without tentpole features that solve problems is mystifying.” — Glenn Fleishman
Give the people RAM:
- “Good riddance, 8GB RAM. You simply don’t have enough memory to be missed.” — Zac Hall
- “Call it the Apple Intelligence Dividend, but I was happy to see the base RAM in Macs increase to 16GB this year.” — John Siracusa
- “Apple finally acknowledges that perhaps 8GB of RAM isn’t enough for users.” — Michael Gartenberg
- “Every Mac sold by Apple now has a (long-overdue) baseline of 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage.” — Nick Heer
Something may be missing:
- “Apple still insists on not making touchscreen Macs or more interesting and weird form factors.” — Federico Viticci
- “The iMac is way overdue for a 27-inch model.” — Glenn Fleishman
- “We need new external display options. It’s time, Apple.” — Chance Miller
- “The lack of an upgrade to the Studio Display is a bit surprising.” — Kirk McElhearn
iPhoneGrade: B (average score: 3.7, median score 4, last year: 4.1)
Feelings about the iPhone lineup were mixed. Many panelists praised the incremental hardware improvements, but there was also disappointment in Apple Intelligence and the new Camera Control feature. The rolling down of previously higher-end features—the Action Button to the lower-end iPhones, 5X zoom to the smaller iPhone Pro—were well received. However, there were still complaints about the lack of a smaller phone option, lackluster color choices for Pro models, and software features that feel rushed or unfinished.
Apple Intelligence:
- “The software promises Apple is making around Apple Intelligence aren’t compelling, and Apple didn’t deliver on them in 2024.” — Joe Rosensteel
- “This year’s focus on Apple Intelligence is disappointing, and sucked a lot of the air out of the room when it came to actual feature improvements.” — Dan Moren
- “Most of these features are as squirrelly as everybody should have expected; no more, no less.” — Andy Ihnatko
- “2024 was all about the slow trickle of Apple Intelligence features of uncertain value.” — Brian Mattucci
- “AI features that actually do something are far behind Google and Samsung.” — Michael Gartenberg
Camera Control:
- “The Camera Control is possibly the worst Apple UI device since the hockey puck mouse.” — Dr. Drang
- “The sheer number of settings to change its behavior is laughable, and perhaps speaks to a need for Apple to give it a second look.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “I’d actually pay more to get a 16 Pro that didn’t have the Camera Control button, because it’s turned into a button that I exclusively use on accident and never on purpose.” — Matt Birchler
- “The button itself is fine, but third-party case makers accommodated it by cutting a huge hole in the side of their cases, which I find awkward and uncomfortable.” — John Siracusa
- “It’s too finicky and often doesn’t do what you expect it to do.” — Jeff Carlson
- “I tried really hard to use the Camera Control to its full potential… the reality is it’s most useful as a way to launch the Camera app and take a picture. Nothing more.” — Chance Miller
iPhone size:
- “I field non-stop complaints from people who want a smaller iPhone and aren’t upgrading from the iPhone SE because of that.” — Adam Engst
- “I miss the iPhone Mini… so much.” — Jessica Dennis
- “I do wish Apple would have continued the mini for folks who prefer something smaller.” — David Sparks
A lack of color:
- “Apple, it won’t take away from the other Pro models to have fun colors. Offer the boring ones of today, as well as some fun ones… PLEASE!” — Casey Liss
- “I love the colors on this year’s standard iPhones, but I continue to hope for some better options on the Pro side.” — Eric Slivka
The incrementality of iPhone updates:
- “This iPhone 16 lineup doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement over previous models.” — Adam Engst
- “Phones are becoming commodities, and Apple Intelligence ain’t it right now.” — Philip Michaels
- “This is one of those years where the new iPhones seem fine, but I feel no urgency to upgrade.” — Michael Tsai
iPadGrade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 2, last year: 2.4)
After a completely quiet year in 2023, the iPad came roaring back with major updates in 2024, and our panel responded favorably. The M4 iPad Pro was praised for its thin design, OLED display, and performance. The iPad Air’s solid update was also praised. But many panelists remain disappointed about iPadOS, which limits the potential of the excellent hardware. Several panelists raised complaints about a confusingly complex iPad lineup.
Give a little, take a little:
- “Apple finally updated the iPad lineup, and it has all of the strengths and weaknesses it has always had: great hardware with amazing computational power that’s almost impossible to utilize because of software limitations.” — Marco Arment
- “The iPad’s frustrations are eternal: the hardware is fantastic. The software feels increasingly left behind, limited, and at times downright clunky.” — Dan Moren
- “Going into its 15th year, the iPad continues to be incredible hardware let down by a lackluster operating system that is neither as intuitive as iOS nor as advanced or flexible as macOS.” — Federico Viticci
The M4 iPad Pro:
- “The M4 iPad Pro is a marvel.” — Rich Mogull
- “The thinness and compactness of the design is remarkable, and it leaves a lasting impression.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “The M4 is a great iPad chip, but the highlight of the year for me was the Tandem OLED display on the new iPad Pro.” — John Siracusa
- “An even thinner design and optional nanotexture define this generation for me.” — Zac Hall
- “I use the 11-inch as my main device at home and I love everything about it. The OLED screen is fantastic, and it is so incredibly thin and light – it’s a joy to use.” — Myke Hurley
Compexity of the product lineup:
- “The fact that Apple’s iPad keyboard page has a huge dropdown for a user to pick which iPad they have so the website can show them compatible models is not great.” — Stephen Hackett
- “I still find the iPad-and-accessories lineup confusing, but it is in much better shape this year than last.” — Nick Heer
- “I am not surprised that Regular People suffer from Apple Pencil confusion — even I had to go back and check which one(s) would work with my new iPad.” — Jessica Dennis
Other iPad updates:
- “The iPad Air got a modest improvement going to M2 and remains a solid choice.” — Allison Sheridan
- “The new iPad Mini is… well… maybe next time.” — Rich Mogull
- “I bought the new iPad Mini, and I like that it’s purple.” — Jessica Dennis
- “The Mini was my iPad of choice for many years, but for me, it’s been squeezed out by the combination of my phone getting ever-larger and the incredible utility the Magic Keyboard brings to my iPad Pro.” — Casey Liss
iPadOS limitations:
- “I still want to run macOS on an iPad.” — Craig Hockenberry
- “It’s probably time they let us run macOS or at the very least virtualize it.” — Dan Moren
- “The fact that after all these years the iPad is still using the exact same foundations as iOS, including its multitasking model, is just baffling.” — Gui Rambo
- “If they want to sell more devices, they’re going to have to make the iPad more useful.” — Shahid Kamal Ahmad
- “The promise of iPad’s modularity still doesn’t pay off.” — Alex Cox
- “It seems like the rest of the world is not as excited as I am about the new iPad Pro. That may have something to do with the (continuing) limited and confusing nature of iPadOS.” — John Siracusa
- “With iPadOS, Apple seems like it is just throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, and sadly, not much is sticking.” — Eric Linder
Wearables, Apple Watch, and Vision ProGrade: B (average score: 3.6, median score 4, last year: 3.5)
Apple Watch specifically: Grade: B (average score: 3.7, median score 3, last year: 3.4)
Vision Pro specifically: Grade: D (average score: 2.4, median score 3)
It was a pretty notable year for Apple’s wearables, with major AirPods updates, Apple Watch improvements, and the arrival of the Vision Pro. The new hearing aid features for AirPods Pro 2 were widely celebrated as one of Apple’s most impactful innovations. The Apple Watch Series 10 and Ultra 2 updates were seen as incremental, with some frustration over the lack of significant redesigns. However, the Apple Vision Pro dominated the conversation, with reactions split between awe at its technological advancements and disappointment over its price, usability, and lack of compelling software.
Hearing aid features:
- “The AirPods Pro 2’s Hearing Aid feature is probably the biggest announcement in all of Apple’s wearables lines this year.” — Dan Moren
- “The hearing features added to AirPods Pro 2 are a huge game-changer in my world.” — Dave Hamilton
- “The addition of medical-grade hearing aid functionality to the AirPods Pro is Apple at its best.” — Casey Liss
- “Using AirPods as a way to take a hearing test or have your hearing augmented means millions of people who didn’t even know they had hearing loss will enjoy more moments with their loved ones in conversation.” — Stephen Hackett
Apple Watch:
- “Apple Watch remains good. There isn’t much in the way of new features that I’m excited about, but it remains good.” — Lex Friedman
- “I feel like this was a miss year for the Apple Watch from a hardware perspective – thinner is great, but I want to see more design change!” — Myke Hurley
- “Apple Watch is turning more into a fitness tracker that happens to show the time, and away from serving as a proper watch.” — John Gruber
- “The Apple Watch Ultra is getting really close to being a true sports watch, but once you hit that category, Garmin still wins out.” — Rich Mogull
New AirPods 4 and “new” AirPods Max:
- “AirPods 4 with ANC are a terrific update.” — John Gruber
- “The new AirPods 4 are great for those of us who don’t want our headphones to be shoved into our ear canals.” — John Siracusa
- “I regret to inform the world that I bought the USB-C AirPods Max. No one else should do the same.” — Christina Warren
- “AirPods Max simply adopting USB-C and some new colors with no other changes is so sad that it’s hilarious.” — Eric Slivka
Vision Pro:
- “The Vision Pro is an incredible feat of engineering. Just holding the thing feels nice, and the years of work that went into it shows. The high price of the device has surely limited its adoption from both the user and developer perspectives.” — Stephen Hackett
- “Apple Vision Pro was the most disappointing launch I’ve seen from Apple in recent memory.” — Marco Arment
- “The Vision Pro is a fantastically impressive technological achievement that no normal person should actually buy.” — James Thomson
- “I think it requires a lot of a person to understand how to wear AVP comfortably, and people simply aren’t used to it.” — Brian Mattucci
- “The Vision Pro has been a calamity. What it needed was content, and what it also needed was app support. Apple hasn’t done the first and alienated developers so badly in other areas that it didn’t get the second.” — Charles Arthur
- “Until there’s developer access to more APIs and more accessibility to dev kits, I don’t think there will be anything interesting made for AVP.” — Alex Cox
- “The lack of apps, let alone a killer app, outside of watching movies alone, is an indictment of Apple’s developer relations problems as much as it is an indictment of the AVP itself.” — Christina Warren
- “At best, the Vision Pro seems like a first step on a long journey. It will require many years of dedication, and perhaps some significant pivots, to turn this platform into a success.” — John Siracusa
- “The Vision Pro deserves better than its current reputation as a pundit punching bag. While everyone’s busy dunking on Apple’s spatial computing experiment, I’m regularly strapping it on and using it for work and entertainment.” — David Sparks
- “Am I predicting that the Vision platform will have as bright and essential a future ahead of it as the Macintosh did in 1984? No. But I suspect it has a bright and essential future ahead of it.” — John Gruber
- “I’m glad they released the Vision Pro, but it still feels like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist (for most people).” — Aleen Simms
HomeGrade: D+ (average score: 2.7, median score 3, last year: 2.8)
Apple’s smart home strategy in 2024 continued to frustrate our panelists, with many complaining that HomeKit remains unreliable, the Home app is unintuitive, and Apple has largely neglected the space. There were some minor improvements, such as improved integration with Control Center and some Matter enhancements. There’s some hope that 2025 may be a banner year for Apple in the smart home, but for now, the platform feels stagnant.
Home app frustration:
- “The Home app is ugly. Home app integrations in Control Center are useful but inflexible.” — Lex Friedman
- “Make the Home app better. It’s still awful.” — Shelly Brisbin
- “The Home app is a dreadful piece of software. I’m fairly technical, but still find it confusing, and the layout and home screen design is just abysmal.” — Rob Griffiths
- “Scenes vs. Automations continue to break my brain. ‘One of your devices didn’t respond’ is a message that could use a slight improvement; WHICH ONE???” — Allison Sheridan
HomeKit:
- “HomeKit is unreliable, and doesn’t work with enough devices.” — Casey Liss
- “I have experienced many bugs with Home. Even after I switched to the new home architecture, the tvOS 18.0 beta broke which Apple TVs could be used as a home hub for a few months.” — Joe Rosensteel
- “HomeKit continues to mostly work, but the promised world of Matter has still not materialized, the HomePod remains a buggy mess, and it’s hard to see any signs of effort on either front.” — Marco Arment
- “Does Apple have a Home strategy? Does it really Matter?” — Peter Cohen
A feeling of drift:
- “Did anything happen in 2024?” — Adam Engst
- “Apple kinda skipped this year as far as the smart home is concerned.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “I can’t name one improvement to HomeKit or anything Home-related in 2024, and this is a platform sorely in need of many improvements.” — John Gruber
- “2025 is sounding like it might be the year of the home for Apple, so 2024 didn’t see very much.” — Eric Slivka
Does Matter matter?:
- “Matter seems to be a total nothingburger.” — Casey Liss
- “I expected a bigger upgrade to the Home app and HomeKit ecosystem in 2024 with the continued rollout of Matter. That didn’t happen.” — Chance Miller
- “Last year, everyone was stoked to tell me they had added Matter support to their various widgets. This year, it was mentioned as an afterthought.” — Dave Hamilton
- “I was pleased to find that Matter all ‘just worked,’ though the automation options are a bit limited, and I still don’t like the Home app.” — Michael Tsai
Siri and HomePod:
- “Siri continues to be a boat anchor weighing down the HomePod and other HomeKit accessories.” — John Siracusa
- “My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music.” — Michael Tsai
- “I like my new HomePods mini, but Siri still hampers their value.” — Dr. Drang
- “I was disappointed by the lack of any Apple Intelligence strategy for the HomePod.” — Benjamin Mayo
Hope for the future:
- “Rumors are swirling about Apple entering new markets, with cameras, locks, and even smart screens a possibility for 2025 or later.” — Stephen Hackett
- “I’m intrigued by the idea of Apple finally waking up and making a HomePod with a screen that could potentially serve as a flexible, interactive home hub.” — Federico Viticci
- “Apple’s Home efforts have been saved for me this year by the new Control Center actions I can add. Outside of that, I am not sure of anything else I could focus on. I have hopes for a 5/5 next year though…” — Myke Hurley
- “If Matter ever really arrives, which ecosystem a particular product supports will become a moot question.” — Stephen Hackett
Apple TVGrade: C+ (average score: 3.2, median score 3, last year: 3.0)
Apple TV remains a solid, reliable streaming device, but 2024 was another year of minimal change, both in hardware and software. There remains considerable appreciation for the ad-free, privacy-focused experience—especially compared to competitors. New features such as automatic subtitles and Enhance Dialogue also received praise. But the product remains much more expensive than the competition, and 2024 did little to change the overall perception that Apple TV is in maintenance mode rather than active development.
Static hardware, but still the best:
- “No new Apple TV hardware for the second year in a row, and only minor tvOS updates leave us wanting as we await the home revolution of 2025.” — Eric Slivka
- “I’d like to see some new hardware here.” — Paul Kafasis
- “The Apple TV box is laughably over-engineered for what it mainly does: stream content.” — Steven Aquino
- “The hardware feels as uninspired as ever, but the Apple TV is still the best streaming set-top box out there.” — Chance Miller
- “Hardware not updated since 2022, software feels like it barely changes each year, and yet still the best streaming device to buy.” — James Thomson
- “I’m a big fan of the Apple TV. I’m willing to pay a premium over other hardware to get an ad-free, upscale experience.” — Paul Kafasis
- “There is not a single other privacy-preserving device for the streaming age. Not one.” — Rich Mogull
- “Apple TV still doesn’t feel like it’s changed a whole lot, but I still swear by it because it’s not the crapware that every other vendor creates.” — Jeff Carlson
tvOS feels stagnant:
- “We haven’t really had any noteworthy changes to tvOS in… years?” — Casey Liss
- “Apple really isn’t making any progress on tvOS.” — Joe Rosensteel
- “What exactly improved or changed in 2024? Anything?” — John Gruber
- “I’m still holding my breath for tvOS to have its iOS 7 moment.” — Steven Aquino
- “After a few years of tvOS updates making the platform more annoying and more clearly an advertising platform, it was nice for tvOS not to move further down this road in 2024.” — Matt Birchler
- “I continue to be frustrated with the poor quality of many of the streaming video apps I use on Apple TV.” — John Siracusa
- “The only thing I hate about Apple TV is how every damn service has its own weird user interface.” — Craig Hockenberry
Small touches:
- “tvOS 18 did include a handful of niceties, like automatic subtitles and a much better Enhance Dialogue algorithm.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “Nothing much happened this year, though I like the new feature of automatically showing subtitles when you rewind a bit.” — Michael Tsai
- “I’m giving it a 4 because of the new Snoopy screensavers.” — Andy Ihnatko
Not an Apple priority:
- “Apple obviously cares a lot about Apple TV+. It seems to care a lot less about tvOS and the Apple TV hardware.” — Christina Warren
- “Apple TV continues to be a product in Apple’s lineup.” — Marco Arment
- “It feels like Apple TV has not only gone back to being a hobby but a hobby that you started, invested a lot of money in, and then got bored.” — Michael Gartenberg
ServicesGrade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 3, last year: 3.3)
Panelists praised Apple TV+ for its high-quality content, though its film lineup still lags behind its strong TV series. Apple Music saw improvements, but panelists felt frustration with the macOS Music app and Siri integration. The biggest recurring complaint remains iCloud storage, with Apple’s 5GB free tier seen as inadequate and outdated. Apple’s services ecosystem benefits from deep integration with its hardware, but few of its offerings are considered best in class, and many panelists felt people are paying more for convenience than for excellence.
Apple TV+:
- “Apple TV+ continues to stand out as the shining beacon of excellence in an otherwise neglected lineup of services.” — Quinn Nelson
- “TV+ is far from the biggest streaming service, but I’d argue adamantly that it has by far the highest batting average for quality content.” — John Gruber
- “There are always Apple TV+ shows on my favorites of the year, and this one was no different. Slow Horses, Bad Monkey. Great work.” — Myke Hurley
- “TV+ has been disappointing. Slow Horses is the standout series. Most else is indifferent and uninteresting.” — Charles Arthur
iCloud storage:
- “Still only 5GB free storage for iCloud, which means a lot of people don’t back up their iPhones. This is unconscionable these days.” — Kirk McElhearn
- “We. Still. Get. 5GB. Of. Storage. For. Free. On. iCloud.” — Casey Liss
- “I guess I should stop waiting for Apple to increase the free base storage amount.” — Roman Loyola
- “The free iCloud tier should be genuinely useful for backing up a modern iPhone. And paid Plus tiers should now offer more storage than they do.” — John Gruber
Apple Music:
- “Apple didn’t make a big deal about the personalized ‘New’ tab in Apple Music, but it makes a big difference. The app feels a lot more vibrant and alive.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “The Music app on macOS is in desperate need of some love.” — John Siracusa
- “Siri and Apple Music’s default for ‘play this song’ to be the most recent release version in my library needs to be stopped.” — Andrew Laurence
- “Apple Music is pretty good, but annoying issues with the app on all platforms wear me down. Any time music just doesn’t play — without any sort of error messaging, naturally — I get just a bit more frustrated.” — Casey Liss
The value of Apple’s services:
- “My continued line about Apple Services is that they are not best in class in any area. But the ubiquity and the way they work with Apple products keeps me paying.” — Christina Warren
- “I know services are printing money for Apple, but the value-for-money for consumers is bad and getting worse. Every time I see a NEARLY FORTY DOLLAR bill for Apple One I die a little inside. Which means I’m dying a little inside twelve times a year.” — Casey Liss
- “As Apple’s services business grows, it begins to do things that feel uncharacteristic but are increasingly commonplace. Partnering with Taboola is one example.” — Nick Heer
- “I understand how important services are to Apple and Wall Street. I simultaneously fear how much building services revenue now enters the equation for new products.” — David Sparks
Other services:
- “Apple Fitness+ continues to add new workouts and the interface improvements make it easier to get to your saved workouts.” — Allison Sheridan
- “I’ve found myself opening Apple News on a surprisingly regular basis. In particular, the election coverage in the Apple News app was top notch.” — Chance Miller
- “Developers can now confidently include iCloud syncing in their apps, making a seamless and delightful experience for users.” — Allison Sheridan
- “Passwords and Keychain sync are borderline disruptive.” — Rich Mogull
A sense of stagnation:
- “Most of the services are somewhat stagnant, which is why we see all sorts of bundles that bring services into users’ hands they wouldn’t necessarily buy, like Apple News.” — Michael Gartenberg
- “Much like the home category, I am struggling to think of anything notable Apple did in services this year.” — Matt Birchler
- “Apple really needs to give some attention to the client apps for its ‘lesser’ services on its ‘lesser’ platforms.” — John Siracusa
- “Barely noticed any improvements, didn’t notice any regressions.” — Matt Deatherage
Hardware reliabilityGrade: A+ (average score: 4.6, median score 5, last year: 4.6)
The top-scoring category in our survey remained exceptionally strong, with very few complaints or major issues reported. Many panelists noted that they had no significant hardware problems, and some praised Apple’s consistency in delivering high-quality devices year after year. The transition to Apple Silicon has continued to pay off for the Mac, with users appreciating the improved performance and durability compared to older Intel-based models. While a few minor concerns were raised, such as Touch ID inconsistencies and the non-replaceability of certain components, the general consensus is that Apple is in a “golden era of hardware reliability.”
Solid stuff:
- “Stellar year as far as reliability goes. I can’t recall any scandal at all, which is perhaps a first.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “No news remains great news in this category.” — John Gruber
- “Another year without any major complaints in this category is a victory for everyone.” — Chance Miller
- “I was reminded of just how bad Apple’s laptops were six years ago. Butterfly keyboards from hell. Chips that required loud fans to cool if they were in thin chassis. Performance that frankly peaked in 2015. The work Apple has done since 2020 or 2021 to re-earn trust is remarkable.” — Christina Warren
- “The iPhone is made at a scale basically no other product in the world matches, and it still releases on time and at very high quality without fail.” — Matt Birchler
- “If there’s one area where Apple is leagues ahead of its competition, I think it’s hardware manufacturing and overall experience.” — Federico Viticci
- “Apple has long been a leader in hardware reliability. Now, with the company publishing repair guides and making parts available to end-users and small shops, users have more options than ever when something goes wrong.” — Stephen Hackett
- “We live in a golden era of Apple hardware reliability that’s so good that it’s easily taken for granted. No other consumer-tech company executes at this level of hardware reliability.” — Marco Arment
Apple’s operating systems and appsOperating Systems specifically: Grade: B- (average score: 3.4, median score 4)
Apps specifically: Grade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 4)
We’ve split the Apple software category in two, allowing commentary about both Apple’s apps and its operating systems. The arrival of Apple Intelligence was the banner topic in this category, with many panelists feeling it was overhyped, underdelivered, and introduced new problems while failing to justify the trade-offs. There were also some fears that Apple’s software design is trending toward unnecessary complexity. Many users wish Apple would focus more on stability and polish rather than pushing new features annually.
Apple Intelligence:
- “Apple Intelligence has really hurt Apple’s reputation, on both the oversell and the underdeliver sides.” — Dr. Drang
- “Apple Intelligence to date not only doesn’t live up to its potential, it doesn’t live up to commercials Apple has aired.” — Matt Deatherage
- “Apple lowered the bar for software quality in its race to ship Apple Intelligence features.” — Chance Miller
- “Never has Apple spent more time on features that seem important strategically but actually feel mostly like things people don’t care about or won’t use.” — Dan Moren
Slipping reliability:
- “Can Apple get off the annual OS update cycle yet?” — Paul Kafasis
- “New shiny continues to trump reliability. It’s not awful, but it’s not great.” — Casey Liss
- “Apple’s computers are lots of things but, ultimately, they are tools. I would like them to feel more confidence-inspiring.” — Nick Heer
- “The software quality slide continues. The same old bugs are still there.” — Michael Tsai
- “Please, Apple, take a year off from flooding us with new features and fix bugs across all the operating systems.” — Kirk McElhearn
- “There’s a trend towards complexity in Apple software. The recent changes in Mail categorization made no sense to me—and they were enabled by default!” — Craig Hockenberry
- “Both [macOS and iOS] are just sort of ‘meh.’ Nothing earth-shattering, long-standing bugs remain, and the Mac continues its horrendous slide towards the iOS UI.” — Rob Griffiths
- “Apple really needs to shift the balance between new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.” — John Siracusa
- “I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed, but their software reliability has been very good for me.” — John Gruber
- “Stuff mostly works. But nothing’s perfect.” — Michael E. Cohen
Some welcomed new items:
- “The Sports app is entirely new this year, and I think it is a pretty novel approach to a sports scores interface.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “The new icon tinting and Home Screen customization options in iOS 18 are great.” — Chance Miller
- “Safari is the true favorite child, with features added every cycle.” — Stephen Hackett
Developer relationsGrade: D (average score: 2.4, median score 3, last year: 3.0)
The vibes are bad out there, folks. This is the lowest score this category has received since the very first year of the survey. Apple’s aggressive responses to regulatory pressure, particularly in the EU, were widely criticized as hostile, manipulative, and profit-driven rather than user- or developer-focused. The rollout of third-party app stores and alternative payment options was seen as an exercise in “malicious compliance” designed to discourage participation rather than actually foster openness. Additionally, Vision Pro’s weak app ecosystem highlighted the declining trust developers have in Apple’s new platforms.
It’s not going well:
- “Apple is blowing it with developers. Full stop.” — Craig Hockenberry
- “Developer relations remain needlessly strained. Antagonistic positions and greedy policies from Apple’s executives continue to burn developer goodwill.” — Marco Arment
- “Apple is doing a lot of taking these days and not giving back to the developer community that has helped make its products thrive.” — Craig Hockenberry
- “If Apple treated all of its customers the same way they treated developers, we’d all still be waiting for cut, copy, and paste on the iPhone.” — Andy Ihnatko
Responding to regulation:
- “Apple’s response to legislation is ridiculous. Using notarization as a way to stop apps from existing, the Core Technology Fee, and countless more dark spots.” — Myke Hurley
- “Apple should compete on merit, not threats.” — James Thomson
- “They know what’s right, and they refuse to do it, because they want to protect every possible revenue source they have.” — Paul Kafasis
- “The new App Store structures are designed by lawyers and accountants, not folks who create software.” — Craig Hockenberry
- “They might be doing it by kicking and screaming, but the regulatory pressure is making the developer ecosystem better.” — Benjamin Mayo
- “Apple’s pushback to the DMA makes the company look petty and recalcitrant.” — Dan Moren
- “I have nothing constructive—I just don’t like watching friends getting fucked over for making things people love.” — Alex Cox
- “The situation is largely unchanged, but stagnation is catching up to Apple. More of the same is making matters worse.” — John Gruber
Vision Pro is a warning sign:
- “Vision Pro, even more than Apple Watch, shows that developers aren’t just going to show up and build apps for Apple’s new platforms anymore. And I can’t blame them.” — Christina Warren
- “The relative dearth of native app support for Vision Pro is a warning sign.” — John Gruber
- “I don’t think developers embraced Apple Vision Pro with open arms like Apple had anticipated they would.” — Chance Miller
- “It’s been hilarious watching the Vision Pro App Store colossally fail. Apple is now reaping what it sows.” — Casey Liss
App Store issues:
- “The App Store monopoly continues in most of the world, and, where it doesn’t, Apple is still being an enormous prick.” — Brent Simmons
- “Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. More of the same is making matters worse.” — John Gruber
- “I wish Apple would focus more on reliability and less on changing features that we’ve just gotten integrated into our workflows.” — Dave Hamilton
World impactGrade: C (average score: 3.1, median score 4, last year: 3.8)
Formerly “Environmental/Social,” this category asks panelists to consider anything they deem appropriate about how Apple lives up to its stated high ideals. Those can include education and environmental initiatives, commitment to accessibility and diversity, treatment of Apple’s workforce, and other political and policy stances. The results were complex and mixed—as usual. Apple continues to lead in environmental sustainability, accessibility, and privacy, earning praise for carbon-neutral products and meaningful accessibility advancements. But Tim Cook’s $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration sparked outrage and disappointment among some. Apple’s growing reliance on AI also concerns about its environmental impact and ethical stance, while its business operations in China remain a persistent point of contention.
Apple’s environmental efforts:
- “Carbon neutral products are great. I am really happy they are able to do this with more and more.” — Myke Hurley
- “The M4 Mac mini is the first carbon-neutral Mac ever made.” — Stephen Hackett
- “For a company that pays so much lip service to being green, using so much energy on very underwhelming AI stuff is very hmmmmm.” — Jessica Dennis
- “Apple Intelligence isn’t going to inflict the same degree of damage on the planet as Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft’s AI efforts. However, Apple utilizes those same AI foundries to build and train its models, so they aren’t entirely free of responsibility.” — Andy Ihnatko
- “Most data on AI efficiency is all over the place, and I thought they’d have at least some information based on their on-device strategies.” — Alex Cox
- “I’d like to hear a little more about that when the company announces its next Apple Intelligence features.” — Dan Moren
- “If AI fits in with Apple’s pledge to be carbon-neutral in five years, they’re not making that well known.” — Matt Deatherage
Accessibility:
- “Apple’s accessibility features are so far ahead of the rest of the industry that I don’t even know who’s in second place.” — John Gruber
- “From an accessibility standpoint, the AirPods Pro hearing aid feature has to exemplify Apple’s ethos on making the world a better place.” — Steven Aquino
- “Apple continues to tweak deep accessibility features, like this year’s Braille Screen Input updates.” — Shelly Brisbin
Tim Cook’s donation:
- “Tim Cook donated $1M to Trump’s inauguration. Apple still relies deeply on China. Apple continues to think it operates above the law. Gross.” — Casey Liss
- “Seeking favor with fascists not only helps the fascists, it harms the world.” — Brent Simmons
- “Tim Cook can’t donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration slush fund when Apple donated a mere $43,200 to Biden’s and expect us to do anything but laugh.” — John Gruber
- “Did Tim Cook give more money to the Trump inauguration than to victims of the LA fires?” — Dr. Drang
- “Apple lives up to its own standards, Tim’s personal ones left me puzzled.” — Peter Cohen
Mixed feelings:
- “Apple is too big and too complicated to be a pure good force in the world.” — Myke Hurley
- “Apple does exceed the on-the-ground bar that is ‘better than Meta,’ but every year they seem to get a little closer to the floor.” — Alex Cox
- “Sometimes Apple reminds you that it is a corporation.” — Zac Hall
- “Apple used to be better when it comes to global impact. Now they seem much more money-grubbing to me.” — Paul Kafasis
NotesFor the record, every year I tell people they don’t need to write a lot, but many just can’t help themselves. Their complete 32,000 words of commentary are also available, and I’ve encouraged them to post them elsewhere if they desire. I didn’t vote in the survey, though you can hear me provide my own thoughts on today’s episode of Upgrade.
Thanks to all of those who participated: Shahid Kamal Ahmad, Steven Aquino, Marco Arment, Charles Arthur, Matt Birchler, Shelly Brisbin, Jeff Carlson, Robert Carter, Michael E. Cohen, Peter Cohen, Alex Cox, Matt Deatherage, Jessica Dennis, Dr. Drang, Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Lex Friedman, Michael Gartenberg, Rob Griffiths, John Gruber, Stephen Hackett, Zac Hall, Dave Hamilton, Nick Heer, Craig Hockenberry, Myke Hurley, Andy Ihnatko, Paul Kafasis, Andrew Laurence, Eric Linder, Casey Liss, Roman Loyola, Brian Mattucci, Benjamin Mayo, Kirk McElhearn, Philip Michaels, Carolina Milanesi, Chance Miller, Rich Mogull, Dan Moren, Quinn Nelson, Howard Oakley, Rosemary Orchard, Dan Provost, Gui Rambo, Joe Rosensteel, Allison Sheridan, Brent Simmons, Aleen Simms, John Siracusa, Eric Slivka, David Sparks, Brett Terpstra, James Thomson, Michael Tsai, Federico Viticci, Christina Warren, and the two anonymous voters. And thanks to Khoi Vinh for suggesting this concept way back in October of 2015.
All our previous surveys are available via our Apple Report Card archive page.
Really interesting interview from The Verge’s Nilay Patel with Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter on a wide range of topics, including the company’s recently launched ebook initiative. They touch on DRM, the big players’ influences in digital reading, and more. Well worth a listen or a read if you’re interested in how the company works, and what Hunter sees as the challenges.
Here’s an interesting and somewhat unexpected take, for example, on the situation with Apple’s 30 percent cut:
And are you expressed as a website? Is there an app? I’m asking about the app because selling ebooks and digital goods on mobile phones is pretty tricky.
Yeah, we launched the app yesterday, and we do not support purchasing in the app. And the reason for that is publishers say that resellers can get 30 percent margins when you sell an ebook. So the publisher gets 70 percent, you as a retailer get 30 percent. Now, if you sell it on the App Store, Apple says we get 30 percent. So that leaves 30 percent for Apple, 70 percent for the publisher. Now that’s 100 percent, so that leaves 0 percent for the bookstore. So you cannot sell ebooks in the app and make even a penny, it’s impossible. So there’s no choice but to circumvent the App Store purchasing and force customers to go to the website to buy the books, which is unfortunate because customers don’t understand that. They just think, “You built this dumb app and I can’t buy ebooks in it, why not?” So you’ve got to try to explain it to them.
I’d say what would be rational is if you were a reseller of a digital good that you would pay Apple 30 percent of the profit margin. Thirty percent of the margin would be reasonable, but by saying it’s a flat 30 percent whether or not you’re a reseller, it makes no sense because if your margins on the product are 30 percent and they take 30 percent, then it’s suddenly impossible to have an ebook app, which is why Kindle, you can’t buy the ebooks in the app either, why you can’t buy audiobooks on Spotify’s app, all of that.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0x faster web browsing in SafariWant to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.
Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and its CFO—now Kevan Parekh, since the semi-retirement of Luca Maestri—hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and creatively avoid answering any pointed questions from analysts. This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call.
Tim Cook’s opening statementGood afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call.
Before I talk about our results, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the devastating wildfires that impacted the Los Angeles area this month. From our retail teams to Apple TV+, Apple Music, Fitness+, Beats, and more, L.A. is home to many of our team members. Our thoughts are with everyone who is beginning the road to recovery. For our part, we are contributing to the relief efforts, and we will continue to support our teams and the local community.
Now, turning to the quarter. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $124.3 billion for the December quarter, up 4% from a year ago, and an all-time record. EPS also set an all-time record of $2.40, 10% higher year-over-year. We achieved all-time revenue records across the majority of the countries and regions we track, including the Americas, Europe, Japan, and the rest of Asia-Pacific. We also continue to see momentum in emerging markets, setting all-time revenue records in a number of markets, including Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, among others.
In services, we achieved an all-time revenue record, and in the past year, we’ve seen nearly $100 billion in revenue from our services business. I’m also pleased to announce that we reached a new record for our installed base with over 2.35 billion active devices.
In October, we released the first set of Apple Intelligence features in U.S. English for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and we rolled out more features and expanded to more countries in December. Now, users can discover the benefits of these new features in the things they do every day. They can use Writing Tools to help find just the right words, create fun and unique images with Image Playground and Genmoji, handle daily tasks and seek out information with a more natural and conversational Siri, create movies of their memories with a simple prompt, and touch up their photos with Clean Up. We introduced Visual Intelligence with Camera Control to help users instantly learn about their surroundings. Users can also seamlessly access ChatGPT across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, and we were excited to recently begin our international expansion with Apple Intelligence now available in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK.
We’re working hard to take Apple Intelligence even further. In April, we’re bringing Apple Intelligence to more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese, as well as localized English to Singapore and India. And we’ll continue to roll out more features in the future, including an even more capable Siri. Apple Intelligence builds on years of innovations we’ve made across hardware and software to transform how users experience our products.
Apple Intelligence also empowers users by delivering personal context that’s relevant to them. And importantly, Apple Intelligence is a breakthrough for privacy and AI with innovations like Private Cloud Compute, which extends the industry-leading security and privacy of Apple devices into the cloud. Apple Intelligence opens up an exciting new frontier and is already elevating experiences across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. We’re going to keep investing in innovation and in transformative tools that help users in their everyday lives.
Let me now turn to our results for the quarter, starting with iPhone. iPhone revenue came in at $69.1 billion, reaching all-time iPhone revenue records in dozens of markets and regions. Our iPhone 16 lineup takes the smartphone experience to the next level in so many ways, and Apple Intelligence is one of many reasons why customers are excited. With the A18-powered iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, users are getting a big boost in battery life and incredible camera experiences with camera control. Our amazingly powerful iPhone 16 Pro models go even further, with larger-than-ever displays and a pro camera system so advanced, it can turn moments into masterpieces.
In Mac, revenue was $9 billion for the December quarter, 16% higher year-over-year, driven by significant excitement around the world for our latest Mac lineup. The Mac is more than just a powerful tool, it’s a launchpad to enable users to bring their best ideas and boldest creations to life. And there are so many reasons to choose Mac, from the breathtaking performance of the M4 family of chips to the groundbreaking and growing capabilities of Apple Intelligence. Every product in the Mac lineup offers something extraordinary, whether that’s the super-portable MacBook Air, the powerhouse MacBook Pro, the world’s best all-in-one iMac, or the small wonder that is the Mac Mini, which is not only stunningly capable, but is our first carbon-neutral Mac. All of this is enabled by the unparalleled power of Apple Silicon.
iPad revenue was $8.1 billion, up 15% from a year ago, driven by strong interest for our latest products. We love hearing from customers who are discovering for the first time the versatility of iPad, from the ultra-portable iPad Mini, built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence, to the powerful M4 iPad Pro in a stunningly thin and light design. iPad is there for our users whenever they need it, and wherever they go, and we are pleased to see so much excitement and enthusiasm for our lineup.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue came in at $11.7 billion. With its most advanced display yet, and a thinner, more comfortable design, the all-new Apple Watch Series 10 is the perfect companion to help users pursue their health and fitness goals this year. From the powerful Vitals app to more customizable activity rings, users have an ever-increasing set of innovative health tools at their fingertips in WatchOS 11. Health innovation has long been a focus for us, and we’re committed to continuing to advance this work because we know how much it matters to our users. We’ve introduced new hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2, and new sleep apnea notifications on Apple Watch are also helping users learn of a potentially serious condition that’s thought to affect up to a billion people worldwide. During the quarter, we also brought Apple Vision Pro to even more countries, enabling more customers to discover the magic of spatial computing. Users are enjoying incredible, immersive entertainment experiences and powerful new features and enhancements to Mac Virtual Display. Vision Pro is also supercharging the creative process, and the incredibly talented director John M. Chu recently shared how its extraordinary capabilities helped him bring the movie “Wicked” to life.
Turning to Services, we set an all-time revenue record of $26.3 billion for the December quarter, growing 14% from a year ago. We set all-time records in the Americas, Europe, and Rest of Asia-Pacific, and a December quarter record in Japan. Five years since launch, Apple TV+ continues to be home to incredible storytelling that viewers love. There’s nothing quite like the anticipation that comes when a fan favorite returns, and we were thrilled to debut the second season of “Severance” earlier this month. We have so much in store for our subscribers this year with new shows like “The Studio” and “Your Friends and Neighbors.” And we can’t wait for the premiere of “Formula 1,” starring Brad Pitt, on June 27th, which will take viewers inside the sport in a truly unprecedented way. We’re excited that Apple TV+ continues to draw attention and accolades. To date, Apple TV+ productions have earned more than 2,500 nominations and 538 wins. During the quarter, we were also excited to launch a new Find My service that can help our users when they lose their luggage. For the first time, if you put an AirTag in your suitcase, you’ll be able to share its location information with many major airlines so they can quickly track down your bags if they get lost.
Turning to Retail, our teams went above and beyond to help customers find the perfect gift throughout the holiday season. We also celebrated openings of new stores in China, Spain, and the U.S., and we were excited to announce plans to connect with even more customers this year by adding a fifth store in the UAE and bringing our online store to Saudi Arabia this summer. We can’t wait to welcome customers to the first of several flagship store locations in Saudi Arabia that we’re opening beginning in 2026. I just had the chance to visit both countries last month, and I had a great time meeting with customers and team members. There’s an incredible energy and passion for technology in these growing markets.
Every day, I get deeply moving notes about the many ways our technology is enriching our users’ lives. I recently got a note from a customer who put his watch on his father’s wrist when he feared something was wrong with him. The watch alerted them that the father was in AFib and they were able to get him to the hospital for potentially life-saving treatment. Another user put his new watch on for the first time, and within 15 minutes was notified of a low heart rate that led to a necessary pacemaker. And there are so many touching notes around the profound impact of our new hearing health feature, like a recent user who told me it had changed her life, allowing her to take part in conversations with her children and grandchildren.
These are the kind of stories that remind us of how profoundly important our work is, and it drives us to innovate each and every day. At Apple, the future is full of promise and potential. We’re always searching across a world of possibilities, finding those places where we can do the most good, and putting all of our energy and ingenuity into making something special. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevan.
Kevan Parekh’s opening remarksThanks Tim, and good afternoon everyone. I’m going to cover the results for the first quarter of our fiscal year. We are very pleased to report an all-time high for revenue, with December quarter revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4% year over year. We achieved all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Rest of Asia-Pacific, and grew in the vast majority of markets we track.
Products revenue was $98 billion, up 2% year over year, driven by growth from iPad and Mac. Thanks to our incredible customer satisfaction and strong loyalty, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and geographic segments and is now over 2.35 billion active devices.
Services revenue reached an all-time record of $26.3 billion, up 14% year-over-year. We grew in every geographic segment and achieved all-time records in both developed and emerging markets. Company gross margin was 46.9 percent, at the high end of our guidance range and up 70 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by favorable mix. Products gross margin was 39.3 percent, up 300 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by favorable mix and leverage. Services gross margin was 75%, up 100 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by mix. Operating expenses of $15.4 billion landed at the midpoint of our guidance range and up 7% year over year. This strong business performance resulted in all-time records for both net income at $36.3 billion and diluted earnings per share of $2.40, up 10% year-over-year. Operating cash flow was also strong at $29.9 billion, which included the impact of the $11.9 billion we paid during the quarter in connection with the State Aid decision. Now I’m going to provide some more details for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was $69.1 billion, roughly flat to the prior year. We grew in the majority of markets we track and reached all-time revenue records in several developed markets, including Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, and in emerging markets like Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. The iPhone Active Install Base grew to an all-time high in total and in every geographic segment. We also set an all-time record for upgraders. According to a recent survey from Kantar, during the December quarter, iPhone was a top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, India, the UK, France, Australia, and Japan. We continue to see high levels of customer satisfaction in the US at 96%, as measured by 451 Research.
Mac generated $9 billion in revenue, up 16% year over year. We saw strength across our lineup, from the new Mac Mini to the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. This incredible performance was broad-based, with double-digit growth in every geographic segment. With our latest advances in Apple Silicon and our fastest neural engine ever, customers are able to take advantage of the full capabilities of AI on Mac. The Mac installed base reached an all-time high, and we saw double-digit growth for both upgraders and customers new to the Mac. Additionally, customer satisfaction in the U.S. was recently measured at 94%.
iPad revenue was $8.1 billion, up 15% year-over-year, driven by the new iPad mini and latest iPad Air. The iPad installed base reached another all-time high, and over half of the customers who purchased an iPad during the quarter were new to the product. Customer satisfaction was at 96% in the U.S. based on the latest reports from 451 Research.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $11.7 billion, down 2% year over year. Customers are excited about the new AirPods 4 and the latest hearing health features in AirPods Pro 2. On Watch, although we face a difficult compare against a watch Ultra 2 launch last year, the Apple Watch installed base reached a new all-time high, with over half of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. Customer satisfaction for Watch in the U.S. was reported at 94%.
Our Services revenue reached an all-time high of $26.3 billion, up 14% year-over-year. Services continues to see strong momentum, and the growth of our installed base of active devices gives us great opportunities for the future. We also see increased customer engagement with our Services offerings. Both transacting and paid accounts reached new all-time highs, with paid accounts growing double digits year-over-year. Paid subscriptions also grew double digits. We have well over a billion paid subscriptions across the Services on our platform. We remain focused on improving the breadth and quality of our Services offerings, from new games on Apple Arcade to exciting new programming on Fitness+. And the continued expansion of features like Tap To Pay, now live in 20 markets.
Turning to Enterprise, we have seen business continue to expand their deployments of our products and services. Deutsche Bank launched its Mac As Choice program for their developers, and also issued the latest MacBook Air as a standard for their entire mortgage lending division, and we’re excited to see leading enterprises such as SAP leverage Apple Intelligence in the U.S., with features like writing tools, summarize, and priority notifications to enhance both their employee and customer experiences. We also see strong demand in our emerging markets. For example, Zomato, a leading food ordering and delivery company in India, has deployed thousands of Macs across their workforce to foster innovation. And Vision Pro continues to see more use cases in enterprise, with Cisco’s new Spatial Meetings delivering a fully immersive video conferencing experience for remote collaboration and learning.
Let me quickly summarize our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $141 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $1 billion in maturing debt and decreased commercial paper by $8 billion, resulting in $97 billion in total debt. Therefore, net cash at the end of the quarter was $45 billion. During the quarter, we returned over $30 billion to shareholders. This included $3.9 billion in dividends and equivalents and $23.3 billion through open market repurchases of 100 million Apple shares. As usual, we will provide an update to our capital return program when we report results for the March quarter.
As we move ahead into the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we’re providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we’re projecting today for the current quarter. As the dollar has strengthened significantly, we expect foreign exchange to be a headwind, and to have a negative impact on revenue of about 2.5 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. Despite that headwind, we expect our March quarter total company revenue to grow low to mid-single digits year-over-year. We expect services revenue to grow low double digits year-over-year. When you remove the negative impact of the foreign exchange headwinds I described earlier, the year-over-year growth rate would be comparable to that of the December quarter.
We expect gross margin to be between 46.5% and 47.5%. We expect operating expenses to be between $15.1 billion and $15.3 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $300 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16 percent.
Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 25 cents per share of common stock payable on February 13, 2025, to shareholders of record as of February 10, With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Analyst Q&AEric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Great, guys. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Tim, in your prepared remarks, you had noted that iPhone 16 models are selling better in markets where Apple Intelligence is available, and I’m just wondering if you could double-click on that comment a bit and share any other details you believe could better help us understand how Apple Intelligence is really impacting iPhone demand. And/or what features do you find that users are using most often already?
Tim Cook: Yeah, Eric. Hi, it’s Tim. We did see that the markets where we had rolled out Apple Intelligence, that the year-over-year performance on the iPhone 16 family was stronger than those where Apple Intelligence was not available. In terms of the features that people are using, they’re using all of the ones that I’d referenced in my opening comments from Writing Tools to Image Playground and Genmoji to Visual Intelligence and more, and so we see all of those being used. Clean Up is another one that is popular, and that one demoed in the stores as well. We only had two, two and a half weeks or so during the December quarter of the second release of 18.2, and then only had the UK and the other English language countries for the two and a half weeks, and so we’ve got just the early indications at the moment.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Thank you for that color, Tim, it’s helpful. And then if we just touch on China, obviously, in the news fairly frequently. If we set aside China macro, which I understand is still challenging, can you maybe talk about the headwinds that Apple faces, whether that’s shifting preferences for Western technology brands in favor of domestic vendors? Or is this just a function of not necessarily having Apple Intelligence available with the iPhone 16, which is not necessarily helping replacement cycles? Just maybe double clicking on what you think and what you’re hearing in China as it relates to the iPhone.
Tim Cook: Yeah, sure. If you look at our Greater China Revenue for the quarter, we were down 11% year-over-year, and over half of the decline that we experienced was driven by change in channel inventory from the beginning to the end of the quarter. And of course on the Apple Intelligence side, we have not rolled out in China, and as we just talked about, we did see better results in the markets that we had rolled out in than markets we hadn’t rolled out in. And of course, it’s the most competitive market in the world, and so all of those things are true. In terms of the macro situation, there was a fiscal stimulus or subsidy announced very recently in January that did not affect the December quarter. There were some provincial subsidies in the December quarter, but the national program was announced, I believe, on January 20th. And it does cover the categories that we have products in, from smartphones to tablets and PCs and smartwatches up to a maximum price point, and so we do see fiscal stimulus occurring and we’ll be glad to talk about what that looks like on the next call.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for the question, and hey, Tim, I wanted to ask you, you knew this one was coming, but there’s a perception that you’re a big beneficiary of lower cost of compute, and I was wondering if you could give your worldly perspective here on the Deep Seek situation, and if anything’s happened to change your views in terms of a tailwind to margins and your ability to execute, even, due to the potential for cost to come down due to that development and probably what was going to happen anyway. But love your perspective on that.
Tim Cook: Sure. In general, I think innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing and that’s what you see in that model. Our tight integration of silicon and software, I think, will continue to serve us very well. As you know, we do things on the device and we do things in the private cloud, which mimics from a architectural point of view what happens on device, and from a CapEx point of view, we’ve always taken a very prudent and deliberate approach to our expenditure and we continue to leverage a hybrid model, which I think continues to serve us well.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Oh, great. All right. Thanks, Tim, and then, just with regard to, the iPhone trajectory, you obviously don’t talk about new products and stuff like that, but do you feel that there’s a lot of room for form-factor innovation in the future, or do you feel that the current lineup shows where you’re going? I guess, without pulling punches, wondering if you you thought, in terms of the phone innovation if there’s a lot more to come and you could see the kind of current market changing a bit over the next two to three years?
Tim Cook: Ben, I think there’s a lot more to come and I could not feel more optimistic about our product pipeline. So I think there’s a lot of innovation left on the smartphone.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Good afternoon. Thank you for the question. I have two as well. First, it was encouraging to hear about the record for iPhone upgraders, which I think is something you haven’t said for about a year now. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you would attribute this upgrade strength to, has Apple Intelligence played a role in helping upgrades in the markets that you’ve launched in? Thanks.
Tim Cook: Thank you for the question. If you look at iPhone, we did set an all-time record for upgraders, we’ve never seen a higher level of upgraders before. The installed base hit a new all-time high as well, and if you look at the 16 compared to the 15 from launch, which occurred as you know, in September, so this is across now two quarters from September to the end of the December fiscal quarter, the 16 outperformed the 15. And so I think you can conclude from that that there are compelling reasons to upgrade, and in the markets where we had launched Apple Intelligence, they outperformed the markets that we did not. Lots of good color there.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Thank you, Tim. That’s very clear, and then, I had one about the iPad Pro M4, the inner version. I was just wondering if you could talk about that thin form factor for the iPad Pro, how did it help iPad sales overall and what did your kind of marketing consumer research tell you about how consumers value that thin product form factor?
Tim Cook: It’s a good question. iPad overall grew 15% for the quarter, and it was more driven by iPad Air and the entry-level iPad than it was the top-level iPad. But overall, we could not be more pleased with the iPad category growing 15%. It’s a great achievement for the quarter, and probably what is most important is that over half of the sales in the December quarter went to customers who were new to the iPad. So that tells us that there’s a good amount of customers there to attract.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: You folks are seeing some very robust growth trend in emerging markets right now for Apple products. Could you, at a high level, discuss the durability of growth that you see in emerging markets and do you think that some of the emerging markets are starting to get big enough or perhaps on the growth path enough that they can actually offset some of the china headwinds.
Tim Cook: We have great results in a number of emerging markets, and as you know from past calls, particularly keen on India. India set a December-quarter record during the quarter, and we’re opening more stores there, we’ve announced that we’re going to open four new stores there. The iPhone was the top selling model in India for the quarter, and it’s the second largest smartphone market in the world and the third largest for PCs and tablets, and so there’s a huge market, and we have very modest share in these markets, and so I think there’s lots of upside there, and that’s just one of the emerging markets.
Kevan Parekh: Tim, maybe I’ll add, Amit, that in emerging markets are also seeing double the growth on the installed base, both in total and for the iPhone as well. So that’s also an encouraging sign.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Perfect. Thank you. And then just a question on gross margins for the March quarter. You folks are guiding gross margins flatter on a sequential basis. It tends to be guided up a little bit, 50 basis points or so sequentially. Can we just touch on what are the offset, the puts and takes you see on gross margins? And, Kevan, maybe you can talk about is FX having an outsized impact in your margin profile as well in March.
Kevan Parekh: Yes, Amit, let me take that one. As we mentioned in my remarks, we’re guiding to 46.5% to 47.5%. So we think we’re very pleased with that level of guidance. As you mentioned, there’s always puts and takes. We do think there’s going to be some FX headwinds, which we talked about, that’s going to affect our revenue growth as well. It’ll have an impact here on the margin, a sequential impact on margins. But we think that’s going to be offset by favorable costs and the relative mix of services. We also, as you know, when we move from Q1 to Q2, especially on the product side, because Q1 is such a large quarter for our products business, we do have a loss of leverage. So there are some puts and takes, and I think we feel good about the range. We think it’s a very, very strong guide for gross margin.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, I want to follow up on your comment about channel inventory in China. I was wondering if you could maybe address more broadly if channel inventory across your different product lines and regions, do you feel they’re elevated or out of range in any other regions? And given the clearing event that kind of happened in China I guess in the quarter, should we think of a more normal progression quarter and quarter into the March quarter in China in particular?
Tim Cook: Yeah, I don’t want to project sales for the current quarter by region, but if you look at the channel inventory and look at iPhone in the aggregate, so on a worldwide basis, we’re very comfortable with our channel inventory position. In China, my point was that our channel inventory reduced from the beginning of the quarter to the end of the quarter, and that was over half of the reduction in the reported results, and so if you look, part of the reason for that is that our sales were a bit higher than we forecasted them to be toward the end of the quarter and so we ended a little leaner than we had expected to.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Okay, that’s very clear. Thank you. Your services growth has been very strong and I know you’ve kind of been navigating some pretty challenging regulatory burdens on the business globally. So how should investors think about maybe either a top-line or margin headwind that let’s say you are currently absorbing in your results that could potentially maybe reverse in a more balanced regulatory environment?
Kevan Parekh: So, I wanted to kind of reiterate the fact that our services business set an all-time record for December quarter, up 14%, and that was one strength that we saw across all geographic segments and also was very broad based across all of our services. So we have, as you know, a very broad services portfolio and so we do see a good momentum across the board, and as well we see increasing engagement across the customer base, across all of the service offerings, both transacting and paid accounts. We talked about reaching all-time highs, and we have over now a billion paid subscriptions across the services platform.
Samik Chatterjee, JPMorgan: You had a great quarter on Macs and iPads both, and I’m just curious in terms of — if you can help us think about the sustainability of this double digit growth that you saw in both the product lines, and we’re interested to also hear, we’re talking about Apple Intelligence sort of influencing volumes on iPhones, but any thoughts on sort of what does that influence look like in terms of volumes for Macs, for example, where I think there’s a lot of conversation already, AIPCs, how you’re thinking about the impact there?
Tim Cook: If you look at Mac, Mac was up 16% and on iPad, we were up 15%. The Mac was driven by a very strong uptake on our new products during the quarter and continued success of the MacBook Air, and so as you know, we launched an M4-based MacBook Pro, an iMac, and a Mac mini during the quarter. We believe we’ve got the best AI PC out there for running workloads. The silicon in the Mac is, and it has been for several years now, designed by us and really designed for these workloads. I don’t want to project at the category level for the future, but we’re incredibly pleased with both the Mac and the iPad for the quarter.
Samik Chatterjee, JPMorgan: Tim, I’m going to use your discussion about India, those strong emerging markets, to ask you about the supply chain planning there in terms of how much of the supply chain planning there that you’re doing is more a reflection of the growth expectations from that market relative to more diversification of the supply chain and how should we sort of think about that strategy related to that particular country?
Tim Cook: Yeah, if you look at the manufacturing we do there, we do manufacturing both for the domestic market and we export. Our business needs certain economies of scale for it to make sense to manufacture in country, and so that really means that we’re going to be both a use for the domestic market and an export market.
David Vogt, UBS: I’m trying to think about your commentary around Apple Intelligence being sort of a momentum driver for the iPhone business. But when I think about your framework for the March quarter, if I kind of adjust for channel inventory over the last couple of years, it kind of feels like your iPhone revenue for the March quarter is going to be relatively similar to the quarter two years ago and even the quarter last year. So how do we square the momentum versus the iPhone business effectively really kind of unchanged over the last couple of years? And then second, when I think about the gross margin profile of the business, obviously you’ve done a great job in taking gross margins up, where do you think we sit in terms of, on the services side at least, where margins could go? It looks like the 75% margin has been an incredibly successful quarter, but just trying to get a sense for where do you think this number could go over the intermediate term.
Tim Cook: Yeah, if you look at Apple Intelligence, my point earlier was that markets where we had rolled out Apple Intelligence during the Q1 period performed better on a year-over-year basis than markets where we had not. It’s a positive indicator that we were pleased with. There are many compelling reasons to upgrade, and the other thing I would say that I think I mentioned earlier is that if you look at it from a launch to the end of the December quarter, and so that goes back to September, the 16 family is outperforming the 15 family. And so I think those are two good data points. Our next round of language rollouts will be in April, and so it will be in our Q3 quarter.
Kevan Parekh: Hi, David. How are you? So on the services gross margin, I think maybe stepping back a second, services business in general and aggregate is accretive to the overall company margin, and one of the things as an important reminder is we have a very broad services portfolio, and those businesses have very different margin profiles, and so I think, one, it’s because of the nature of those businesses, and in part, also because of the way we account for them. And so one of the big factors that drives the services gross margin is the relative performance of those different businesses within the portfolio. We also have the dynamic of some scale businesses, like payment services, iCloud, that are actually growing, and there when we add incremental users, those end up being accretive to margins as well. And so, in general, what we saw in the December quarter was nice momentum across our entire services business, that allows us to deliver that 75 percent margin at the services level, and I think our guidance takes into consideration what we think we’re going to land from a company standpoint at 46.5 to 46.5, which again we think is a strong guide.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: You had very strong Mac growth, 16% year-over-year last quarter, just wondering how much of that was driven by some of the Mac silicon innovation versus a replacement cycle for Macs?
Tim Cook: I don’t know the answer to your question precisely, but I think it is a combination of of these products are so compelling. The M4-based products are so compelling that it’s driving both upgrades, at the double-digit level, and it’s driving switchers at a double-digit level. And so we’re seeing both come out and I think it’s just because of the compelling products.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: On gross margin, more on the product side, last quarter you had 39.3%, which is very strong compared to the year ago period. How much more level do you have on the product side to improve the gross margin, or do you think some of the more new AI related devices there’s more upside to growth margin from here on the product hardware side?
Kevan Parekh: Yeah, thanks Krish for the question. So on the product side as you mentioned, we had pretty strong sequential improvement, 300 basis points for the December quarter. That was really driven by, we talked about favorable mix and leverage. In Q1, again, it’s a launch quarter for many products, and so we tend to benefit from the leverage that we get from that higher volume. I would say, in general, our gross margin on products is driven by a number of factors. One of them is the various product launches that we have, different products do have different margin profiles, and so that mix does make a difference. And in particular what we’re seeing is, for example, many of our of our mixes across like phone, for example, we’re seeing customer gravitating toward our pro products because of things like affordability that allows our customers to get into our best products which have favorable gross margins. So we’re continuing to that trend that impacted us in the December quarter. As well, I think we’re in a favorable commodity environment from a cost standpoint, and so we’re benefiting from that as well in the December quarter. And then that’s going to be, as we talked about, we’re going to have a foreign exchange headwind heading into the March quarter. But we figured, that’s contemplated in the guidance range that we gave in the 46.5 47.5 percent.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: I’d like to ask about what might accelerate the pace of Apple intelligence adoption. I guess, do you see this simply as a question of time, i.e. to launch more markets and languages or increase the percentage of installed base devices that can support it, or is it a question of money, i.e. shifting R&D or marketing spend towards AI? And based on other prior Apple services, do you expect a sort of tipping point where adoption will go mainstream?
Tim Cook: I do believe it will go mainstream. I’m getting feedback from people using different features today, and this is—keep in mind that on the iPhone side of our business, you either have to have an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 to use Apple Intelligence. And so as that base grows, I think the usage will continue to grow. And I know from my own personal experience using the features, you can’t imagine not using them anymore. I know I get hundreds of emails a day and the summarization function is so important. So I think it’s a combination of that and of course in April we roll out a whole series of new languages that we had mentioned and so the base grows further.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Kevin, one of Luca’s legacies was really getting Apple to record margin levels and also maintaining very consistent pricing across the product range. But taking the current high levels of profitability as fairly stable, what observations might you share about price sensitivity of users and whether having a wider range of pricing across the products might unlock potentially further market share gains or boost overall product growth?
Kevan Parekh: Yeah, it’s a good question. One, I don’t think we’re going to really depart from what’s served us pretty well to now. I mean, we always take into consideration looking at comparisons between short-term and the long-term. We’ve had a pretty disciplined pricing strategy, which has served us pretty well, and I think we’re going to continually kind of stick with that, as far as I can tell.
Atif Malik, Citi: How do you guys see the potential tariff impact to your products for consumer demand under Trump 2.0? You guys did find under Trump 1.0.
Tim Cook: We are monitoring the situation and don’t have anything more to add than that.
Atif Malik, Citi: Great. And Tim, as a follow up, there is a lot of discussion on agentic AI, the use of agents. Do you guys see the upgrades to Siri expected in April as something that will, let’s say, be the killer application among the suite of features that you have announced for Apple Intelligence?
Tim Cook: I think the killer feature is different for different people, but I think for most, they’re going to find that they’re going to use many of the features every day, and certainly, one of those is Siri. And that will be coming over the next several months.
Ben Bollin, Cleveland Research Company: Tim, I’m interested in your thoughts and how you would have us think about the average useful life of these devices in the wild, and in particular, I’m curious if you look at the strength you saw in fiscal ’21 and how that might support accelerated refresh opportunity into the future.
Tim Cook: Yeah, Ben, I think it’s different for different types… you have very early adopter kind of users that are very quick to jump on the latest technology that upgrade very frequently, and then you have people that are on the entire opposite side of that barbell. And most people are between those two points, and so I do think there were lots of units that are sold during the COVID period of time and it’s a huge opportunity for us as a company for more than one of the product categories.
Apple reported its financial results on Thursday for its first fiscal quarter of 2025, which covers the last three months of 2024. As expected, it was an all-time revenue record at $124.3 billion, up 4% from the year-ago quarter and beating the record set three years ago.
Probably most notable is that iPhone revenue was down 1% from the year-ago quarter, which will certainly upset some analysts and investors, given that the iPhone is more than half of Apple’s total revenue. But the Mac jumped 16%, the iPad was up 15%, and services was up 14%. The recently sluggish Wearables, Home, and Accessories category was down 2%.
See also: our transcript of Apple’s call with financial analysts. And we went live on YouTube for some chart analysis.
And now, bring on the charts:
Existing in my weird in-between status as a tech journalist and an author, I was intrigued by the announcement this week from Bookshop.org that it would now be selling ebooks.
I like Bookshop.org; while I haven’t worked with them directly, most of my books are available through them, and I’ve pointed customers to them in the past (as well as their partner Indiebound, who now uses Bookshop.org for sales). That’s because the heart of their mission is working with local independent bookstores; Bookshop.org essentially serves as a portal for online sales for those indie stores, many of whom don’t have the money or infrastructure to create their own online marketplaces. By banding together, the hope is, they can compete with the Goliaths like, well, Amazon.
Previously, Bookshop.org focused on physical books. If you wanted to buy the paperback of the latest Galactic Cold War novel1, for example, you could search for it on Bookshop.org, then choose your local bookstore, and the full 30% profit from the sale would go to the store. If you don’t choose a bookstore, Bookshop.org still contributes a (smaller) percentage to a pool divided amongst its indie bookshop partners.
Adding ebooks is a smart move in theory. After all, you can’t exactly walk into your local indie bookstore and ask for an ebook. So there are a lot of people who love reading and would no doubt love to support their local indie bookstore instead of a big chain, but just can’t or don’t buy physical books.
I’m rooting for Bookshop.org because of all this. Amazon continues to control the bulk of the book market—not a great position for authors, publishers, or readers—roughly in that order, though.
However, there are two major technological barriers that I think will hamper broad adoption of Bookshop.org’s ebook sales—and unfortunately, they’re both out of Bookshop’s control. One is due to the current status quo of the publishing industry when it comes to technology, and the other is…drumroll…Apple.
Putting “The Man” in “Digital Rights Management”Ebooks are great: they take up no physical space, very little virtual space, and are extremely convenient. But, as with digital media since what seems like time immemorial, they are also saddled with a pesky limitation: Digital Rights Management.
DRM is borne out of, in short, fear. Fear from the companies that publish these works (and, to a lesser extent, the people who create them) that the nature of digital media being easily copyable and, thus, easily transferrable, will lead directly to widespread piracy.
Unfortunately, the use of DRM to remove copying and transferring also imposes a significant downside to ebooks compared to physical books. You can’t easily loan an ebook to a friend or family member.2 Heck, you often can’t even read a DRM-encumbered ebook you have legally purchased on anything other than devices or apps from the place where you bought it. Bought a book from Amazon but prefer reading on your Kobo? Oh well! It’s a bit like a bookstore saying that you can only read your book at home or in the store where you bought it. Want to read it on the plane? Or on vacation? Tough luck.
In regards to Bookshop.org, this means that your only option for reading ebooks purchased through the storefront is Bookshop’s own app, available on iOS and Android, or on the web. Some people will be fine with that, of course, but for a whole class of consumers who read largely or exclusively on e-readers—many of whom, I imagine, are among the most passionate buyers of ebooks—this setup is a non-starter. (Bookshop says it’s working with Kobo to enable support for its books “later this year,” and of course its Android app works on Android e-readers like those from Boox.)
There are two specific factors that make the insistence on DRM even more ridiculous. The first is that we already have a place where you can get books for free: they’re called public libraries. And you can even get ebooks from them these days that—though they do still have DRM—work with more than one company’s devices.3 Plus, you will not find an author of any repute who isn’t fully in favor of people having free access to their works via libraries.
The second and more ridiculous aspect is that DRM does not stop piracy. Never has. Not only can you likely find a cracked copy of pretty much any book you want somewhere on the Internet, but the tools to break that DRM are widely and easily available if you know where to look. A lot of people use these tools for totally reasonable purposes, like that aforementioned example of reading your Kindle books on your Kobo reader.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. Two decades ago, the music industry was struggling with this exact same problem. There were loud and insistent calls for labels to drop DRM—ultimately from no less than then Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Jobs wasn’t totally acting out of altruism here: Apple had a decided interest in making it easier for people to get their music onto iPods, thus selling more iPods.
But he was also right. As I wrote at the time:
…unlocking all the DRM on music files doesn’t magically turn people into pirates any more than unlocking every house in a town turns the inhabitants into thieves. Simply because something is available via illicit means doesn’t mean that people will take advantage of it… Some people will steal music, yes, but those are mostly the same people already stealing music. As difficult as it is for businessmen to admit, you must account for some degree of morality, some sense of right and wrong. Money may be the be-all, end-all in the industry, but it’s not for consumers—we’re willing to exchange money for something that we want and value; that’s the whole point of being consumers.
This hasn’t changed, and I don’t think it ever will. By and large the people who buy books like books and, moreover, want to support the authors writing those books so that they can keep writing books for people to buy. It’s a virtuous circle.
And guess what! Some publishers already offer DRM-free ebooks. For example, Tor Books, an imprint of publishing giant Macmillan, has been selling DRM-free ebooks for more than a decade, and not only are they still in business, they’re one of the most respected and successful publishers in their part of the industry.
There are other approaches too: the publisher of my Galactic Cold War series, Angry Robot Books, while not one of the Big Five, does sell DRM-free ebooks and has, in the past, offered free ebooks to people who buy their physical book.4
I suggested not too long ago that Apple might actually be able to use this situation to its advantage, positioning itself as a counterweight to Amazon by putting itself forward as a DRM-free marketplace. But Cupertino seems to still feel burned from a decade-old antitrust action from the Department of Justice and doesn’t seem invested in meaningfully improving its ebook offerings, choosing instead to plod along the same old course.
And, ultimately, the decision rests with the publishers. A company the size of Apple might be able to exert significant leverage, but they can’t make the decision to drop DRM any more than Bookshop.org can. Still the point is, solutions exist, if these big companies were courageous enough to implement them. But in the words of Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
30 percent for 30 percentThe second impediment to Bookshop.org’s plan can be laid directly at the feet of Apple and Google. Read Bookshop’s FAQ on ebooks and you’ll find this wholly unsurprising tidbit:
Why can’t I buy ebooks in the app?
Both Apple and Google require app developers who use in-app purchasing to pay around 30% of their earnings from those purchases in fees. We want that money to be used to support local bookstores instead, so this extra step is required.
🎶Hello, 30% cut, our old “friend.”🎶
Yeah, it’s 2025 and though you can read an ebook on your iPhone or iPad you still can’t buy one without using the web and then jumping through some hoops.
Look, plenty has been written about Apple’s 30% cut, and you don’t need me to rehash it all. But it does feel particularly galling in this circumstance where Apple is not only taking profit that would go to independent bookstores, hardly businesses that are generally flush with cash, but also ones that—and I cannot stress this enough—are, by selling ebooks, competing directly with Apple.5
A company like Bookshop.org has only a few options: mark up all their prices even further in order to make sure that those profits still help benefit the small businesses they intend to; keep their prices competitive, and thus make significantly less profit, potentially risking their own business; or, as they’ve decided to do, not sell books via their apps. A move that, in the end, hurts users of Apple’s own platform by making this whole process harder than it needs to be.
I’ve long sided with developers upset about giving 30 percent—or even 15 percent—of their proceeds to Apple, but Apple has least attempted to justify that by saying that they provide the tools and the platform for those people to build their apps. The involvement Apple has with independent bookstores and authors of these books is tertiary at best.
Apple’s business is, of course, currently in the process of being upended, at least in Europe, and while those developments may or may not make their way to the U.S., I feel convinced that it’s time for the company to reconsider their model when it comes to the vast majority of sales via its platform. It’s one thing to hash it out with behemoths like Spotify, Netflix, or Amazon; it’s quite another to hold all these small developers, independent bookstores, and authors hostage by applying this usurious cut across the board.
Yeah, Apple is a business at the end of the day, and it wants to squeeze as much money as possible out of its work. But what Steve Jobs understood—and, up until recently, what I would have said Tim Cook understands—is that sometimes the bottom line isn’t about just how much money you can rake in; it’s that sometimes there is a tangible benefit to putting the customer before yourself. Getting to the top of the pile may be the end goal of capitalism, but sometimes you have to stop and see who you’re trampling on to get there.
I keep coming back to this line from the classic Christmas movie—and of my all-time favorites—Miracle on 34th Street. As Macy’s owner R.H. Macy (Harry Antrim) declares when he finds out about the store’s Santa Claus sending parents to other retail establishments to find the toys their kids want:
We’ll be known as the helpful store, the friendly store, the store with a heart, the store that places public service ahead of profits. And, consequently, we’ll make more profits than ever before.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Mr. Macy.
- Your support is much appreciated. 😁 ↩
- There are exceptions, of course. Amazon and Apple both have some degree of purchase sharing with other people in your household, but it’s not as if you can put every single person you ever want to lend a book to in your household. ↩
- That said, the way in which the industry is set up to license ebooks to libraries is, frankly, kind of broken. But that’s another post for another time. ↩
- I’m not sure if that initiative is ongoing, alas, but it’s always worth reaching out to them if that’s the situation you find yourself in. ↩
- Hm. If only there were some kind of word for this kind of behavior. ↩
Today’s the day: Apple will be announcing the results of its fiscal first quarter of 2025, which covers the holiday quarter of 2024. This is traditionally Apple’s largest quarter of the year, and has a chance to break the all-time revenue record of $119.6 billion set during the previous year’s holiday quarter. The results will also offer details about how the iPhone 16 series did during its first full quarter on sale.
As always, Six Colors will publish a load of charts after the results are released at about 1:30 p.m. Pacific, and a quick transcript of Tim Cook and new Apple CFO Kevan Parekh’s comments to analysts on a conference call that begins at 2 p.m. Pacific. We’ll follow it all up with a live stream looking at the results beginning at 5 p.m. Pacific.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
After a couple of seasons as an Apple exclusive, Major League Soccer and Apple are broadening the reach of MLS Season Pass for this season. The company is making MLS League Pass available to Xfinity subscribers, who can add it to their package and stream it on Apple devices or on the Xfinity X1 box, and to DirecTV subscribers, who can just tune it in on channels 480 through 495 just like any other subscription sports TV package.
These are interesting moves, and suggest that Apple and MLS are not satisfied with the reach of MLS Season Pass solely within the TV app. Both parties are trying to balance Apple’s desire to use MLS as a gateway into Apple’s ecosystem and the need to improve total subscriber numbers. Letting people who’d rather just buy an MLS package through their cable or satellite provider seems like it’ll broaden the audience, but at the expense of that Apple ecosystem play. (Xfinity subscribers will get access to the whip-around MLS 360 channel even if they don’t subscribe to MLS Season Pass.)
There’s also a new franchise, Sunday Night Soccer, which features a single match in a unique time slot. Previously, Apple and MLS had jammed all MLS play into limited windows on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Now they’re creating a premier Sunday showcase for a handpicked game—think ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball or NBC’s Sunday Night Football—and making it available within the TV app for all Apple TV+ subscribers, not just MLS Season Pass subscribers.
The MLS season begins February 22. MLS Season Pass still costs $99, or $79 for Apple TV+ subscribers. Apple’s also rolling out a new MLS documentary series, “Onside,” on February 21.
Seems like a waste of an iPhone.So Apple is apparently taking the smart home seriously. Apparently the company is working on a new home controller that looks like a small iPad, and is exploring security cameras and smart doorbells. All of that makes some sort of sense, since most of it can be assembled out of software and hardware features Apple has already integrated with some other product.
I’d like to suggest another one. I’ve actually mentioned it before on a few podcasts, but I guess it’s never appeared here, so let’s do it. I was prompted to write about this by Six Colors reader Jono, who wrote:
I’m really wanting a “Continuity Camera” device for Apple TV, because Zoom is going away from the discontinued Facebook Portal TV device and I don’t want to have to have my parents attach their phone to a mount every time we want to have a call.
Yes, Jono! I love Continuity Camera, the feature that lets you use an iPhone as a remote camera for other Apple devices, including the Apple TV. Since 2020, my wife’s parents and siblings have gotten together every other week via Zoom for a family video chat. For the last few months we’ve been do it on Apple TV, using the Zoom app for tvOS connected to my iPhone via Continuity Camera. (It’s better than it used to be.)
In fact, the experience is pretty awesome. Center Stage makes sure the right people are in frame, the quality of the iPhone camera beats every other webcam out there, and watching everyone on our big-screen TV makes it feel like something out of a sci-fi movie about how people will communicate in the far-off future year of 2025.
To get it to work, I have to clip my iPhone into a iPhone-compatible tripod that I can set on my coffee table (I previously used a magnetic mount on top of the TV), but once it’s set up, it works okay. Still, it’s clunky. Which leads to the hardware request: How about just making a continuity camera, Apple? It would be nice to permanently stick one on the top of my TV so that I could use it whenever I wanted to do a FaceTime or Zoom from my living room.
I’d suggest that Apple TV could be made to support USB webcams, but whoops—Apple took away the USB-C port! So it’ll have to be a wireless connection, though the camera itself will need to be plugged into power. It could even double as a standalone high-quality webcam for Mac users who are stuck with worse cameras.
Apple’s already got all the pieces to this puzzle. I could argue that the worst thing about Continuity Camera is that it requires (and monopolizes) your iPhone. I’m not going to buy a second iPhone to use as a camera, but I’d buy and install a Continuity Camera in a heartbeat.
Reading the California Sun in Readkit.About four years ago I wrote about how I caught up with all my email newsletters by routing them into an RSS reader:
I love newsletters, but checking email is a drag—and reading long emails an even bigger one… My newsletter consumption has shot up as a result, and those mornings reading in bed while drinking my tea have become that much more pleasant.
I’m happy to report that I still do this—all of my newsletters either get sent directly to Feedbin or are forwarded to Feedbin via an email rule—and reading RSS and newsletters together is still as much of my morning routine as that tea is.
A couple of things have changed: First, I’ve been using ReadKit as my RSS reading app of choice for a few years now, and I love it. I keep it parked in Today view —just links from the last day—99% of the time.
And last year Feedbin introduced custom newsletter addresses, so now I can create unique email addresses for different newsletters. I am slowly upgrading all of my newsletters to use unique email addresses, which Feedbin lets me turn on and off at will.
If you’re frustrated by your newsletters ending up in all sorts of different places, I highly recommend this approach—especially if you also have some favorite sites that offer RSS feeds.
[Update: If your RSS provider of choice doesn’t offer an email-to-RSS feature, Reader Chris suggests Kill the Newsletter, which does the same thing and works with any reader that supports Atom feeds.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The how often we use our non-default smartphone cameras, the tech or techniques we use to stay focused at work, where we buy and read ebooks and whether supporting indie bookstores appeals to us, and our least favorite thing to troubleshoot.
Go to the podcast page.
The best time for Apple to truly embrace smart-home tech was five or ten years ago. The second best time, of course, is now. The good news is that, according to reports from reliable sources such as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple seems to have finally embraced the home as an area of growth, and a bunch of new Apple-designed home products are on the way.
It’s a sensible decision, and if Apple does it right, its years-long intransigence in this category might not matter. Let’s take a look at where Apple may be going.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
TikTok troubles; Apple Intelligence to be turned on by default; the UK moves toward its own DMA; Apple leans into the smart home; and Samsung joins Apple in the chase for the ultra-thin smartphone.
Go to the podcast page.
Joe Adalian joins Jason to discuss Netflix’s big moves, price hikes, and what drove Jason to cancel it. Also we answer your letters and make some TV picks! (Downstream+ members also get: the return of CNN+, death of Venu, and Tubi spikes the football.)
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
So, join the community of over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
I know the road is well-trod by now, but yes, we’re back to talk about Apple Intelligence once again. Why? Well, for better or worse, it seems to be pretty much all that Apple wants to talk about these days, and when the company has put this much time, energy, and, yes, marketing attention onto a single feature, then scrutiny is, also for better or worse, what you get.
While the features under this Apple Intelligence banner have had their fair share of problems so far—everything from inaccurate news summaries to misidentifying spouses—none of that seems to have slowed Apple’s adoption of the technology. With the news that the upcoming iOS 18.3 and macOS 15.3 updates will activate Apple Intelligence by default, the company continues to plow full speed ahead, directly into a minefield that’s also somehow replete with both asteroids and icebergs.
Apple Intelligence agencyApple’s AI features exist in a Schrödingeresque limbo: the company continues to label them as betas (in increasingly fine print, it seems) while simultaneously using them to sell its products. Go to Apple’s website right now, and the top spot on the company’s homepage is a banner for the iPhone 16 Pro with the subtitle “Hello, Apple Intelligence.” The company is having its cake Genmoji and eating it too.
Unsurprisingly, this stems mainly from its business concerns. AI is on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now, and Apple both has to be seen to be relevant and, moreover, has to be relevant by incorporating said features. The company was caught flat-footed in the AI groundswell and has had to scramble to catch up, which means telling everybody loudly that it has now caught up, even if it hasn’t.
From a purely technological standpoint, the change to make Apple Intelligence opt-out rather than opt-in makes sense from a couple of standpoints. One, it eliminates any steps for people who have Apple Intelligence capable devices, making those features immediately available to people who might not have otherwise known they were there or spent the time figuring out how—or even if—to turn them on. As an ancillary benefit, enabling these features expands the pool of people using them, which helps the company gather analytics and metrics, in turn feeding into improving those features.
Is there a risk for Apple in making this move? Sure. Some people will be confused or unaware of what the features are doing and might end up with unexpected or misleading results, despite Apple’s attempts to provide caveats. Some people will be upset that the features were enabled without their explicit permission. (You don’t have to look far on social media these days to see similar uproars about more innocuous capabilities that people have lumped in with generative AI.) But to Apple, the benefits clearly outweigh any potential downsides.
The same can’t necessarily be said for users.
Fight for the usersLet’s start with this: I don’t believe AI features to be a total waste of time. There are obvious utilities to machine learning algorithms of the kinds that Apple has been employing for years and even generative AI and Large Language Models can be tremendously useful within certain contexts. But those technologies are also not without their costs, including everything from the unauthorized use of intellectual property to their not infrequent errors to the environmental impact.
And this is where Apple’s move to enable Apple Intelligence by default raises an eyebrow. Given the contentious nature of these features, there is understandable frustration to users immediately having their devices start utilizing this functionality without their say-so. It’s not dissimilar from Google’s recent choice to start serving up an AI overview—often with hilariously bad information—at the top of its search results. Like Apple, Google is struggling to prove its relevance in a field that risks leaving it behind, but it’s a move that I would argue has made Google’s product worse, and even cheapened their brand overall. That’s a risk for Apple too, and it’s a company that lives by its reputation more than most.
But it’s not all downside: for every person upset about Apple’s choice to automatically enable Apple Intelligence, there may be another who benefits from the addition of its proofreading tools or delights in making Genmoji, and might never have found those features had they not been on by default.
Gimme an A, gimme an I, what does it spell? A…I….dunno?It’s not as if there isn’t precedent for this on Apple’s part. The company has long taken a paternalistic approach to its users, whether it be in swapping scrolling direction on the Mac, insisting that people held its phones wrong, or getting rid of small phones. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that the company would go down this road—but that doesn’t mean it’s not disappointing.
Like it or not, Apple Intelligence isn’t going anywhere. The company has one more set of promised features to deliver before the presumably next round is unveiled at June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and there exists the possibility—slim, perhaps—that those capabilities might prove the whole endeavor worthwhile. But don’t be surprised if the number of Google searches for “how to turn off Apple Intelligence” start climbing—just remember that putting glue into your phone is never the answer.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Apple enabling Apple Intelligence features by default, the AI summaries that work for us, Samsung’s boring new phones, and our cable management predilections.
Go to the podcast page.
Two office views from 2014. Left: My final docked work setup at IDG. Right: My first setup in my garage.When I started Six Colors more than a decade ago, I maintained continuity with my corporate job in a bunch of ways. I had been using a MacBook Air as my primary computer, taking it back and forth on the bus to San Francisco in my backpack, and had set up a work-from-home space in my garage, with an external monitor that replicated my setup at work, so I just kept using that.
But that fall, Apple introduced the 5K iMac, and I was so smitten with the Retina display that I decided to become an iMac user full-time, leaving behind the laptop-only lifestyle. (Later on I went from iMac to iMac Pro to M1 Max Mac Studio with Studio Display.)
But things have changed.
It’s cold out thereA little background: Even though I live in California and our weather is mild, my garage workspace has a garage door that leaks cold air efficiently, and my sturdy electric oil heater can only do so much.1 As a result, in the winter, my garage is always cold, and I often find myself shivering uncontrollably in the late morning until I stand under the shower for half an hour.
Also, my daughter is now an actual adult with her own job and life a state away, and her bedroom is well-heated and sitting right there, largely unused. Last winter, I created an outpost in that room, moving in my first work-from-home desk and attaching my MacBook Air to a Studio Display. I was a lot warmer, but it meant using different computers in different rooms.
While cloud-based syncing makes everything much easier than it ever used to be—I can access most of the files I’m working on from anywhere—there are a lot of Mac features and functions that don’t sync, or don’t sync easily. When I switch between the two rooms, all context is lost.
One thing leads to anotherThis fall’s release of the new M4 Mac Mini made me consider whether I wanted to replace my M1 Mac Studio with a Mac Mini. While I decided against it, I had broken the seal on reconsidering my entire computing life. And I realized that maybe going back to the way I used to work, back when I commuted between Mill Valley and San Francisco, might work when going from the garage to my daughter’s old bedroom.
With a laptop, whether I’m just carrying it down the hallway or putting it in a backpack and riding a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge, I’m always maintaining context. All my documents are in one place, all my settings remain the same at all times, and I don’t need to update apps that were already updated elsewhere before I can get back to work. That sounds pretty good.
And then there’s the performance of the M4 Max chip on the MacBook Pro, which is a big boost from the M1 Max Mac Studio. The only real downside is that this decision required me to give up my beloved M2 MacBook Air, which doesn’t have enough horsepower to satisfy everything I need to do across video, podcasts, and more. When I do travel, I’ll be carrying almost a full pound (0.38 kg) more than I was before. But at the same time, when I do travel, I will now be traveling with the same computer I use all day at my desk(s), not one that’s sporadically used (especially in the warmer months).
The desktop/laptop lifestyleSo, after a few weeks of living with a laptop as my main computer—with nearly all of that time spent in lid-closed mode attached to a Studio Display—how has it gone?
Generally, it’s been amazing. When I update an app, it stays updated. If I download obscure command-line apps or update Homebrew or Python, I don’t have to worry about a mismatch on another device. All the right software is installed. Wherever I go, there’s just a single Mac, and it’s mine. And when I do pull the laptop out and use it somewhere else, I get to stare at that spectacularly good 14-inch MacBook Pro display.
What’s not so great is the extra pound, obviously, when traveling. I’ve had to deal with the fact that my two different docking locations have different inputs and peripherals, which can lead to some confusion with settings that don’t switch automatically.
Since setting up the laptop, I’ve noticed that how I use my computer has changed. Having my “real” computer available in the main part of my house, just a keypress away from waking up has meant that I will sometimes pop in on an evening or over a weekend and do something quick when I previously would’ve deferred it until the next workday. I’ll need to watch this—I don’t want to get sucked into work when I don’t want to be.
I’ve also, on a few occasions, pulled my laptop out of the dock and brought it into the living room. Again, I’m trying to keep up some barriers—this is why I mostly limit my in-home device use to my iPad—but these were unusual occasions where I probably would’ve been running back and forth between two rooms, and instead, I could just bring my MacBook Pro into the living room and make it all happen in one place.
A surprising side effect, at least thus far, is that I haven’t written on my iPad at the bar in my kitchen, a favorite winter change of pace. Maybe part of the reason I liked to sometimes work inside is because I was feeling cold out in the garage? I wouldn’t be surprised if I still do this from time to time, but it’s worth pondering if having the ability to take my main computer literally anywhere will reduce the amount of time I use my iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard attached.
Even in the winter, I generally spend Mondays and Tuesdays out in the garage because that’s where I prefer to record Upgrade and MacBreak Weekly. (It’s a more photogenic space, and both podcasts offer video versions.) In the past, I’d spend the rest of the day working out there, but since switching to the MacBook Pro I’m only staying out there for the recording. I started writing this article in the back bedroom, transferred to the garage to record MacBreak Weekly, and then returned to the bedroom.
Now, many long-time laptop users will read my descriptions of my behavior and find themselves utterly boggled. “Yes,” they’ll say, “that is what happens when you use a laptop. You get to move the computer around.” And I know that, but for me, the big difference is that I’m really shuttling between two separate desktop setups. It’s something I haven’t experienced in more than a decade.
What’s on my desksWith that all said, let me detail my two new setups, since I’ve had to buy some new hardware to make it all work the way I wanted. A key to this entire approach is that I wanted to be able to plug into either desk with a single Thunderbolt cable to supply all data connectivity and power. One cable, one plug, and I’m in or out.
The big addition was the CalDigit TS4 Thunderbolt Dock in the garage. The Mac Studio had an awful lot of external ports that a MacBook Pro lacks, and of course I also wanted to reduce down to that single cable! While the CalDigit dock is not cheap, it’s loaded with ports. Even better, I was able to set my power-saving auto-switching power strip to use the CalDigit dock as the device that signifies whether or not to switch the rest of the strip on or off. By itself the dock doesn’t draw a lot of power, but when I attach the MacBook Pro, it has to supply power to the laptop—and power use surges, which crosses the outlet’s threshold and sends power to the Studio Display. I’ve got a few devices plugged into the back of the Studio Display, so when my laptop isn’t present, none of those devices are powered. That’s how I want it.
Garage:
Apple Studio Display on a Right Angle Hover Series 2 arm, Keychron Q1 keyboard (Kiwi switches, MT3 Dasher keycaps), CalDigit TS4 Thunderbolt Dock, Magic Trackpad, fully deconstructed Touch ID button, Twelve South BookArc, Elgato Stream Deck, Elgato Key Light, Elgato Wave Mic Arm LP, Shure SM7B microphone, Sound Devices USBPre2 audio interface, Uplift Standing Desk, Herman Miller Aeron chair, Smart Strip switching outlet.
Back bedroom:
Apple Studio Display, Vortex Race 3 keyboard (brown switches, MT3 Camillo keycaps), Magic Trackpad, Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, Twelve South Curve Riser, Anker 555 USB-C Hub (attached to Studio Display), Elgato Stream Deck, Heil PL2T boom arm, Shure MV7 microphone, HON Ignition 2.0 office chair, Beyond the Office Door VertDesk.
That’s it! Two rooms, one appreciably warmer than the other—at least, for now. The next question is, what happens when the temperature in the garage returns to normal. I’m assuming I’ll stay out there all the time, but you never know. (Also, what happens if my daughter decides to move home? She’s welcome to, but… let’s cross that bridge if we ever get to it.)
- We have opted not to convert the garage and attach it to our central heating system for several mundane reasons involving spending lots of money. ↩
VFX artist and movie fan (and Friend of Six Colors) Todd Vaziri, in a post from 2018 that he updated Monday with new information that debunks the myth that there was an “actual shooting star” in a couple of shots in the movie “Jaws”:
I reached out to film historian Jamie Benning about this issue. He said, “let me ask Joe Alves.” Alves was the “Jaws” production designer and also worked with Spielberg on “The Sugarland Express” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and has spoken extensively about his experience on “Jaws”. Paraphrasing, this is the response he got from Alves in August 2023: yes, the shooting stars in the movie were animated. Yes, they were added in post-production….
Another source has access to Steven Spielberg. So this person asked Steven Spielberg in September 2023… Paraphrasing from Spielberg: Yep, it’s animated shooting star, animated by Albert Whitlock.
This was a bombshell for me. No, not that Spielberg confirmed that it was animated, but that it was supervised by none other than Al Whitlock who passed away in 1999, the veteran visual effects artist who contributed to some of the most amazing visual effects of all time. Not to mention that really terrific illusion in “The Blues Brothers” (1980) that I documented on Twitter.
Todd’s site FXRant seems to be slowly emerging from hibernation, and just as he does on social media, he’s using it to combat misinformation about how special effects are used in movies. (If you didn’t know, Todd is a longtime VFX artist for Industrial Light and Magic.) Just yesterday, he slapped down that meme about how it took five months to film one scene in ‘Severance’, which of course it didn’t.
But still… going to Spielberg to debunk misinformation about how he made “Jaws.” That’s next-level stuff, even for Todd.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Summing up Apple’s devil’s bargain when it comes to AI features; what TikTok says about the chaotic future of tech regulation; Apple TV+ in the era of “Severance” and “Silo.”
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and also blocks all YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads
- search ads
- plus many more
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that in the latest iOS 18.3 betas, Apple has changed how it handles summaries, presumably in response to criticism of inaccurate headline summaries:
- When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta.
- You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.
- On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.
- In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”
Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps.
Turning off summaries for an entire category is a quick fix, though it doesn’t address the larger long-term problem of inaccuracy. Empowering users to turn things off more easily is good, and styling them differently from regular notifications is important.
In short, this seems like a good bit of damage control, but there’s much more work to be done here—and these features should all have been in iOS 18 to begin with.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Sometimes a solution is simpler than you think it’s going to be. I was trying to figure out a way to write a shortcut to take a folder and have all of its sub-folders compressed into individual archives—i.e., one archive per folder. Alas, selecting them in the Finder and choosing Compress turns all your folders into one big archive.1
As easy as this feels like it should be, Shortcuts was thwarting me. I wrote a workflow that seemed like it ought to be fine, and it did nothing. I could have fallen back to a shell script, but I’ll be honest, I was feeling stubborn.
So I hit the old search engine and found this post by Lukas Polak, which from its description seemed like it should work, even if I didn’t really understand why.
Sure enough, it does. The secret is in opening the Archive Utility app, which is the macOS program that handles compressing/expanding files—yes, there’s actually a whole app with an interface! Drag the folders onto that app icon in the Dock and it will, by default, compress them into individual archives. You may also want to change the compression format to ZIP—the default, compressed archive, is a .cpgz file, though that’s more a matter of personal preference—the behavior is the same.
While I wish this was easier to do in Shortcuts, I’m gratified that there was a pretty simple way to do it with no scripting at all. Always a nice discovery.
- Weirdly enough, if you hold down option while bringing up the contextual menu, it changes the text from “Compress” to “Compress X items”…but the end result is the same: one archive for everything you select. I’m not even sure why it changes the text—perhaps it’s a bug? ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
In the past couple of weeks, two different projects of mine have been released that were powered, at least in part, by a Python script that eliminated enormous amounts of labor from a process that used to take hours of drudgery.
Both The Upgradies and Feuding Families rely on compiling a list of most common answers from hundreds of submissions into a free-entry box in a Google form. As you might expect, this leads to some pretty inconsistent data entry. Poll people about their favorite Apple product of the year and you’ll get Mini, Mac mini, M4 Mac mini, The Mini, The Mac Mini, The New Mac Mini, and even things like Macmini and Mca mini and Macini.
I started down the path of automating because I just thought computers would do a better job of counting identical input than humans would. And that’s true, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted the tool to go beyond counting identical entries—I wanted it to throw all the similar entries into the count as well. Why not?
And so I created the first iteration of this tool, which Myke Hurley and I have been using for our projects for a year or two. It’s a Python script that’s just inserted into a one-line Shortcut (run shell script, since you can choose Python from a list of shells) for convenience’s sake.
All the original script does is read the clipboard, puts everything in title case (thereby avoiding differences in capitalization), and then strips out a bunch of extraneous spaces and the addition of “The” via regular expressions.
Once all of that is normalized a bit, it’s run through a pretty amazing python command called Counter, contained within the collections package. It takes a list and returns an array with the number of times each list item appears. My script processes it, using the most_common sorting technique, and formats it fancy for export. And with that, a data set of one, two, three, four, four, four, five, one becomes:
Four 3
One 2
Two 1
Three 1
Five 1
So that’s good, but it still requires quite a bit of merging items that aren’t quite close enough to be caught and normalized by my small stack of regular expressions. Enter Six Colors member Adrian, who suggested using the Levenshtein method to match similar strings to one another. There’s even a Python package that does the trick.
So I decided to recreate my script using Adrian’s suggested approach. After normalizing the list by removing articles, punctuation, extra spaces, and different cases, my script loops through the list and uses the Levenshtein ratio to decide if a string is close enough to be considered part of the larger group.
Then I brought in ChatGPT1 to do the dirty work of formatting and sorting the output in a way that was pleasing to me. The result is that a data set of one, two, three, threee, five, one hundred, a hundred, one hundreed, theree, four, fore, five, one becomes:
Three 3
One Hundred 3
One 2
Five 2
Four 2
Two 1
I tested this all with actual Feuding Families data. Here’s the result of a real list of nearly 700 poll submissions answering the question “Name a bounty hunter in Star Wars”:
Boba Fett 335
Ig-88 86
The Mandalorian 41
Bossk 36
Mando 34
Greedo 27
Jango Fett 27
Ig-11 13
Not perfect, I’m going to have to manually merge The Mandalorian with Mando, but that’s it! And it managed to merge Baba Fet, Babo Fett, Bob A Fett, Bob Fett, Boba Fet, Boba Fety, Bobafett, Bobba Fet, Bobba Fett, Bobs Fett, Boda Feta, Bona Fett, and Bubba Fett together into a single “Boba Fett” answer.
Finally, the Mac-friendly integration: By saving this as a Shortcut and opting for it to appear in the Services Menu, because the script accepts input and generates output, I can actually use this script in pretty much any Mac text editor. I just select the text of the list, choose Count Duplicates in List from the Services submenu under the Apple Menu, and the uncounted list will be replaced with a counted one.
Anyway, if you ever find yourself in the very specific need of processing a bunch of similar, but not identical, answers, the script is available as a gist on GitHub.
- Pro tip: AI assistants are good at writing software that counts things, but very bad at counting things themselves. Pasting these results in a chatbot led to hilariously inaccurate counts. ↩
Our use of CarPlay, Android Auto, or other systems for navigation; creative AI problem-solving cases we’ve encountered; thoughts on Sonos’s struggles and future as a customer; and whether we use TikTok amid its potential US shutdown.
Go to the podcast page.
The Camera Control ~~button~~ control on the iPhone 16 family seemed like a good idea, but the devil’s always in the details, isn’t it? Apple made too many promises, all of them in conflict with one another because they all rely on using the same tiny hardware feature to function. And as it ships more features, things aren’t getting better.
A half-baked half pressIt was definitely confusing that Camera Control was introduced as a shutter button that could also be half-pressed—but the half-press gesture didn’t do the thing it does on every normal camera, which is to lock focus and/or exposure. Apple shipped Camera Control with a complex swipe-and-press interface to move among different functions but said that the most basic exposure/focus function would be coming later.
The new half-press feature is in direct conflict with the original overloaded half-press feature. To enable it, you need to go to Settings and then to Camera -> Camera Control where there’s a toggle for AE/AF Lock.
In hindsight, it’s absolutely the right move to have this feature disabled by default. Not only because most ordinary people wouldn’t want to use it, not just because it is in such deep conflict with the tiny half-press menu overlay for the slider functions, but because it is terribly executed.
First of all, you don’t always want to do both AE and AF lock. Sometimes you do, but not always. We’ll set that aside for now. The way that the iPhone handled AE/AF before is that you could tap on something, and it would set focus and exposure for that region you tapped. If that subject, or your camera, moved, then the temporary lock would go away. If you tapped and held, then you’d get an actual AE/AF lock, in which the subject or the camera could move, and the AE/AF would stay in place.
A way to get around the lack of independent exposure controls in the Camera app is to tap the sun icon overlay next to your single-tapped region and drag the exposure up or down to perform exposure compensation relative to the exposure setting the Camera app picked for you. This comes in handy when I take photos of neon signs. You can also get exposure compensation in one of the overlay submenus revealed by tapping the top arrow to expose the bottom row, as you do, with the plus and minus in a circle. Not a sun. (It’s as perfectly logical and consistent as the rest of the interface.)
The problem with the AE/AF lock feature triggered by Camera Control is that it activates a large region of the center of the screen. With a camera, you can set this to be a significantly smaller center area. Basically a cross-hair or just a single phase detection point in the center. Even if you tap and hold on the screen for AE/AF Lock, the region of the screen is much smaller.
If a “subject” is in frame, like a person’s face, the Camera app draws a box specifically around the bounds of their face instead of the larger region box it draws for a landscape or other wide shot. It’s still not a tiny box you’re sticking to a person’s eye, but it does not cast the wide net that the oversized region box does.
The reason the region size matters is that if your subject is layered in depth—let’s say a foreground, middle ground, and background—then you’ll capture some of another layer in what you’re trying to lock instead of just the center-most point. It’s a lack of precision. That’s for both metering for exposure and focus together. Again, for some reason, you can tap, or tap and hold, to get a finer level of control than you can with the thing that has “control” in the name.
In these two screenshots, you can see that the Camera Control is going to grab and lock on to a region that is 2.5 times larger than the region you get from tapping. The overlays are highlighted in red to read them more easily against the warm environment.
You can still get to the layered object you want to lock to by moving more broadly to capture only that subject in the large center region, but that’s more effort than tapping and more movement than you’d have to expend using a real camera with a smaller center region since you need to get what you want in that large box.
There are no deep menus to go into to refine the region size or lock only exposure or focus. This is the entirety of the feature enabled by the buried toggle. On or off. Press the button gently, but not too gently. Also move a lot, maybe.
Otherwise, you can simply give up and tap the screen, which anyone with any model of iPhone can do. What a selling point for Camera Control!
This is absolutely where third-party camera apps can fill a void, but then what was the point of doing all this not-so-useful work for the official top-dog Camera app?
Lacking in Visual IntelligenceApple also included Visual Intelligence in iOS 18.2, and it’s a huge disappointment. The two on-screen buttons always divert you to two different third-party services. If you select Ask, the image will be sent to ChatGPT. If you select Search, it will be sent to Google. There are appropriate warnings for both services, but again, Apple’s vaunted new feature is primarily a quick image upload to a partner.
We’ve got both kinds. Country and Western.
Other options can be triggered if it detects certain criteria, but it’s pretty picky about it and doesn’t tip you off that it can do more until you press the shutter. Unlike constantly showing “Ask” and “Search.”
In one case, I held my phone up to a yellow warning sign in Spanish, and it offered up a Translate button, but only after I hit the “shutter” button, which isn’t saving the photo, but hitting pause on the input for the software to more thoroughly examine it. Google’s apps and Apple’s own Translate app offer live translations without needing to hit the shutter to pause, but Visual Intelligence doesn’t have that option.
There is also the option to summarize the text you took a photo of with the shutter button. It’s probably the least likely thing I would want to do, but hey, it’s something the software can do, so why not?
Apple has many other machine learning models for all kinds of image recognition, but only the ones that use optical character recognition are present. I can’t use this to identify a plant, for example. I have to take a photo of a plant, go to the photo in my Camera Roll, expand the photo, thumb the whole thing upwards to reveal the info panel, and then tap on the plant identification option there. The same goes for animal and landmark identification.
Conversely, you can’t use Visual Intelligence “Ask” and “Search” features on a photo that you’ve already taken from inside of the Photos app, like you can use those other features. You can certainly send those images off to ChatGPT or drop them in the Google app. What gives? Why not put the “Ask” and “Search” buttons under every photo? Why not put them in context menus?
Maybe, someday, all of those things will be true, and Visual Intelligence will act as an umbrella for all the image-based models Apple has. Why make a promise about shipping this right now when it’s really not terribly beneficial to anyone —including Apple?
If it was to appear like they weren’t behind (Google Lens shipped one million years ago), then unfortunately the shipping product reveals that they are more behind than they were if it was something in a lab they were still promising. There is a danger that this trains customers that Visual Intelligence is not worth using, especially since it’s so hard to get to.
Dialing back the dialSpeaking of training customers, I’ve reached the point where Camera Control has trained me to turn off the features I keep accidentally triggering. Settings -> Camera -> Camera Control -> Accessibility -> Toggling off both Light-Press and Swipe. I’m not interested in accidentally triggering them, and there’s no reward for trying to do anything with those on purpose.
Apple has not addressed any critiques of Camera Control other than the “we are totally shipping a half-press focus lock” promise from the launch. Anecdotally, most people use it as a Camera app launcher or shutter button that’s easier to reach than the volume-up button. Yay?
I’ll leave AE/AF Lock on for the time being, but the truth is that with the way it’s enabled, it’ll likely return to the default too, and all of that will be for naught. I currently regret that so many of us asked them to give us this, because it was only ever going to be another thing on top of this complicated stack of decisions they already made about what Camera Control is. They can’t take these things away, but maybe they can make profiles, or group them into modes to make the button do less under certain circumstances instead of people not wanting to mess around with it. Perhaps it’s time to exercise some control.
Truly, Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to being one of the most valuable companies in the world is a story for the business history books. But as legendary football coach John Madden frequently said, “winning is the best deodorant.” When you’re riding high—and have been riding high for a couple of decades—it’s very hard to notice the parts of your business that have begun to emit a bit of an odor.
To take another page from football, Apple has a winning playbook, and it keeps using it. But if you keep calling the same plays without adapting and reacting, a winning playbook can become something much worse. In the past year, two major Apple product launches show just how calcified the company’s strategy has become—and how much it needs to change.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Bonnets off to the BBC, the trouble with headlines, Socrates on mountain skis, some slight existential dread about Mac software, irrational love of old computers, Apple’s smart home strategy for 2025, and the long wait for some AI features.
Go to the podcast page.
The Verge’s Abigail Bassett profiles Watch Duty, the remarkable nonprofit app that’s become a must-download utility during the Los Angeles fires:
Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.
The reasons we’re appreciating Watch Duty right now are tragic, but how great is it that this app exists?
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
One of the consequences of switching to a laptop from a desktop is that my old method of cloning my disk daily has been thrown out of whack.
Previously, I kept a USB disk attached to my Mac Studio at all times. Once a day, Carbon Copy Cloner would launch and clone the disk. But now, if I attach that USB drive to the hub my MacBook Pro will be connected to, I get a bad bit of behavior: the disk mounts the moment my Mac is attached, and then if I want to unplug my Mac, it’ll yell at me for unmounting that disk improperly.
Fortunately, there’s a solution. It begins by telling my Mac to not automatically mount the USB disk when it attaches to my Mac. It’s a multi-step, Terminal-based process. It begins by using the command diskutil info "volume name", which will generate a lot of information about the disk—including its Volume UUID, a long string of characters.
Next, I need to edit the file /etc/fstab and add a line that specifically tells the system not to mount this particular drive, so I enter in sudo vifs and then add this line at the bottom of the file:
UUID=[long UUID of the disk] none apfs rw,noauto
This configuration line tells the system not to automount a disk with that UUID.
CCC offers to unmount the disk again when it’s done.Carbon Copy Cloner handles the rest. It automatically mounts the disk when it’s time to run the clone job, and can be set to automatically dismount the disk when it’s done. So long as I don’t unplug my Mac during a clone task, the clones happen more or less invisibly in the background and I don’t need to make any effort to attach, mount, detach, or dismount the USB drive. (I believe you can get the same effect in the cloning utility SuperDuper! via its pre- and post-flight scripts.)
Will Carroll joins for a mega Sports Corner: Fubo meets Hulu to enable Venu, Netflix goes full force into live sports, how football dominates American TV, NFL announcers, and our TV picks!
Go to the podcast page.
If you hoped flipping the calendar over to a new year meant that we’d stop talking about AI, well, you better keep flipping for a while. Eventually we won’t be talking about it because AI will be in charge of everything.
As my colleague Jason Snell recently wrote, prepare for 2025 to be the year of Apple Intelligence all over again. As we wait for the last tranche of features announced by Apple last year, the company will no doubt be ramping up to talk about the features it plans to add this year.
All of this remains a contentious issue in tech. It seems as though nary a day goes by without some company or other announcing a new AI-powered lawnmower or weird keyboard. Right now the prevailing opinion in the tech industry seems to be that AI is the solution to every problem you encounter—and more than a few that you don’t.
While I think that’s far from true, there are places that AI—and, in particular, Apple Intelligence—could prove itself useful in our lives. For every Image Playground that has us wondering “who asked for this?” there’s a corollary of “why hasn’t AI solved this yet?”
SpamaheckofalotI cannot believe I’m talking about spam in the year 2025, but here we are. We’ve all just come to accept that our email inboxes and text messages will be chock full of the stuff, but this seems like a problem Apple Intelligence could actually help us deal with. Apple’s made the barest of tips of the hat towards this with the mail categorization feature in iOS 18.2 (which, it should be noted, is still not available on either macOS or iPadOS), but that system is not only not specifically designed for spam, its efficiency at even categorizing mail is…hit or miss.
Here’s one big problem: iOS/iPadOS has no email spam filtering. Yes, there’s a Junk mailbox, but that’s reserved for messages you manually move to it; messages moved there by spam filtering on a Mac, if you have one; and messages categorized as spam by your email server. That’s quite the patchwork quilt with a lot of holes in it. At times, Apple’s spam filtering feels like three outfielders converging only to let a baseball drop between them. I still end up with spam in my inbox and good messages in my Junk mailbox—and let’s not even get started on iCloud’s silent email filtering which sometimes just doesn’t deliver messages at all.
And spam has encroached elsewhere too. Text messages and iMessage have seen a decided uptick in junk too, but calling Apple’s tools there “lackluster” is an insult to things that lack luster. There is no message filtering (beyond unread and unknown contacts), and Reporting Junk has questionable utility (it doesn’t even block the sender, for example).
Recognizing patterns is one thing that AI is actually pretty good at. Apple Intelligence should be taking on the spam problem across the board, because the end result should be that users spend less of their time managing their inboxes.
Search and ye shall find (maybe?)From Sherlock to Spotlight, Apple’s got a long history trying to improve search on its platforms. Unfortunately, it’s still not good enough. A Spotlight search for “files edited in the last 30 days” does nothing. Even typing to Siri in macOS 15.2 gamely suggests I should try ChatGPT instead, which is abrogation of responsibility to the extreme. Yes, you can set up an advanced search in the Finder and select all the right criteria, but natural language parsing seems like table stakes in this day and age.
Even basic search in some places seems woefully broken. Take Settings on iOS, for example: if you want to search for a particular section, say, Messages, you’ll find yourself wading through dozens of irrelevant results to find the one you’re looking for, if you can find it at all.
I don’t necessarily want Spotlight or Siri to provide me with all world knowledge at my fingertips, but in the domain of my files and information, it seems like this system should be better informed than any other source. Siri Suggestions on iOS has demonstrated that Apple’s systems can be good at anticipating their users’ needs, so a little bit of that old Apple Intelligence wouldn’t go amiss when I’m just trying to find that document I was working on yesterday.
Call me Dan the AutomatorOne of the places that I’ve used AI to great effect in recent weeks has been in working on some hobbyist programming projects. Programming is largely a bound problem, one that there’s a lot of training material for, and tools like ChatGPT and Claude understand it much better than I can with the time available to me to learn. And that’s not even talking about tools like Copilot or Apple’s Swift Assist that integrate directly into development environments.
Me, as I said, I’m a hobbyist. But I do love automating a task to save myself time. Still, all too often, I have an idea, open up Shortcuts, and fumble with where to even begin. This seems like a place where Apple Intelligence could notice that I do a certain task a lot and suggest some steps I could take to automate it and save me time in the future. Is that complex? No doubt. But Apple’s systems should understand their capabilities and how to help users get the most out of them.
That’s really the case across the board with Apple Intelligence. Where these technologies work best for Apple is when they make its devices more capable (and more time-saving) for the people who use them. The late Steve Jobs was fond of describing computers as a bicycle for your mind, and I for one would like to spend less time fiddling with Allen wrenches and more time enjoying the ride.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Meta ditches third-party fact-checking, making unsightly TVs more attractive, the tyranny of always-on phone displays, and the robot vacuum of your nightmares.
Go to the podcast page.
Lex Friedman’s dual-desk setup, now (again) with treadmill.I’m writing this article at 2.6 miles per hour.
Fifteen years ago(!), I wrote an article for Macworld about upgrading to a standing desk. Many studies warn of the negative health impacts of sitting all day long.
After about a year of standing, I upgraded to a treadmill desk (and of course, I wrote about that for Macworld, too.) I used that setup for years. I reviewed expensive, Bluetooth-enabled treadmill desks. And then eventually, I found I was on phone and video calls all day long, and it was increasingly difficult to tread for any significant amount of time. I switched back to merely standing. And then, eventually, the pull of gravity reduced me back to sitting.
But now I’m back, baby. I took 23,000 steps yesterday, and I’ll likely exceed that number today.
One step at a timeA year or so ago, a local friend of mine named Anthony posted on Instagram about having lost 20 or so pounds while working with a (remote) trainer. I commented to congratulate him. Minutes later, at most, that trainer slid into my direct messages: Did I have belly fat I wanted to shed, too? Let’s set up a call.
Whoa there, trainer man. You don’t know me. I ignored the message and kept living my life. But this past November, when Anthony shared that he was down 90 pounds, I felt inspired. I wrote to that same trainer, and started working with him. I’ve been making steady progress.
I’d been averaging roughly 5000 steps per day. I work from home. When my trainer mentioned that I could accelerate my weight loss if I got more steps, I knew I didn’t have more time to dedicate to workouts than I was already doing. I don’t feel like I have time to inject outdoor walks into my day right now. But I remembered my treadmill desks. In fact, I still had my treadmill desk in storage.
So I dug it out and turned it on. Like me, it hadn’t aged too gracefully. So I freecycled the old treadmill and bought a walking pad from Amazon.
Walking the walkWow, have the prices on treadmills for treadmill desk usage come down. I owned a $700 one; I reviewed $1000+ ones for Macworld back in the day. Today, you can find treadmills for under-desk usage for less than $250, with some costing barely more than $100.
What makes a treadmill good for desk use? Typically, it won’t have the standard hand railings (since those wouldn’t fit under your desk). It will prioritize a quiet motor. And the maximum speed will top out far slower than a traditional treadmill. Wirecutter has recommendations that didn’t speak to me. I ended up going with a highly-rated Sperax Treadmill. It includes a remote that I never use, and I actually keep its foldable handrails up; my height and desk are each tall enough that the rails fit, and I like the controls there.
I set up the new treadmill and started walking while working. It was like riding a bicycle. Just, you know, without wheels.
One foot in front of the otherWhen you’re first starting out on a treadmill desk, walking 1.5 miles per hour or slower is the way to go. It takes some time to get used to seeing your screen while you’re moving, and typing while walking adds some complexity. But if you start slow and work your way up, you can get to comfortable casual paces — again, mine is currently between 2.4 and 2.6 miles per hour — without impacting your work at all.
I still shut off the treadmill while on Zooms. But on audio calls, no one hears a thing. I’ve even recorded multiple podcast episodes while treading and no one knew. I use the NS1 Noise Supressor plugin from Waves on my recordings, but Zoom’s built-in noise cancellation and even GarageBand and Logic’s freely included noise gates do a great job of stripping out the treadmill’s sound.
I did encounter a few technical hurdles with my latest treadmill desk setup. Some were related to my displays, and some were related to getting my ego-boosting step count credit. Let’s start with the latter.
Log those steps, Jason style.I wear an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring. Neither is particularly good at tracking steps on a treadmill desk. If you tell the Apple Watch you’re doing an indoor walk, it’ll fare slightly better, but only barely: In my testing over a few days, it would record 20 to 30 percent of the distance I actually covered.
The problem is that unlike normal walking — or even traditional treadmill walking — treadmill desk walking doesn’t involve my arm movement. I’m typing and walking literally right now as I write these words; there’s not much for smart devices to glom onto to figure out how many steps I’m taking. But I wanted credit for my steps, dammit!
You can buy (much) pricier treadmills that offer different levels of Apple Health integration through their own third-party apps. You can buy third-party adapters to strap your Apple Watch to your ankle, where it can log your steps better. (But unless you’re very limber, said placement makes it rather difficult to check your notifications.)
Even your iPhone itself can count your steps — and I considered just dropping mine in my pocket to measure my treadmill walking. But I, you know, use my phone a lot, so that solution didn’t seem like the right one.
I went even lower tech: I bought a cheap, rechargeable pedometer that I stick in my pocket when I’m on the treadmill. When I stop the treadmill, I look at the pedometer and manually log those steps in the Health app. Or I used to, until I asked myself WWJD: What would Jason do?
I built a dead-simple Shortcut with three steps: Ask for numerical input, log those steps in Health, and then confirm with an on-screen message. I saved that Shortcut as an app on my iPhone, and now it takes mere seconds to look at the pedometer, log those steps, and move on with my day.
Prioritize Shortcuts over your collection of Apple Watches.Except… when I first started this approach, I noticed that Health (and my third-party apps that connected to it) didn’t always reflect my increased step count. I’d manually logged 10,000 incremental steps, but the app was stuck on 2500.
The trick is understanding how Health prioritizes disparate data sources. Apple knows you have multiple devices that theoretically can measure your physical activity (your phone, watch, third-party fitness apps), and does some behind-the-scenes work to avoid double counting. And by default, Health trusts the Apple Watch to be the best source of intel for your movement. I get that instinct, but it’s wrong for treadmill deskers.
To tweak this, head over to the Health app, tap the Browse tab, and find Steps. Scroll down to the bottom and choose “Data Sources & Access.” The next screen may take a long moment to load. Once it does, scroll to Data Sources. If your phone is anything like mine — and you’ve owned or reset a few Apple Watches and iPhones in your day — you will likely see a lengthy list. Mine lists multiple entries for “Lex’s Apple Watch” and “Alexander’s Apple Watch” and numerous old iPhones. And in my case, Shortcuts was listed at the very bottom.
Tap Edit at the top right, and drag Shortcuts way up to the top of the list. Now steps entered via your new Shortcut will take priority.
Monitoring your healthThere was one final tech aspect I had to handle for my personal setup. I use an M2 MacBook Air, which supports one external display. But I still wanted my seated setup to work for when I need a walking break. And my giant, 3-foot wide curved Dell monitor wouldn’t fit in my standing desk space. So I ordered a new monitor for my treadmill desk setup, and needed to figure out how to connect both to my MacBook Air at the same time.
It was time for me to learn about DisplayLink. In truth, I learned as little as possible. I installed DisplayLink on my Mac and ordered a DisplayLink adapter, the subtly named WAvLINK USB 3.0 to HDMI Adapter for Multiple DIsplays, 2k. You may need a different one if your monitor has a higher resolution, but this worked great for me. I now have the treadmill monitor connected via that adapter and an HDMI cable, and — as with my giant Dell monitor — it mirrors my laptop’s screen.
Once that was all set up, I encountered one final hiccup: Notification Center stopped working.
I’d get texts and reminders and other alerts, and they’d be in Notification Center on my Mac itself, but they’d never appear as banners on screen.
That’s because mirrored Macs with multiple displays default to expecting you’re presenting something — so they hide your alerts. Head to System Settings -> Notification Center and turn on “Allow notifications when mirroring or sharing the display.”
Do tread on meI’m down 19.1 pounds since November. I’ve walked more than two miles while writing this piece for Six Colors.
I take seated breaks when I need to, but honestly they’re fewer and further between than you might guess.
The last time I used a treadmill desk, I took to eating more desserts and such because I could do so without gaining weight, thanks to the extra calories I was burning walking 10 to 20 extra miles per day. This time, at least so far, I’m not eating so much extra; I’m just burning more.
Now that I’ve figured out all the nuances covered here, everything’s pretty seamless; I walk up to my desk, and then I start walking. As bad for you as lots of sitting can be, lots of walking is pretty darn healthy. And the journey of a thousand healthier work days begins with a single step.
I was literally using Script Debugger yesterday to inspect variables.Mark Alldritt & Shane Stanley of Late Night Software:
We are announcing the retirement of Script Debugger as a product.
January 2025 marks Script Debugger’s 30th anniversary. It’s been a very long run for a two-person effort. Script Debugger began as a Classic MacOS product, survived Apple’s near-death experience, transitioned to macOS X and migrated across 4 CPU processor types. We are so grateful for the support we’ve received over these years. This support allowed us to keep working on Script Debugger much longer than we ever imagined.
I’ve been a Script Debugger user for years. It has made building AppleScript scripts so much more by giving script developers access to debugging tools that the built-in Script Editor lacks. While I’m obviously disappointed in the end of the product, it’s been a remarkable 30-year run!
Also, if I’m being honest, I don’t use Script Debugger as much as I used to, because I don’t use AppleScript as much as I used to. It’s still unparalleled in the control it gives over Mac apps themselves, but I tend to use it as a bridging tool for places that Shortcuts and Keyboard Maestro can’t reach. For most general-purpose automation that doesn’t involve Mac apps, I’m using Python these days, not AppleScript. I graduated, I guess.
There are many great independent Mac apps out there that have been developed for decades by a single developer or a small team; I admit that I’ve been worried about the fate of those apps for a while now. Developers deserve to retire just like anyone else, but as happy as that moment can be for the people involved, I also selfishly dread the loss of another indie Mac app I’ve relied on for years.
The good news: Late Night Software will continue updating the app for six months and then will post past versions back to 5.0 on its website with serial numbers attached, so that people who rely on Script Debugger for older installations will be able to use it forever. Unfortunately, the next time a macOS update breaks something in Script Debugger, that’ll mark its end as an actively usable product.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
On Monday I complained about Apple’s response to Apple Intelligence making mistaken summaries of news headlines. But here’s the funny thing: large-language models are actually pretty good at writing news headlines.
The problem with Apple’s approach is that it’s summarizing a headline, which is itself a summary of an article written by a human being. As someone who has written and rewritten thousands of headlines, I can reveal that human headline writers are flawed, some headlines are just not very good, and that external forces can lead to very bad headlines becoming the standard.
Specifically, clickbait headlines are very bad, and an entire generation of headline writers has been trained to generate teaser headlines that purposefully withhold information in order to get that click. (Writing a push notification is not the same as writing a headline, but it’s at least similar.)
Not to get all Fred Jones on you, but: I was trained to write headlines that made you want to read more, but didn’t withhold information. The idea was to compete for your attention, not pose riddles that could only be decoded by reading the story in question.
The now-dead news app Artifact built a killer feature that rewrote clickbait headlines on demand. It used the complete content of the news story to write a new headline that was always better than the ones being served up by various news organizations. Yes, when given enough information and asked to generate a headline, it turns out that AI is pretty good at the job!
Still, as Mike Krieger of Artifact wrote about in a Medium post, the company also built in some layers of human validation:
When we rewrite a title given a user request, that new title is initially only visible to the user. If enough people request a rewrite of a given title, the rewritten title will be escalated for human review and if it looks good, we’ll promote it the new default title for all users.
One of the principles we use when applying AI to features inside Artifact is to be as transparent as possible. For both Summarize and the clickbait title rewriter, we’ve used consistent iconography (the star-like shape) to denote that there’s AI involvement.
It didn’t work out for Artifact, but there’s something here. Summarizing summaries isn’t working out for Apple, but more broadly I think there’s something to the idea of presenting AI-written headlines and summaries in order to provide utility to the user. As having an LLM running all the time on our devices becomes commonplace, I would love to see RSS readers (for example) that are capable of rewriting bad headlines and creating solid summaries. The key—as Artifact learned—is to build guardrails and always make it clear that the content is being generated by an LLM, not a human.
The BBC, following up on two reports of Apple Intelligence summaries that transformed its own headlines into factually inaccurate text, got a public response from Apple:
Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.
The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.
Here’s what the BBC reports Apple’s statement is:
Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.
The statement uses the beta tag it has placed on Apple Intelligence features as a shield, while promising to add a warning label to AI-generated summaries in the future. It’s hard to accept “it’s in beta” as an excuse when the features have shipped in non-beta software releases that are heavily marketed to the public as selling points of Apple’s latest hardware. Adding a warning label also does not change the fact that Apple has released a feature that at its core consumes information and replaces it with misinformation at a troubling rate.
Apple is shipping these AI-based features rapidly, and marketing them heavily, because it fears that its competitors so far out in front that it’s a potentially existential issue. But several of these features simply aren’t up to Apple’s quality standards, and I worry that we’ve all become so inured to AI hallucinations and screw-ups that we’re willing to accept them.
We shouldn’t be. Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong. That’s a failure, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as being the nature of OS features in the 2020s.
So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.
Beta software contains an implicit promise that the developer will actively work to squash bugs and make the product better before it goes final. Adding a warning label in the interim is an easy band-aid, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Apple needs to do much more work here, and if it can’t, it needs to turn this feature off until it can release a version it can stand behind.
A new year dawns! We consider what it has in store for Apple and why the company’s A.I. features need to be judged critically. Then we turn back the clock to 2000 and consider the moment when Mac OS X changed everything.
Go to the podcast page.
Twenty-five years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS X, ushering in a new era for the Mac and the world of desktop computing at large.
That sounds like hyperbole, but after watching the keynote for a second time—the first time was from the front row, thank you very much!—it’s remarkable what an enormous moment this was for Apple and the Mac.
It’s funny. What’s remarkable about the moment is actually how uneventful it seems. When I watch the video back, it’s almost surreal how Steve Jobs keeps doing utterly normal, boring things in Mac OS X while the crowd completely loses its collective mind. Viewed by someone without any historical context, it would seem like a cult being whipped into a frenzy by its leader.
But I was there, and I can tell you that it wasn’t that. This was the moment, after sixteen years of classic Mac OS—and let’s face it, the last five of those were pretty rough—when all the failings of the Mac were swept away and replaced with something modern, ready for the challenge of the 21st Century.
How did that work out for Apple? The keynote seems so weird now because almost everything in it is just how the Mac works, even 25 years later. Yes, interface styles have changed over time, but that moment on stage in January 2000 redefined the Mac for 25 years and counting.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Sunday marks the 25th anniversary of the unveiling of Mac OS X, and yeah, I wrote the cover story for Macworld. While I was working on a forthcoming piece celebrating that anniversary, I asked my friend James Thomson if he had a good link about his time working on the Dock, which was unveiled as a part of that event.
He said he didn’t, but was apparently inspired enough to write one for me to link to:
The version [Steve] showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.
The timeline is interesting. James wrote his classic Mac utility DragThing before working at Apple, then was hired by Apple, then ended up working on the Dock, and then left Apple… to resume working on DragThing.
Also: James’s story about Apple trying to hide James’s location from Steve Jobs is an all-time classic.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Fat Cat Software’s PowerPhotos for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
I spend a lot of time using and writing about Apple’s Photos app. And the pre-eminent utility for Photos on the Mac is PowerPhotos. It works in conjunction with the Photos app, filling in missing features that Apple didn’t provide.
You can work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while still keeping all your photos handy in the Photos app.
Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your libraries side by side in multiple windows, multi library search, advanced exporting, converting old iPhoto/Aperture libraries, and more.
PowerPhotos 2.0 can be downloaded for free and offers many of its features for free. Purchasing a license unlocks advanced features such as library merging, deletion of duplicate photos, and unlimited photo copying and exporting. Existing users of PowerPhotos 1.0 or iPhoto Library Manager can use their serial number to upgrade for 50% off the regular price, and Six Colors readers can use the coupon code SIXCOLORS25 to receive a 20% discount.
AppleVis has announced its 13th Golden Apple Awards, recognizing apps and games designed for (or useful to) people who are blind or visually impaired. The awards also honored a developer and included a new award for ongoing achievement.
- The past year’s best app, as voted by AppleVis community members, is Seeing AI from Microsoft. Developed by a blind engineer within Microsoft, Seeing AI was first released in 2017, and has evolved to include a growing list of modules that use machine learning and AI features to read text, identify objects and products, and describe photos and people.
- Best Game for 2024 went to Downcaster: Deckbuilding RPG, by Rick van der Wall.
- Jienfeng Wu took Developer of the Year honors for his resurrection of Soundscape, an app initially developed by Microsoft, and later dropped. Now called VoiceVista, the app allows blind users to understand their surroundings by using sound at various pitches and frequencies.
- A new award, named for the founder of AppleVis, recognizes a developer who has made ongoing contributions to accessibility. The David Goodwin Award recognizes a developer who has made an outstanding and lasting impact for people who are blind, deaf/blind, or who have low vision over a minimum of the last three years. The inaugural award went to Envision Technologies, whose EnvisionAI uses AI to process visual information and provide it to blind users through an app or via the company’s smart glasses. Honorable mentions for the Goodwin Award went to Weather Gods Ltd (Weather Gods), and Aira Tech Corp (Aira Explorer)
Nominees for the Golden Apples were made by a committee of writers and podcasters (disclosure: yours truly included), and accessibility experts. The nominees were then voted on by AppleVis community members.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I’ve recently switched from using two computers in two different offices (the hard-to-heat garage and my well-heated back bedroom) to using one computer (a MacBook Pro) docked in either location. There’s a lot that has gone into this decision, which I will detail in a future post, but this post is about one of the most frustrating aspects of this switch: the inability of my computer and automations and settings to understand when the context has changed.
Fortunately, my Mac reacts to switches to my network configuration with aplomb, so I don’t have to dive deeep into Network Locations, though if I did, there are several alternatives to old classic utilities like ControlPlane.
But I record a lot of podcasts, and I have two entirely different USB devices that I use for audio. How can I make it so that when I press the “record” button, the right USB device is recording and receiving audio?
My overall solution ended up being pretty complex, but the key insight was to use a Terminal command to list all the connected USB devices. You don’t need to know a lick of Terminal to use it, because you can stick it in a “Run Shell Script” block in Shortcuts. Here’s the command:
ioreg -p IOUSB -w0 | sed 's/[^o]*o //; s/@.*$//' | grep -v '^Root.*'
This command will output a list of all your currently attached USB devices in plain text.
(Optional explanation: ioreg will display an enormous list of devices and ports on your system. -p IOUSB restricts it to USB devices and -w0 makes it display complete devices one per line, without truncation. That result is sent to sed, which uses a regular expression to match just the names of the attached USB devices. The final step is to use grep to remove the initial line, which summarizes the list rather than listing an actual USB device. You don’t need to know this.)
At that point, you can build a Shortcut that alters its behavior based on the contents of the output. For example, my Shortcut’s next step is an If/then block that checks to see if the result contains the text “MV7” for my Shure MV7 microphone or “USBPre” for my USBPre2 audio interface. But it’ll work with any USB device that happens to be attached at a given time.
Ars Technica’s senior security editor Dan Goodin breaks down where we are with passkeys going into 2025:
The security benefits of passkeys at the moment are also undermined by an undeniable truth. Of the hundreds of sites supporting passkeys, there isn’t one I know of that allows users to ditch their password completely. The password is still mandatory. And with the exception of Google’s Advanced Protection Program, I know of no sites that won’t allow logins to fall back on passwords, often without any additional factor. Even then, all but Google APP accounts can be accessed using a recovery code.
This fallback on phishable, stealable credentials undoes some of the key selling points of passkeys. As soon as passkey adoption poses a meaningful hurdle in account takeovers, threat actors will devise hacks and social engineering attacks that exploit this shortcoming. Then we’re right back where we were before.
This is a great and thorough look at this technology, disheartening as the truth of it is. The fundamental problem is that while the idea of passkeys is excellent, the implementation of it has been a mess. Every platform and site seems to have its own different way of handling the process, and what should be simple has instead become extremely confusing.
The passkey portability standard should help part of the problem, but overall there needs to be some standardization on how the passkey logins are implemented so that users aren’t befuddled.
And I’m not even restricting that to non-tech-savvy users. I’ve run into multiples sites where I have set up a passkey and it doesn’t work correctly. Just last night I was trying to log into iTunes Connect on my iPhone: iOS showed I had a passkey and offered to use it, but for some reason, the site kept throwing an error. Maddening.
That said, there are plenty of places where passwords vary in their implementation. (Please stop putting username and password fields on different pages, thank you.) We’re in the midst of a painful transition period, and while I’m glad to see so many sites and services embrace passkeys, the fine details are going to take longer to iron out than I’d hoped.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
As a sports fan, I’m besieged with ads for gambling these days. Sports media is full of experts that are happy to claim they know who’s going to win and who’s going to lose, but of course, if they really had all the answers they’d be rich and not flogging their predictions.
What I’m saying is, nobody knows anything. And while I’ve been covering Apple since time immemorial (okay, the 1990s) and predicting in this space for a decade, let’s just say that nobody’s perfect.
Still, it’s fun to think about the blank canvas that 2025 offers us. Here are my predictions for what’s to come in the next year. As always, no wagering.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
It’s time for the 11th Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2024, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
Go to the podcast page.
Vince Vaughn in “Bad Monkey” (Apple TV+)TVBad MonkeyA surprise hit, this Vince Vaughn vehicle on Apple TV+ is based on a Carl Hiaasen novel of the same name, following Florida cop Andrew Yancey—suspended from duty for…reasons—as he gets embroiled in a fishy case after a fisherman finds a severed arm. This is one of my favorite sub-genres of crime stories: darkly funny, wildly eccentric, and full of colorful characters. There is a monkey, but it’s not about the monkey…or is it?
Standout performances go to Jodie Turner-Smith (also electric this year in the much more uneven Star Wars show The Acolyte) as the Dragon Queen and Meredith Hagner as the “bereaved” widow Eve. There’s also a great sub-plot involving Saturday Night Live veteran Alex Moffat as a floundering real-estate agent.
While this season tells a perfectly concluded story, I’m glad to hear that the show will be returning for season two…my only question is whether or not the monkey will return too.—Dan Moren
Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5I do feel bad for Star Trek: Prodigy which had its second, and potentially final season this year, and Star Trek: Discovery which also came to a kind of sputtering finish, but Lower Decks is the one I love the most. Yep, a 2D animated cartoon by one of the Rick and Morty guys. Little did I know how much I would miss it. If you didn’t get the chance to check it out there’s five great seasons, with only a handful of episodes that could have been better. That’s an outstanding run for a Star Trek show, or any show for that matter. The fact that it’s an animated show means they can also do things that the live action Treks can’t. Something they’ve taken full advantage of over the years, and especially this season.—Joe Rosensteel
SiloThe first season of Apple TV+’s adaptation of Hugh Howey’s viral self-published “Wool” series was unexpectedly great. Season two is a change of pace, quite literally, as the outcome of the first season leads to a split storyline for season two. While some might resist the natural slowdown in pacing—parceling out two stories necessarily means slowing things down—the intrigue continued, new characters came to the fore, and the mystery of the Silo deepened. Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, Common, and Steve Zahn (!) all gave great performances this season.—Jason Snell
Superman & LoisThe fourth and final season of the CW’s take on the man of steel also marks the end of the Arrowverse, the twelve years of DC comics shows on the network. (Even though Superman & Lois itself is technically only Arrowverse-adjacent—don’t at me.) It seems appropriate that a venture that started depicting a B-level, powerless vigilante should culminate with the most iconic and powerful of superheroes.
The last season is heavy on the pathos and family drama, while also doing its own spin on one of the most infamous Superman storylines. But one of the show’s strengths is its humanistic portrayal of Clark, a refreshing antidote to the distant and seemingly unfeeling god of the recent DC movies. There’s also an excellent menacing performance by Michael Cudlitz as a decidedly different kind of Lex Luthor, and the show is, as always, anchored by fantastic performances from Tyler Hoechlin and Bitsie Tulloch as the titular couple. If you don’t find yourself getting weepy in the show’s closing minutes, then you may be carved of stone.—DM
ShōgunThe show of the year might be FX and Disney+’s Shōgun, a sprawling epic of feudal Japan. That it was this good is something of a miracle, given that it’s an American adaptation of a James Clavell novel previously adapted into a popular (but questionable) 80s ministeries starring Richard Chamberlain. But by leaning heavily into Japanese creators and collaborators, the show really blossomed. Hiroyuki Sanada’s character of Toranaga becomes the true central character, with the Anjin (Cosmo Jarvis in the Chamberlain part) and Mariko (the unforgettable Anna Sawai) not having to carry the weight that the characters did in the original adaptation. I read the book, watched the original miniseries, and wondered why they bothered trying to make this. But the creative team, led by Rachael Kondo and Justin Marks (the creator of all-time classic Counterpart) nailed it. What a wonderful ride.—JS
Monsieur SpadeA one-off miniseries following Dashiell Hammett’s iconic sleuth, Sam Spade, who has retired to France in the 1960s. Having taken up the pastoral life, he’s dragged back into his old profession after a brutal murder at a convent leaves him watching over one of the only witnesses, a teenage girl with whom he has a past. The story unfolds in traditional convoluted film noir fashion, interspersed with Spade’s own personal demons and—surprisingly enough—French politics of the era.
If all of that isn’t enough to get you in the door, the show’s anchored by a great performance from Clive Owen as the retired sleuth and the behind the scenes creators include Scott Frank (Oscar nominated for his screenplays for Out of Sight and Logan) and Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz). It’s an absolutely fabulous looking show too; shot with a cinematic look and feel to it. And with just six episodes, it’s tightly constructed—taut with not too many frills, appropriate for Spade himself.—DM
The Traitors U.S.The Traitors is a reality competition show that’s shot in a Scottish castle, with a host who comes dressed in kilts, tartans and tweeds. How is that reality? Well, what we call reality TV is anything but, and I mostly give the genre a pass. But this show, whose second US season aired this year, is fun, suspenseful and delightfully campy. The Traitors divides contestants into “faithfuls” and “traitors.” No one knows who is who, and it’s the faithfuls job to find and evict the traitors, one by one, all while the traitors gather as a group to “murder” one faithful each night. It’s hosted by the spectacular Alan Cumming, playing his part as lord of the manor to the hilt. This year’s installment brought together reality contestants from Big Brother, Survivor, the Bachelor, the Real Housewives franchises, and more, to murder and be murdered, scheme and play silly games. The first season featured a mix of normies and reality stars, but leaving out the civilians this year turned the drama and charisma on display up several notches. I know it’s true because I was only familiar with two of the contestants, as they’re past players on the only other reality show I watch, Big Brother (which also had a great 2024 season). I had no idea I would be rooting for a Real Housewife to win the game. The Traitors is an international phenomenon, with franchises in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, all reputed to be great fun. The new US season, with more reality stars already announced, debuts next month on Peacock.—Shelly Brisbin
MoviesMan’s CastleThe May release of Man’s Castle (1933) on Blu-ray says everything about why I collect physical media. I’m a classic film obsessive, and streamers can’t be trusted to show some movies I want to see. And when a rare gem like Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle gets restored because an intrepid film historian found nine previously deleted minutes of the film, physical media is where I’ll be able to see those new scenes. It’s a 4K restoration from the original 35 mm nitrate negative, and it looks and sounds great. Man’s Castle is a precode film, so when it was rereleased in the post-code late 1930s, these minutes were very sloppily edited out, because of racy dialog and even some suggestive images of the leads skinny-dipping. The film is a Depression-era saga of a couple, living hand-to mouth, under a bridge. He is the youngest Spencer Tracy you’ve probably ever seen, and she is the winsome Loretta Young, who you will root for throughout. Beautifully and sensitively directed by Borzage, it’s a true discovery that you can’t see on your favorite streaming service.—SB
BooksKarla’s ChoiceIt’s one thing to fill the shoes of a literary giant—it’s another when it’s also your dad. Noted sci-fi author Nick Harkaway switches genres to pick up the mantle of his father, legendary spy scribe John Le Carré, who passed away in 2020. The result is Karla’s Choice, which brings back Le Carré’s most indelible protagonist, spymaster George Smiley (most memorably portrayed on TV and in film respectively by dual icons Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman).
Set in the previously unexamined period between Le Carré’s breakout hit The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and his equally acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the book finds Smiley, haunted by the fallout of the former story, having left the employ of British intelligence agency the Circus and attempting to patch up his tempestuous marriage. When a would-be assassin shows up to kill a seemingly random literary agent, Smiley is pulled back into the shadows. The result is a labyrinthine tale of loss and secrets, conjured in an impeccable Le Carré style—with just enough of Harkaway’s own tone injected to play to his strengths. —DM
Service ModelI’m picking Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model. It can be picked up as an ebook, which makes it technology, but I really wanted to highlight it for the subject matter, which is also technology. More importantly, the use (or misuse) of technology in a former, stratified society. The book is from the perspective of a robot valet that needs to go on a quest through the decaying, dystopian remains of human civilization. You wouldn’t believe it from that bleak description, but it’s also very funny.—JR
[This was also my favorite book of the year. —JS]
Penric & Desdemona seriesThis year I ripped through the 12 novellas and one novel of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series. These are high fantasy stories, which aren’t usually my favorite, but Bujold is such a great writer—her Vorkosigan Saga series is must-read sci-fi—that I had been meaning to jump into this series, and I’m so glad I did.
The simple version: Penric is a young man who, largely by accident, ends up being inhabited by a demon, which he eventually names Desdemona. Demons aren’t fundamentally evil in this world, and Penric and Desdemona end up as both sides of an buddy action/comedy duo in a single body as they navigate a world of violence, magic, and tragedy. Just as Bujold sketched the lives of her Vorkosigan series characters from youth through old age, she also lets us watch Penric grow from callow youth to well-seasoned veteran. And since most of these stories are novellas, they’re bite sized, so you can read as many as you want. Me, I couldn’t stop. I read them all.—JS
Grave ExpectationsI like a good mystery with some supernatural elements, and Alice Bell’s debut novel Grave Expectations manages to hit both of those genres with a solid dose of hilarity. Claire is ekeing out a paltry living as a medium, “haunted” by the ghost of her friend, Sophie, who disappeared when the two were in high school. She’s hired to do a seance at an English country house for a particularly eccentric family, and is surprised to discover the grounds are haunted by the ghost of someone murdered there the previous year.
Naturally, they investigate. If you were to wonder if hijinks would ensue, yes, yes they do. I honestly found this one of the funniest books I’ve read in years—it’s pretty rare that I laugh out loud while reading, but I did during this book. Several times. It’s the perfect cross of ghost story and murder mystery, not too dark despite its subject matter, and Claire is an appealing if flawed protagonist.—DM
PodcastsA Very Good YearHow do you talk about movies from every era of cinema? If you’re the hosts of A Very Good Year, you organize each podcast episode around a guest and a specific year of moviemaking, from the ancient classic era, to modern times. Jason Bailey and Mike Hull are enthusiastic movie fans, but they rely on guests, who range from filmmakers and actors to critics and film bloggers, to choose five films from the year they’ve picked, and explain why they’re great, or just favorites. The top fives are surrounded by a short news segment for the chosen year, and a lightning round where the group chews over award-winners and other significant films of the year. The format is lively and engaging, and the hosts have lots of opinions, both good and bad, about the movies they cover. And they can be kind of foul-mouthed, too, if you care about that. The guys at A Very Good Year retired the show this year, promising a new show in 2025.—SB
The Rest Is HistoryLate last year I discovered Goalhanger’s The Rest is History podcast and the rest—well, you know. It became my most listened-to podcast of 2024. Hosted by two British historians, it’s podcasting exactly the way I like it: two personalities who feed off one another as they tell gripping stories from the past. Both Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook have good senses of humor (“That definitely happened, didn’t it?”) and pick a refreshingly broad range of topics, including wonderful series about Montezuma and the Aztecs, the roots of the French Revolution, Custer and the battle of Little Big Horn, and the conquest of Britain by the Romans. I can’t recommend it highly enough.—JS
PowerPhotos is the ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac. It works in conjunction with the Apple Photos app, filling in missing features that Photos itself doesn’t provide.
PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while still keeping all your photos handy in the Photos app.
Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your libraries side by side in multiple windows, multi library search, advanced exporting, converting old iPhoto/Aperture libraries, and more.
PowerPhotos 2.0 can be downloaded for free from www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos and offers many of its features for free. Purchasing a license will unlock advanced features such as library merging, deletion of duplicate photos, and unlimited photo copying and exporting. Existing users of PowerPhotos 1.0 or iPhoto Library Manager can use their serial number to upgrade for 50% off the regular price, and Six Colors readers can use the coupon code SIXCOLORS25 to receive a 20% discount.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
The folks at 1Password recently attended the RSA conference in San Francisco and were struck by how infatuated everyone was with the promise of new, shiny solutions to fix new, shiny problems.
But there are a lot of non-shiny, foundational problems still out there. In the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, accidental breaches caused by human error or victimization in phishing attacks was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials.
Yet in 1Password’s 2022 State of Access Report, only 29% of respondents said they used a password manager at work. This needs to change, and the Verizon’s report offers a clear look at where the industry is falling short and where it goes from here. To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full blog post.
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” is one of my favorite movies (and Steven Spielberg’s best, in my opinion), but I never knew about this “loose end” until I read about it in a compilation of deleted scenes:
A plot element involving the Ark of the Covenant was cut from the film and is only hinted at during the finale when the Ark is opened. Basically, there were 2 rules about the Ark not mentioned in the final cut of the film:
- If you touch the Ark, you die.
- If you look at the Ark when it is opened, you die.
This is first explained in additional dialogue for the scene when Indy and Sallah visit Imam. Before translating the writings on the headpiece that give the height of the Staff of Ra, Imam warns Indy not to touch the Ark or look at it when it is opened….
Notice that nobody ever touches the Ark throughout the rest of the film until the finale.
This scene is screenwriting 101 in that it properly sets up the rules of the Ark, so that when Indy shouts, “Don’t look at it, Marion!” at the film’s climax (spoilers for a 43-year-old movie, I guess) we understand why.
But Steven Spielberg had gone way beyond Screenwriting 101, even in 1981. He knew there was literally no need to include these rules, which turn the Ark from an unknowable supernatural object into something more mundane. And so that scene is cut out, and at the fateful moment when the Ark is opened by Belloq and a crew of Nazi officers, noted archaeologist Dr. Indiana Jones just knows that he and Marion need to close their eyes and not look upon the fiery judgment of the God of the Old Testament.
Sometimes less is more.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Here it comes, barreling down on us full steam: 2025. Somehow we’ve already burned through a quarter of this century. It’s been a good twenty-five years for Apple, to be sure, and from all the early indications it seems like the next year will continue the trend, insofar as such things can be predicted with any certainty.
While there are plenty of rumors about what Apple might do in the next twelve months, the simple truth is that the company only has so much time and so much money. (To be fair, it is a lot of money.) Not everything can be a priority, and not everything that gets talked about will actually end up happening.
Even amongst the things that do happen, there are always some that will stand out in terms of their impact for the company—and for its customers. In looking ahead to 2025, there I’m thinking of a few that are most likely to be the kind with ramifications that move the needle—even if, in some cases, it may take a little time for the true effects to be felt.
Home, at your commandIn 2024, Apple released the Vision Pro, a device that was decidedly cutting edge, but carried such a high price tag as to be out of the reach of all but the wealthiest Apple users—and for a company that tends to charge a premium for its products, that’s saying something.
The newest Apple product line rumored for 2025 seems of a decidedly different bent. The company’s rumored to be working on a “home command center” that has variously been likened to a stationary iPad or a HomePod with a screen. Such a device would provide a central way to control smart home tech, as well as displaying ambient information like the weather or news headlines.
There are plenty of questions about the nature of this device. My general rule of thumb is that Apple’s products are almost always simpler and less radical than you might hope. They’re the kind of things that, in hindsight, look obvious, given the technology the company has already put out. Apple rarely reinvents wheels, and something like the Vision Pro is the exception, rather than the rule. So in this case, look to things like StandBy mode on the phone, tvOS, or CarPlay as examples of templates for this kind of device—and don’t be surprised if the tech it uses is an offshoot of one of those.
Whatever this home command center is, will still likely end up being a niche product like the Vision Pro, but even so, it will at least be one that the average user may be able to afford.
Depth chargeThe iPhone remains Apple’s cash crop, but even as it continues to account for the largest chunk of the company’s revenue Apple has struggled to figure out how to expand the line. The Pro and Pro Max have been significant hits, yes, but the attempts at broadening the lower end—the mini and Plus phones—have fallen more flat.
Third time’s the charm: if you can’t change the length or width, maybe depth is where it’s at. This year Apple reportedly intends to introduce a thinner iPhone, possibly called the iPhone 17 Air or Slim.
That thinness is likely to come at a cost—in part literally. While it may be less than the $999 starting price of the Pro line, it’s probably going to be more expensive than the base $799 iPhone—which would seem to position it around the same $899 price point as the current Plus. And such a slim design could mean some trade-offs in capability, including a simpler camera and perhaps lower battery life.
As always, the big question is the story Apple intends to tell about this device. Why does it exist? Are people crying out for a thinner iPhone? Will the tradeoffs be worth it? Or is the company simply trying to cash in on the cachet of having a fancy new exterior? We’ll find out next fall.
The call is coming from inside the phoneOne of the biggest Apple success stories of the past decade is the shift to building its own processors. It’s allowed the company to not just elicit great performance from its products, but also great energy efficiency. By having control over the lowest level of the hardware, Apple can tie it all together in a package that was simply impossible to do with third-party chips.
It also speaks to a major part of Apple’s philosophy: that if something is important to your bottom line, you do it yourself.
And so 2025 is reportedly going to see the next step along that path as Apple brings another key technology in house: cellular modems. The company bought Intel’s modem business way back in 2019, and rumors have sprung eternal that it would incorporate its own cellular radios into its products ever since. But reports have also suggested that the engineering has proved more complicated than expected, hence continued deals with rival Qualcomm to use their modems.
The time, however, may finally arrive in the form of an unassuming product: the fourth-generation iPhone SE. The low-cost iPhone, expected to be announced in the spring, may be the first to feature an Apple-built modem. That’s a canny move, since the SE isn’t subject to nearly the same scrutiny as Apple’s flagship phone models, and probably doesn’t ship in the same number of units. It gives Apple time to deal with unexpected problems without necessarily tanking its biggest product launch of the year. And even if its modem performance in the SE doesn’t match up to the iPhone 16 line, well, SE customers are likely to be a less performance-conscious market than those buying the latest and greatest phones.
Eventually those modems will probably make it into other Apple products, including iPads and Apple Watches and maybe, for the first time ever, Mac laptops. But it all starts with the little iPhone SE that could.
The restOf course, 2025 will bring the usual other assortment of Apple news. We’ll see the last tranche of previously announced Apple Intelligence features, a likely revamp to the base-level iPad, and the debut of the M5 processor line. More recently we’ve also seen rumors of an updated HomePod mini and a revised Apple TV.
But the biggest questions that remain for me are about the future of Apple’s software platforms. Will the impact of Europe’s Digital Markets Act continue to spread around the world, forcing Apple to change some of its longstanding business practices? Will we see the next step in the evolution of the Vision hardware, showing us Apple’s plan to push the line forward and bring it to more customers? And what will Apple focus on in its platform updates this year—will AI still be the name of the game or will that bubble burst?
2025 promises to be an exciting year for Apple and the tech industry, so buckle in: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Our likelihood of investing in smart home tech with Apple’s entry, our technology goals for 2025, our end/start of year tech rituals, and predictions for how technology will improve the world in 2025.
Go to the podcast page.
Down the chimney comes Tim Goodman, reuniting with Jason to discuss his super-secret insider TV reviews, streaming’s influence in the rise of international TV here in the U.S., and Jason’s top TV shows of the year.
Go to the podcast page.
Runestone on Vision Pro, framed by Shareshot.TailscaleOne of my persistent quests over the years has been making it easy to access all my devices no matter where I am. I’ve played with everything from SSH and SFTP to remote screen sharing and VPNs. 2024 was the year I added a new tool to the mix: Tailscale.
The idea of Tailscale is that you create your own little network that all your devices can connect to (it accomplishes this using VPN technology). You can also set up any of your devices to be an “exit node,” so, for example, if you’re surfing the web from a café, you can set it up so that your connection is routed through your Mac mini sitting at home. Plus it lets you access any of the machines on your little network, so it’s easy if you need to retrieve a file or do something on your home Mac.
Tailscale is free, works with any platform—including everything from your iPhone to your Apple TV to your Synology—and is relatively easy to set up. As someone who has more devices than is probably wise, it’s a great little utility for making sure they can always talk to each other. —Dan Moren
ShareshotFor a couple of months each year, framing iOS screenshots is a major task on my to-do list. My book about iOS accessibility features 175 or so. I’ve used various shortcuts over the years to place device frames around the shots I take. Some worked better than others, and most performed the basic task of framing one or more screenshots, hopefully allowing me to create an easy workflow from phone to computer to book document.
This year, I was happily surprised to come upon Shareshot. It’s an iOS app (not a shortcut) that frames your screenshots according to several parameters, and based on the device that took the screenshot. Employ a shadow, a simulated spotlight, a small, medium or large amount of white space – there are many ways to make your screenshots look just the way you want them. It’s a slick, professional app.
Since the product is new, there are features that have yet to be implemented, like support for placing multiple screenshots side-by-side. But the current version has already come a long way in the few short months it’s been available. A surprise bonus for me was the innovative way the developer supports VoiceOver accessibility. Any app can tell you which settings are on and off, as you flick across them. But with Shareshot, tapping your screenshot gives you a full description of everything you’ve done to it within the app. That’s very innovative.
It’s also worth mentioning that when I reached out to the developer about some screen contrast issues I had with Shareshot, he quickly responded, and sought further information about my issue. Two thumbs, way up.—Shelly Brisbin
SleeveI discovered quite a few nifty Mac utilities this year, and Sleeve remains in constant use on my desktop. It’s a $6 utility that displays what’s currently playing in Apple Music or (if you prefer) Spotify. I’ve permanently parked a widget on the bottom left corner of my display, showing the currently playing tack. Sleeve also adds global hotkeys for play/pause and volume control, and even scrobbles to Last.fm! I just like seeing pretty album art and song information on my desktop, though.—Jason Snell
A Better Route Planner (ABRP)My husband and I began our electric car journey this year. We started, as nerds naturally do, by hunting down apps we could use with our new Kia EV6. One of our favorites is ABRP, which will plan routes, based on charging locations between your starting point and destination, and the range of your specific car. You can set parameters, like the speed or provider of a charging station, and you can save routes for future use. This year, ABRP got a big boost in CarPlay integration, making it easy to follow routes from the driver’s seat. You’ll also get efficiency data for your charging and driving experiences, which is especially welcome if you’re just getting comfortable with how measuring EV efficiency differs from the same task for gas-powered cars. There are also all sorts of live data feeds you can use to connect to other EV drivers, if you want them. ABRP was acquired by Rivian late last year. So far, that’s meant rapid feature improvements, no matter what EV you drive, but there are a few Rivian-specific features that seem interesting, too.—SB
SwiftBar 2On January 2, one of my very favorite Mac utilities got a 2.0 update: SwiftBar. This utility lets you put anything in your menu bar, making it a great place to stash ambient data. The 2.0 update added support for plugins fed by Shortcuts, making it even more accessible to people who aren’t comfortable feeding data via pretty much anything that runs via the command line. I use SwiftBar to display my local weather data, my solar data, and even my podcast live-stream stats. But it can pretty much do anything you want. And it’s free and open source.-JS
Runestone2024 marked the release of the Apple Vision Pro, and while I don’t think I’m going to award anything to a $3500 developer kit, I do want to praise it as a tool that’s remarkably good at certain tasks, including letting me write in complete isolation. On iPadOS, my text editor of choice is 1Writer, but it only works on the Vision Pro in iPad compatibility mode—and the text rendering in that mode is inferior to native visionOS apps.
Enter Simon Støvring’s Runestone, an open-source visionOS (and iOS and iPadOS) text editor that supports Markdown. It’s pretty bare bones, but it does the job. I’ve written thousands of words on my Vision Pro, and almost all of them have been in an immersive environment while using Runestone.—JS
Star Wars: OutlawsFor me, it’s not a year-end list if there’s not something Star Wars on it. For years I wanted an immersive Star Wars game, one where I could run around on a planet, dealing with stormtroopers or scoundrels, then hop in my starship and take off for space-based combat. Star Wars: Outlaws finally delivers on that, all couched in a fun story about minor criminal Kay Vess and her journey to becoming a serious player in the galaxy. Is it wonky at times? Sure, though patches have fixed a lot of the most egregious issues. And it does, as many AAA games do these days, suffer a bit from over-collectible-ization, but nothing has come closer to the feel of being immersed in a galaxy far, far away.—DM
BalatroI spent most of this year playing Marvel Snap, but the release of Balatro on the iOS App Store and Apple Arcade broke me out of that rut in a hurry. Balatro is a card game that’s modeled on poker, but that doesn’t do it justice: it’s a roguelike game where you face increasing challenges that you can only surmount by modifying the rules with a series of jokers, and by using your earned cash to change your deck and alter the payout math. Once you lose, all that work is wiped clean and you must start again, which isn’t as bad as it sounds since it basically leads you to explore different winning strategies based on the jokers that come your way. It’s exactly what I want from a game: you can play a session pretty quickly, but there’s always another challenge the next time you sit down to play.—JS
Disney+ for Vision ProI feel like I need to praise the third-party visionOS app I’ve probably spent the most time in: Disney+. There are other streaming apps for visionOS, but none (other than Apple’s own TV app) offer the breadth of 3-D content that Disney+ offers. (C’mon, Max, where are the 3-D movies?) Disney also offers some pretty amazing immersive environments for you to watch movies in, including Marvel and Star Wars worlds. My only real complaint is that they’re so good, they should be available as environments throughout visionOS… but Apple is the one who needs to make that visionOS feature happen.—JS
The Kindle Paperwhite (left) and Colorsoft (right).The world of ebook readers is in a weird place, but when hasn’t it been?
E-readers have always been a strange product niche, not just since that oddball first-generation Kindle, but since our first attempts to make computerized books in Hypercard or on PalmPilots.
Paper books are a great medium, tested by the centuries—but the prospect of packing as many books as you want into a small computing device has been a temptation too great for many of us to ignore. Others remain unmoved; the Kindle didn’t destroy paper book sales, and even in my own house, I’m usually found reading an ebook while my wife is almost always reading a paper book.
For those of us who love e-readers, though, that love can be fierce: I love reading books, mostly fiction, and according to GoodReads I’ve read 58 so far this year! Almost all of those were ebooks. E-readers take up very little space (even for massive thousand-page tomes!); download books (either from a bookstore or library) instantaneously; offer a respite from the distractions of our phones, tablets, and computers; let you pick your own typeface, size, and other visual specs; work flawlessly in bright sunlight but also light themselves gently when they’re inside; are easy on the eyes because they’ve got reflective screens that work just like paper; have batteries that last vastly longer than our other tech devices; and are generally waterproof, so you can read at the pool or in the tub or on the beach without worry.
My love for e-readers is strong. But there apparently aren’t enough people like me to feed the growth of a technology category, so the last few years the e-reader manufacturers—and I’m going to focus on Amazon’s Kindle and Rakuten’s Kobo because they are the leaders in this space—have been trying to find other use cases beyond reading text on a page, so they can bring in more users and make more money. Many e-readers support a stylus for handwritten notetaking, something that makes sense to me on a large, PDF-friendly device like the Kindle Scribe, but makes less sense on a small, trade-paperback-sized device.
The latest tech innovation in e-readers, driven by some remarkable engineering breakthroughs by E Ink, the maker of the screens on all of these devices, is the addition of color. Earlier this year, Kobo rolled out a series of color displays, and replaced its excellent Libra 2 with the $220 Libra Colour.
As remarkable as E Ink’s color screen tech is, it comes with one huge tradeoff: the screen’s got a visible light gray dot pattern, which is always there and decreases contrast when you’re just reading words on a page. Words on a page! It’s kind of the top priority when you’re reading a book, I think. If you’re going to degrade that experience, even a little, the trade-off needs to be worth it.
Here comes the Kindle ColorsoftComic reading is a good use of a color screen, but the Colorsoft’s screen is too small to read full pages.Now Amazon has integrated that same E Ink color screen—but with some modifications, the company says—into the new $280 Kindle Colorsoft. I’ve got to hand it to Amazon—the Colorsoft’s screen is visibly better than the one on the Libra Colour, and I suspect it’s largely because the device’s lighting rig makes everything brighter, which reduces the issue of reduced contrast.
But is that trade-off worth it, when Amazon sells several non-color versions—the Kindle Paperwhite line—for between $80 and $120 less?
There are some contexts where color really adds to the Kindle experience. Obviously, if you’ve got the Kindle’s home screen set to display book cover thumbnails, they’ll all pop out in color. (Congratulations, book publisher art departments, those tricks you use to draw people’s eyes at airport bookstores will work on e-readers now too!) I’ve seen a lot of coverage that praises how nice it is to see a color book cover when you turn off your e-reader, but when you turn off the device, its backlight turns off. Without the backlight, the color is barely visible except in very bright light. It’s not a reason to spend more money on a color screen.
Okay, you can highlight text in different colors, which is fun but probably of limited utility. If you read a book with color images, they’ll be in color, and that’s great—I would’ve loved that back when I read my daily newspaper via Kindle, but Amazon killed that feature a long time ago.
Panel View makes comics readable, but does change the reading experience.So what we’re left with, really, is comics. And Amazon has a huge advantage here, having purchased Comixology, which helped pioneer comic reading on smartphones with Guided View, which maps the sequential narrative of comic pages so you can read the page a panel at a time. This is vitally important on devices with smaller screens, because no iPhone—and none of these tiny e-readers—has a big enough screen to make an entire comic page legible when it’s fit into view.
I don’t like reading comics on my iPhone, but at least it’s responsive when I pinch to zoom and swipe to move around. The problem with E Ink screens is that their refresh rates are poor, so zooming and scrolling is not nearly as nice as it is on a phone. (Again, I don’t want to bash E Ink—the fact that they make a color screen that has a remotely usable frame rate is amazing! But it’s no smartphone screen.) You can do it, but I found it really unpleasant and I would never read a comic that way unless I was desperate.
Here’s the good news: Amazon supports Panel View for comics purchased via the Kindle Store, which is basically the old Comixology Guided View feature. Double-tap on any comics page and you’ll enter a mode where first the entire page is displayed, and then when you tap to advance, each panel is displayed individually, zoomed in to fill the screen.
I read issues of several comics, including my gold standard, Watchmen, on the Kindle Colorsoft, and you know what? It worked. It was a perfectly acceptable panel-by-panel comic viewing experience. There was one surprising frustration: sometimes panels are wide, not tall, and the Kindle doesn’t have an accelerometer, so it won’t auto-rotate when you turn the device sideways. You can do it manually, but that’s no fun. Wide panels end up being really small and hard to read.
I’m sure some people will find Panel View an absolutely great way to read comics, and more power to ’em—now your book-reading device is also a comic-reading device, and Amazon is the world’s leading provider of digital comics. However, and I can’t stress this enough: there are much better devices to read comics on, and they’re called tablets. LCD backlight displays can reproduce the bright range of colors in comics very well; the Colorsoft’s color is, well, soft.
When the backlight is off, color book covers don’t stand out.And while Panel View is the only thing that makes comics readable on a Kindle (or smartphone), and I’m glad it exists, you really do lose something when you take storytelling that’s intended to be viewed as a whole page containing individual items, and turn it into a sequence of rectangular boxes you can only see one at a time. It’s a clever hack that also breaks the artist’s chosen form, and can do so in some peculiar ways.
Unless you have some very specific needs, such as reading material that is truly made better with color, paying more for a color screen just isn’t worth it—at least not yet. I’d be less strident about this if the color E Ink screens didn’t degrade black-and-white reading contrast, but right now they do. Save your money and buy a cheaper e-reader.
(Also, yes, apparently an early batch of the Kindle Colorsoft had a yellow patch at the bottom of the screen—and mine was one of the ones affected. I would imagine that Amazon will fix this issue forthwith and replace any affected devices, but it’s yet another reason to say no to the Colorsoft.)
A better option: 2024 Kindle PaperwhiteSpeaking of cheaper readers, I also tried out the 2024 edition of the $160 Kindle Paperwhite. Physically it seems identical to the Colorsoft, which means Amazon’s mid-range Kindle line now extends from a $160 black-and-white reader with ads and no ambient light detector, to a $180 version if you remove ads, to a $200 Signature Edition with no ads and an ambient light sensor, to the $280 color model. Ergonomically, all of these variants are pretty much the same, right down to the power button on the bottom edge that’s way too easy to press accidentally.
The Colorsoft’s screen (bottom) is well lit, but that can’t cover up its contrast issues compared to the clearer, crisper Paperwhite (top).As of today, I’d call the $200 Paperwhite Signature Edition the sweet spot in the Kindle product line. Amazon’s cheaper Kindle ($130, $110 with ads) isn’t waterproof and doesn’t offer a flush front, both of which make it a lot less appealing to me. The cheaper non-Signature Edition Paperwhites are fine, but having the ability to auto-adjust brightness on a Kindle is a really nice feature that doesn’t add a lot to the price. (Unlike Kobos, which let you run your finger up and down on the edge of the screen to adjust brightness, adjusting brightness on a Kindle is a multi-swipe/tap process. Kindle’s auto-adjusting brightness isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing.)
As always, though, I’m not an enthusiastic supporter of the Kindle product line. It feels to me that Amazon’s priorities for the product—Color! Stylus! Trials of various Amazon subscription services!—just aren’t the same as mine. The discontinuation of the excellent Kindle Oasis at the top of the line—the last Kindle with physical page-turn buttons—says a lot about where Amazon is focusing its Kindle these days.
I don’t want to belabor the point, but I find that resting my fingers on a physical page-turn button rather than tapping on a touchscreen to be a superior reading experience—and Amazon’s just not interested in buttons. Apparently that’s true of most people, including my pal Scott McNulty, but it’s a shame that there aren’t any options in the Kindle line. (Even the Boox Palma has buttons!)
Amazon’s Kindle software has gotten a lot better in recent years. Its Overdrive library integration has come along so far that I think it might be better than that offered by Kobo, in that you can send books checked out from multiple libraries to a single de
vice without sideloading. Kobo still has the advantage of letting you browse your library on-device, but the Libby smartphone app is so good that I never bother using anything else to check out books these days.
Kindle’s typography controls are a little less granular than Kobo’s. And with these 2024 models you can no longer copy files to the Kindle via the Finder, but must use a utility like Android File Transfer or the new USB File Manager feature inside Amazon’s Send To Kindle app. (They still work perfectly with Calibre, which is my go-to ebook file manager and converter.)
What else is there?If you don’t want a Kindle, there are other options, but I no longer find that there’s an easy, go-to recommendation that clearly beats the Paperwhite. Kobo has phased out its $190 black-and-white Libra 2, my previous pick, and its replacement (the Libra Colour) is more expensive with a worse reading experience. The larger $270 Kobo Sage is the closest thing to a Kindle Oasis that is being sold today, but not only is it pricey, it’s got a feel that’s substantially less premium than the Oasis was. The Kobo Clara BW is $130, so basically the equivalent of the cheap Kindle, but waterproof.
Beyond the big two, it’s slim pickings. I tried a Barnes & Noble Nook recently, and came away convinced that nobody should ever buy one. I’ve dabbled quite a lot with Boox’s line of Android-forward e-readers, and while they keep getting better, they require so much configuration and maintenance (because they’re basically Android tablets with E Ink screens) that they’re only for very tech-savvy people who don’t mind fiddling with Android details. And they’re not cheap, either!
I take pride in being able to recommend the best e-reader for most people, but it’s about as complicated a task as it’s ever been. If you’ve got an older model you love, you may want to hang on to it and see if things change in the next few years. If you’ve got a load of Kindle books and don’t want to deal with moving to a different platform, the Paperwhite Signature Edition is my pick. Yes, it’s $200, but it’ll last for many years.
If, like me, you’d sort of like to free yourself from the Amazon ecosystem, your choices are fraught. I wish Kobo made a black-and-white successor to the Libra 2, but at least as of right now, it doesn’t. Maybe search eBay? And while you’re there, look for used Kindle Oasis models, which are all also excellent and will be usable for years. (If my Kobo Libra 2 died today and I wasn’t able to bring my Kindle Oasis out of retirement, I’d probably buy a Kobo Sage despite the price.)
So I guess that’s where we are, right now, in the weird world of e-readers. The Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition is pretty much the best all-purpose e-reader out there right now. I don’t love it, but it’s solid in a lot of ways. And if you are that wild person who wants to read comics panel by panel on your Kindle, then go ahead and get the Kindle Colorsoft. Nobody’s going to stop you.
One of the most-used buttons on my Stream Deck is a one-touch connection to the Mac mini server sitting in a closet in my house. I’m frequently popping in to manage files on my RAID, or reconfigure a script that’s fed by my weather station, all sorts of odd jobs.
Beginning with macOS Sonoma, the built-in Screen Sharing on macOS has gotten really good, with support for a high-quality stream and even multiple virtual displays. But connecting to another Mac on your local network via Screen Sharing can be a bit fiddly. Here’s how to make it easy.
First, you’ll need to connect. The easiest way to do this is to open Finder, choose Network from the Go menu, double-click on the Mac you want to connect with on your local network, and then click Share Screen. (If you don’t see the Mac in the Network window, you may not be on the same network or it might not have Screen Sharing turned on. To turn it on, open System Settings, search for Sharing, and then turn on Screen Sharing.)
You’ll be asked to log in with a user name and password (you’ll want the ones that grant you access to that Mac, not the ones on the Mac you’re using to connect), and then you’ll be prompted to choose if you want to use high-quality sharing and how many virtual displays to use. (If you’re on a local network, be sure to turn on the high-quality mode.)
Once you’ve connected, you’ll see that Mac’s screen in a window. Now here’s the sneaky part: Under the Connection menu in the Screen Sharing app, choose Save As. This will save a .vncloc document to your Mac. Later, after you’ve closed the Screen Sharing window, you can re-establish that session by double-clicking this file. it’ll automatically connect you back to the server, and all you’ll have to do is re-enter in the user name and password.
That’s a nice shortcut, but it can get better. If you use a text editor like BBEdit or TextEdit to open that document, you’ll find that it’s the special kind of text file Apple uses to store preferences—a property list.
Now, everyone who is extremely concerned about passwords being stored in insecure ways should close their browser window and forget you ever read this article.
Okay, we’re safe now.
You can embed the user name and the password in the .vncloc document, at which point it will open your session with just a double-click. Toward the top of the file, there’s a line that says <key>URL</key>. On the next line, surrounded by <string> tags, there’s the URL for the screen sharing connection, starting with vnc://.
A little-known (and hated by people who care about password security) trick in the URL specification is that you can embed a user name and password in any URL. The format is:
protocol://username:password@name-of-computer
So if I edit that VNC URL in the property list to begin vnc://jsnell:mycoolpassword followed by the Mac’s address, and then save the file, it will automatically connect and log me in when I double-click.1 A step saved. And the .vncloc document contains a bunch of additional information based on your session preferences, so if you’re using something other than the defaults, this is a nice way to lock all that in. You can take the .vncloc file, give it a nice name and icon, and put it in your Dock or launch it from a launcher utility or even just leave it out on your desktop.
Here’s another second secret: the Stream Deck has a “website” option that will open any arbitrary URL when you click on it. The format of the URL in the .vncloc document gives away what you need to do to form a proper VNC URL:
vnc://username:password@name-of-a-mac.local?quality=5&numVirtualDisplays=1
If you paste that URL (with all the proper names and passwords swapped in for my placeholders) into Safari, it should ask you if you want to open it in Screen Sharing. If I paste that URL into Stream Deck’s website option, then it will launch Screen Sharing and connect without any .vncloc file at all.
In my case, I prefer to use the .vncloc file method because it does lock in all my other preferred Screen Sharing settings. I added the Stream Deck’s Open command, pointed it at the file, and presto—one touch brings my server up on my screen, no additional interaction needed.
- As my pal Dan Sturm points out, if your password contains special characters like spaces, you’ll need to escape them using a simple tool like this one. ↩
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has been reporting for some time that Apple is planning a “smart display” to be used in the home, but Tuesday he reported a remarkable level of detail:
The product has a touch interface that looks like a blend of the Apple Watch operating system and the iPhone’s recently launched StandBy mode. But the company expects most people to use their voice to interact with the device, relying on the Siri digital assistant and Apple Intelligence. The hardware was designed around App Intents, a system that lets AI precisely control applications and tasks, which is set to debut in the coming months.
Gurman says that there will be no third-party App Store at launch, but the use of App Intents strongly suggests to me that one will come down the road, since the features of App Intents with third-party apps should dramatically increase the usability of Apple Intelligence.
His report says the product could launch as early as March, and includes optional attachments including a base with included speakers, which would make it more like the “HomePod with a screen” that many of us have been expecting. In some ways, making it modular seems unlike Apple, but it would allow the product to cover many different use cases, including a home that’s already got plenty of speakers to play audio through.
This kind of product has seemed like a no-brainer for Apple for some time, since it’s largely built out of features and functionality Apple is already shipping, or is about to ship. It seems like Apple Intelligence is the feature that is finally putting it over the top.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Magic Lasso Adblock: incredibly private and secure Safari web browsing
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. And it’s been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.
Users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Remove ad trackers, annoyances and background crypto- mining scripts
- Browse common websites 2.0x faster
- Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Jason’s gotten his hands on the M4 MacBook Pros, the M4 iMac, and a visionOS widescreen Mac display. (And we’re both considering Mac mini purchases.) Plus: Apple’s issues with new products, and the threat of huge EU fines.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn. This is something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On (SSO), often by lumping it into a product’s enterprise tier.
So the enterprise tier is priced only for large companies… but companies of all sizes need access to SSO. In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.
Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager like 1Password, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, check out 1Password’s blog post.
Ready to go, a more respectable Vision Pro travel case.Belkin has just released two new Vision Pro accessories—a $50 add-on Head Strap that supplement Apple’s Solo Knit Band, and a $100 Travel Bag. They’re now for sale at Belkin’s website and the Apple Store.
I’ve been given a sneak peek at both, and they’re really nice—so nice that I’m starting to wonder if Apple is admitting after the fact that it missed the mark with the original Vision Pro configuration. (Unfortunately, they’re not giving these products away—you will need to pay for them.)
First, the Head Strap: It’s a soft, adjustable hook-and-loop enclosure band that’s quite similar to the one included with Apple’s Dual Loop Band. However, at both ends, there’s a plastic attachment that slides on the end of the Vision Pro’s built-in straps. This is a bit different than the $40 Spigen Head Strap, which is padded and seems less adjustable.
Belkin’s strap connects to the Vision Pro at the end of the built-in straps. I haven’t been able to use Belkin’s Head Strap in a marathon Vision Pro session yet, but in my first uses, it seems to be very adjustable and comfortable, offering a little more support than just using the (otherwise quite comfy) Solo Knit Band on its own. It’s also a lot less wild than some of the 3-D printed options you’ll find out there, including the Solotop, which I was previously using to add a second Solo Knit Band as head support.
Hello, it’s a man with a thing on his face, but like it’s 2023.I’ll just point out that during Apple’s initial Vision Pro demos in June 2023, the devices were equipped with a combination of a Solo Knit Band and an over-the-head band that was extremely similar to the experience with the Belkin Head Strap. I don’t know why Apple went with the options it did, but if you’re struggling to get a proper fit with the Vision Pro, Belkin’s accessory is a nice compromise between Apple’s two included options. (And, yeah, it’s $50—I’m resigned to the fact that every Vision Pro accessory is going to cost a lot.)
Belkin’s case looks nice and offers a perfect fit.Now, to the Belkin Travel Bag. It’s half the price of Apple’s Vision Pro travel case, which kind of looks like a pillow, but of course, at $100, it’s not cheap, either. I’ve been traveling with a no-name case I bought on Amazon for $25, which was clearly designed for the Meta Quest. It was fine, but the Belkin bag puts it to shame.
I’m impressed with almost everything about Belkin’s bag. It’s got a carrying strap as well as a longer, adjustable and removable shoulder strap. It perfectly fits the Vision Pro, which is smaller than your garden-variety Meta Quest, so it feels compact. It’s not big and puffy like the Apple case, but it feels like it offers at least some padded protection. It’s got a flip-up protector that covers the device’s eyepieces, and there’s a velcro-enabled battery holder to hold the battery unit in place. I was able to slightly zip open the bag and plug in a USB cable to charge the battery, which I really liked.
The bag also has a pocket on the back and a zip pocket on the front, so there’s room for some small additional storage (so long as it’s small and thin). My only complaint is that you can’t open the flap entirely when you unzip it, but that’s probably better in terms of making it impossible for the Vision Pro to fall out when the case is partially unzipped.
Basically, I refused to buy Apple’s case, and while I thought my cheap Amazon case was better than nothing, Belkin’s case really puts it to shame.
It’s funny—the Vision Pro has been out for many months now, and by all accounts there aren’t that many of them out there in the wild. Yet here’s Belkin rolling in with some new accessories that feel very strongly like they’re the accessories Apple should have initially launched with the Vision Pro. And they’re both available at the Apple Store! Hmm.
So is this Apple working with a partner to right some initial wrongs? It sort of feels like it. Regardless, both of these products feel practical and sensible in a way that some of the decisions around the original Vision Pro launch didn’t.
The latest update to the MacBook Pro is not a radically different laptop than what has come before. Since the product was redesigned in 2021, subsequent updates have been largely the same, at least on the outside.
But just as the MacBook Air is the default Mac for a majority of consumer Mac users, the MacBook Pro is the tool of choice for most Mac professionals. As a result, even a small update can be of great importance.
Anyway, here’s the good news: All the things that have made Apple silicon-based MacBook Pros great are still here, now powered by the impressively upgraded M4 chip. Apple has also sufficiently improved the base model to finally elevate it out of “Why does this exist?” territory, boosted the device’s world-class display, and seriously upgraded the built-in webcam. Not bad for a small update.
Validating the base modelApple’s relationship with the low end of the MacBook Pro line has some weird history. For a while, it was the one model to not get the Touch Bar. Later, it was the last model to have a Touch Bar. In the Apple Silicon era, it has used the same M series chip as the thinner, lighter, and more affordable MacBook Air.
Fortunately, last year Apple decided that the base-model MacBook Pro should have the design and most of the features of the more expensive models. It still had a base-model M3 chip, but it did have the amazing Liquid Retina display, the array of microphones, good speakers, the works. Still, it was not quite a full member of the club, with an alternate color scheme (Space Gray instead of Space Black) and some degraded functionality thanks to its lower-end chip.
I’m happy to report that, as of now, the $1599 base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro really feels like a full member of the family. It’s got the same Space Black color option as the other models, sure, but it’s also got—enabled by the expanded capability of the M4 chip over the M3—an extra Thunderbolt port, bringing its total to three. Most relevant: that third port is located on the right side, not the left, meaning that users of this laptop can plug in peripherals or charge from either side! I know it seems like a little thing, but sometimes the little things can mean a lot for ergonomics, especially when you’re using a laptop on the go.
In terms of processor performance, yes, the base model has the same M4 chip that’s in the iPad Pro and will undoubtedly be in the MacBook Air sometime next spring. Even the base-model M-series chips have been great, and four generations in, they’re so fast that I can’t even lift an eyebrow at Apple using one in a laptop labeled “Pro.” Yes, you can spend more money for faster and more capable versions of the MacBook Pro, but isn’t that always the way?
A few display upgradesIt takes a lot of bright sun to overcome nano-texture and 1000 nits.And now, the star of the show—that Liquid Retina display that debuted in 2021:
This is a 120-hertz ProMotion display with a wide color gamut, backlit by mini-LED display technology that allows it to run bright and peak even brighter, while also maintaining black levels that contribute to a remarkably extended level of dynamic range.
It looks incredible.
The Liquid Retina display on these new laptops is the same as it ever was—absolutely the best Mac display experience ever. Every time I get my eyes on one, especially the gigantic 16-inch model, I am blown away by how great it looks. And yet Apple has made a couple of changes in this generation to make it even better.
First off, it’s brighter—sort of. The peak brightness of the screen when displaying HDR content is unchanged, at 1600 nits. But if you’re in standard dynamic range mode—which most people are, pretty much all the time they’re not looking at HDR photos or watching HDR movies—the screen is brighter than ever before. Apple has been slowly ratcheting up this figure, from 480 nits with the M2 to 600 nits with the M3 to, now, 1000 nits with the M4.
One thousand nits is bright. So bright that you probably would only want to use it outside, in bright sunlight. But this is a laptop, which means it’s the kind of computer that might very well be used outside, in difficult lighting conditions.
Speaking of which, there’s another new feature designed to enhance the display in difficult viewing environments: a $150 nano-texture option. Apple has slowly been rolling out this anti-glare surface on many of its devices, from iPads to Macs to external displays, and now it’s reached the MacBook Pro (as well as the M4 iMac).
I frequently use my laptop outside. If it’s a nice day, I will sit in my backyard under a redwood tree and write. I did so for this article, in fact, and spent some time trying to counteract the afternoon sun shining through the branches with the new screen brightness and nano-texture display.
The results were very good. True, not even the nano-texture display can really defeat the sun shining directly into the screen and reflecting into my eyes. But beyond that extreme condition, it defeated all other forms of glare easily. Using a nano-texture-covered display is a little weird—the reflections just stop at the screen edge, as if by magic. It works incredibly well. And most of the time, in more normal lighting conditions, I didn’t really notice the nano-texture being there. Yes, if you look closely, you will notice a light scatter that reduces contrast a bit.
Laptops are designed to be portable. That means they can be used in uncontrollable conditions, and this display is more resilient in those situations. Of course, you may also be able to turn your chair to a different angle and solve the problem that way. It’s up to you to decide if you’d rather trade a little contrast for some dramatic glare reduction.
An improved webcamThe MacBook Pro’s Center Stage camera (right) seems better than the one in the Studio Display (left), especially in low light.Three years ago, Apple introduced a new feature called Center Stage. This feature uses a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera pointed at the user to capture a scene. Then, machine-learning software automatically crops, pans, and zooms the picture as if a camera operator were shooting your FaceTime calls and Zoom meetings.
I’m a fan of the feature, but it’s undeniably true that the 12MP camera really showed its limitations in certain lighting conditions, especially when zoomed in on a small portion of the image. In plenty of circumstances, it looked worse than a standard, boring, locked-in-place webcam. (Try using an iPhone camera as your Center Stage camera via Continuity Camera sometime—it looks so much better.)
With the M4, the MacBook Pro’s FaceTime camera has been upgraded from a 1080p model to a new 12MP Center Stage camera. I can hear the groans now, but here’s the thing: This isn’t the same sensor as in some previous Center Stage cameras. It seems better, though for whatever reason, it doesn’t look as good as the one in the M4 iMac.
In a challenging low-light environment, the original Center Stage camera on an Apple Studio Display can look fuzzy, blotchy, and low contrast. The new Center Stage camera on the MacBook Pro did a better job, with more contrast and more natural-looking skin tones.
Apple’s still promoting Desk View, which lets the Center Stage camera display documents placed on a desk in front of the camera, as a productivity feature—but I don’t think it makes sense on a laptop. To get Desk View’s geometry to work, you’ve got to push your laptop way back on the desk or table and tilt the screen forward, which makes viewing pretty awkward. It’s a fine feature for a desktop display or an iMac, but not a MacBook Pro.
Fourward marchWe already know about how fast the M4 chip is, because it debuted earlier this year in the iPad Pro:
Regarding the M4 as a whole, the early returns are encouraging. The M4 single-core score was 24% higher than an M3 MacBook Air and 45% faster than the M2 iPad Pro. In multi-core operations, the 10-core M4 bested an eight-core M3 by 22%, and the eight-core M2 iPad Pro by 50%.
The same holds for the M4 when used in a device running macOS. What’s new is the arrival of the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, which offer higher levels of performance. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to review a MacBook Pro with the high-end Max chip, but I did get to spend nearly a week using a 16-inch MacBook Pro with a 14-core, 20-GPU M4 Pro processor and came away impressed.
In the M3 generation, the Max variety seemed to take a big step forward while the Pro version advanced by more of a half-step. That seems reversed this time, with the Pro chip getting a major memory bandwidth boost. So, if you’re in the market for a fast MacBook Pro, should you be satisfied with the Pro chip or spend the extra money for the Max?
It depends on what kinds of tasks you’re doing. (Isn’t that always the way?) On multi-core CPU tasks, the M4 Pro holds its own with the M3 Max chip of the previous generation. Basically, the faster M4 cores mean it has a little more power despite having a couple fewer cores. Yes, you can spend a lot of money for an M4 Max chip with a couple of additional CPU cores, but I’m not sure that would be reason enough to upgrade.
No, the big difference between the Pro and the Max is the availability of many, many more GPU cores—if you want to buy them. The M4 Pro tops out at 20 GPU cores, but you can spend a lot of money and configure an M4 Max chip with up to 40 cores. If your goal is to completely blow out GPU performance, Max will let you do it. Most people will be plenty comfy with the M4 Pro.
The M4 Pro and M4 Max chips also bring Thunderbolt 5 to the party, while the M4 remains behind on Thunderbolt 4. Thunderbolt 5 is obviously new, and there aren’t many (any?) accessories for it, but they’ll come eventually. The important things to know about it are that Thunderbolt 5 can deliver 200 watts of charging and that it supports enhanced transfer speeds—good for people who need fast storage, but also good for people who want to hook up big external displays. The M4 Max model will apparently drive four external displays! (The two models I tested only support two external displays.)
Onward and upwardFor developers, artists, and creative people, the MacBook Pro is the Mac product line’s most vitally important representative. Apple must keep moving it forward with a combination of new features and ongoing performance boosts. The current MacBook Pro design is a few years old, but it doesn’t feel stale or boring—it’s still excellent. This year, Apple has improved on it by brightening the screen, improving the webcam, making the base model a full citizen of MacBook Pro nation, and, of course, raising the bar for performance with the M4 chip family.
Not too long ago, Apple struggled to ensure that the most important Pro Mac was updated regularly and reliably. Thankfully, in the Apple silicon era, that’s no longer the case.
Meet the new Mac mini—for the first time in the last fourteen years, not the same as the old Mac mini.
The latest iteration of Apple’s most diminutive Mac really earns that superlative in its newest incarnation, only the third in its history. The form factor really shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: it’s basically a smaller version of the Mac Studio, which was itself a taller version of the Mac mini. Time, as they say, is a flat squircle.
As the most versatile Mac, the Mac mini finds itself into all sorts of niches that no other Mac can easily (or cost-effectively) fill. Whether it’s rack-mounted as a server, hooked up to a TV, or even tucked somewhere in a car, the mini is the Mac of all trades.1
Since the Apple silicon revolution, it’s also become more powerful than ever, and the new M4-powered models are no exception. The mini holds its own against consumer models like the iMac and MacBook Air, and can be upgraded into the mid-range with an M4 Pro chip, positioning it comfortably alongside some MacBook Pro models.
When it comes to desktop Macs, it’s quite possibly the best one Apple offers.
Design of the timesThe Mac mini’s appearance has only changed a handful of times in its almost two decades of existence. (It turns 20 in just two months, hard as that is to believe.)2 Fun fact: the new model, at two inches tall, is the same height as the original G4 model back in 2005. That version, however, measured in at 6.5 inches square, an inch and a half larger than the new Mac mini’s small 5-inch-by-5-inch footprint. While that original design survived into the Intel era, it ultimately didn’t last that long: just five years after its introduction, it was replaced by the familiar unibody aluminum model, which went on an incredible fourteen year run.3
Note the family resemblance.So now here’s the Mac mini’s long-awaited third act. There’s been clamor for a smaller version for some time, ever since the Intel NUC form factor gained popularity. While some hoped that it might come in the form of an Apple TV-sized computer, the new mini is larger and taller than the set-top box—but comes with commensurately more power and expandability than a smaller chassis would allow.
That the new design is small is great: with more than 40 percent less volume compared to the previous Mac mini, it fits in more places, takes up less room on your desk, and is less obtrusive than ever before. It ought to, for example, sit fairly well atop the foot of an Apple Studio Display (though the cables coming out the back might make that harder). Apple also hasn’t cheated by moving the power supply into an external brick: it’s the same standard two-prong power connector cord.
Like the Mac Studio, the whole mini case is now one piece of aluminum, with machined openings for ports on rear—that’s a departure from the unibody model, which had a plastic backplate. The corner radius has changed too—it’s slightly tighter than the old model—and there’s a new, larger power light.
The new mini is also—and this isn’t insignificant, as I’ll get to in a moment—lighter than ever, weighing in at 40 percent less than the previous model. At a pound and half (slightly heavier for the M4 Pro model), it’s—and this is fun!—the lightest Mac ever made. That makes it easy to move around if you need to; if you wanted to throw one in a bag to carry around with you, you could do that too. (Granted, you’d still need a keyboard, pointing device, and display.) The reductions in weight and volume also contribute to the Mac mini’s status as Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac, in that Apple has used 85 percent less aluminum in the construction than in the previous model.
Fortunately, the Mac mini is light enough to hold in one hand.There is one somewhat puzzling decision on the design front: the power button has migrated from the back of the mini, and not to the front but to underneath. If I had to speculate, I’d guess that space on the back of the machine was at a premium and putting the button there would have necessitated the use of a curved aluminum button à la the Mac Studio’s, if it could have been fit in there at all. This feels like a change made for cost and expediency.
But it also speaks, to some degree, of Apple’s vision of the Mac mini: this is not a computer that you’re turning on and off with regularity. If anything, you’re probably restarting it. From a power perspective, the mini sips electricity—though Apple hasn’t specified the power consumption of the M4 versions, the M2 models used just 7 watts at idle, and I’d imagine these are around the same. The Mac mini is more of an appliance than ever, one that you turn on and keep on—not unlike an iPhone, iPad, or even Mac laptop.
I confess, this made me laugh.That said, the power button being underneath is awkward at times—none more so than when I first set up the machine and was asked to pair with the Touch ID keyboard, requiring me to double-click the power button. But, as I said above, the mini is also incredibly light, so if you do need to lift it up and hit the button, it’s not an insurmountable problem—you can even do it with one hand pretty easily. Moreover, this is hardly a computer of yesteryear where you’re worried about spinning discs getting knocked out of whack—just pick it up and turn it over if you need to.4 The biggest annoyance is probably whatever cables you have attached. Frankly, I can never remember which side of my M2 Pro Mac mini the power button was on—I guarantee that’s not going to be an issue here.
Ultimately, is the power button placement a little annoying? Sure. Is it the kind of thing that should keep you from buying this machine? No, it really isn’t.
Apple also says that the Mac mini includes a redesigned thermal system where all air flows through the foot. In my tests, I tried maxing out both CPU cores and, separately, GPU cores and in either case I had to literally hold the mini up to my hear to maybe hear something that could have been a fan. We’re a long way from having a machine nicknamed “Wind Tunnel”.
Make sure you’re connectedThere was some concern Apple might skimp on ports for a smaller Mac mini, but I’m happy to say that’s largely not true. The back of all Mac minis sport three Thunderbolt ports (Thunderbolt 4 on the M4, Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro models), as well as Gigabit Ethernet (configurable to 10Gbps if you need it) and HDMI. The two USB-A ports of M2 model have shuffled off this mortal coil, but there are now, for the first time, two USB-C ports on the machine’s front, aping the design of the Mac Studio.
Apple’s kind of split the difference here: technically, yes, the M4 Pro version of the Mac mini has fewer ports than its M2 Pro predecessor, which had four Thunderbolt 4 ports in addition to the pair of USB-A ports; but the base M2 model had just two Thunderbolt 4 ports. In both cases, the ports are on average better than what was previously available, even if there aren’t as many of them. That feels like a net win, though if it means you now need a hub to connect things, well, I can understand the frustration.
Three Thunderbolt ports in the back is decent, though it’s easy to use them up.Those front-mounted ports, though, are a real win. Gone are the days of having to fumble behind the mini in order to plug in a thumb drive or USB security key. Need to quickly charge something or connect an iPhone or iPad? Easy. It’s a triumph of function over form.
The audio-out jack has also moved to the front, which is a bit more of a mixed bag for me.5 That’s great if you’re the kind of person who plugs in headphones frequently, but if you—like me—keep a pair of speakers connected to your Mac, it ends up being an awkward place to plug them in. Yes, you can use a USB-C-to-audio adapter, like the one Apple conveniently sells for $9, and plug them in on the back, but then you’re using a Thunderbolt port to drive a pair of analog speakers, which is a bit like using a Hemi to power your bicycle. If you’re using a Studio Display or other hub, the adapter will also work there just fine. At that point, though, I wondered if maybe I would be better off just using the Studio Display’s pretty good internal speakers.
The Mac mini does have an internal speaker, for what it’s worth, but what it’s worth isn’t very much: while it gets impressive volume, the quality is tinny with no spatial separation and negligible bass. Better than you might expect, but almost any pair of headphones or speakers will blow it out of the water, much less a HomePod.
There’s the usual complement of wireless tech—Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3—unchanged from its predecessor. Like other recently revised Apple products, the Mac mini also appears to have a stealth Thread radio, as per FCC filings, but it’s not listed on its tech specs page. This radio appears to be dormant, though in theory, I suppose it could be activated with a software update at some future date if needed.
I also tested the Magic Keyboard (extended) and Magic Trackpad with USB-C; Apple provided a Magic Mouse in addition but, well, I’m not a mouse user. Everything that’s been said about those has already been said: they’re functionally equivalent to the previous versions, just with a different port. I’m glad to have everything standardized on USB-C and disappointed (but not surprised) to see that Apple has elected not to otherwise revisit these products, whether it be the Magic Mouse’s awkward charging port or the lack of an inverted-T arrow key layout on the smaller keyboard. But, well, at least you know what you’re getting into.
Performance artsApple’s been on a consistent tear with Mac performance since the introduction of Apple Silicon. Every chip generation has seen a 10-20 percent increase in the speed of processor cores over the preceding generation, reflected in single-core benchmarks; that scales with additional cores available in more powerful chips. The Pro, Max, and (if they exist) Ultra variants all also feature better memory bandwidth than the base model chips, as well as many more GPU cores.
The M4 follows the pattern here. In single core benchmarks, its performance is 22 percent faster than the M3 and roughly 45 percent faster than the M2. It’s almost 60 percent faster than an M1. None of that should be a surprise: this is the same chip powering the M4 iPad Pro introduced back in May and the same featured in the new iMac and base-level MacBook Pro. Which means at single-core CPU tasks, all those models basically perform exactly the same.
The review model Apple provided me is the $799 configuration with the base M4 chip (10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores), 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. The mini’s also available with a 12-core CPU/16-core GPU M4 Pro for another $600—the cost of an entry-level Mac mini—which will get you another 8GB of RAM in the bargain. (The M4 models can go up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, while the M4 Pro can support up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage. The costs are…high.)
Lining the M4 model up against my own Mac mini, which sports an M2 Pro, is thus not a straight comparison but still yielded some interesting results. The earlier Pro model still outperforms it when it comes to GPU-intensive tasks (no surprise given the higher GPU core count), but for anything CPU-related, the faster cores are the deciding factor. I bounced a roughly one-hour Logic project with nine tracks in 2 minutes and 51 seconds on the M4; the same project took 3:03 on an M3 Air, 3:48 on an M1 Air, and a surprising 3:48 on my M2 Pro Mac mini (something strange is going on there, so I’m not inclined to view it as representative).
None of this is to say those earlier chips are slouches—it’s just that the newer generations are that much better. For most of the things people are doing day-to-day, those earlier machines are still more than capable. Even using Apple Intelligence to, say, summarize a lengthy Wikipedia article on World War I had a negligible difference in speed between the M2 Pro and M4.
Apple does tout that the M4’s better Neural Engine is more than 3x faster than the M1’s. While it’s tricky to test this exactly, I put the hour-long WAV file I made in Logic through MacWhisper to generate a transcript and the two minis came out very close: 3:01 for the M4, and 2:49 for the M2 Pro. On the M3 Air, it was a minute pokier at 3:49 and my M1 Air was definitely the slowest by far, clocking in at 6:09, perhaps speaking to a combination of slower cores, fewer GPU cores, and the slower Neural Engine.
Unsurprisingly Apple once again is making claims about the M4’s gaming prowess. That’s always difficult to test, since many of the most prominent titles still don’t make it to the Mac, but the M4 GPUs seem to be the same as the M3 version, which added support for high-end features like hardware ray tracing and mesh shading. Great news, but the problem is still more about software than hardware.
Seeing how the M4 compares to the M2 Pro, I find myself wondering whether I even need a Pro level processor for the tasks I do. It’s nice to have some performance headroom, to be sure, but would the money spent on (predominantly) extra GPU cores be better allocated to RAM and storage? It’s certainly a question worth asking when you’re in the market.
ConclusionThere’s a lot to like about the new Mac mini. It still starts at the same $599 price—even if its base 256GB of storage is a bit paltry—but making the jump to the $799 512GB configuration is not unreasonable. External storage is cheap and fast these days, and Apple’s move to 16GB of RAM for starting configuration means that none of these machines feels underpowered out of the box.
The addition of the front USB-C ports and the smaller footprint are good changes that help the mini really live up to its name.6 Might I have kept the audio jack and power button on the back, if I were king of all Apple design? I would have considered it, but neither are dealbreakers.
Honestly, the temptation to swap out my M2 Pro Mac mini for an M4 model is strong—it’s tough to resist the siren song of the new, and those front-mounted USB-C ports are great. The good news is, if the previous Mac mini incarnation is any indication, this design is here to stay for a while. So even if I don’t make the switch to the M4, there’s always the M5, M6…M18, anybody?
- If you think the puns end here, you’re ministaking. Too much? ↩
- Other than the iMac, it’s the only Mac model name that dates back to the PowerPC era. ↩
- That design was tweaked a year after its release to remove the optical drive; but the size remained unchanged. ↩
- Look, ma! No moving parts! ↩
- True story: When I first saw the images of the new Mac mini, I thought for a moment that Apple had brought back the IR receiver from previous models. ↩
- Not to mention harkening back even more strongly to its roots in the Power Mac G4 Cube—yes, it’s the most cubic Mac mini Apple’s ever made! ↩
The iMac, redesigned for Apple silicon in 2021, is a gorgeous reinvention of Apple’s venerable all-in-one. It’s colorful (if you want it to be), powerful (enough), and designed to show itself off at home and in public spaces.
After a very basic update to M3 last year, Apple has now updated the iMac again, adding the more powerful M4 processor—and addressing a few of this fun desktop computer’s few shortcomings.
What hasn’t changedLike its two predecessors, the M4 iMac is an ultra-thin (11.5mm) slab that looks like an oversized iPad attached to a stand (or optional VESA mount). It comes in seven different color options, which have been tweaked a bit (except silver) but are still as striking as they were before. A magnetic connector attaches the iMac to an external power brick that (optionally for the base model) also integrates an Ethernet jack. The 24-inch screen is at 4.5K resolution and is bright and colorful, though it can’t pop the brightness in dynamic range content like a MacBook Pro display can (it’s limited to 500 nits). It comes with color-matched accessories, now charged by color-matched USB-C cables.
As before, Apple has essentially built a $1299 budget model with a reduced feature set. It has two fewer processor and GPU cores, only two Thunderbolt ports, an Ethernet jack, and a Touch ID-capable keyboard, which are extra-cost options. It can only drive one external display. I reviewed one of the higher-end models (which start at $1499), which has a full set of 10 CPU and GPU cores.
In a world of laptops, the iMac is designed to fill some very specific niches. Sometimes, you just want a home computer station that anyone can sit down and use, and the iMac obliges. Some businesses want them at reception, hotels at check-in, or even schools in a computer lab. The iMac isn’t the definitive Mac model. It was back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and the modern iMac is designed to fit into your life or workplace and stand out. (If you think about it a certain way, you can almost look at it as a laptop with a really, really big screen. It’s certainly thin enough!)
Take a bow, Center StageThe iMac’s Center Stage camera (right) looks better than the one in the Studio Display (left), especially in low light.Three years ago, Apple introduced a new feature called Center Stage. This feature uses a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera pointed at the user to capture a scene. Then, machine-learning software automatically crops, pans, and zooms the picture as if a camera operator were shooting your FaceTime calls and Zoom meetings.
Frustratingly, the M1 iMac was released after the first iPad with Center Stage, and yet it didn’t offer the feature—instead, it just had a basic 1080p webcam left over from the last-generation Intel iMac design. It’s an example of how Apple’s product lines sometimes get weirdly out of sync since the iMac seems to be the perfect system for such a feature—as it’s a big screen sitting on a desk with limited opportunity to be repositioned.
However, maybe it was all for the best? When the Center Stage camera did debut on a big screen sitting on a desk, it was in the Apple Studio Display. Over time, the 12MP ultrawide camera it used has been exposed as having severe limitations in poor lighting conditions, especially when zoomed in on a small portion of the image. In plenty of circumstances, it looked worse than a standard, boring, locked-in-place webcam. (Try using an iPhone camera as your Center Stage camera via Continuity Camera sometime—it looks so much better.)
With the M4 iMac, the FaceTime camera has finally been upgraded to Center Stage. And maybe it was worth the wait, because this isn’t the same 12MP sensor as in some previous Center Stage cameras. It’s new and improved—so improved that I could tell the difference the first second that I turned it on.
In a challenging low-light environment, the original Center Stage camera on an Apple Studio Display can look fuzzy, blotchy, and low contrast. The new Center Stage camera on the M4 iMac looks sharper, with more contrast and much more natural-looking skin tones. It’s what Center Stage should’ve looked like all along, and it’s a nice upgrade.
With Center Stage, you also get Desk View, a feature that lets the Center Stage camera share video of items (such as documents) placed on the surface the iMac is sitting on. This is a feature that requires some open space in front of the iMac, but it’s much more reasonable to use on an iMac than it would be on an iPad or laptop.
Fantastic fourIt’s all Thunderbolt back there now.We already know about how fast the M4 chip is, because it debuted earlier this year in the iPad Pro:
Regarding the M4 as a whole, the early returns are encouraging. The M4 single-core score was 24% higher than an M3 MacBook Air and 45% faster than the M2 iPad Pro. In multi-core operations, the 10-core M4 bested an eight-core M3 by 22%, and the eight-core M2 iPad Pro by 50%.
The same holds for the M4 when used in a device running macOS. My tests showed the M4 model outpacing the M3 model nicely on all fronts. But of course, most people will not be buying the M4 iMac to upgrade from an M3. Instead, they’ll presumably be putting old Intel iMacs out of service—and the speed boost from even a high-end Intel iMac will be dramatic. (To be fair, the M1 iMac was already faster than almost every iMac that preceded it. This one’s that much faster.)
I also appreciate that, with the exception of the base model, this iMac features four full Thunderbolt ports on the back. Previous models featured two Thunderbolt ports and two USB-C ports, which required the Thunderbolt-having ports to be labeled. The whole thing seemed very un-Apple-like to me. Now they’re all Thunderbolt, which is good.
The peripherals are now USB-C, but they’re still the same in every other way—including being color-matched to the iMac.And yes, Apple has updated its keyboard, mouse, and trackpad to charge and pair via USB-C instead of Lightning. Otherwise, they’re unchanged, and they remain color-matched (right down to the charging cable) with the iMac you buy. (If you want to buy colorful peripherals separately, you can’t—seeking them on eBay from someone who doesn’t want theirs is the only way to get the orange keyboard of your dreams.) I’m a little perplexed that Apple doesn’t seem to let iMac buyers pay for both a color-matched mouse and trackpad—that seems like an oversight that the company should correct.
The screen’s the thingThe modern iMac really is a 24-inch flatscreen with a tiny computer hidden inside. It’s a nice screen, though it’s not any brighter than the previous models. If you’re someone who has been hoping to replace an old 27-inch iMac with a display of similar size, there’s no news on this front. If you want a 27-inch display right now, you’ll need to buy an external display and connect a Mac mini or laptop to it.
But there is one new wrinkle when it comes to this display: a $200 antiglare nano-texture option. (It’s not available on the base-model iMac, of course.) Apple’s slowly been rolling out this anti-glare surface on many of its devices, from iPads to Macs to external displays, and now it’s reached the M4 iMac (as well as the M4 MacBook Pro).
I used to work in an office where my display was pointed directly at the window, and there was very little I could do to change that. I used a screen with an anti-glare texture that made it bearable, but everything looked a little foggy. This technology has gotten a lot better in the intervening 15 years. Using a nano-texture-covered display is a little weird—the reflections just stop at the screen edge, as if by magic. It works incredibly well. And most of the time, in more normal lighting conditions, I didn’t really notice the nano-texture being there. (Yes, if you look closely you will notice a light scatter that can reduce contrast a bit.)
Choosing whether to add the $200 nano-texture upgrade really depends on how you plan on deploying the iMac. Oftentimes, iMacs end up getting placed where they fit, regardless of lighting conditions. If there’s going to be a bright reflection in view of the person using it, the nano-texture options seems like a no-brainer. If you can put the iMac somewhere else, or if it’s going to be used in a fairly dark space, you could save some money and gain a little extra contrast in the bargain.
One disappointment is that Apple continues to churn out nice 24-inch iMacs without keeping an eye on their long-term usability. I anticipate that Apple silicon Macs will have a usable lifetime far beyond that of Intel Macs, but at least theoretically the iMac display should last even longer. As I pointed out last year:
Since Apple moved the iMac to Retina displays nearly a decade ago, the company has abandoned its old concept of a “target display mode,” which allowed an unused iMac to be repurposed as an external display for a different computer. It’s already a little painful to think about how wasteful an all-in-one computer can be, given that displays can have lifespans vastly longer than the computers they’re attached to. Apple could assuage a lot of that frustration if it would engineer the iMac to double as a display for another device. Given the company’s commitment to the environment, perhaps it’s time to build a new Target Display Mode.
Here’s another possible use case that has occurred to me: Maybe a MacBook Air user might find it useful to sometimes plug in and use the family’s 24-inch iMac as an external display when they work from home?
Apple talks a lot about how it wants to reduce waste and be a better environmental force in the world. Making iMacs with perfectly good displays that can’t ever be repurposed into something else doesn’t seem to fit with that attitude. It’s unfortunate.
Too good for this worldI love the Apple silicon era of the iMac. Its colors and thin design make it not just a computer, but a conversation piece. (It’s the rare Mac to flash bold colors—I wish Apple would do that more often.) Apple’s modern chips give it plenty of power for 99% of users.
The iMac is so good that I wish we didn’t live in a world where most of our computers are laptops. Desktop computers can be great, but these days they’re a niche device. Fortunately, sometimes what you want is to plop down a Mac with a big screen in a particular place, and let it do its job. And if you want that Mac to be purple, or blue, or orange, or whatever, the M4 iMac will be up to the challenge.
Our default apps on iOS, how we feel about Genmoji, our favorite end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms, and whether we use Live Activities for news and sports.
Go to the podcast page.
If you didn’t notice, Apple Intelligence is here. But it would be hard not to notice—Apple is marketing its new collection of AI features everywhere it possibly can, from television ads to its website to every single product announcement it’s made in the last two months. (Each video announcement Apple released last week—iMac, Mac mini, and Macbook Pro—featured an original, extended Apple Intelligence segment.)
But to say that Apple has gone all-in on Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be quite true. Yes, the Big Three are covered: iPhone, iPad, and Mac. But Apple makes many more devices than just those three! This year, understandably, the company is going to be focused on getting as many AI features up and running on the Big Three as it can. But sometime soon, probably next year, Apple is going to need to roll out a strategy regarding everything else in its product line-up.
So, how’s it going to manage that?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
You may remember Aaron Rodgers throwing a Surface on an NFL sideline, but this year football teams in three college conferences are using iPads, as detailed in this feature from Apple Newsroom:
“Having iPad on the sidelines makes coaching way more effective in-game,” says Mike Saffell, University of California, Berkeley’s tight ends coach. “Live feedback enables the players and coaches to correct quickly. It also makes the game more competitive since both teams are able to fix issues on game day.”
Cal’s starting quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, agrees. “Before, there were a lot of things that we couldn’t see until after the game, so it’s great to have that coaching on the sideline. When you’re on the field, football is the same football. But when you’re off the field, now you can go with the coaches, make adjustments, get coached up, and then go back in the game, which has helped young players’ development a lot,” he says.
Tim Cook promoted this story on social media by mentioning his Auburn Tigers, but as for me, this is probably just an excuse for me to post pictures and quotes from my beloved Cal Bears. Who, by the way, beat Tim’s team this year. Roll On You Bears!
Just don’t throw the iPads.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Scoring our very weird draft, The new Mac mini and MacBook Pro announcements, Apple’s latest financial results, our reactions to Image Playground and Genmoji betas, and pondering the actual job of a CEO.
Go to the podcast page.
Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn.
Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class.
Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax.
The SSO tax is the name given to the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier.” The jump in price can be astonishing–one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.
In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.
To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with charging some extra for SSO–it’s not free for vendors to build or maintain–but putting it out of the reach of so many companies is irresponsible, and makes us all less safe.
Still, until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for the apps that aren’t integrated with SSO.
To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read the full blog.
Holiday specials and streaming rights; the questionable future of linear cable channels; Bob Iger’s Endgame gets interesting; Sports Corner with Rob Manfred, Jason Kelce, and Charles Barkley; Behold, the power of CBS; and some TV shows you should watch.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
The folks at 1Password recently attended the RSA conference in San Francisco and were struck by how infatuated everyone was with the promise of new, shiny solutions to fix new, shiny problems.
But there are a lot of non-shiny, foundational problems still out there. In the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, accidental breaches caused by human error or victimization in phishing attacks was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials.
Yet in 1Password’s 2022 State of Access Report, only 29% of respondents said they used a password manager at work. This needs to change, and the Verizon’s report offers a clear look at where the industry is falling short and where it goes from here. To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full blog post.
Pixelmator Team, announcing a shocker:
Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.
Pixelmator is great. Photomator is great. This team has been making great image-editing apps for years, and apparently now… they work at Apple? I don’t know what this means for the future of Apple’s apps—though I hope it means Photos is going to get a serious infusion of new talent and functionality!
If you’re a Pixelmator Pro or Photomator user, this has to be a bit of a bummer, but there’s some good news: It will probably take a few years for Apple to fully integrate the team into whatever is happening next, and the existing apps will probably still be around until then.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
If you had any idea that satellite connectivity isn’t a key part of Apple’s strategy, well, the company’s satellite partner Globalstar has disclosed changes to its deal with Apple, including a new influx of $1.1 billion from Apple tied to capital improvements, and $400 million in equity, which gives Apple a 20-percent stake in the company.
That is quite a bit of money, but it’s not necessarily a huge surprise. There aren’t that many companies around with these kind of capabilities and by locking down an investment in Globalstar, Apple ensures bandwidth and access.1
Apple’s been offering satellite connectivity since the introduction of the iPhone 14 line in 2022, which debuted with the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature. At the time Apple said it would be offering two free years of service, though it later extended that by a year. Alongside the introduction of the iPhone 15 line, it added Roadside Assistance capabilities; this year, it added Messages via Satellite. All these features are under the same aegis.
Apple has never said what these features might cost after the expiration of the initial free period. The company’s been content to kick that can down the road—the latest expansion of this deal suggests that it might be happy to kick that can right into orbit. It’s gotten a whole lot of good publicity on the back of the Emergency SOS Satellite feature, not infrequently highlighting the lifesaving stories it’s enabled. It’s hard to imagine it would ever want to be in a position of dealing with a scenario in which somebody’s life could have been saved if only they’d paid Apple for the feature.
The real question is what additional features might be enabled by the improvements to Globalstar’s infrastructure: true satellite calling? Globalstar already offers some plans for that, as do competitors. FaceTime via Satellite? (Bandwidth and latency would seem to be real challenges there.) Perhaps even general internet access?
It still seems most likely to me that Apple will eventually offer tiers of these, perhaps bundled along with its Apple One subscription, leaving some features like Emergency SOS free, while others will cost an additional fee. But Apple seems confident enough that adding these capabilities are helping sell iPhones, and for the moment, that seems to be enough for it to keep investing.
- It also helps ensure Globalstar can continue to hold its own against one of its major competitors, Elon Musk’s Starlink. ↩
Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and dodge—er, I mean answer—questions from analysts. This is a transcript of the call, Maestri’s last (sniff) as Apple CFO.
Tim Cook’s opening statementGood afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $94.9 billion, a September quarter record and up 6% from a year ago.
iPhone grew in every geographic segment, marking a new September quarter revenue record for the category, and services set an all-time revenue record, up 12% year-over-year. We also set September quarter segment revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and the rest of Asia Pacific, as well as in a large number of countries, including the United States, Brazil, Mexico, France, the UK, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and we continue to be excited by the enthusiasm we’re seeing in India, where we set an all-time revenue record.
This has been an extraordinary year of innovation at Apple. We brought the revolutionary Apple Vision Pro to customers in February, which brings users tomorrow’s technology today. And in June, we announced Apple Intelligence, a remarkable personal intelligence system that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that is incredibly useful and relevant.
Apple Intelligence marks the beginning of a new chapter for Apple innovation and redefines privacy and AI by extending our groundbreaking approach to privacy into the cloud with Private Cloud Compute. Earlier this week, we made the first set of Apple Intelligence features available in U.S. English for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users with system-wide writing tools that help you refine your writing, a more natural and conversational Siri, a more intelligent Photos app—including the ability to create movies simply by typing a description, and new ways to prioritize and stay in the moment with notification summaries and priority messages.
And we look forward to additional intelligence features in December, with even more powerful writing tools, a new Visual Intelligence experience that builds on Apple Intelligence, and ChatGPT integration, as well as localized English in several countries including the UK, Australia, and Canada. These features have already been provided to developers and we’re getting great feedback. More features will be rolling out in the coming months, as well as support for more languages, and this is just the beginning.
Now I’ll turn to our results for the quarter, beginning with iPhone.
iPhone revenue set a September quarter record of $46.2 billion, up 6% from a year ago, with growth in every geographic segment. With the introduction of Apple Intelligence, we’re beginning a new era for iPhone. iPhone 16 powered by A18 is equipped with an incredible new 48 megapixel Fusion Camera, fantastic photo experiences, and the addition of the action button and camera control. And iPhone 16 Pro is the most advanced iPhone we’ve ever made, powered by A18 Pro and featuring even larger displays, an industry-leading pro camera system with camera control, and studio quality mics, all with a huge leap in battery life.
Turning to Mac, revenue was $7.7 billion, up 2% from a year ago. Just this week, we brought a new generation of Apple Silicon to Mac: M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. From blazing fast performance to Apple’s most advanced neural engine yet, our latest chips can easily tackle incredibly complex workflows, and they ensure our newest Macs will be the best personal computers for AI the instant they hit stores. With the newest additions to our Mac lineup, customers can choose the Mac that’s just right for them. Whether that’s iMac, the world’s best and most beautiful all-in-one; MacBook Air, the world’s most popular laptop, now with double the starting memory; MacBook Pro, the best Pro notebook anywhere; or the incredible, mighty new Mac mini, our first ever carbon-neutral Mac.
iPad revenue was $7 billion, 8% higher year over year. iPad is unlike any other product on the market today, and it’s become an essential device in homes, schools, and businesses of all sizes. Recently, we were thrilled to introduce the newest iPad Mini, featuring an ultra-compact design built for Apple Intelligence with support for Apple Pencil Pro. It’s been a big year for iPad. iPad Air was popular with students and teachers as they got back to school this year, while creators are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with the M4-powered iPad Pro.
In Wearables, Home, and Accessories, revenue was $9 billion, down 3% from a year ago. During the quarter, we launched the all-new Apple Watch Series 10, bringing a beautiful new design and new capabilities to the world’s most popular watch that make it even more powerful, intelligent, and sophisticated. It’s the thinnest Apple Watch yet, making it more comfortable than ever, while offering the biggest, most advanced display. WatchOS 11 brings some huge new health and fitness insights to users, including sleep apnea notifications, which help to alert people with a potentially serious but often undiagnosed condition. We’re proud of the impact we make through our health innovations on Watch and I’m grateful for every note I receive about the importance of watch in people’s lives.
With AirPods 4, we’ve broken new ground in comfort and design with our best ever open-ear headphones available for the first time with active noise cancellation. And we were especially pleased to unveil Revolutionary end-to-end hearing health capabilities for AirPods Pro 2 with hearing protection, hearing test, and hearing aid features. These just became available in a software update this week, and we believe this will make a meaningful difference in our users’ lives. I’ve already started getting notes from customers calling the experience life-changing.
And Apple Vision Pro continues to deliver spatial experiences that weren’t possible before, including immersive entertainment like the new short film “Submerged,” which gives people a view into the unique storytelling power made possible by spatial computing. Vision Pro has more than 2,500 native spatial apps and 1.5 million compatible apps for visionOS 2, as well as applications companies are building to reimagine how they work. Vision Pro continues to inspire awe in its users, and we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. And just yesterday, we announced we’re bringing Vision Pro to Korea and the UAE.
As I mentioned earlier, Services achieved an all-time revenue record of $25 billion, up 12% from a year ago, and with all-time revenue records across most of our categories. With Apple TV+, we love celebrating the craft of great storytellers who know how to put on a show. Audiences love to discover new movies like “Wolfs,” explore acclaimed new series like “Disclaimer,” and dive back into returning favorites like “Slow Horses” and “Shrinking.” Apple TV+ productions have become fixtures at award shows, earning more than 2,300 nominations and more than 500 wins to date. Apple also offers a live sports experience in a league of its own with MLS season pass, and subscribers have been cheering on their favorite teams in the MLS Cup playoffs.
This month we also marked 10 years of Apple Pay. There’s always something magical about being able to buy groceries or pay for movie tickets seamlessly with your Apple device. Today, users choose Apple Pay for purchases across tens of millions of retailers worldwide, and we’re excited to make the Apple Pay experience even better with the option to redeem rewards and access loans from credit cards, debit cards, and other lenders right at checkout.
Whenever we celebrate big moments, Apple stores are the best places to share them with customers. I had an incredible time during launch day in September alongside our team at Apple 5th Avenue, where energy and enthusiasm filled the air. And in stores all over the world, customers are eager to get a closer look at our latest innovations. We also opened two new stores during the quarter, and we can’t wait to bring four new stores to customers in India.
We’re passionate about education, and believe technology has a vital role to play in both helping teachers to inspire their students and students to learn about the world around them. In honor of World Teachers Day, Apple was proud to share new resources for teachers to engage their students in ways that aim to make learning easy and fun. Additionally, we’ve expanded our education grant program into 100 new schools and communities, helping with everything from access to technology, to educator resources, to scholarships and financial support.
As we near the end of the year, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made in our efforts to be carbon neutral across our entire footprint by the end of the decade. As I mentioned earlier, we were thrilled to introduce our first-ever carbon-neutral Mac with the latest Mac Mini. And in another milestone, customers can choose a carbon-neutral option of any Apple Watch. These achievements are amazing for all of us at Apple, and we are determined to reach our 2030 goal.
At Apple, across everything we do, we manage for the long term because we’re always thinking about what comes next: the next great challenge, the next innovative idea, the next big breakthrough. As we close out the year, we have the best lineup we’ve ever had going into the holiday season, including Apple Intelligence, which marks the start of a new chapter for our products. This is just the beginning of what we believe generative AI can do, and I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.
Before I hand it over to Luca, with Luca transitioning to a new role with Apple, this will be the final time he’s joining our call. So I just wanted to take a moment to recognize his extraordinary service as Apple CFO and to thank him for his partnership. I am deeply grateful. In his 10 years in the role, Luca has done truly exceptional work in shaping Apple as we know it today. He has helped manage Apple for the long term, thoughtfully and deliberately. He has helped us enrich the lives of so many around the world. And he has been a leader that people look up to and have learned so much from. I have incredible confidence in our incoming CFO, Kevin Parekh, and we look forward to more of you meeting and working with him going forward. With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s (last) opening statementGood afternoon, everyone, and thank you, Tim, for the very kind words. Serving as Apple’s CFO has been a real privilege and an amazing journey, and I have greatly appreciated the support from our investors and the analyst community over the years. Kevin is exceptional, and I know you will enjoy interacting with him going forward.
Let me now turn to the results for the fourth quarter of our fiscal year.
We are very pleased to report a new September quarter revenue record of 94.9 billion, up 6% year-over-year. We grew in the vast majority of the markets we track, and achieved September quarter revenue records in the Americas, Europe and rest of Asia Pacific. Products revenue was $70 billion, up 4% year-over-year, driven by growth in iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and geographic segments, thanks to very high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, and a large number of customers who are new to our products.
Services revenue reached an all-time record of $25 billion, up 12% year-over-year. We saw broad-based strength around the world, reaching all-time records in both developed and emerging markets with double-digit growth and record results across most services categories. Company gross margin was 46.2%, near the high end of our guidance range. Products gross margin was 36.3% up 100 basis points sequentially primarily driven by favorable mix. Services gross margin was 74%, unchanged from the prior quarter. Operating expenses of $14.3 billion were at the midpoint of the guidance range we provided at the beginning of the quarter, and up 6% year-over-year.
During the quarter, we recorded a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion, which relates to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision. When we exclude this one-time charge, net income was $25 billion, and diluted earnings per share were $1.64, up 12% year-over-year, and a September quarter record. Operating cash flow was very strong at $26.8 billion, a new September quarter record. Let me now get into more detail for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was $46.2 billion, up 6% year-over-year, and a September quarter record in total and across several markets, including the U.S., the Middle East, Korea, and South Asia. The iPhone active installed base grew to a new all-time high in total and in every geographic segment. During the September quarter, many iPhone models were among the top selling smartphones around the world. In fact, according to a survey from Kantar, iPhone was the top selling model in the U.S., urban China, the UK, Australia, and Japan. We continue to see high levels of customer satisfaction for the iPhone 15 family, with 451 Research recently measuring it at 98% in the U.S.
Mac revenue was $7.7 billion, up 2% year-over-year, driven by the strength in MacBook Air. Customers have been loving the performance of Apple Silicon on Mac, and we are very excited to bring the latest M4 family of chips to the lineup. The Mac installed base reached an all-time high, with about half of customers in the quarter being new to Mac, and in the latest reports from 451 Research, customer satisfaction was 95% in the U.S.
iPad generated $7 billion in revenue, up 8% year-over-year. In addition to growth in developed markets, we also saw strong performance in many emerging markets, with double-digit growth in Mexico, Brazil, the Middle East, India, and South Asia. The iPad installed base reached another all-time high, and over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. Also, customer satisfaction was recently measured at 97% in the U.S.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $9 billion, down 3% year over year. The Apple Watch installed base reached a new all-time high, with over half of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. And the latest reports from 451 Research indicate a customer satisfaction of 96% for Watch in the U.S.
Our services revenue reached an all-time record of $25 billion, growing 12% year-over-year. Services continue to see strong momentum, with the growth of our installed base of active devices setting a solid foundation for the future expansion of our ecosystem, and we see increased customer engagement with our services offerings. Both transacting our accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double digits year-over-year. Paid subscriptions also grew double digits. We have well over one billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number we had only four years ago. And as always, we remain focused on improving the breadth and quality of our services, from new games on Apple Arcade, to new features, like tap-to-cash and pay with installments using Apple Pay, to many successful new and returning shows on Apple TV+. This past quarter, we celebrated the five-year anniversary of Apple Card, which was ranked number one in customer satisfaction among co-branded credit cards by JD Power for the fourth year in a row.
Turning to enterprise, we continue to see strong demand across our products and services. NVIDIA launched its “Mac as a Choice” program, supported by AppleCare for Enterprise and Apple Professional Services, with over 10,000 Macs deployed worldwide. And Novartis, a leading global pharmaceutical company, recently chose iPhone 16 as the standard mobile device for all employees. We also see continued momentum with Apple Vision Pro in the enterprise space. UC San Diego Health is the first hospital in the world to test spatial computing apps on Apple Vision Pro in clinical trials for patient surgery in the operating room.
Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $157 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $2.6 billion in maturing debt and increased commercial paper by $7 billion, leaving us with total debt of $107 billion. As a result, net cash was $50 billion at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we returned over $29 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $25 billion through open market repurchases of 112 million Apple shares.
As we move ahead into the December quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we’re providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter.
We expect our December quarter total company revenue to grow low to mid-single digits year over year. We expect services revenue to grow double digits at a rate similar to what we reported in the fiscal year 2024. We expect gross margin to be between 46 and 47 percent. We expect OPEX to be between $15.3 and $15.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative 250 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark to market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%.
Finally, today our board of directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.25 per share of common stock payable on November 14, 2024, to shareholders of record as of November 11, 2024. With that, let us open the call to questions.
Q&AMichael Ng, Goldman Sachs: I was wondering if you could just expand a little bit on some of the early feedback to Apple Intelligence, both for iOS 18.1 but also the developer beta so far, and whether you would attribute Apple Intelligence to any of the strong iPhone performance that we’ve seen to date.
Tim Cook: Thanks, Michael. As I noted in my comments, just this week on Monday, we made the first set of Apple intelligence features available in U.S. English for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and this includes things like system-wide writing tools that help you refine your writing, a more natural conversational Siri, more intelligent Photos app, including the ability to create movies simply by typing a description, which is really cool, and new ways to prioritize and stay in the moment with notification summaries and priority messages. There’s also email summaries and email priority. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback from developers and customers, and in fact if you just look at the first three days, which is all we have, obviously, from Monday. The 18.1 adoption is twice as fast as the 17.1 adoption was in the year-ago quarter, and so there is definitely interest out there for Apple Intelligence.
Carrying on in the quarter, we are looking forward to bringing even more features in December, and this will include even more powerful writing tools and a Visual Intelligence experience that builds on Apple Intelligence, and ChatGPT integration, as well as we’ll bring local English to several countries that include the UK, Australia, and Canada. So it’s going to be quite a software quarter between the release on Monday and the release in December, and then as we turn the corner to 2025, we’ll have more languages rolling out starting in in April as well, and more features as well. And so it’s a very, very strong drum beat and we couldn’t be more excited about it.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great, thank you very much, and my second one just for Luca first, congratulations again Luca on the new role, and it’s been a real privilege being able to spend some time with you. A question that I think will overlap with your new role as well: Could you just talk a little bit about the CapEx outlook and whether investments in things like Private Cloud Compute could change the historical CapEx range of roughly $10 billion a year.
Luca Maestri: Thank you, Michael. On the CapEx front, I’ve mentioned before a number of times, we have a bit of a hybrid model in the way we run our data centers. In some cases, we use our own data centers, in some cases we use third-party providers, and so our CapEx numbers may not be fully comparable with others. But obviously we are rolling out these Apple Intelligence features already now, and so we are making all the capacity that is needed available for these features. You will see in our 10K the amount of CapEx that we’ve incurred during the course of fiscal ’24, and we will in fiscal ’25 continue to make all the investments that are necessary, and of course, investments in AI-related CapEx will be made.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Tim, maybe if we start with you, you know, I think each of the last four years you’ve exited the December quarter with iPhone demand outpacing supply. As we look to this quarter in the iPhone 16 cycle, you know, lead times are relatively short. There are no known supply shortages, and I’m just curious whether you’ve been able to maybe get a better read on early cycle iPhone demand this year relative to past years? And if so, what you’ve learned about upgrade rates, switching rates, trade ups versus trading down and being more price sensitive, and overall, any impact that Apple Intelligence may have on iPhone 16 sales?
Tim Cook: There’s a lot there. On Apple Intelligence, it’s a compelling upgrade reason. But we just launched it three days ago and so what we’ve got now from a data point point of view is the number I just referenced that 18.1 has twice the adoption rate of 17.1. So that clearly shows a level of interest out there. In terms of exiting the December quarter with demand greater than supply, that’s not my recollection that that happened for all four of the years. We clearly had cases during COVID where there were disruptions and some spilled over. But in a more regular environment where we’re not having something, a hundred year flood kind of thing, our desire is to get into balance as quickly as possible. We don’t want customers having to wait for products. And so if you look at how we’ve done this year, we did that very quickly on the 16, on the 16 Pro family, the Pro and the Pro Max. We’ve been constrained in October, but we believe that soon we’ll be out of constraint, and so that’s a good sign from our point of view. Keep in mind that that’s a function of supply and demand, not one side or the other, and we’ve been preparing for the quarter for a while. So that’s what I would say there.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you, Tim, and then, Luca, if I just turn to you, obviously, it’s been a pleasure working with you, and we wish you all the best in the next role. There’s plenty of debate in the market right now about input costs and commodity prices and the impact that’ll have on gross margins. Historically, you do guide gross margins up 50 basis points sequentially, which you do just told us about for the December quarter. So can you maybe just help us understand your view of component prices and broadly whether you still see those as tailwinds to gross margins and how sustainable that tailwind might be or whether that should become a headwind as we look forward? Thanks so much.
Luca Maestri: Yes Eric, as you know our gross margins are a factor of many many variables. Commodities, of course, are important—they’re not the only factor. But specifically on commodities, I can tell you that both for the September quarter and what we expect for the December quarter, most commodities are going to move down in price, while NAND and DRAM increased during the course of the September quarter, and we expect them to increase during the December quarter. We are very pleased with the level of gross margins that we’ve reported during the course of the entire fiscal year of ’24, that really, for our company, record levels of gross margin, and obviously guiding to 46 to 47 percent for the December quarter, with all the new technologies that we’ve included in the products, with all the new features that Tim has talked about, a lot of new products across the board, I think it’s a very good sign.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Hey, thanks a lot, and I’ll echo those comments about Luca. You know, we’ll miss you and good luck. My question is with regard to iPhone again, and with regard to the fourth calendar, your first quarter… when you look at mid-to-low single-digit revenue growth, do you expect the iPhone to grow faster, and what are you thinking about in the answer that question with regard to China, which keeps improving each quarter?
Luca Maestri: You know, Ben, we are not providing that level of color today. Yes, we’ve said that we expect total company revenue to grow low to mid single digits. Keep in mind Apple Intelligence, as Tim said, is rolling out over time, both features and languages, and we just had a number of exciting launches just this week, you know, from the Apple intelligence feature to the new Macs. So we’ll leave it at that. You know, we’ve given you the total for the company and some pretty good direction on services, which we expect to continue to grow at a similar rate than what we’ve seen in fiscal ’24.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Well, great, thanks, Luca. Hey, Tim, I wanted to ask you, you guys are well aware of a lot of the noise out there, people chattering about builds, build lead times, and you guys are guiding for mid-to-low single-digit growth. That certainly doesn’t sound like alarm bells here vis-a-vis what you guys must be hearing. And I know you guys are just running your business and doing the best you can, but, you know, you have a lot of perspective now, Tim. What are people missing here? And it certainly just sounds like you guys are typically conservative. That guide for revenue sounds like the sky is certainly not falling, and you have a pretty good product cycle. So what do you think people are missing and what are you excited about? Thanks so much, Tim.
Tim Cook: Ben, I could not be more excited about Apple Intelligence and the rollout that we’ve got in front of us. I’m obviously on future releases as well, working on it and it’s changing my daily life. I’m super excited about the health features that we’re rolling out. The number of emails I’m already getting from customers that have taken a hearing test and are using their AirPods Pro 2 as a hearing aid are just… are staggering and heartwarming to read. I’m also thrilled about sleep apnea and the notification there that we’ll have through the watch. This week is a very exciting week for us because we just rolled out three days, three launches of different Macs, desktops and laptops, and so we have a lot of things on the docket and it’s definitely the strongest lineup we’ve ever had going into the holiday season. In terms of the noise, I tune it out. Because if not, it would just be deafening. That’s what I do. I can’t speak for everybody else, but that’s what I do.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Luca, best of luck in the future. It’s been a pleasure working with you. The first one I have is away from iPhones. On the services side, you’re at a hundred billion dollar run rate with services today, which is a phenomenal achievement by itself. As you look at the services portfolio today, can you just talk about how much of this business do you think is reoccurring versus transactional, and are the growth rates different between the subscription portfolio over here versus the transactional portfolio?
Luca Maestri: Yes, I’ll take this one. Yes, we are, first of all, very, very happy with—it’s an important milestone, of course, we got to a run rate of $100 billion. You look back just a few years ago, and the growth has been phenomenal. We’re very pleased. We’ve got a very diversified portfolio of services, and over the years, the amount that is recurring in nature has grown, and it’s growing faster than the transactional piece. We have well over a billion paid subscriptions on our platform right now between our own services and third-party services. That continues to grow strong double digits. So we feel very, very good. And essentially to your question, yes, the the recurring portion is growing faster than the transactional one.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: If I can just follow up, if I look at the growth rates across the different geography, there’s always concern around China when it comes to iPhone demand, I feel, but the performance in September looks fairly good. So one of you just touch on, what are you seeing from a demand perspective in China, if the recent stimulus plans in China could essentially be a catalyst for iPhones? And then, EMEA really stood out with double-digit growth. Maybe you can just flush that out as well for us. Thank you.
Tim Cook: Yeah. I’ll take the China question. If you look at how we did for the quarter, we were relatively flat year over year. And a key component of that improvement relative to the year-over-year performance that we had been achieving is that there was a sequential improvement in foreign exchange, and so that helped us out. As you know, it’s been a headwind that we’ve been reporting for a period of time. But the other parts, what else is going on there, is that our installed base of the active devices reached an all-time high. We had the top two selling smartphones in urban China according to Kantar. The level of new customers that we have buying the products, like Mac and iPad, are well over 50 percent, Watch is over three quarters that are new to the product, and so there’s several positive signs there. In terms of the stimulus, it’s a clear focus of the team there, but I’m not an economist and don’t want to ad lib on the effect of it.
Luca Maestri: On the Europe side, Amit, a number of things. As you see from our results during the quarter, Europe grew double digits, 11%, and really it was really good growth across the board, the different segments, they all did well. Keep in mind our definition of Europe in our segment reporting includes a number of emerging markets like Turkey, where we’ve grown very strongly, the Middle East, Tim mentioned a number of records, in Saudi, in UAE, and we also include India, where we set an all-time revenue record during the September quarter. But I have to say, also Western Europe grew nicely, so we’ve seen very, very good results for us in the entire segment.
David Vogt, UBS: Congratulations, Luca. Luca and Tim, you don’t want to give a lot of granularity, but if I just try to pull together your comments about what the demand environment looks like: are we to assume, based on sort of the commentary, that there is a risk that maybe the product revenue portfolio could be down in the December quarter, if I take your numbers at face value? And if that’s the risk, is that more iPhone related, Mac related given the strength that you’ve seen, iPad related? Just trying to get a handle on kind of what potentially is giving you that degree of, I don’t want to say caution, but maybe balance for you going into the December quarter.
Luca Maestri: As I said, David, we’re now providing that level of color. We’re giving you some data on services. I would repeat what I said earlier, we’re very early in the cycle. Very early in the cycle with a lot of new products and features that we are launching and, you know, we’re very excited about them, but it’s early, and the Apple intelligence rollout is going to happen over time, not across the world as normally we do with software releases.
David Vogt, UBS: Right. Okay, so maybe a follow-up for Tim. When you think about, to Luca’s point about the rollout being staged over the next several quarters across the world, do you think that has any impact on sort of the normal historical demand cadence across different regions? So should we see something different, let’s say, in the December quarter, the March quarter, the June quarter, etc., relative to history, given the timing of the rollout and where customers are probably waiting for the devices to be enabled to have the operating system, we’d just love to kind of get your perspective on how we think about the demand cadence, how it might be different than maybe historically. Thank you.
Tim Cook: David, it’s clearly, as you point out, a different cadence, if you will, than we would normally do. As we talked about at WWDC, we wanted to give a comprehensive vision of Apple Intelligence, and we said then that it would roll out over time. And we’re right on what we said at WWDC, and so we’re executing well. In terms of the demand curve, I would just say that what we believe here is that it’s a compelling reason for upgrading, and that’s both my personal experience and feedback that I’m getting, and so we’ll see, but we’re not projecting beyond the current quarter, obviously. We just don’t do that.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Luca, we will miss you on these calls. Tim, maybe for you, as you think about the staggered rollout of Apple Intelligence, can you help us think through potentially how much of the global installed base of phones will have access to Apple intelligence in their native language in their region within the next year or maybe in the next two years and what are some of the gating factors in the rollout?
Tim Cook: If you look at our schedule, we started with U.S. English. That started on Monday. There’s another release coming that adds additional features that I had referenced in December in not only U.S. English, but also localized for UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand. And then we will add more languages in April. We haven’t said the specifics yet in terms of the languages, but we’ll add more in April and then more as we step through the year, and so we’re moving just as fast as possible while ensuring quality. That’s what we’re doing.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Maybe this is a little premature, but how is Apple at a high level prepared to potentially deal with any tariffs that might come post this election cycle? And if not exactly how, perhaps you can just help investors think about some of the things Apple has done already to try to insulate from some of these potential impacts.
Tim Cook: You know, I wouldn’t want to speculate about those sorts of things, and so I’m gonna I’m going to punt on that one.
Krish Sankar, TD Cohen: Thanks for taking my question, and again, thanks, Luca, for all your help with the analysts and investors. My first question is on R&D. Given how much your tech peers are spending on AI, does this new era of Apple Intelligence actually require Apple to invest more in R&D beyond your current 7 to 8 percent of sales to capture this opportunity?
Luca Maestri: Krish, as you know, we’ve been investing heavily in R&D over the last several years. Our R&D growth has been significant during the last several years. And obviously as we move through the course of fiscal ’24, we’ve also reallocated some of the existing resources to this new technology, to AI, and so the level of intensity that we’re putting into AI has increased a lot and you maybe don’t see the full extent of it because we’ve also had some internal reallocation of the base of engineering resources that we have within the company.
Krish Sankar, TD Cohen: I understand Apple Intelligence is a feature on the phone today, but do you think that in the future it could potentially benefit the services growth business, or is that too bifurcated to even make a call this early in the cycle?
Tim Cook: I think, just to keep it in mind, Apple Intelligence is also available on the Mac for the M-series products and on certain models of iPad, in addition to the phone, and so it’s on all three.
Krish Sankar, TD Cohen: Can the Apple Intelligence actually help the services growth rate?
Tim Cook: Oh. Keep in mind that we have released a lot of APIs, and developers will be taking advantage of those APIs. That release has occurred as well. And of course more are coming. And so I definitely believe that a lot of developers will be taking advantage of Apple Intelligence in a big way, and what that does to services, I’ll not forecast. But I would say that from an ecosystem point of view, I think it will be great for the user and the user experience.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Thanks for taking my questions, and Luca, congrats on the new role and a pleasure working with you these years. I guess if I could for my first one start with mix on the iPhone side, and what I’m really curious about if you have any thoughts given that Apple Intelligence is now going to be your consistent feature set across all the four sort of iPhones on the iPhone 16 series that you launched and going back to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, are you seeing any change in behavior from a consumer perspective in terms of on the mix front within the iPhone series where consumer adoption is, given that there’s more consistency of the features when it comes to Apple Intelligence across the board.
Tim Cook: It’s tough to answer your question because we’ve been constrained in October on the Pro and the Pro Max, and so it’s really too early in the curve to call the precise mix on the consumer versus the pro. We’ll see.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: During the quarter, I think over the last 90 days, we had the quotes come out in relation to the DOJ, relative to the Google sort of revenue sharing agreement that you have with them. How do you sort of look at it going forward in terms of emphasizing the role that Apple has in that ecosystem with Safari and sort of the potential outcomes that you’re looking at.
Tim Cook: You know, I don’t want to speculate on that from a legal point of view. It’s an ongoing case, and I will save that for another day.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Tim, I’d like to ask about some of the components and services where despite your installed base, some parts of the Apple One bundle like Music and News and Arcade and Fitness are not obviously the market-leading offerings. Maybe what might change that and what other services could you call out as growing faster or having wider or widening addressable markets like we’ve seen in Pay or advertising?
Tim Cook: The way that I view it is that we have lots of opportunity in all of those. And so there’s lots of customers to try to convince to take advantage of it, and we’re gonna continue investing in the services and adding new features, and whether it’s News+ or Music or Arcade, that’s what we’re going to do. Keep in mind that for us, we’re more focused on being best than being most, and so in some cases, not in every case, the majority of the services that you mentioned are not cross-platform. We make them for our customers only. And so that in some cases changes the person who’s going to sell the most, perhaps. But that’s our objective. Our objective is to make the best.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Luca, one piece of unfinished business was your pledge to get to a net neutral cash position, and over the last two years, you’ve stayed around $50 billion of net cash. We’ve clearly seen instances in the past where elevated marketing spend or other programs brought increases in market share. I guess my question, looking back on your tenure is, at your scale now of $57 billion of OPEX, do you still see incremental ways to put that cash to work in the business? Or will we just continue to see increased shareholder returns?
Luca Maestri: Well, obviously, as you’ve seen, our OPEX has gone up over the years. We’ve also seen at the same time a significant expansion in gross margin, maybe to a level that I would have not expected a few years ago, but we’ve done a very good job on a number of fronts. And so I would say we – when we plan – every time we plan for the upcoming year, we think about all the different areas where we can deploy our resources and we make them available to grow the business. I think we’ve done very well over the long term, but our fundamental philosophy is to look after the business first, and then if we have excess cash, we will continue to return it to our shareholders and the plan has worked quite well so far.
Apple reported its financial results on Thursday for its fourth fiscal quarter, which ended on September 28. Revenue was $94.9 billion, up six percent versus the year-ago quarter and an all-time fourth quarter record.
The one twist: Apple recognized a one-time charge of $10.2 billion related to Apple finally having lost a long-time tax case in the European Union. That’s a lot of cash, and it bit into Apple’s profit for the quarter.
All in all, Apple’s business was relatively flat. iPhone sales were up 6% but flat for the fiscal year; Mac sales were up 2%, which is about how they’ve been all year; Services continues to have reliable double-digit growth, but the rate of growth slowed to 12% year-over-year.
After the results, Apple did its traditional call with financial analysts and we’ve got a complete transcript. And now, here are the charts:
The hearing test first checks your fit and environmental noise (left). During the test, you tap the screen when you hear a tone, as the screen image throbs (center). Even if your AirPods Pro hearing test says you have little or no hearing loss, you’ll get a number that quantifies the small amount it finds (right). When Apple launched new phones and other hardware in September, I said on a couple of podcasts that the AirPods Pro’s forthcoming hearing aid tech was the most important item on that day’s bill of fare. And finally, this week, the release of iOS 18.1 and updated AirPods Pro firmware brought the promised hearing test functionality to my AirPods Pro, along with the promise of software tuning to meet any hearing loss the test found.
Of course, all of it seems to have been eclipsed by the multi-day rollout of a bunch of new Mac computers. Still, somewhere between ordering a new Mac Mini and showing my coworkers the updated iMac colors, I took the AirPods Pro hearing test—along with a family member who has a longstanding hearing loss.
Is something wrong?When AirPods Pro detects a mild hearing losss, you can proceed to set them up as a pair of hearing aids.I’ve suspected for a few months that I’d lost a few frequencies in my left ear for age-related reasons. I don’t seem to hear as much detail from a big Sonos speaker in the kitchen, when I’m facing the other way, in the living room. I have some tinnitus, too, which is relatively new. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending a lot of time with a family member whose hearing has never been the greatest due to a number of childhood infections. So we both took Apple’s hearing test.
Once you’ve installed iOS 18.1, the test is offered by the AirPods Pro configuration screen. First, iOS runs a version of the AirPods Pro fit test, which I don’t think I’ve ever taken before. When I got my ‘pods, I just chose the smallest ear tips in the box.
Sure enough, I passed the fit test, and it was on to the hearing check. You’re tested one ear at a time, touching the screen anytime you hear a tone. Meanwhile, the image onscreen throbs in a way that convinced me that I should be hearing something, whether I did or not. I’m sure I tapped once or twice when I thought I was something was happening, but was not.
Hearing upgrade?When the test for both ears was completed, I got the verdict: little to no hearing loss. iOS did offer to tune my earbud so that media listening would be the best it could be for me—sure, why not? Music did sound noticeably better with Media Assist. It felt like a nice qualitative improvement. A podcast I listened to sounded as though they had slightly more high frequencies. Nice, but the improvement in music listening was greater for me.
My family member, who is not a power user by any means, had been gifted a pair of AirPods Pro precisely because of the hearing evaluation and assistance features. Her test showed mild hearing loss, and she was offered the chance to set up her AirPods Pro as hearing aids. (Despite the ruling, she believes her hearing loss is more than mild.)
She wore her AirPods at home and in the car throughout the day. She has worn hearing aids before, and says that like those devices, AirPods Pro sometimes accentuate sounds she doesn’t want to hear, like the noise of paper being crumpled. Overall, her take is that everyday sounds are sharper in tone. She said she wasn’t able to lower the required volume of her kitchen television as she had hoped. She also noted that AirPods Pro need to be charged during the day. While that process is quick, she perceives the buds’ battery life as a limitation versus other hearing aids.
For my part, it’s tough to tell if AirPods Pro have made listening to media mind-blowingly better. It’s good, though. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It’s also worth pointing out that you can retake the AirPods Pro hearing test at any time. That might offer some peace of mind if you’re worried about the trajectory of your hearing.
Our use of tech in Halloween celebrations; the smallest tech we regularly use and the small gadget that wowed us; which Apple Intelligence features we’re using and looking forward to next; and the one item we’d give up this week, tech or non-tech.
Go to the podcast page.
Twelve years ago, my former Macworld colleague Lex Friedman and I were at an Apple focused conference where we presented a talk called “Apple is Huge Now (And That Sucks For You)”. The long and short of it was that the Apple of 2012 was not the same Apple of the 1980s, 1990s, or even the 2000s—now Apple was a giant company that could less afford time worrying about you as an individual.
A decade-plus on, it’s hard to believe that Apple has gotten even bigger and that, fundamentally, each and every one of us matter that much less to it, but it’s unarguably true. Simply put, it’s a matter of scale—the company simply can’t afford to spend the same amount of time worrying about its customers that it could have twenty years ago, because there are just that many more of them.
In its role as one of the largest purveyors of technology in the world, Apple has no choice but to adopt a perspective of scale. This comes to play in all sorts of decisions the company makes, from the biggest of the big to the smallest of the small.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
This guy gets more RAM now.This week, all of Apple’s Mac announcements have featured one trend beyond the arrival of the M4 processor family on macOS: The lifting of base RAM configurations from 8GB to 16GB across the board on new models.
But it’s actually not just new models that are getting this boost. On Wednesday Apple also reconfigured its most popular laptop, the MacBook Air, to feature 16GB of RAM across all configurations at the same starting prices: $999 for the M2 model, $1099 for the M3 model.
With this move, there’s not a single new Mac being sold directly by Apple with less than 16GB of RAM. This is a big deal, because Apple doesn’t change base RAM that often—it’s a source of lucrative upgrade revenue.
As pointed out by Friend of the Site David Schaub, Apple’s base RAM figures tend to stick around for a long time. On consumer Mac laptops, since 2011 the base has only increased once—to 8GB, back in 2017.
Based on Schaub’s charts and the prevailing conversation in my own circles, these changes certainly feel long overdue. But let’s not be too quick to applaud Apple for its largesse here. Remember, Apple Intelligence (and AI models in general) tend to require a whole lot of memory to run well. The advent of Apple Intelligence seems likely to be the real motivator in giving even the cheapest Macs—a $599 Mac mini and a $999 M2 Macbook Air—a full load of 16GB of memory.
Whatever the reason, I’ll take it.
Apple’s week of Mac reveals rolls on with Wednesday’s announcement of the M4 MacBook Pro line. In some ways this is the smallest update of the week, but I’d wager that Apple sells far more MacBook Pros than iMacs and Mac minis put together. So in some ways, this is the biggest announcement yet.
The new 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro base model now starts at 16GB of RAM—the days of base 8GB of RAM in Macs seem to be at an end—but retains the same base price of $1599. Unlike last year, where only more expensive configurations gained access to the Space Black shade, this year all MacBook Pro models come in just Silver and Space Black, even the base M4 model.
The 14-inch base model now has ports on both sides!The M4 model sports three Thunderbolt 4 ports, one more than in the M3 model. And, yes, this means that the base-model MacBook Pro now has Thunderbolt ports on both sides.
The MacBook Pro’s best feature is its gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, which gets a boost in the M4 generation by getting quite a bit brighter, with a maximum of 1000 nits (up from 600) in standard-dynamic-range mode. (The max peak brightness in HDR mode remains unchanged at 1600 nits.) There’s also now a nano-texture display option, for laptop users who really need to get screen glare out of their eyes.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro also comes in higher-end chip configurations, and the 16-inch model only comes with the more powerful chips. The M4 Pro, which technically debuted Tuesday with the Mac mini, is of course also available on these models. It sure seems like the M4 Pro is the chip to gain the most between generations, with 75% more memory bandwidth and performance. Apple claims the M4 Pro is 30 percent faster than the M3 Pro, and three times as fast as the M1 Pro. The M4 Pro maxes out at 14 cores, 10 for performance and four for efficiency, can have as many as 20 GPU cores, and starts at 24GB of RAM with configurations up to 48GB. M4 Pro models start at $1999 (14-inch) and $2499 (16-inch).
But of course, there’s more—the M4 Max chip is making its debut in these systems. The M4 Max just offers more of everything, from its 16 CPU cores (12 performance, four efficiency) to up to 40-core GPU, to support for up to 128GB of memory.
Both higher-end chips support Thunderbolt 5, with doesn’t just support much faster data transfers, but also twice as much power delivery (200 watts, up from 100 watts in Thunderbolt 4), which is probably more relevant to a laptop than it would be to a Mac mini.
All three chip levels get a major webcam upgrade to the 12MP Center stage camera, which is the first Mac laptop webcam upgrade in quite a while. And Apple is claiming that all models can get up to 24 hours of battery life, which seems like a bit of a major milestone, even though (as always) battery life is not a simple thing to measure, and can vary widely based on how you use the computer in question.
Apple is taking pre-orders now, and the new MacBook Pro models will arrive in customers’ hands on Nov. 8.
Great piece by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge about the evolution of the Amazon Echo and how an exciting project turns into a boring one:
Alexa is still mainly doing what it’s always done: playing music, reporting the weather, and setting timers. Its capabilities have expanded — Alexa can now do useful things like control your lights, call your mom, and remind you to take out the trash. But despite a significant investment of time, money, and resources over the last decade, the voice assistant hasn’t become noticeably more intelligent. As one former Amazon employee said, “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer.”
I’ve had some sort of smart speaker in my house since the first Echo, which I reviewed back in 2015, and I agree wholeheartedly with Tuohy’s assessment. There was a real feeling of breakthrough to that original product, but—not unlike Siri—it feels like it never really moved a base level of functionality, despite all of Amazon’s efforts.
I think a big part of what has stymied Amazon in particular is trying to figure out where the Echo fit into its overall strategy. If Apple’s business is selling hardware and Google’s is selling ads, Amazon’s biggest might be shopping? But the shopping experience from the Echo has always been weird and less than ideal. 1
Some of these problems might get resolved by the introduction of large language models that make voice assistants like Alexa and Siri more responsive, but again, as Tuohy points out, the real challenge is acting on our requests—to which I’d argue, the real underlying subtext is that whether we can get to a point where we can trust the voice assistants to do what we’re asking them. If you can’t—if the worry is that you will ask it to water your plants and come home to find your house flooded—then this whole technology is nothing more than an evolutionary cul de sac.
- My wife and I still regularly joke about the time when, after having bought several ceiling fans from Amazon in the process of renovating our now house, the Echo weeks later chimed, seemingly at random, and suggested that it might be time to order more ceiling fans. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Just in time for Halloween, Apple has delivered a new version of its smallest Mac, which you could probably even fit into one of those plastic pumpkins.
As a current Mac mini user (and someone who’s owned three or four of them over the years), I eyed today’s announcement with interest and, if we’re being painfully honest, no small amount of envy. This M2 Pro Mac mini sitting on my desk? It’s fine. Well, truthfully, it’s better than fine: it’s great. I use it every day and it never bats an eye at any task I throw in its direction. It’s just a year and a half old, and as we know with Apple Silicon Macs, these things last. (Just ask my M1 MacBook Air.)
But the siren song of the new and shiny is always alluring, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t already priced out a new M4 model within a few minutes of its announcement. But in true Halloween fashion, there are some spoooooky factors to consider that make a swap not quite straightforward as you might think.
Treat: The mini-est Mac everIt’s jut so wee. At 5 inches square, the M4 Mac mini is more than a third smaller in both width and depth than its 7.75-inch predecessor—in fact, it’s closer in footprint to the 3.66 inches of the Apple TV 4K. (Although at 2 inches, it’s a bit taller than both the M2 mini and the Apple TV.) I won’t say my desk space is at a premium—all you have to do is look at the junk strewn across it—but the idea of freeing up some room is pleasing, as is the fact that the M4 models weigh about a pound less than the M2 models—aluminum may be light, but it’s still metal.
Trick: Memory games32GB was dead all along!?My current M2 Pro Mac mini has 32GB of RAM; the M4 Pro Mac mini ships standard with 24GB of RAM, but the upgrade options are 48GB for an extra $400 or 64GB for an extra $600. That’s not an insignificant cost to meet (and, to be fair, beat) my current specs. Would I choose to pay the money or downgrade? Now that’s a dilemma.
Treat: USB-C what I did there?I’ve been calling for this ever since Apple proved it could put ports on the front of its desktop Macs with the Mac Studio, and I’m pleased as punch it delivered. No more maneuvering behind my mini or Studio Display when I want to plug in a thumb drive or security key. I could even plug in the audio interface on my desk with a shorter cord if I needed to. Convenience! Function over form! Who would have thunk it!
Treat/Trick: Audio port affront…Wait, there’s an audio jack in the front too? Look, having just extolled the virtues of front-mounted USB-C ports, I feel that I would be a cad to ding the design for putting the headphone jack there too. After all, if you’re plugging in headphones, you don’t want to root around in back of the mini every time.
Except I use my audio port to keep a pair of desktop speakers plugged in, which is a little awkward from a cable management perspective. Sure, I could use a dongle, I guess, but then I’m eating up a valuable Thunderbolt 5 port for speakers. Maybe it’s time to—gasp—finally ditch those desktop monitors in favor of the Studio Display’s built-in ones.
Trick: Trade-in shunYes, I did go ahead and price out exactly how much Apple would give me for my pristine Mac mini with a 10 core CPU/16 core GPU M2 Pro, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. It’s practically brand new, well, from April 2023. And the result was…$445.
Look, I’m not saying that’s nothing compared to the cost of a brand new computer, but it is on the sobering side. They say your computer loses half the value when you drive it off the Apple Store lot, but that’s more like two-thirds! I’d probably fare better selling it elsewhere.
Ultimately, I think an M4 Pro Mac mini is unfortunately not in my future, even though I keep getting misty-eyed when I look at the pictures. But good news: given the last design of the Mac mini lasted effectively fourteen years, this one’s not going anywhere soon. So I guess there’s always the M5.
Apple’s big week, featuring a new iMac and the launch of Apple Intelligence, just got smaller. A lot smaller.
Just in time for Halloween, it’s a Fun Size Mac mini. The redesigned M4 Mac mini has a footprint of five inches by five inches (and two inches high), making it 60 percent less volume than the previous design and easily the smallest desktop Mac ever.
The previous Mac mini design dates from all the way back to 2010, when it was sized to incorporate an internal optical drive! That was terrible timing because of course that was the last generation of the Mac mini to even offer an internal optical drive as an option. Still, all the extra space inside that 7.75-inch-by-7.75-inch footprint was probably helpful in fitting in PowerPC and Intel hardware… and cooling it. Now, fourteen years later, the Mac mini is sized for the tiny, cool Apple silicon era at last.
Behold! (Image: Apple.)Following the lead of its larger silver-aluminum cousin, 2022’s Mac Studio, the new Mac mini features two conveniently front-facing USB-C ports (but no SD card slot). On the back are three Thunderbolt ports, as well as Ethernet and HDMI. Apple says the new enclosure uses 85% less aluminum than the previous model, is partially made of recycled aluminum, and is officially Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac.
The M4 Mac mini starts at the same $599 price point as the previous model, despite the fact that the base model now ships with 16GB of RAM, twice the previous 8GB minimum. (All M4 models come with 10 CPU and GPU cores.) Of course, prices escalate quickly from there, if you want to add RAM or storage capacity or a 10G ethernet option.
While the M4 Mac mini will undoubtedly be quite a bit faster than its M2 predecessor, there are more substantial gains to be made on the higher end. Just as with previous Apple Silicon-era models, the new Mac mini will also be available in a higher-end chip configuration.
The Mac mini with the new M4 Pro chip—which starts at $1399—supports the upgraded Thunderbolt 5 specification, comes with 24GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), offers 14 CPU cores (10 performance and four efficiency) and up to 20 GPU cores, and 75% faster memory bandwidth (!!!) than the M3 Pro. The base model has 12 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores; a $200 upgrade gets you the full 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores. As with the M4 mini, the M4 Pro model can very rapidly cost you $2500 or $3000 if you boost RAM, storage, and more.
And keep in mind, the Mac mini was never updated to the M3—its last update was to the M2 in early 2023. So if you’re just looking at the Mac mini, the model-to-model speed boosts will be even more impressive than the gains between this chip generation and the last.
Finally, if you’re afraid Apple has cheated by moving its power supply outboard to make the Mac mini smaller, don’t worry. Just like the previous Mac mini, the new model’s power supply is internal, and it’s connected by the same two-pin power plug used in previous models. (The only difference is that Apple’s now using a braided power cable.)
The new Mac mini models will arrive in stores and customers’ hands beginning Nov. 8.
We kick off a busy week by analyzing the new M4 iMac, the arrival of two different waves of Apple Intelligence, and Jason’s review of the iPad mini, but we’ll have to wait a week to score our draft because there’s more yet to come!
Go to the podcast page.
I recently attended the RSA conference in San Francisco–security’s biggest event of the year– and I was struck by how infatuated everyone was with the promise of new, shiny solutions to fix new, shiny problems. On some level that’s not surprising–tech is constantly driving toward the future, and security is one of the fastest-moving areas of tech.
But on the other hand, it seems like the security industry is walking away from some of its most foundational problems before they’ve actually been solved. People would rather talk about AI-powered behavioral analytics that can detect when a worker’s mouse is moving strangely than the decidedly un-glamorous work of rolling out patches and managing permissions.
This disconnect was especially clear in the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). This year’s report found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials. The 2024 DBIR found that “use of stolen credentials” is the number one initial action during a breach, and that credentials are the number one way attackers get in in non-error, non-misuse breaches, followed by phishing and vulnerability exploits.
What’s frustrating about the persistence of credential-based attacks is that they are eminently solvable! Roll out a password manager to your end users, put SSO and MFA in front of sensitive applications, and implement passkeys when possible. Yet in 1Password’s 2022 State of Access Report, only 29% of respondents said they used a password manager at work.
The same narrative about credentials is also true about compromised devices and, especially, employee training. The DBIR’s authors said as much in a webinar about the report, claiming that “You can address two-thirds of these breaches by training and equipping your employees appropriately.”
But at RSAC, it was tough to fill a room for a talk on employee training or credential management. The popular talks tended to focus on things like the dangers of AI deepfakes, which is ironic, since the 2024 DBIR said that GenAI hasn’t made much of an impact on breaches so far.
This needs to change, and the 2024 DBIR offers a clear look at where we’re falling short and where we go from here.
To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full blog.
With the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, Apple is hopping aboard the generative AI train. Apple Intelligence is a suite of disparate features, first announced earlier this year at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, that the company is gradually rolling out over the course of several software updates in the next months.
The first round of these features includes a few different capabilities, most prominently a systemwide set of Writing Tools; summaries of notifications and email messages; minor changes to Siri (with more coming later); and tools in Photos that led you remove unwanted elements or create themed movies with just a text prompt.
It’s unquestionable that Apple is putting its weight behind these efforts, but what’s been less clear is just how effective and useful these tools will be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for anybody who has used similar generative AI tools, the answer is a definite maybe.
A collection of Writing ToolsOne of the more complete and functional pieces of the first wave of Apple Intelligence is Writing Tools, a set of language-model-based tools that are designed to refine, summarize, and reformat things you’ve written.
Writing Tools’ Proofread can be useful, but it’s also inconsistent.The Proofread feature is meant to offer a set of intuitive corrections that go beyond a standard spelling or grammar checker (both of which are already offered by Apple’s built-in text system). It’s sort of an inbuilt version of something like Grammarly Pro, which costs $144 a year. When you choose Proofread, an animation represents Apple Intelligence “scanning” your document. (Apple Intelligence is full of this sort of razzle-dazzle. You can decide for yourself if it’s whimsical or phony.) When it’s done, a floating palette appears, letting you navigate between suggested corrections and choosing whether to approve or undo the changes.
Unfortunately, I found Proofread’s interface to be pretty inconsistent. Sometimes the “scanning” animation never ended. Other times, it would say that it had found numerous corrections, but didn’t show them to me or let me navigate to them. When it did work, the results were also spotty. I introduced five common mistakes (ones I make myself, all the time, like dropped words) to a document and Proofread found three. Better than nothing, but Grammarly would’ve aced the same test. Building a feature like Proofread into the OS is a great idea, but this particular feature needs more polish.
All Writing Tools are collected in a single view.The Rewrite command lets you use the power of Apple’s LLM to change your writing into one of three different styles: Friendly, Professional, and Concise. Now, let me be honest: I am not the target audience for this feature, because I’m someone who writes stuff for a living. The goal of Rewrite is to provide output that is superior to content provided by someone who struggles with writing, with getting their points across, with getting the right tone. When I wrote sample paragraphs that were halting and a bit confused and messy, Rewrite did a pretty good job of making them serviceable.
When I turned it on my own writing, I saw it do what LLMs tend to do—change a bunch of the words to synonyms, add two-dollar words when simpler ones would do, and drain the entire thing of personality. Look, LLMs are all about finding the middle ground, embracing clichés, and stamping out individualism. If you’re a professional writer, your job is to avoid writing samey stuff. But if you’re someone who struggles to get your point across in writing, the middle ground is exactly where you dream of being. This set of tools will be a boon for people who struggle with writing. If you’re already an average writer, though, they’ll be of no use to you.
LLMs are great at churning through content and then summarizing it, and Apple has embraced that by adding two different summarization features to Writing Tools: Summary and Key Points. Summary takes your selected text and generates a one-paragraph summary in a floating box. You can choose to have the summary replace your text, or put it on your Clipboard to use elsewhere.
Key Points is a little more expansive. It creates a bulleted list of the points in your content—basically it’s an executive summary, for the kind of people who prefer to view the world as a series of bulleted lists. Your boss might be one of those people. Key Points will be able to help you out—though I found some of its suggestions a little iffy. As with so many LLM-generated bits of content, my advice is to use Key Points and then edit it a bit to match your own understanding of the key points. LLMs are best used in conjunction with a human brain, as an aid, not as a replacement.
The last two Writing Tools are really reformatting tools, and I like them unreservedly. List takes your selection and turns it into a list—great for quickly converting a sentence that lists a bunch of stuff (separated by commas) into a bulleted list. And Table will take text that would probably be better formatted as a fancy table, and turns it into that table! Computers exist to remove drudgery from our lives, not create more of it. If an LLM can be harnessed to save you a minute of formatting, or four minutes of remembering how to make a table in your text editor, that’s the right thing to do. —Jason Snell
Photos gets cleaned upBackground items to be cleaned up will be highlighted (left), and then intelligently replaced with generated background imagery.After a bunch of major interface changes in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, Apple’s Photos app gains a few new features courtesy of Apple Intelligence.
The major addition is Clean Up, which allows you to remove unwanted items from your photographs. To use it, you need to enter editing mode and then click or tap on the Clean Up icon. Apple Intelligence will scan your photo for potentially distracting items and will highlight them with a shimmering effect. Tapping shimmering items will remove them, but you can try to remove anything at all in a given image. The best way to remove an item is probably to swipe across it as if you’re blotting it out, but you can also try just circling an item to indicate that you want it gone.
Apple Intelligence will look at the context of your entire photo and then attempt to replace the erased item with something that matches the rest of its surroundings. In my tests, it worked quite well, though occasionally it failed. Most of the failures seem to have been when there was a complex background and just not enough additional information for it to make a good guess about what should be back there.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/cleanup-ios18.mp4I just wish Apple hadn’t waited until 2024 to launch this feature—and limit it to devices powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence—since you could use the Photomator app to do this on the iPad five years ago. It’s great that it’s here, but I don’t understand the wait.
The other major Apple Intelligence feature in Photos is the ability to build a Memory—a movie and collection of photos—based entirely on a typed prompt. (This feature appears to not have yet been made available on macOS, but Apple says it’s coming later.) Click or tap to enter the Memories collection and then tap Create to bring up an Apple Intelligence prompt, and then just type in whatever you’d like to see. Apple Intelligence will then scan your entire Photos collection—and all the while, a fun animation gives you the impression that you’re watching it do its magical A.I. work. All of these Memories are saved and are editable, just like any other Memory.
When I prompted Photos to create a Memory of “Evie on walks on trails,” it obliged—every photo and video it showed me in the resulting Memory was of my (dear departed) dog walking on various hiking trails. A prompt of “Myke smiling” generated a very smile-forward montage of my friend Myke and various times he smiled for the camera. The results aren’t perfect, but they can be impressive. —JS
Siri: New look, mostly same old intelligenceDespite Apple’s marketing of a new and improved Siri, the voice assistant hasn’t changed that much with this first set of Apple Intelligence capabilities. The most obvious “new feature” is actually a new look: on iOS and iPadOS, instead of the little glowing orb that used to indicate Siri had been activated, you’ll now see a colorful wash over the entire screen, accompanied by a “ripple” effect. When you speak, the rainbow colors around the edge will pulse with the rhythm of your speech, a pseudo-waveform. As Siri recognizes your words, you’ll see the transcription appear in a gray bubble at the top of the screen.
The effect is in your face and utterly unmissable. Whether that makes it better, well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I think it looks fresh and new, but there is something distracting about it, as if it’s suggesting that rather than Siri being something that lives in your phone, your entire device is nothing more than a vessel for the assistant. (The effect is similar on iPad and even CarPlay, though it’s more subtle on the Mac.)
That said, one actual advantage of the new design is that you can continue to use your device while the Siri interface is active, in case you need to open an app to refer to something. Siri, in other words, is more persistent. Similarly, it’s also more patient. If you stumble over your words, or you realize you’ve made a mistake and hasten to correct it, Siri will now be far more forgiving. So, for example, if you say “What’s the weather going to be in Cupertino, I mean San Francisco” you’ll get the San Francisco weather, not Cupertino or, worse, some message about how it didn’t understand you.
In general, Siri isn’t significantly more knowledgeable in this incarnation than previously. Don’t expect it to suddenly be able to answer queries that it didn’t before. There is, however, one exception: information about Apple’s own products. Apple has fed the virtual assistant its help documents, allowing you to ask questions about how to use features—within reason. You can say “How do I turn on Screen Sharing” and it will print out a list of steps. But that’s limited by the information Apple has given it—a question about how to turn on Screen Sharing via the command line yielded the same steps. Asking it how to find out how much RAM my Mac had gave me instructions for finding out how much RAM my Mac was currently using—close, but not quite right. “How to set up Time Machine” fared worse: Siri just told me it couldn’t do that.
All of that functionality raises a separate question: it’s great that Siri can tell you how to do these things, but why can’t it take things a step further and actually do them? Why do I have to ask Siri how to turn on Screen Sharing when it should be able to at least open System Settings to the right pane and show me the checkbox? (The ability to perform actions in apps is one that Apple is promising for the future, though it’s unclear when it will arrive.)
macOS Sequoia’s Type to Siri option.Finally, Siri also gains easier to access “type to Siri” options across the line. On the iPhone and iPad you can quickly trigger this by double tapping the Home bar at the bottom of the screen. This will pop up a keyboard and dialogue box, backed by the same undulating colors. On the Mac, you can configure a keyboard shortcut to bring up a glowing dialogue box that you can drag around the screen. As you type, it’ll suggest actions to you, including shortcuts you’ve created.
I can see the appeal to a multimodal approach for Siri, but in the past weeks that I’ve had this feature available I’m not sure I’ve ever used it beyond testing. To my mind, Siri is still a primarily voice-driven interface; if there’s information that I want to retrieve by typing it, I’m still more likely to type it into a web browser or open the relevant app. Some of that is muscle memory, to be sure, but some of it is just a general uncertainty that remains with Siri: whether it will understand the query, whether it will return the information I’m looking for, or whether it can handle the task at all. Why waste my time with that when I know exactly where to go for the information I want? Or, frankly, type the same query into Google?
Apple has promised a smarter Siri as part of Apple Intelligence, though it seems likely those improvements will not arrive until next year at the earliest. But utility remains Siri’s biggest hurdle: as the old expression goes, if you want something done right, do it yourself. Whether Apple’s changes can overcome more than a decade of users getting accustomed to Siri’s limitation remains to be seen. —Dan Moren
Check what’s in the MailTry as we might, we haven’t been able to get rid of email. As someone who still wades through a not insignificant number of messages every day, I was excited that Apple seemed to actually be bringing some attention to bear on Mail with three Apple Intelligence features: message prioritization, summaries, and Smart Reply. Unfortunately, they’ve been mostly underwhelming in my experience.
Messages from my mom are, of course, high priority……but it’s hilarious when Mail thinks messages about my Dungeons & Dragons campaign also reach that threshold.Priority messages has been the most disappointing for me. The promise is that Apple’s algorithms are analyzing messages to let you know when there’s something important you need to see; it then moves it into a special highlighted section at the top of your inbox so you can’t miss it. Unfortunately, the analysis has been less than great; most days I don’t even see a priority message in my inbox (which I guess means maybe my mail isn’t important enough?). The messages it has shown me have included an emailed verification code for a login. Which I guess is important, but given that Mail will already autofill that code for me, doesn’t actually seem like it needs to be highlighted? I’ve seen reports of other users getting spam messages getting priortized too.
Meanwhile, actual messages from, say, my literary agent or guests on my podcasts, get mixed in with all the other mail. So what are we doing here? Right now this feature feels tremendously uneven, and rather than helpfully highlighting mail you really should see, it’s mostly providing opportunities for eyerolling and occasional amusement. It’s my hope that the results will get better as Apple improves its model.
Smart Reply, meanwhile, is an extension of autocomplete, offering you automatically generated replies to an email. This feature appears to, not unlike Priority Messages, be highly contextual: I’ve mainly seen it offered on occasions when the original message asked a specific question. (A similar feature appears in Messages.) For example, a request for my availability for a meeting might have prompts for “Yes…” and “No…”; tapping either would quickly generate reply of the likes:
“Hi Jason,
Yes, I am available for a meeting at that time.
Best,”
Or
“Hi Jason,
Thanks for reaching out. No, I am not available for a meeting at that time.
Best,”
The responses are perhaps a bit anodyne, likely best suited for professional interactions. I appreciate that it lets me at least sign my name, as though waiting for my imprimatur.
As with the Writing Tools, I find myself at a bit of a loss when it comes to evaluating this feature. Frankly, I’m not sure that I will ever use it—I balk even at the cases when Messages wants to offer me a “Sounds good!” reply, a thing I might actually type!—because of some inherent resistance to letting a machine speak for me. Not to mention that if I am ultimately going to have to edit an automatically generated reply anyway, am I really saving any time?
But I also know that my opinions aren’t necessarily universal. I like writing. It’s what I do for a living. I’m not saying I handcraft each email I write with the same attention to detail that I put into a novel or a review like this, but I do take pride in how I convey myself in writing. Not everybody wants to spend their time and energy on that, and definitely not everybody enjoys it. If there are people who are stressed or harried by having to write responses to lots of email, Smart Replies can certainly be a timesaver, but like any generative AI, it probably bears a human eye reviewing it—we’re not yet in “hit a button and have it send the reply for you” territory.
Finally, summaries. Much has already been written about this frequently used aspect of AI technology, so let me…sum up.
Sometimes Apple Intelligence’s summary of mail messages is useful……and sometimes it summarizes spam messages.Apple’s got a strong argument going for it that showing a summary of a message in the inbox is more useful than just a preview of the first line or two. Of course, that’s highly dependent on the contents of the message. I’ve had the summary feature summarize a two-line message, in which case, I would ask: is that actually more valuable than seeing the first one or two lines of a message? On the other end of the spectrum, it’s gamely tried to provide a summary of the New York Times morning newsletter, which…why? Providing a summary has little impact to me, personally, on whether or not I’m going to read a message. Sometimes messages don’t get summarized, or summaries show up later.
I’ve also had it summarize spam messages with the same level of enthusiasm as actual mail, because—and this is key for all of these AI language models, not just Apple’s—it has no way of telling the difference between what’s real and what’s a scam, anymore than it can detect humor, tone, or subtext.
Similarly, much of the challenge with these summaries, as with their appearances elsewhere, is whether or not you can trust them. I have a daily report that gets emailed to me for an automated task running on my Synology, and on at least one occasion, the summary interpreted part of that report in exactly the opposite fashion, saying no new update was available when one was. Fortunately, it was not a critical situation by any means, but it doesn’t exactly make me confident that the summaries are going to reflect reality—and at that point, again, I’m not sure that makes this feature better than not having it.
Can summaries save you time? Sure, they can. I would argue that Apple coudl save me more time by doing a better job of identifying spam and not letting it get to my inbox, but ah well. Perhaps the forthcoming mail categorization features that Apple announced back at WWDC will improve upon the mail triage experience. —DM
Summary judgmentThanks, Apple, for summarizing your web page where you post press releases.Apple Intelligence summaries pop up in a few other places around the operating systems in these updates, including in Safari, where they’re accessible via what used to be the controls for Reader mode in the address bar. That result means that Reader is a little trickier to access, since it’s now just a button within that menu, but you can alo tap/click and hold on the button to jump right to the mode.
The summaries are, like summaries elsewhere in the OSes, of mixed utility. One can argue they do exactly what they claim to on the tin by summarizing. Summaries are one thing that generative AI are reasonably good at.
Here, for example, is the summary of Jason’s Wikipedia page1
The article discusses Jason Snell, an American writer, editor, and podcaster. Snell has had a successful career in technology and pop culture journalism, covering Apple products and services extensively. He is known for his early Internet publishing work, including creating the fiction journal InterText and editing several other early Internet magazines and websites.
As a summary this is…fine. It’s straightforward, identifying broad highlights, but ultimately bloodless and I’d argue it elides certain important details (such as, for example, which magazine he spent most of his career working for?). It remains unclear to me under what circumstances most people want this summary info, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that if Apple felt like this feature was actually compelling, it wouldn’t be buried in the Reader mode, a feature designed to enhance people’s experience of reading an article. More than anything, this feature seems to exist as a preventive measure for people using summary tools from other generative AI services.
Sometimes the summarize feature warns you it’s not designed for this, but you can still go ahead anyway.The feature has also been somewhat inconsistent in terms of when it is available. I’ve had web pages of articles where the Summarize option isn’t present at all. Sometimes summaries are automatically generated, albeit in potentially humorous places, such as Apple’s Newsroom site. Other times, I’ve tried to get a summary only to have the system warn me that the feature “isn’t designed to handle this type of content.”2
Summaries are also utilized by notifications in order to collect groups of alerts that you might get from an app: for example, if you receive several text messages while you’re away from your devices, it theoeretically provides a quick way to catch up when you return. Sometimes this feature is very handy, but it also often yields hilarious and strange results, misinterpreting who is commenting or even, in some cases, providing a summary that is the opposite of what actually happened. Other times the summaries seem to highlight the “machine” nature of machine learning, such as in the now viral tale of the man who got dumped via text message: the summary may have been accurate, but it was delivered in an inhumane fashion that belied any actual understanding of the message’s import.
Summaries of Home notifications are more useful and less prone to error than, say, text messages.That said, there is still some utility. For example, repeated messages from the Home app about the status of certain sensors can be grouped together with the most recent information highlighted. For these kinds of rote messages, summaries seem much handier; one gets the most relevant detail at a glance, which is what summaries should do, with little risk of misinterpreting someone’s meaning.
The idea behind notification summaries is a sound one; its usefulness seems to come down entirely to the accuracy of Apple’s models. Given how endemic that issue seems to be amongst all LLMs, it seems as though there is an uphill climb in front of the industry in general.—DM
ConclusionOf course, these updates represent only the first set of Apple Intelligence powered tools. The second wave, including Apple’s image-focused features, is already rolling out in developer betas, and are likely to arrive as public betas in the not too distant future. It’s probably fair to say that the features get more ambitious as they go; Apple was slow to ramp up its generative AI efforts, and this first set is more about table stakes than anything truly transformative.
The other big question is about how Apple Intelligence will improve over time. Rivals like OpenAI have made a point of regularly rolling out better models; it seems reasonable to assume Apple would do the same, though that the ultimately depends on how important they truly consider these features. So there is certainly every possibility that our results for these features are in the earliest of days. But just as you should never buy hardware based on the promise of future software updates, you should never trust software updates to improve software either: there’s always the chance that what you see now is what you get.
- And here’s the summary of my Wikipedia page: “”. ↩
- We can all agree that the Macalope is unsummarizable. ↩
Begun, the week of Mac announcements has. Apple on Monday unveiled revamped iMac models, powered by its new M4 processors, in a series of bold new tints.
The iMac’s design remains largely the same as its predecessor, with a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, although Apple has now added a nano-texture option, à la the Studio Display and the new iPad Pro, for some models.1 There’s also now a 12MP Center Stage capable webcam, replacing the previous 1080p option. Apple also notes that this version supports the Desk View feature that allows it to show the user’s desk in addition to their face.
While the colors remain the same—blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow, green, and silver—Apple has tweaked the backs of the computer with more vibrant versions of most of the colors.
The new M4 iMac green and pink colors (left) compared to the M3 models (right).The M4 iMac comes in a handful of configurations: a $1299 base 8-core CPU/8-core CPU model with 16GB of RAM (double the previous 8GB, and expandable to 24GB) and a 256GB SSD (configurable up to 2TB), along with two Thunderbolt 4 ports. The previous model offered only two Thunderbolt 3 ports along with two USB 3 ports. This model supports a single external 6K external display at 60Hz in addition to the built-in display. Gigabit Ethernet is available as a $30 configuration option.
The higher end $1499 model features a 10-core CPU/10-core GPU processor and adds the ability to go up to 32GB of RAM as well as an additional two Thunderbolt 4 ports and Gigabit Ethernet standard. There are also $1699 and $1899 configurations as well; the former upgrades to 512GB of storage, while the latter includes both that and 24GB of RAM. Any of these configurations offer the nano-texture display for an additional $200, and can drive up to two 6K external displays at 60Hz or a single 8K external display at 60Hz. (Apple’s iMac website originally said 120Hz, but that was an error that the company has corrected.)
VESA mount versions of all models are available at the same price.
Along with the new iMacs, Apple has at long last updated its input peripherals with USB-C support, offering color-matched versions of the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad. They remain otherwise unchanged, including the lack of an inverted-T arrow key layout and the Magic Mouse’s underside charging port. It’s also worth noting that the $1299 base model includes a Magic Keyboard without Touch ID standard.
The new iMac models are available for pre-order today and will be on sale as of November 8.
- However, those two products use different techniques to achieve that finish and it’s unclear as of this writing which the iMac is using. ↩
Next week, the first round of Apple Intelligence will be loosed on the general public, including the Clean Up feature in Photos that lets you alter images to remove unwanted elements. This is not a new feature in photography—in fact, Photos is probably the last photo utility in the world to get a feature like this.
But that won’t stop some very loud, reactionary voices complaining about Clean Up as if it were the end of the world. And of course, as with any high-profile Apple announcement, there have been media reports that purposefully try to take features like Clean Up to extremes far beyond what anyone would reasonably do. The approach that leads to headlines like “I only ate peanut butter for a week!”
Last year, people were starting to get very existential about image editing because of the first version of Google’s Magic Editor, and everyone suddenly became concerned that Apple’s image pipeline was getting too over-engineered. People should really have not gotten so hung up on what even is a photograph, maaaaaan.
I first wrote about this last October, but this time, I feel like I need to be less philosophical about it and a lot more direct.
If it pleases the courtThe photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.
Clean Up is a fairly conservative photo editing tool in comparison to what other companies offer. Sometimes, people like to apply a uniform narrative that Silicon Valley companies are all destroying reality equally in the quest for AI dominance, but that just doesn’t suit this tool that lets you remove some distractions from your image.
Clearly, companies like Meta which posted on Threads that people could use AI to fabricate their images of the northern lights so they wouldn’t feel left out, are up to entirely different shenanigans. Sure, that mushed-together image isn’t courtroom evidence either, but morally and artistically, what is even the point of a fake image of the northern lights posted to social media?
This is where everyone with a computer engineering degree starts saying, “But, but, but…” Because they are uncomfortable with any kind of ambiguity. How can removing a distraction from the background be ethical when hallucinating an image of the northern lights is not? Aren’t they all lies? Through the transitive property, doesn’t that make them both evil?
Yes and no. (Indistinct grumbling.) Ethically, what is the subject of your photo? Who is the audience for the photo? What do you want to communicate to the audience about the photo?
If the subject of the photo is my boyfriend, the audience is the people on Instagram who follow my boyfriend’s private Instagram account, and the thing that he wants to communicate is that he was in front of a famous bridge in Luzerne, then there is no moral or ethical issue with me removing the crossbody bag strap that he had on for some of the photos I shot.
I took the photo, composed with him in the center, as is the way he likes these things composed, and then he remembered he had the bag on and didn’t want the bright green strap. He did move and wanted different framing, though that I didn’t feel was as good as the first shot. I told him I thought the other one I took with him and the strap looked the best for the narrow 9:16 Instagram Story framing, and he agreed, but he wanted the strap removed.
See, that composition on the one without the strap just isn’t as good. However, he didn’t like the strap in the one with the strap. Problem solved with editing.This was before the release of Clean Up, so I fired up Pixelmator on my iPhone, removed part of the bag with the retouching tool, and then copied and transformed the shoulder and part of the shirt collar from another image. Certainly not as easy as Clean Up, but things like his shoulder are genuine images from another slice in time instead of total reconstructions using only the image being edited as a source (I feel like this is a shortcoming of Clean Up and would like a 2.0 that can source from patterns in surrounding photos, but I digress.)
The point is that yes, the image is no longer courtroom evidence, but courtroom evidence of what? That he never wears bright green bag straps? Who would care about such a thing? Certainly not the audience of people who follow his private account on Instagram that just like to see a photo of him smiling in front of some bridge in Switzerland. That’s exactly what the photo was.
Morally, I’m totally fine with all that. He was at the bridge. He did, at one point, not have that strap on his shoulder. I wasn’t removing a tattoo. I didn’t fabricate a different background for the photo.
“But, but, but!” Yes, I know, it’s not 100% what happened all in that same sliver of time. “The bag strap is part of the moment!” Yeah, but there were all those photos where he’s holding it below the frame, off his shoulder. No one is going to argue that I should have framed the shot to include him holding the bag for truth. Why would they?
For some reason, even the most literal of literal people is fine with composing a shot to not include things. To even (gasp!) crop things out of photos. You can absolutely change meaning and context just as much through framing and cropping as you can with a tool like Clean Up. No one is suggesting that the crop tool be removed or that we should only be allowed to take the widest wide-angle photographs possible to include all context at all times, like security camera footage.
Another example from that day in Luzerne was when we got lunch in a neat brewery by the river. He had a big copper still behind him, but he also had that dreaded green bag and my reflection in that still. I just cropped it. It was the simplest solution. However, he did have a water bottle that I removed with a retouching tool. Is that different from cropping out the bag? Again, is there some court case about water bottles or bag straps? No. No one would care. This is for the people who follow his Instagram Stories. Crop it, and use Clean Up; it’s ethically equivalent.
Artistic considerationsI will provide two counterpoints for when not to use Clean Up that has nothing to do with morality, just to show that there are other artistic considerations. If you have a photo that has a crowd of people in the distance at a landmark, then leave them alone. Those indistinct clumps of people provide scale for the landmark and a sense that you’re not traveling in some world devoid of humanity.
Not every person in the background of a photo is a candidate for removal. You don’t want to be at a haunted beach or a waterfall that could be 2 feet or 200 feet tall. If one bozo has a highlighter-yellow fanny pack, then sure, remove, or selectively desaturate that in Pixelmator or Lightroom. (Gasp! More lies!)
The other time to not use Clean Up is when you have some overlapping areas of high detail behind, or in front, of what you’re trying to remove. Tools like Clean Up, just like all other retouching tools, work best when the thing you’re removing is fairly isolated and distinct, with a very indistinct area of fill behind them. If you’re trying to remove a guy standing in front of a tapestry, then it’s probably not going to go very well. If the foreground subject matter you’re keeping has long hair blowing in the wind, then the bozos behind that hair are not going to be removed cleanly. Wait until they at least walk to the screen left or right of the hair.
People can understand these limitations and use them to make creative choices while they’re framing their shots. If there’s a bozo that’s standing in front of a wall, and they’re just not going to move any time soon, then get a shot where he’s near the edges of your foreground subject (it’s a digital camera, so take a bunch of shots) and then you can have an easier time removing them. Also, things like Portrait Mode (more lies!) can help, especially since Portrait Mode has substantially improved its image segmentation and edge detection. That blurry bozo is even easier to fill in with blurry background than detailed background.
Above all else, remember that if it’s just a bad photo, then it’s just a bad photo. You can keep it for yourself instead of sharing it or trash it if you prefer. Even with every photo-editing tool under the sun, they can’t all be winners.
Don’t get it twistedLike I said earlier, this is about common sense, and if, upon some introspection, the thing you find alarming is that you don’t know how to ethically use this tool, then it’s totally fine if you don’t use it.
However, I don’t want to see silly, sweeping statements from people that foist their anxieties based on their ignorance onto other people. I don’t want to see all image editing tools lumped together with one another, or worse, with every other thing that has “AI” in the name. These tools are not all the same thing. These photos aren’t all the same. Use your brain and not some puritanical binary rule to lump all edited photos together. Let people have photos that they like!
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.
So, join the community of over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Last month, my Mac Studio stopped working. It went quickly from a bizarre error message to the inability to install software updates to a failure to reinstall the base operating system to a trip to the Genius Bar. (Shout out to Apple Genius Jim at the Corte Madera Apple Store for instantly detecting the problem!)
Unfortunately, the solution that got my Mac going again involved entirely wiping the drive. Once I got home from the Apple Store with a functional Mac Studio, I had to pick up the pieces and get my Mac back to a functional state.
It took almost no time because of one choice I made a few years back. And I’m going to encourage you all to make the same choice, if you haven’t already.
I got up and running in no time because I keep a USB drive permanently attached to my Mac Studio, and make sure it’s a complete clone of my drive. When I reinstalled macOS Sequoia, I was able to use Migration Assistant to restore from my cloned backup drive, and it returned me to more or less the same state I had been in when the computer died. (I also rely on files synced with the cloud, which was another help.)
So here’s my two-fold advice for every Mac user, especially if you tend to leave your Mac docked in one place most of the time1:
First, buy an external SSD that’s as big or bigger than your Mac’s internal hard drive. My Mac Studio has a 1TB internal drive and I bought a Samsung external 2TB drive on Amazon for about $175. Today’s external drives are small, silent, and bus powered—a far cry from the external drives of yesteryear. Since my Mac Studio lives under my desk, I just plugged the drive in and slid it next to the Mac Studio in its holding shelf. It’s invisible.
Next, I set a disk cloning program to run every day, in the afternoon, and clone my entire internal drive to the external one. My Mac Studio is currently using Carbon Copy Cloner, but other Macs of mine use SuperDuper! which works more or less the same way. The clone task is automatic and scheduled, so I don’t have to do anything, and it’s as invisible as the drive itself.
Yes, I also do a Time Machine backup—because it’s nice to have redundancy and it can be helpful in grabbing a file that’s changed in the past. It used to be that Time Machine was a must-have because your cloned disk wasn’t really a backup, since it only contained the most recent view of your disk, and if a file was deleted a few days earlier, it would not be retrievable.
But with the advent of Apple’s APFS filesystem, tools like Carbon Copy Cloner use the APFS snapshot feature to fill up all the excess space on your backup drive—remember, I bought a 2TB drive for a 1TB disk—with previous versions of your disk. So there are some extra layers of protection, though I’m still running Time Machine and Backblaze too. You can never have enough data protection.
It used to be that to restore from a clone, you needed to boot your Mac and then clone the copy back to the original disk. These days, they work perfectly with Migration Assistant, so it’s very easy to get up and running in a short amount of time. And of course, the disk I bought runs at USB 3 speeds, so it was even pretty quick. A couple of hours after I brought my Mac Studio home from the Apple Store, it was back in working order as if the disaster had never happened.
- If you roam around with a laptop, it’s a little more cumbersome, though you should still do it. ↩
Over on Mastodon, I was embroiled in a whole conversation about fonts we use for writing. I write exclusively using monospaced fonts, and have done so for decades now.
Anyway, I shared my favorites: JetBrains Mono is my current go-to. Craig Hockenberry likes the old-school flavor of IBM Plex Mono. John Gruber uses Consolas in BBEdit’s dark mode, Source Code Pro in MarsEdit’s light mode, and Berkeley Mono in the Terminal.
And for the record: I write in light mode in BBEdit, MarsEdit, and (on iPad) 1Writer, but when I’m editing code in BBEdit or Nova I try to do that in dark mode. Similarly, my Terminal is eternally dark, with bright green letters, because I like to pretend I’m a cyberspace cowboy.
A couple weeks back on MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte pointed me to the very clever site Coding Font, which lets you step through a tournament-style bracket of monospace fonts to find the one you like the best. Unfortunately it’s lacking a bunch of the options mentioned above, but if you’ve ever been curious about switching up your terminal font, it’s worth a go.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
All the Apple devices we use, the risks of switching to the Apple Password app, the games we play on our phones, and whether tech plays a part in our hobbies.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple Intelligence just keeps on coming.
The first batch of features in Apple’s much-hyped entry into the artificial intelligence boom will be released to the general public sometime next week, but the company is already moving on to the next one.
On Wednesday, Apple rolled out developer betas of iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2, which run Apple Intelligence features previously seen only in Apple’s own marketing materials and product announcements: Three different kinds of image generation, ChatGPT support, Visual Intelligence, expanded English language support, and Writing Tools prompts.
Three kinds of image generationApple’s suite of image-based generative AI tools including Image Playground, Genmoji, and Image Wand, will be put in the hands of the public for the first time. When it introduced these features back at WWDC in June, Apple said they were intended to enable creation of fun and playful images that are shared amongst family and friends, which is one reason the company has eschewed the generation of photorealistic images, instead opting for the use of a couple different styles that it dubs “animation” and “illustration.”
Custom-generated emoji with Genmoji will provide several options based on a user’s prompt, and allow the resulting images not only to be sent as a sticker but also inline or even as a tapback. (One could, just as an example, ask for a “rainbow-colored apple” emoji.) It can also create emoji based on the faces in the People section of your Photos library. Genmoji creation is not supported on the Mac yet.
Image Playground is a straight-up image generator, but with some interesting guardrails. The feature will offer concepts to choose from to kick off the process, or you can just type a description of what sort of image you want. Like Genmoji, Image Playground can use people from your Photo library to generate images based on them. It can also use individual images from Photos to create related imagery. The images that are created conform to certain specific, non-photographic styles such as Pixar-style animation or hand-drawn illustration.
Image Wand allows users to turn a rough sketch into a more detailed image. It works by selecting the new Image Wand tool from the Apple Pencil tools palette and circling a sketch that needs an A.I. upgrade. Image Wand can also be used to generate pictures from whole cloth, based on the text around it.
Of course, image generation tools open a potential can of worms for creating content that may be inappropriate, a risk that Apple is attempting to combat in a number of ways, including limiting what types of materials the models are trained upon, as well as guardrails on what type of prompts will be accepted—for example, it will specifically filter out attempts to generate images involving nudity, violence, or copyrighted material. In cases where an unexpected or worrying result is generated—a risk with any model of this type—Apple is providing a way for that image to be reported directly within the tool itself.
Third party developers will also get access to APIs for both Genmoji and Image Playground, allowing them to integrate support for those features into their own apps. That’s particularly important for Genmoji, as third-party messaging apps won’t otherwise be able to support the custom emoji that users have created.
Give Writing Tools commandsThe update also adds some more of the text input, free-association flair frequently connected to large language models. For example, Writing Tools—which in the first-wave feature release mostly let you tap on different buttons to make changes to your text—now has a custom text input field. When you select some text and bring up Writing Tools, you can tap to enter text to describe what you want Apple Intelligence to do to modify your text. For example, I could have selected this paragraph and then typed “make this funnier.”
Along with the developer beta, Apple’s also rolling out a Writing Tools API. That’s important because while Writing Tools are available throughout apps that use Apple’s standard text controls, a bunch of apps—including some of the ones I use all the time!—use their own custom text-editing controls. Those apps will be able to adopt the Writing Tools API and gain access to all the Writing Tools features.
Here’s ChatGPT, if you want itThis new wave of features also includes connectivity with ChatGPT for the first time. That will include the ability for Siri queries to be passed to ChatGPT, which will happen dynamically based on the type of query, for example, asking Siri to plan a day of activities for you in another city. Users will not only be initially prompted upon installing the beta to enable the ChatGPT integration, but also asked again when the query is made. That integration can also be disabled within Settings, or you can opt to have the per-query prompt removed. In certain cases you might get additional prompts to share specific kinds of personal data with ChatGPT—for example, if your query would also upload a photograph.
Apple says that by default, requests sent to ChatGPT are not stored by the service or used for model training, and that your IP address is hidden so that different queries can’t be linked together. While a ChatGPT account isn’t required for using the feature, you can opt to log into a ChatGPT account, which provides more consistent access to specific models and features. Otherwise, ChatGPT will itself determine which model it uses to best respond to the query.
If you’ve ever tried out ChatGPT for free, you’ll know that the service has some limitations in terms of models used and the number of queries that you’re allowed in a given time. It’s interesting to note that the use of ChatGPT by Apple Intelligence users isn’t infinite—if you use it enough, you will probably run into usage limitations. It’s unclear if Apple’s deal with ChatGPT means that those limits are better for iOS users than for randos on the ChatGPT website, though. (If you do pay for ChatGPT, you’ll be held to the limits on your ChatGPT account.)
Visual Intelligence on iPhone 16 modelsFor owners of iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models, this beta will also include the Visual Intelligence feature first showed off at the debut of those devices last month. (To activate it, you press and hold the Camera Control button to launch Visual Intelligence, then aim the camera and press the button again.) Visual Intelligence then looks up information about what the camera is currently seeing, such as the hours of a restaurant you’re standing in front of or event details from a poster, as well as translate text, scan QR codes, read text out loud, and more. It can also optionally use ChatGPT and Google search to find more information about what it’s looking at.
Support for more English dialectsApple Intelligence debuted with support only for U.S. English, but in the new developer betas that support has become very slightly more worldly. It’s still English-only for now, but English speakers in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa will be able to use Apple Intelligence in their versions of English. (Support for English locales for India and Singapore are forthcoming, and Apple says that support for several other languages—Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese among them—are also forthcoming in 2025.)
What’s next?As part of these developer betas, Apple is collecting feedback on the performance of its Apple Intelligence features. The company plans to use that feedback not only to improve its tools but also to gauge when they might be ready to roll out to a larger audience. We definitely get the sense that Apple is treading as carefully as it can here while also rushing headlong into its artificial-intelligence future. It knows there are going to be quirks when it comes to AI-based tools, and that makes these beta cycles even more important in terms of shaping the direction of the final product.
Obviously there will be many more developer betas, and ultimately public betas, before these .2 releases go out to the general public later this year. And there are still a bunch of announced Apple Intelligence features that are yet to come, most notably a bunch of vital new Siri features, including support for Personal Context and in-app actions using App Intents. Today marks the next step in Apple Intelligence, but there’s still a lot of road left for Apple to walk.—Jason Snell and Dan Moren
The 2024 iPad mini has just been updated for the first time in three years, and yet, for some of the product’s biggest fans, it’s a bit of a disappointment. The truth is, very little has changed from the 2021 model, other than the processor.
Apple’s new tendency to name iPads after the processors they contain means that this new product is officially the 2024 iPad mini (A17 Pro). It’s a mouthful, but it also points out the fundamental contradiction that has bothered so many iPad mini fans: Finally, there’s an iPad mini with “Pro” in its name—but it’s only the name of the chip it contains. The iPad mini itself remains a notch below the iPad Air in Apple’s priority list.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Getting my hands on a new iPad mini always feels a little bit like a happy reunion. I use an iPad Pro all the time, so I haven’t handled an iPad mini since I gave back the 2021 model three years ago.
The new 2024 iPad mini, powered by the A17 Pro chip curiously taken from last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, is mostly the same iPad I reviewed way back then. The new processor is really the point, as it makes the iPad mini the latest Apple device to be ready for Apple Intelligence.
Beyond that, though, it’s pretty much the same iPad mini as three years ago. Apple appears to be content to let the iPad mini operate at relative feature parity with the iPad Air, a notch above the generic iPad but also a notch below the iPad Pro. Those who pine for an iPad mini Pro (and the terrifying capitalization regime that would follow) are going to go away disappointed—probably forever.
The iPad mini is already a niche product within a niche product line; it’s likely that Apple will never want to slice things even thinner than it already has. That said, the iPad mini’s got a comfortable niche: it’s great for kids, for people who prioritize reading over productivity, and generally for anyone who can fit an iPad into their lives—but there’s not a whole lot of space to fit into.
As I reported three years ago, iPad hardware is so fast that you can basically do anything you set your mind to do. I edited podcasts and wrote articles on the old iPad mini, and this one’s even more powerful, thanks to that new processor. The additional ray-tracing features of the M3/A17 processor generation mean that it’s even more capable when it comes to graphics-intensive games—though you’ll be playing them at 60 frames per second because ProMotion is a feature reserved for Pro-level Apple products.
In terms of sheer single-core performance, the A17 Pro processor will beat the M2 iPad Air, thanks to the superior processor core inside the one-better A17 Pro generation. But since the M2 has more processor cores than the A17 Pro, the iPad Air beats it out on other tests. Still, it’s not really important—the iPad mini is fast enough for anything. And, most importantly, it’s got enough system memory to run Apple Intelligence features when they arrive later this month. (The iPad mini I tested shipped with iPadOS 18.0, which, of course, doesn’t offer any of those A.I. features.)
When I hold the iPad mini in my hands, I’m reminded that it works incredibly well as a vertical/portrait-oriented device. That, and the fact that it’s just too small in any orientation to support a proper add-on keyboard, is probably why Apple has chosen to leave the FaceTime camera on the short side of the device rather than move it to the long side as on other iPads. I agree with the decision. Keeping the volume buttons to the top of the iPad, opposite the sleep/wake/Touch ID button, still seems odd to me, but it’s necessary to add proper magnetic charging support for the Apple Pencil.
With support for that Pencil—along with the standalone-charging USB-C model introduced in 2023—Apple’s Pencil story keeps getting simpler. Eventually, there will only be a couple of Pencil models supported across the line, but we’re not quite there yet. Still, since no iPhone supports the Apple Pencil, this iPad mini is the smallest device available for those who wish to write, draw, or drive the interface of other apps using Apple’s stylus.
A sign that I’m getting used to Apple’s modern iPhones and iPads is that I was a bit taken aback by the size of the bezels around the iPad mini’s display. Every other Apple device seems to have sucked in its gut a bit and either expanded its display, contracted its physical dimensions, or some combination of both. While the iPad mini’s bezels aren’t huge, relatively speaking, they feel enormous compared to those on my iPad Pro, let alone my iPhone.
I’m also disappointed with what Apple’s done with the colors of these models. After a set of vibrant colors on the previous generation, apparently the Fun Police have arrived and decreed that all colors should be watered-down versions indistinguishable from silver. I don’t understand modern Apple’s relationship with color, nor can I understand how a company that got it so right with the last iPad mini, the iPhone 16, and the M1/M3 iMacs can get it so wrong with a boring, washed-out color palette like this. I’ve been using a purple one, but if I hadn’t looked it up in my email, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that it wasn’t just silver.
One bit of good news, I think: Many users of the previous-model iPad mini complained about a “jelly scrolling” effect, where scrolling content in portrait orientation could lead to a visual artifact where one side of the screen updated before the other side. It’s my understanding that the new model’s display circuitry is different from the old model, and I couldn’t detect any “jelly scrolling” in my use. It doesn’t mean it’s for sure gone, and I’m looking forward to eagle-eyed “jelly scrolling” experts reporting back with their results, but I sure couldn’t see it, even when I recorded myself scrolling at a high frame rate and played it back frame by frame.
So beyond the goose for Apple Intelligence, I’m not sure what there is to say about the iPad mini that I didn’t say in 2021. It’s a great little iPad, capable of pretty much anything you can throw at it. It’s fun to hold in one hand. It makes an excellent device for reading, though it doesn’t replace my e-reader due to the e-reader’s lack of display glare, waterproofing, and distraction-free reading environment. It’s too small for typing, really. That’s okay.
What’s great about the iPad mini, ultimately, is also what limits it. It’s a small iPad with plenty of power. It fits in places other iPads just don’t. Depending on what you want to use an iPad for, it might very well be the perfect iPad. The jury is still out on Apple Intelligence—and may be for some time—but I’m glad that Apple cares enough about the iPad mini and the people who love it that it’s made sure that the iPad mini is ready to use those features on day one.
This week we recommend some TV shows, differentiate between types of vaporware, and break down the new iPad mini and Amazon Kindles. Then, Myke and Jason try to predict exactly what Apple might announce later this month.
Go to the podcast page.
Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0x faster web browsing in Safari
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.
Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Strings of data breaches and other cybersecurity failures have forced greater investment in vulnerability management. The SEC now requires companies to report on how their managers and board of directors deal with vulnerabilities. This is good news for IT and security teams; in a 2023 survey, 50% of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent.” But obviously, that still leaves the other half out in the cold.
If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, you’ll need to come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing and a clear plan to remediate them. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources available to help prioritize your needs. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s full blog post.
Apple’s Ricky Mondello recaps how the company’s password generation system tries to come up with easy to type—but still very secure—passwords:
To make these passwords easier to type on suboptimal keyboard layouts like my colleague’s game controller, where the mode switching might be difficult, these new passwords are actually dominated by lowercase characters. And to make it easier to short-term have in your head little chunks of it to bring over to the other device, the passwords are based on syllables. That’s consonant, vowel, consonant patterns. With these considerations put together, in our experience, these passwords are actually a lot easier to type on a foreign, weird keyboard, in the rare instances where that might be needed for some of our users.
Having had to repeatedly type the password I generated for my kid’s Apple ID, I have noticed a certain degree of…memorability?…there. Brains work in strange ways when it comes to words and reading, so I think this is a clever compromise between making sure that passwords are easy to type and also having them remain as secure as possible.
A side note: I first saw the link to Mondello’s blog post over at Daring Fireball, amidst several posts about passkeys and the relevant benefits and drawbacks, to which I’ll add one pro for passkeys that I think John didn’t mention: not only are passkeys resistant to phishing, but in a world where we all see countless compromises of servers that contain our passwords—hopefully securely hashed, but not always—there’s basically no valuable information that a remote server will store for passkeys.
At worst, what would end up leaking is the public key side of the private/public key pair, from which it is nigh impossible1 to do anything malicious. Moreover, with individual passkeys being mandatorily generated on a per-site basis, you can’t even compare that value to other leaked values. So it’s not just about you maintaining your security, but about improving the security of entities you need to trust who are outside of your control.
- The exception would be if the algorithm generating the keys is flawed in some way—which is not impossible, but is unlikely. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple TV+ comes to Prime Video, and the Diamond bankruptcy continues to disrupt the entire economy of sports. [Downstream+ listeners get: ESPN Flagship, Paramount and the NFL, the future of sports rights, and in praise of narrowcasting.]
Go to the podcast page.
My first Apple Pay transaction, in 2014.It’s hard to believe Apple Pay launched a decade ago, and only slightly less hard to believe that we’ve reached the point that I can link to my decade-old story about using Apple Pay for the first time at my local Whole Foods:
“Oh, you’re going to try that?” Tyler said.
“Yep, I’m one of those people,” I said, and habitually placed my thumb on the phone, as if I was going to unlock it. Which was what I was going to do, but instead of doing that, I paid for groceries.
“Whoa, I don’t know what just happened,” Tyler said as the paper receipt popped out of the cash register’s printer.
Today Apple posted a Newsroom PR item celebrating the milestone while also announcing a few new wrinkles: additional installment loan support and the expansion of rewards support in participating cards. Unfortunately, the number of cards participating in the program are quite small—in the U.S. I believe it’s only Discover—but it does mean you can apply your Discover cashback or miles directly to an Apple Pay purchase if you want.
In the United States, Apple Pay has had the effect that I thought it would have: Tap-to-pay is now commonplace, in a way that it simply wasn’t before. The U.S. is now slightly less out of step with the rest of the world in that way. Express transit support has also been a gamechanger in about 20 cities.
However, I’m surprised that Apple’s other financial products—Apple Card and Apple Cash—have basically not gone anywhere. They’re still only available in the United States. Apple’s financial reach only goes so far, apparently.
I really enjoyed this story by Rachel Karten about how, amid widespread outrage about a disastrous software update from Sonos, the company’s Social Media Program Lead was doing it right:
KeithFromSonos is a Sonos employee who is very active in the r/Sonos subreddit and has somehow won over customers in a particularly tumultuous time for the brand. It’s hard for me to not use jargon here, but he shows up as a customer and not like a brand mouthpiece. When it was announced two months ago that Sonos had a big round of layoffs, someone commented “KeithFromSonos – you still around?”, he replied with a Weekend at Bernies GIF. It was upvoted 788 times. (He, of course, then posted a thoughtful note.) And when Keith isn’t solving user issues, he might be recommending his favorite A24 movies or writing paragraphs about why he loves the r/Sonos community.
I’m not sure how replicable all this is—Keith may just have a unique set of skills and worldview—but I suspect that there are still a lot of lessons here for companies that are interacting with their customers and ecosystems on modern social media.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The two previous Kindle Oasis models, in happier times.Amazon announced a bunch of brand-new Kindle models Wednesday, including a refreshed Paperwhite and a new color model, both of which I’ve ordered and will review soon. But Jay Peters of The Verge brings us the bad Kindle news of the day:
Amazon has discontinued the Kindle Oasis, which was the only Kindle still available with physical page-turn buttons. The company announced a new Kindle lineup earlier today, but Amazon confirmed to The Verge that it’s moving on from the Oasis.
The writing was on the wall, but it’s still sad. Amazon has apparently decided that there’s no place in the Kindle line-up for an e-reader that still has physical page-turn buttons.
Regular readers of this site will know that I am an ardent supporter of physical page-turn buttons on e-readers, because they allow you to rest a finger on the button and turn the page with a simple squeeze, while touch-only readers require you to constantly reposition a finger, tap, and the move the finger away. Not exactly torturous, but decidedly less optimal.
Instead, Amazon (and many other e-reader makers) seem quite keen on the idea that you can read color comics (on screens that are far too small) and that you can take copious notes (which I stopped doing after grad school). I admit that e-readers are a niche tech product and don’t fault e-reader makers from searching for new use cases to expand their markets. I’m just sad that Amazon doesn’t think there’s room somewhere in its Kindle line for buttons.
In the meantime, if you want a new e-reader with page-turn buttons, I recommend (with reservations) the $220 Kobo Libra Colour or the $270 Kobo Sage. Neither is cheap, I know. (The Oasis was $250, though, so in the ballpark.) Of those two, the Sage is larger, has a flush screen, and doesn’t suffer some of the contrast issues of the Libra Colour.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Our experiences with Passkeys and thoughts on their upcoming portability, opinions on Threads showing online status by default, views on Amazon’s new Kindle lineup including the color model, and our preferred methods and platforms for consuming news.
Go to the podcast page.
AirPods 4 with ANC (left) are great if you can’t bear AirPods Pro 2 (right), but are inferior in every other way.It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since AirPods first arrived on the scene. After years of avoiding Apple-branded earbuds for better-sounding headphones, I was really skeptical that Apple could build something that sounded good, but it sure did, and it was rewarded with a hit. I went from being skeptical to using them everywhere except mowing the lawn or riding on an airplane.
But in 2019, the AirPods Pro barreled in, with their in-ear design and active noise cancellation, and they became my go-to earbuds for everywhere. That noise cancellation made a huge difference and was enough for me to turn my back on the original AirPods design forever.
But in a bit of a surprise, this year, Apple has introduced the $179 AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, a slightly pricier version of the $129 AirPods 4 that throws noise cancellation into the more affordable AirPods for the very first time. I’ve been able to use the AirPods 4 with ANC over the last few weeks, including on an airplane, and my feelings are… well, they’re mixed.
On the one hand, the fact that you can get noise cancellation on base AirPods is amazing. Their hard plastic body means that they can’t make a soft seal like the silicone tips on the AirPods Pro can, so there’s more outside audio leakage to compensate for. However, there’s a huge advantage there: If you can’t stand silicone ear tips sticking into your ears, maybe the AirPods 4 will let you finally use ANC AirPods for the first time.
I found the shape of the AirPods 4 to be perfectly acceptable, but every ear is different. Apple says it’s upgraded its database of global ear shapes in order to craft a shape that’s the best for most people, but there’s literally no way to generalize something like this: The only way you’re going to be able to tell if the shape of AirPods 4 is better or worse than previous AirPods is to try them for yourself.
Apple’s made a few other changes from the previous-generation AirPods, too. The H2 chip powers noise cancellation as well as conversational awareness, transparency mode, voice isolation, and adaptive audio. There are also a few downgrades: battery life is rated an hour lower, and the skin-detect sensor to reduce the number of times your music or podcasts keep playing when you shove the earbuds in your pocket has been replaced with a more primitive optical sensor.
But here’s the thing: While AirPods 4 with noise cancellation are a step up from the base model and from previous models, that $70 difference (only $20 if you can find AirPods Pro 2 on Amazon for $199, as I can right now) between the models comes with a huge leap in quality.
When I put the AirPods 4 with ANC in my ears while the house next door was being loudly power washed, I could hear my music and the faint sound of power washing. On an airplane, the hum of the engines was tamped down. Great! But in contrast, when I used my AirPods Pro 2 in those situations, the power washing sound was gone, and so was the hum of the engines. Apple’s claim that the AirPods Pro are twice as good at noise cancellation might be a bit of a head-scratcher in terms of how it’s calculated, but it’s not wrong.
And a few years of using AirPods Pro have also spoiled me when it comes to audio quality. The sound on the AirPods 4 is… fine? In a vacuum, I’d say that they sounded good. But the AirPods Pro sound better, and it’s not really close. I also missed the ability to adjust the volume on the fly by moving my fingers on the AirPods Pro—you have to use Siri, your iPhone, or your Apple Watch to adjust the volume on the AirPods 4.
There’s no denying it: AirPods Pro are superior to the AirPods 4 in every way, and if you’re buying a new pair of AirPods, you should really consider if it’s worth spending a little bit more to get the very best. (See Quinn Nelson’s YouTube review for a lot more detail on these issues.)
Everyone’s priorities are going to vary. At $129, AirPods 4 are a pretty good buy. At $249, AirPods Pro 2 are pricey but great. I’m not sure if these $179 AirPods 4 with ANC really make sense. If they’re the best fit for your ears and the AirPods Pro aren’t an option, great. But don’t make the mistake of buying AirPods 4 with ANC, thinking that they’re an easy way to save on AirPods Pro 2. They aren’t.
Apple Intelligence is about to hit the mainstream. Within the next couple weeks, Apple is likely to ship iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, all of them bringing the first in the suite of features that Apple has been talking about since June. If you have any doubt, just go watch a TV show with ads and I guarantee you’ll see Snoop Dogg hawking it as a selling point of the new iPhone 16 in fifteen minutes or less.
Apple isn’t usually the first to enter a brand new market, but it does have a reputation for helping usher technologies into the mainstream, and for setting the bar for its rivals—including being often imitated. With millions of Apple Intelligence-capable devices already in customers’ hands, it’s sure to make a big splash.
But as Apple is prepared to embark upon this new venture, it might be worth zooming out a little bit and looking at the company’s overall strategy. That includes both how it’s rolling out these features as well as where the company is ultimately aiming.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
I suppose it’s telling that the most interesting and surprising thing about the just-announced 7th-generation iPad mini is the processor Apple put inside.
For fans of the iPad mini who were hoping that after three years there would be some substantial upgrades, this announcement is undoubtedly disappointing. This is absolutely a minor upgrade, with some (disappointing) color changes, slight improvements to Wi-Fi and HDR, added support for Apple Pencil Pro, and not a lot more—except for the big one.
The big one is that it’s using an A17 Pro processor, the same one found in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, and that means it’s the first iPad mini to be compatible with Apple Intelligence.
The surprise is that they’re using that A17 Pro processor, rather than the A18 found in the new iPhone 16.1 The A17 Pro was the first chip built on TSMC’s first-generation 3nm chip process, which was a milestone in chip design—but also, as it turns out, a dead end. TSMC shifted to a newer, more efficient second-generation process, and that’s what Apple is using in its 2024-vintage processors: the M4, A18, A18 Pro. The forthcoming M4 Pro and M4 Ultra processors will be on that process, too.
Based on various reports, it seems like Apple’s goal is to turn over its entire Mac product line to the M4, so they can leave the old process (used on the M3 as well as the A17 Pro) behind. And yet… here’s a new product that uses a chip on the old process that everyone is trying to drop like a hot rock? What?
That’s why my guess is that the new iPad mini is using this chip for non-technical reasons. Here are the possible explanations:
- Apple ended up with excess A17 Pro chips after discontinuing the 15 Pro
- These are all just binned versions (with five GPU cores instead of six) that didn’t make the cut for the iPhone and were sitting around to be repurposed in another product
- Apple has a contract with TSMC that includes enough capacity for them to continue building this chip until that deal runs out
- The design of the iPad mini predated the arrival of the A18 chip generation
- Apple didn’t want to divert any of a presumably limited quantity of fresh A18 chips to the iPad mini when it had iPhone 16s to build
Regardless, I feel like there are a few nuggets of good news for iPad mini fans here. First, the new iPad mini does support Apple Intelligence, and the A17 Pro is quite a bit faster (25 percent in single core, 40 percent in multicore) than the A15 Bionic overall.
Second, while it’s certainly possible that Apple has stockpiled enough five-GPU A17 Pro chips to make three years’ worth of iPad minis, this model feels more like a holding action that gets the iPad mini onto Apple Intelligence… while also using up some amount of chip excess. If I had to predict when we’ll see a next-next-generation iPad mini, I think I’d guess that it will probably be sooner than three years from now.
But for people like my pal Sparky who really want an iPad mini pro, this release is understandably deflating. Apple continues to view the iPad mini as an iPad air-class device in a smaller case, and the high-end features seem likely to remain out of reach for quite some time.
- Update: Several people pointed out that the A18 doesn’t support USB 3 speeds, which the previous iPad mini supported. Fair enough—but they didn’t choose the M2 or the A18 Pro either! ↩
The FIDO Alliance, which oversees the specifications for passkeys, has released a draft standard for the import and export of those cryptographic keys:
FIDO Alliance’s draft specifications – Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) and Credential Exchange Format (CXF) – define a standard format for transferring credentials in a credential manager including passwords, passkeys and more to another provide in a manner that ensures transfer are not made in the clear and are secure by default.
Once standardized, these specifications will be open and available for credential providers to implement so their users can have a secure and easy experience when and if they choose to change providers.
Currently, there’s no easy way to move your passkeys from one password manager to another. So if you generate a passkey in Apple’s Passwords app, for example, it can’t easily be moved to 1Password—or vice versa. In fact, the only way to currently share a passkey at all from Apple’s Passwords app (aside from via a Shared Password group) is via AirDrop. And because these are large cryptographic keys, it’s not as if you can simply memorize them and enter them somewhere else.
Passwords, by comparison, are easily shareable, but that same ability makes them easier to compromise, because they’re generally just exported as plaintext. The standards proposed for passkeys, by comparison, would allow for secure exchange between applications.
These standards are in draft format, meaning it will be some time before they are approved and then eventually implemented in various programs. Apple has not specifically commented on whether it will adopt the standards for its own app—notably, the contributors to the standard includes reps from 1Password, Dashlane, Bitwarden, NordPass, and Google—but the company is a member of the FIDO Alliance.
[via 9to5Mac]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
If you had a square on your bingo card for a new iPad mini during an October Apple event, well, partial credit: the company today unveiled the seventh-generation of the diminutive tablet, adding the A17 Pro processor and support for the Apple Pencil Pro.
In addition to those headline features, the new mini also gets Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and starts at 128GB of storage (twice as much as the previous generation’s 64GB), with upgrades available to 256GB and 512GB. Its size and weight remains unchanged from the previous model, as does its 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display, 12MP cameras on front and back, and button-based Touch ID. The cellular model also no longer supports a Nano-SIM, going eSIM-only, like most of the rest of Apple’s tablets and phones.
The new mini is also available in four finishes, including the same Space Gray and Starlight as its predecessor. There’s also a new blue finish that replaces a previous pink, and a different purple that appears much paler than the sixth-generation’s purple. There’s also a new $59 Smart Folio in charcoal gray, light violet, denim, and sage.
The addition of the A17 Pro processor, which debuted in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, allows for the new mini to support Apple Intelligence—presumably that also means 8GB of RAM under the hood, though Apple isn’t advertising that fact.
The new iPad mini is available for pre-order today, starting at $499 for the 128GB Wi-Fi configuration, with upgrades to 256GB and 512GB costing $599 and $799 respectively. Adding cellular will cost another $150 on top. They’ll be available in stores starting October 23.
This announcements comes only a couple weeks before a rumored Apple event introducing a slew of new Macs based on the M4 processor; it seems likely that Apple didn’t want to spend stage time talking about a very minor update to one of its less popular products. But it is also possible that Apple will choose to eschew an event in favor of press release announcements sometime in the next couple weeks.
What AirPods Adaptive mode is for, Apple’s first immersive narrative film, tricky executive retention efforts, the Vision products roadmap, Apple TV+ goes to Amazon channels, and the trouble with iPhone 16 Camera Control.
Go to the podcast page.
There’s a line in Titanic that any IT or security professional can relate to. The ship’s architect
explains that he wanted to include enough lifeboats for all the passengers, “but it was felt the
deck would look too cluttered.”
That decision takes on a tragic significance in the second half of Titanic, and yet it’s a choice
that’s replicated (although with less dire consequences) in companies to this day. It’s a constant
challenge to get leadership to invest in breach prevention–many leaders would prefer to pay for
cybersecurity insurance and hope for the best.
Yet, just as the famous shipwrecks of old inspired today’s laws about lifeboats, there are signs
that the endless parade of data breaches is forcing greater investment in vulnerability
management. (To be clear, we’re talking about “vulnerability management” in the broadest
sense; not just patch management.)
In the past few years, NIST, the SEC, ISO, and PCI DSS have all published updated guidelines
that mandate more proactive vulnerability management. Many of those guidelines specifically
call out the role of leadership, such as the SEC, which now requires companies to report on how
their managers and board of directors deal with vulnerabilities.
This is good news for IT and security teams; in a 2023 survey, 50% of respondents said that
their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a
large/great extent.” But obviously, that still leaves 50% of respondents out in the cold.
If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the
risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. Thankfully there are plenty of
resources available to help prioritize your needs. And if you’re still not getting through, you’re
welcome to borrow the Titanic analogy.
To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read the full blog.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
So, join the community of over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
It was a busy summer at the Snell house. Our roof predated our purchase of our house, and we’ve been in this house 25 years, so… yeah. We needed a new roof. Getting a new roof was an opportunity to add a rooftop solar power system and update our HVAC system, so we went all in, and all summer I coordinated with three different companies, all of whom wanted to spend time on my roof, or attaching things to the side of my house, or rewiring things on the inside.
Anyway, it’s all done now. We survived, and our house got a big upgrade! But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wasn’t also excited to figure out how to integrate my new home tech into my life in a custom way.
The new HVAC system was easy—there’s a Homebridge plug-in, and boom, it’s now integrated with HomeKit. On the solar side, things were trickier. I found a few Homebridge plug-ins, but looking in the Home app to see my solar status didn’t really make sense? I wanted it in my Mac’s menu bar. Just because. Why did we pay for three big solar batteries on the side of our house if I can’t see a battery icon that represents my house? C’mon.
Anyway, what I ended up doing was digging through loads of documentation—most of which involved querying the solar system manufacturer’s API, which is delayed and limited to about one query per hour unless you pay a subscription fee. But I did finally discover, by looking at the code for one of those Homebridge plug-ins, that there’s a local API for my solar system. Yep, it’s true—my solar system, the one inside my house, has its own web server and will respond to properly formatted queries with blobs of JSON.
After a lot of wrangling, I got it to work. So if you’ve got an Enphase Energy solar system of recent vintage (hello, Google searchers!), feel free to check out my Python SwiftBar script, which shows me how much power my house is using, the status of the battery, how much power the solar panels are generating, and what (if ever) we’re taking from or sending to the grid.
And so there it is. My house has a battery, and that battery icon is in my Mac menu bar. It feels… right? Yes, that’s it. It feels right.
I just watched “Submerged,” the new immersive short film directed by “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger, on the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the first scripted, narrative-driven piece of immersive video on the platform, and after the failure of Apple’s MLS video highlights, I was curious to see what choices Berger would make in using a medium with a very different grammar than traditional filmmaking.
By the time I was done with “Submerged,” I was convinced that Berger is a very talented director who knows how to adapt his skills to a different format. There are no quick takes in “Submerged”—I’d wager the average length of a shot is multiple times longer than your regular 2024 blockbuster—because quick takes are disorienting in the immersive format. Instead, Berger allows shots to linger, occasionally toggling between one shot and its reverse angle, which allows a perspective shift without a complete loss of the understanding of the scene’s geography.
In a format that can’t really use century-old tricks for focusing a viewer’s attention—like focus shifts and zooms and pans and close-up cuts—Berger tries a few different approaches to focus our attention. I was struck by his use of extreme close-ups, which get us very close to the actors a few times—and make it impossible to look at anything else. There’s also a lot of short depth of field, allowing the out-of-focus background to drop away from our attention—or even to entice us without distracting us.
I wondered if “Submerged” would be a series of static shots or if the director would find a way to be a little more dynamic, and Berger seems to have figured out that pushing in or pulling back (on a smooth track) is not as likely to trigger motion sickness as a completely handheld shakycam would. (I will admit to feeling a little bit of vertigo during one shot, which was a very fast-paced pull-back down a corridor.)
Still, most of the shots are more static, and seeing actors performing in those shots reminded me much more of a live theater performance than a film. This is not a bad thing, but it sure felt different. It was all on the performer, in those moments, and on me as the viewer to observe their performance. Similarly, the sets in “Submerged” are intricate and beautiful—and because of the immersive nature of the project, I think that was a necessity. It felt like looking at an amusement park experience, with detail in every corner you look.
The film also makes excellent use of Spatial Audio to further immerse you in the scene of a submarine during World War II. It’s got a score, which I didn’t expect but which didn’t feel unwelcome, even though I was watching immersive scenes—mentally, I knew I was watching a movie, just one playing by some very different rules.
Obviously, the film was short—there’s really just a prologue for us to meet some key characters, one long action set piece, and a brief denouement—but it worked for me. It also left me wanting more. I’m not sure the world is ready for an immersive feature film, but I could absolutely imagine what a feature-length version of a taut submarine thriller would look like, and it would be extremely fun.
Apple’s got a making-of video on YouTube, and in a press release it touts some forthcoming Immersive content, including highlights from the 2024 NBA All-Star weekend (which took place eight months ago!), an intimate concert with English singer Raye that is destined to make me just as uncomfortable as Alicia Keyes did, an immersive story about a free diver who is swimming under ice (just in case “Submerged” wasn’t enough underwater for you), a spotlight on a free solo climber, and a travelogue soaring over Maine.
I’ll watch it all. But “Submerged” has made me really interested in the next immersive narrative film, whatever it might appear.
We’re getting closer to the end, presumably, of the most static design era in the iPhone’s history. While Apple continues to iterate on the specs of its most important product, the iPhone 16 product line is visually part of a generation that dates back four years to the iPhone 12.
On the one hand, it’s a fact that reveals just how the pace of smartphone design innovation has slowed. This is the longest time Apple has been stuck on a design generation in the history of the iPhone. On the other hand, Apple largely stopped redesigning its laptops in 2010, and nobody seems to mind too much. There’s something there about a device slowly iterating toward its ideal form, and I do wonder if Apple thinks that the iPhone 5-esque stylings of the iPhone 12/13/14/15/16 are the equivalent of the classic MacBook Air/MacBook Pro design.
The problem is this: History suggests that every time Apple does a physical redesign of the iPhone, there’s a surge in iPhone sales. That’s quite a motivator, given the iPhone’s place as the generator of more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue.
So what do you do if you’re Apple? You (again, presumably) try to work on new technological breakthroughs that will let you change things up more dramatically—the introduction of Face ID in the iPhone X let the home button go away, for instance—while you keep pushing forward with the specs and internals in the meantime. It’s not exciting, but neither is it a moral failing.
I’d sure rather be using an iPhone 16 Pro than an iPhone 12 Pro, because the newer model is better in almost every way. That’s what years of iteration will do. Since most iPhone buyers do not upgrade once a year, those individual iterations only really matter in the cumulative sense. So before I dig into this year’s collections of choices and iterations, it’s worth considering the grand sweep of time (iPhone Pro edition):
- iPhone 13 Pro: ProMotion, 3x telephoto lens, chip improvements
- iPhone 14 Pro: Dynamic Island, Crash Detection, SOS via satellite, 48MP camera, always-on display, brighter display, Action Mode, chip improvements
- iPhone 15 Pro: Action Button, USB-C port, 24MP fusion image, chip improvements, titanium exterior, and (in hindsight) Apple Intelligence support
This year, that list grows to include larger displays, a new 48MP camera, 4K120 video support, 48MP ultrawide camera, new Photographic Styles workflow, surround audio, 5× telephoto lens (which arrived last year on the Pro Max model only), and (of course) chip improvements courtesy of the new A18 Pro chip.
Would it be fun if Apple unveiled an entirely new, never-before-seen iPhone design? Yes, it would. Maybe next year. But the company needs to sell phones in the meantime, and as ever, it has taken the last year to add a bunch of improvements that will provide a solid set of upgraded features that, when added to those from previous years, make for a solid update.
There are four modelsThe many shades of iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 PlusWhile this review is primarily focused on the iPhone 16 Pro, I’ve had a chance to use all four new iPhone models. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is really only different from the Pro model in that it’s larger (and has commensurately greater battery life); the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus are lacking some pro features, but in many ways the gaps between the Pro and non-Pro models are the smallest they’ve been in a while.
Let’s start with the single best feature of the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, and the one in which those phones utterly blow away their more expensive Pro counterparts: color. Apple’s behavior strongly suggests that it’s just not interested in offering striking color options on high-end iPhones, and its choices of colors on the lower-end models are often muted and questionable. Not so this year, because the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus come in three delightful colors (in addition to more staid white and black models): Ultramarine, Teal, and Pink.
I’m colorblind and can’t see pink very well, and even I appreciate this beautiful pink. The teal is the quintessential blue-green tone that I’d absolutely expect to see on an ’80s prom dress or the uniform of a sports expansion team from the ’90s. And the ultramarine… I don’t even know what to say. It’s a gorgeous, bright blue with purple undertones that is my favorite iPhone color of all time.
However, here’s what you’ll give up if you want to take the plunge into ultramarine: The always-on, high-refresh-rate ProMotion display; a small amount of performance due to the A18 rather than A18 Pro chip; a third, telephoto camera lens; a higher resolution ultrawide/macro camera; 120fps 4K video captures; and a titanium frame in any shade you want as long as it’s monochrome.
For my money, the killer features there are the extra camera and the display. When my iPhone Pro is charging, it’s parked in my kitchen on a magnetic stand and displays the current time, temperature, and weather forecast in StandBy mode. I’d miss that if I gave up the always-on display. And I find myself using the telephoto lens more than I expected to, especially now that the iPhone 16 Pro has the 5× zoom that last year’s Pro Max had.
Still… there’s less than I expected. Would I be perfectly happy using an iPhone 16 in ultramarine for the next few years? You know, I think I would. If you like the colors, don’t care about the screen or telephoto camera, and want to save some money—well, let’s just say it’s been a while since the iPhone and iPhone Pro product lines have been so close.
There have also been moments in the last few years when it looked like the iPhone Pro Max was slowly accelerating away from the iPhone Pro, as it became more of its own creature, one that could maybe even have been renamed iPhone Ultra. This year, though, the Pro Max comes back to the pack—it’s literally the same phone as the iPhone 16 Pro, just bigger. Maybe in the future, Apple will find ways to differentiate that model beyond size, or perhaps it will turn its attention to other designs that raise the bar on what it means to be the most expensive iPhone in existence. Either way, this year the Pro Max has nothing special to differentiate it from the Pro. If you don’t need the display size or battery life, you don’t need the bigger phone.
Happy Clickmas (War on Buttons is Over)“Why did Steve Jobs wear a turtleneck? Because he hated buttons.”
During the Steve Jobs and Jony Ive era, minimalism was everything. The pair believed that tech gadgets were too fiddly and needed to be streamlined. So the iPhone had no keyboard, the Apple TV remote didn’t have a number pad, and the iPod had a simple scroll wheel. It was a good impulse, but as so often happens, the impulse can be taken too far and result in bad decisions like a buttonless iPod shuffle or a professional laptop without enough ports.
As a survivor of the War on Buttons, I’m happy to report that the tide has shifted, and today’s Apple has decided that buttons… are… good? Last year brought the Action Button to the iPhone 15 Pro models, and this year all models sport both the Action Button and a new Camera Control button. (Even the most enthusiastic fan of buttons might caution Apple to slow its one-new-button-a-year pace, lest the iPhone become a Blackberry by 2050.)
I love the idea of the Camera Control button. It’s literally a shutter button on the side of your iPhone, so you can pull out your phone entirely on feel and start snapping pictures. (A first press opens the Camera app, and from there on—unless your phone is locked, when you have to press to unlock first—every press takes a photo. Pressing and holding records video.) Muscle memory is a thing. Navigating a touchscreen interface can be fussy and frustrating, especially in bright light or if you’re rushing to capture an important moment.
That said, I don’t think Apple executed Camera Control as well as it should have. The basic functionality—click to shoot—works pretty well, with real button movement combined with a crunchy haptic signal. It takes a little getting used to, but not much, and I found that I’m quite capable of taking pictures with one hand when using Camera Control. (When fully zoomed in, I find that pressing Camera Control makes my iPhone shake a lot more than just tapping on the screen to take a picture; the camera system seems to compensate for this, but I still don’t like the idea that my picture could be degraded because I chose to use a physical button.)
It’s the rest of it that I have issues with. In true Magic Kingdom fashion, Apple has taken a simple shutter button and plussed it: the button is also force sensitive (so it can sense intermediate pressure that comes before a full click) and its surface is like a tiny trackpad (so it can sense finger swipes). I admire packing that much technology in a little button and can see how both of those technologies could enhance the basic camera interface.
But I think Apple’s implementation just isn’t up to the challenge. It’s overly complex, for starters. Before I deconstruct what Apple is doing, let me describe how it works by default: If you press halfway down, a menu strip pops out (there’s a cute animation, of course) on the screen right beneath the button. This strip contains a set of functions that you can switch between by swiping your finger on the button, so you can switch between cameras, zoom, or adjust exposure. To switch between different function sets, you double-squeeze (like a Mac double-click) to go up one level in the menu hierarchy, then swipe to choose a different function set, then squeeze to enter that set, at which point you can swipe through a different set of controls.
The idea here is to emulate the physical controls on real cameras, which frequently use a half-press on the shutter button to focus, and (depending on the mode) might use a dial to adjust aperture or shutter speed. It’s powerful, and I think that power users can learn to navigate it fairly well, but there’s no way that this should be the default interface for the Camera Control button. Even when you finally grasp the amount of pressure that triggers the half-press but not a full press, you then have to master doing it twice in quick succession, and now you’re swiping between different menus in a hierarchy.
I appreciate the ambition, but this is too much complexity for a default feature, and if users get frustrated by accidentally swiping out of the right mode and wrecking their photo (which is very easy to do), they may swear off Camera Control entirely. On my dedicated digital cameras, the default in Automatic mode is that a half-press lets me set a focus target (via a crosshair or an intelligent object selection) and hold that target, and the adjustment wheel does literally nothing because I’m in Automatic mode. Apple needs to go in this direction—and the saving grace of Camera Control may be that software updates can solve its biggest issues.
For my money, by default the half-press should emulate a traditional camera focus (Apple says this is coming in a future software update—why in the world was it not in the first version of this software?!) and the whole double-tap/swipe thing should just be turned off. (Obviously, it should still be optional to enable it—I’m not advocating for the removal of the feature, just for its activation by default.) I’m open to the idea of parking something very basic on the swipe control—changing cameras, or changing modes (video, portrait, etc), but there’s too much baked in and it’s just too complex.
I appreciate that Apple tried to pull out all the stops with Camera Control, but it overshot the target, which is regular people who just want to take a picture.
A peculiar side effect of the arrival of Camera Control is that the Action Button is having a bit of an existential crisis. When it debuted on the iPhone 15 Pro models last year, Apple extolled the virtues of the Action Button as… a way to take pictures with a hardware button. One year in existence, and it’s already lost its job. Tough times.
Of course, the Action Button has always been customizable, and it continues to be so. Apple’s language describing the Action Button has been adjusted accordingly, but any list of applicable features will eventually land you in the realm of writing Shortcuts. I like Shortcuts a lot, and I do think that with a little bit of help, regular people can create them, but resorting to Shortcuts to buttress the Action Button’s viability feels like a failure on Apple’s part. Not only should the Shortcuts Gallery (remember that?) be full of Action Button recommendation Shortcuts, but perhaps Apple needs to revamp its beautiful Action Button settings interface to add more functionality.
Maybe the Action Button Settings need a little more sophistication so you can choose different actions based on some basic triggers (like time, or device orientation, or location—basic stuff that can be built via Shortcut but should probably shouldn’t require that level of effort). Or maybe the solution is for Apple Intelligence to gain the ability to generate that Shortcut for you? I don’t know what the right approach is, but I do think that the Action Button needs to be made more versatile for everyone, especially now that the new button on the block has taken over its original default action.
Cameras in styleThe iPhone 16 camera cluster.The iPhone 16 Pro features an updated version of the 48-megapixel camera introduced two years ago. The company has settled on an approach that is now inscribed in the camera’s name, dubbing it the “Fusion camera”—presumably because of the technique that bins the data from the 48-pixel sensor into a 12MP image with superior light collection, and combines it with the refined detail of a full 48MP collection, resulting in a fused 24MP image that is (ideally) the best of both worlds.
What I can report is that I think Apple’s camera game continues to be strong, aided by the spectacular 5× zoom that’s now available on the more mainstream size of iPhone Pro. The 24MP fused images from the main camera look very good. I was honestly stunned at some of the photos I shot at a concert from about eight rows back. I ended up with photos that were colorful and clear and stunningly close—and then I double-tapped on my iPad and discovered that I wasn’t even zoomed in all the way. There was even more resolution to be had. It’s really remarkable how good these cameras are.
That said, these cameras are also complicated, even beyond what I’ve already written about the new Camera Control button. There are so many different icons and modes in the Camera app these days that it can be really daunting. Do you want Action Mode, or to shoot regular video at 4k120? Do you want night mode, or to fire a flash, or just for the phone to take its best shot without either? I know there’s a lot of intelligent software making decisions in the background, but sometimes when confronted with something to shoot, I find myself spoiled for choice. Sometimes I am paralyzed by the options.
At least one innovation on these phones will help me not worry about what’s going on in the moment, because I know I can fix things later: the new iteration of Photographic Styles. When Apple introduced the original Photographic Styles a few years back, it was a revelation because Apple was allowing users to alter the decisions being made deep down in the photographic pipeline, in order to generate images that were more pleasing to the users (rather than to Apple’s own decision-makers). Great idea, but it meant that those decisions were, like Apple’s own baked-in assumptions in previous cameras, baked in to the final photos. Any future adjustments to the photos would be using the end-result pixels. You could never go back and recapture the moment, deep in the pipeline, and reprocess that image. Captures only happen once.
That’s… not quite true anymore. The new Photographic Styles feature, basically Styles 2.0, still allows users to pick their favorite styles and adjust them in ways that please them, but the results are more changeable after the fact than before. Apple is capturing a load of camera data and retaining it in the HEIF container file, meaning that you can choose to reprocess the image with a different set of styles after the fact. It’s not quite re-editing a RAW format file, but it does mean you can do things like shoot using a black-and-white style and then restore the color data if you change your mind!
I wish Photographic Styles was simpler, though. There are two different sets of styles, and then you can dial settings in by dragging your finger up and down, left and right, in a square. There’s another setting that’s a slider just below the square. I don’t know if I understand fully what those three axes actually do to the image, but at least you can watch the changes on the photo you’re editing and decide for yourself what you find aesthetically pleasing. Again, I applaud Apple for trying to find simple, intuitive ways of giving users access to extremely complex concepts… but it still feels like a lot. I’d kind of like to just dial in that I prefer my images to be a bit warmer and with a little more contrast and be done with it, you know?
Apple silicon marches onWith the iPhone 16 series, Apple’s releasing two different chips: the A18, which powers the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, and the A18 Pro, which powers the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. These are different chips, marking the first time in iPhone history that Apple has shipped two brand-new chip designs in the same set of iPhone models. Though the A18 has five GPU cores and the A18 Pro has six, these aren’t two “binned” versions of the same chip. A detailed analysis shows that they’re quite different.
While both chips are built on the second-generation 3nm build technology from Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, my guess is that the A18 Pro is using the latest CPU and GPU core designs from the M4 chip series, while the regular A18 is a new budget design using some older core generations. I suspect the A18 will be repurposed in numerous forthcoming Apple products that require a base level of Apple Intelligence, from iPads to HomePods to Apple TVs.
To illustrate Apple’s relentless pace forward with chip design, I’ve plotted the GeekBench scores for the last nine generations of top-level iPhone processors. Single-core performance has risen by an average of 15% per year over the last five years; this year it’s 20%. During that same five-year period, multi-core performance has improved by an average of 18%, and this year it’s 20%. Oh, and GPU performance per core? Up 20% too. The whole thing’s just… up 20% from last year’s A17 Pro chip.
I should mention a few other general improvements to the hardware in this generation. Battery life appears to be quite a bit superior to the previous generation, though of course whether that means an extra hour or 30 minutes or two hours all depends on how you use your phone. The phones also never felt hot in my hand, unlike the previous generation, showing off the fact that Apple appears to have done some thermal mitigation.
And I want to single out the first-time support for Wi-Fi 7. I tested an iPhone 16 on a symmetric gigabit connection via Wi-Fi 7 and the results were 950Mbps up and down—essentially the same speed that I got from a Mac using a wired Ethernet connection, and faster even than the Wi-Fi 6E connection I got on an M3 MacBook Air. Most people won’t have access to Wi-Fi 7 networks for a little while, but… wow. It’s very impressive.
“Ready for Apple Intelligence”Judging by Apple’s marketing materials, the most important selling point of the iPhone 16 series is that it’s ready for Apple Intelligence. The company’s website and press kits are full of Apple Intelligence features, many (most?) of which won’t be available to customers until sometime in early 2025. As I write this story (several weeks after the release of the iPhone 16 models!), Apple Intelligence is still only available to customers who opt in to a Public Beta version of iOS 18.1.
So, how is Apple Intelligence? I couldn’t tell you. Not only would it be somewhat irresponsible to represent beta software features in a hardware review, Apple Intelligence will hardly be done when iOS 18.1 ships. In fact, it’ll only have begun. Apple plans to continue fulfilling the promise it made back in June from now until—well, June 2025.
I don’t need to go too far out on a limb to predict that some of the new Apple Intelligence features will be great, and others will be uninteresting. I do suspect that the longer it takes for a feature to reach us, the more interesting it might be. I’m particularly optimistic about the potential for the use of a device’s Semantic Index and the power of App Intents in individual apps to construct a next-generation Siri that knows everything about who I am and can do whatever I demand of it. I realize that’s a broad, unattainable goal—but progress toward that goal would be pretty great.
Still: Don’t ever buy a piece of hardware because you’re excited about a promised, future feature. Apple’s big enough and high-profile enough to have a pretty good likelihood of delivering what it’s promising, but there’s no reason to spend hundreds of dollars based on the hazy promise of a feature that’s not even in beta yet, with nobody to tell you if it really works or if it’s more hype than substance.
If you want to get excited about buying the iPhone 16 series, there are plenty of reasons. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus come in gorgeous colors, sport an upgraded main camera, and gain Camera Control, Photographic Styles 2.0, and the Action Button. The iPhone 16 Pro gains a 5× zoom, and both the Pro and the Pro Max get Camera Control and Photographic Styles. That’s the stuff we should all be focused on right now. As for Apple Intelligence, Apple is going to have to prove its worth over the next year.
On Wednesday Amazon and Apple announced that Apple TV+ will be available inside Prime Video as an add-on subscription:
Later this month, Apple TV+ will be available via Prime Video in the U.S. as an add-on subscription for $9.99 per month. Prime members who subscribe to Apple TV+ via Prime Video will have access to premium entertainment including Severance, Slow Horses,The Morning Show, Presumed Innocent, Shrinking, Hijack, Loot, Palm Royale, as well as global hit films such as Wolfs, The Instigators and more, plus Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball sporting events.
Both Apple and Amazon have made efforts to resell other services within their own apps, which can simplify billing and user interface. This step suggests that Apple, which has struggled to broaden the appeal of TV+, has decided that it’s more important to get TV+ in front of more potential viewers than it is to use it as an inducement to get more people to use Apple’s own TV app.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
How we prepare our tech for emergencies, the headphones we like best, our file organization systems, and outfitting our home theaters for spooky season.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s Messages app may have lost the global messaging wars, but in many countries—including the U.S.—it’s still an incredibly popular way of communicating. That’s why Apple keeps upgrading it.
This fall’s Messages updates are some of the biggest ever, with the addition of RCS messaging, true emoji and sticker tapbacks, styled and animated text, Send Later, and support for texts via satellite.
But as the people in my Messages group chats all upgraded to iOS 18 and started taking advantage of some of these new features, it all became too much for me. All these new features are good, yes, but they can also be spectacularly distracting. This is why Apple’s next big step in Messages needs to be to give users the power to control when and how we’re interrupted in ways far beyond what’s available today.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
We discusss how Apple is so influential that even its simplest moves can make or break companies and industries. Also: Apple plans a big Halloween week, and there’s an immersive thriller coming to Vision Pro.
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and also blocks all YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads
- search ads
- plus many more
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Nick Heer comments on a spectacularly weird New York Times story titled “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?,” which is actually about how Apple has ratcheted up contacts-sharing security in iOS 18:
What I do not understand is granting Bier’s objections the imprimatur of a New York Times story when one can see the full picture of Bier’s track record. On the merits, I am unsympathetic to his complaints. Users can still submit their full contact list if they so choose, but now they have the option of permitting only some access to an app I have not even decided I trust.
I didn’t originally link to the NYT story because I thought it wasn’t worth the kick. (It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.) I’m glad, though, that Heer was willing to write the takedown. The more I think about it, the more off-balance the entire story seems. Apple increases user choice and privacy, and we’re worried about the startup bro?
But as Dan Moren pointed out to me on the Six Colors podcast earlier today, the one thing the article does point out is that Apple’s scale is so enormous these days that any move the company has potentially huge ramifications. They are a Godzilla, and you don’t want them to step on you.
That said, if Apple feels it’s beneficial for its customers if it occasionally steps on creepy tech bros who want to violate our privacy in order to build their next business, I might be okay with the crunching.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Sometimes there are bugs that happen and hit wide swaths of devices causing serious problems for users, and other times a teeny tiny thing breaks and it only affects a handful of people. It doesn’t really matter, though. Bugs are still frustrating.
On October 1st my friend Ry went on a hike. He completed his hike, and I sent him the usual, terrible, canned fitness response that we send one another ironically. “Way to take a hike. 🌳” He said thanks, and then the Messages app in iOS said Ry was only available via satellite. I thought he was being a fancy lad on a hike using satellite messaging, but he was no longer on a hike, and was on 5G cellular.
He tried force-quitting Messages, and restarting his iPhone, and reseting his network settings, but no matter what he did, my iPhone insisted Ry was only reachable via satellite. So then I restarted my iPhone, and I tried turning off and on all the various connection methods at my disposal.
That’s when I found out that everyone else having a one-on-one conversation with Ry from an iOS 18 device was also experiencing what I was experiencing. Anyone on 17.4, or using macOS Sonoma1 just had messages pop through with the usual iMessage tag.
What gives? How could only conversations with him be stuck in satellite mode and only on iOS 18 devices? This is a very annoying problem, because every time you send a message “via satellite” it bugs you about it, and you can’t do things like send images or media. Naturally, if he was really on satellite, you wouldn’t want to do that.
I did what everyone else does in this scenario and went to bed with the expectation that the passage of time would reset something.
October 2nd was the same deal. Ry was still stranded over Earth like a modern-day balloon boy.
I opened his contact info and messaged the email address tied to his Apple ID, instead of the phone number. It went through as a regular iMessage. I tried switching back to the phone number and it went back to satellite. Another friend tried the same trick, but stayed on the email address only to have it switch to satellite a few seconds after he messaged.
I was on to something, though, right? Maybe the problem was on the receiving end (our iOS 18 iPhones) instead of the sending end (Ry’s iOS 18 iPhone).
Drastic times call for drastic measures, and so I turned iMessage off and on again. Hold onto your butts.
Fortunately, no raptors were released, but the conversation thread with Ry split into two. One thread had some messages and was stuck in satellite mode. The other thread had some other messages and was in normal iMessage mode. I force-quit Messages for the zillionth time in two days, and when I relaunched it, the conversations had merged back together and the satellite mode was gone.
It was all iMessage, baby.
I relayed this information to the other friends, and they did the same thing. Messaging Ry returned to normal… but I hadn’t noticed one side effect, reported by another friend.
On the lock screen of the iPhone, and only the lock screen of the iPhone, notifications from Ry were now labeled “Maybe: Ry Amidon To You & Ry Amidon”. As if Ry and I were in a group text with Ry.
For crying out loud. The Watch notifications, Mac notifications, and even the display name in iOS were all singular Ry. That’s when I remembered the email address tied to the Apple ID that I had messaged earlier.
I blew away the email address and then the “Maybe” went away. Everything was normal.
I typically don’t open Feedbacks when I can’t reproduce something (and I absolutely can’t reproduce whatever this is) but I put together one with system logs and screenshots and fired it into the void2.
If I had to guess (and it’s probably better if I don’t) it seems like Ry’s phone pushed some status to Apple’s iMessage servers which was pushed to our iOS 18 devices… and stuck. I can’t think of another reason why the satellite messaging state was preserved until we each toggled off iMessage support on our individual devices. There’s no toggle to disable sending and receiving satellite messages in Settings. In fact, if you search Settings for “satellite” it doesn’t return any results at all.
Having satellite messaging is definitely a boon to people that have experienced real emergencies and have been otherwise disconnected from the world. Ry, however, wasn’t experiencing any such issues—so we all just got some puzzling inconvenience.
I can’t even say for certain that I fixed anything, because in the grand tradition of internet problem-solving, all I can report is that it “works for me!”
If anyone does eventually run across this weirdness (hello, Google searchers!), I hope you can at least learn from what I tried. If you’ve got an easier fix, or you happen to work at Apple and can just toggle this stuff from the heavens, then drop me a line.
- I’m not upgrading to a .0 OS release. I have real work to do. This policy has never lead me astray. ↩
- Feedback ID FB15362065 ↩
Brian Williams will bring live news to Prime Video, but what’s the future of streaming news? Also: More cable bundles include streaming services; Amazon programs a night of game shows; Netflix’s coming compensation crunch; and a Diamond/MLB update.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s often got a reputation as an uncompromising driver of new technology. Look no further than the classic example of shipping the original iMac without a floppy drive or legacy ports, or designing the iPhone without a hardware keyboard, or even killing off the iPod mini to make way for the iPod nano. The company certainly puts forth an image of pushing technology forward without dwelling on the past.
But while those examples might get a lot of attention, the Apple of these days is a bigger, more ponderous organization—a battleship that can’t simply turn on a dime. As a result, the move to any new technology takes time, and often what came before isn’t excised in months, or sometimes even years.
So as much as Apple might like to see itself as an unstoppable force barreling ever forward, you don’t have to look too far through its lineup to see plenty of places where it’s still clinging to the past, even if it’s out of sheer practicality.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Our preferred devices for listening to music out loud, recent frustrating tech-related customer service experiences, current social media habits, and examples of technology that have recently impressed us.
Go to the podcast page.
From The Verge’s Victoria Song, a fascinating and disturbing project that turns Meta’s smart glasses into a system for immediately doxxing people:
In the demo, you can see Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the other student behind the project, use the glasses to identify several classmates, their addresses, and names of relatives in real time. Perhaps more chilling, Nguyen and Ardayfio are also shown chatting up complete strangers on public transit, pretending as if they know them based on information gleaned from the tech.
It’s really creepy stuff. Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the tech behind it, but most of this system is built on top of publicly available information from online databases and LLMs that anyone can use. The pair have also detailed the places you can go to try and opt out of some these databases (but there are a lot of them and not all of them make it easy).
As Song points out, part of what makes this extra unsettling is the fact that Meta’s smart glasses are largely indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses, and the only indication that they’re capturing video (a small privacy light) is subtle and hard to notice in daylight. (At least Google Glass was pretty obvious.)
In some senses, we’ve all gotten used to having cameras all around us all the time, but the even more sobering fact is that if this is what two college students can cook up with mostly off-the-shelf ingredients, it’s not hard to imagine what a giant company or government agency with a lot more resources could do.
Meta, however, seems less than concerned:
For its part, Meta cautions users against being glassholes in its privacy policy for the Ray-Bans. It urges users to “respect people’s preferences” and to clearly gesture or use voice controls when capturing video, livestreaming, or taking photos.
Yeah, don’t be creepy when using Meta’s smart glasses. That’s Meta’s job.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Lex and Moltz will wait for AR contact lenses. Dan wants off this ride.
Go to the podcast page.
It’s rare that I find a new app that immediately becomes part of my workflow, but it’s just as rare that an app as useful as Croissant comes out.
Hailing from indie developers Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy, Croissant aims to simplify the process of posting to multiple social media sites. You know what I’m talking about: in the wake of Twitter’s X-ification, many of us are dealing with a splintered social media landscape. I, personally, have been reading and posting on no less than Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, and boy am I tired.
This came to a head last week as I was promoting the launch of my latest book and various ancillary projects like new t-shirts and a live event. Copying and pasting posts between those three sites was practically a full-time job1, especially when they included pictures with attendant alt text.
But I got a chance to try Croissant in beta last week and it absolutely saved my sanity. It supports text and images, complete with that alt text, as well as threaded posts, and lets you choose which services you want to post to each time. You can also archive drafts for later, choose post visibility on both Mastodon and Threads, and add content warnings for Mastodon.
There are some limitations, however. For example, right now, while you can insert images from your Photos library, you can’t copy and paste, which can be frustrating. There’s also no support for GIFs or videos as attachments. And it’s currently only designed for the iPhone.2 Many of those are on the app’s roadmap, according to the developers.
There are also issues that are beyond Croissant’s control: for example, tagging other accounts can work, but you won’t get autocomplete, and if a username doesn’t exist on a service it’s just going to show up as text. And ultimately it’s still only an app for posting to multiple networks, not for reading all of them in one place. But such are the vagaries of social media in 2024.
Croissant’s free to download and give a whirl, but it requires a subscription for posting to multiple services: either $2.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or $59.99 forever.
- On the iPhone with its—sigh—still very limited copying and pasting abilities, it felt less like a job than something that I was paying for. My sins, perhaps. ↩
- The app does sort of work on the Mac, though not without some interface quirks (pop-up sheets that you can’t dismiss, for example). ↩
Jason and Myke break down Meta’s preview of its Orion AR glasses project and what it says (or doesn’t say) about the future of Apple’s Vision product line. Also: An Apple Intelligence timeline, Masimo board intrigue, and a million-dollar celebration.
Go to the podcast page.
Meta’s Orion prototype. (Image: Meta)The game is to create a wearable, augmented-reality device that takes everything that’s great about a smartphone and overlays it on your vision, making the entire world a smartphone canvas. It’s part of a larger strategy, which is to own the next must-have technology device that supplants or augments the smartphone.
This game has no rules. There’s no single accepted way to play it.
Earlier this year, Apple made a move: It launched the Vision Pro, a headset that emulates augmented reality in a limited way. It is a finished product shipping to anyone who wants one, but it’s very expensive and has a very limited selection of software and content. It’s also a stake in the ground, suggesting that Apple thinks there’s something to “spatial computing” and that this is the first tentative step on the path to creating something more broadly appealing.
This week, Meta made another move.
Meta has been a leader in VR headsets for a while now—it’s a small market that attracts outsized interest because it’s surrounded by a cyberpunk-tinged cloud of possibilities that it might augur something about future of computing.
Originally pitched as a game console you put on your face, the Meta Quest series has increasingly also been pitched as being productivity-related. I don’t think that’s a coincidence—productivity is a use case that Apple has emphasized, so Meta is countering. And the new $300 Meta Quest 3S sure sounds like a compelling new device. I’ve got a Quest 2 and Quest 3, and they’re both pretty impressive in their own ways, especially given the price. The Quest 3S seems like it might be a great holiday purchase.
But, of course, the Quest 3S is not what people are talking about. They’re talking about Orion, a pair of chunky augmented-reality glasses that show that Meta really gets where this is all going. It’s a real punch to Apple’s jaw, one that makes the Vision Pro look dowdy and pointless. Media coverage of Orion has been really strong. People who tried it were impressed. It’s a win for Meta.
But look closer, and you can see exactly what game Meta is playing. Meta says that Orion would cost about $10,000 today, and that the company couldn’t see itself shipping the product. Orion, as used this week by various media influencers, is a tech demo—not a product that will ever ship. Meta says that it has backed off any plans to ship it and instead expects that it will ship a product sort of like it between 2027 and 2029.
This is all part of the game, of course. For decades now, competitors have made hay over Apple’s refusal to make public demonstrations of what it’s working on behind the scenes. Apple’s silence is assumed by many to indicate the company is behind on some innovation or another. And sometimes it’s actually behind—but other times, it’s not. It’s just keeping quiet.
I have no idea what the current state of the art is inside Apple. And while visionOS has seen some nice updates including the introduction of Spatial Persona, the excruciatingly slow rollout of immersive content and the dearth of new apps in the visionOS App Store leave the question of Apple’s commitment to this platform a bit murky.
Still, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has been working on AR glasses alongside Vision Pro:
At one point, Apple aimed to release the glasses in 2023, before delaying the launch until around 2025. Now, Apple has postponed the rollout indefinitely and pared back its work on the AR device.
That’s a report from early 2023 that suggests that Apple was trying to build AR glasses presumably very much like Orion, but realized that the tech wasn’t yet at the point where they could release anything. So instead, they shifted work to Vision Pro.
In other words, Meta and Apple—both committed to the idea that AR glasses we wear in our daily lives might be a huge part of future computing tech—tried to make the product happen, and realized that the time just wasn’t right. Apple didn’t say anything. Meta showed off a product that will never ship (but might lead to something that will ship at the end of the decade) and gained some nice press coverage this week.
These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ever comment on unannounced products is beneficial or not, but it’s a Steve Jobs-created bit of Apple personality that is very unlikely to be countermanded any time soon.
I was impressed by what Meta showed with Orion. It absolutely gives me the sense that there is a product here, and it might actually be closer than I thought it would be. I sort of assumed wearable, powerful AR glasses in the style of Vision Pro would be more like a full decade away, but the end of this decade now seems plausible.
Of course, that’s for a first version—which will be expensive and compromised. It will take more years for the price to come down and for the utility of such a device to overcome resistance from people who don’t want to wear glasses and don’t want to be seen as a cyborg navigating the human world. If that resistance can ever be overcome enough to make that product category a hit, it’ll take years. Like, mid-2030s at the earliest.
This is a long game. We already knew Apple had the pieces to play (Meta’s system features a wristband that’s like a simplified Apple Watch and a compute puck that’s basically an iPhone), and now Meta has shown that it’s planning its own strategy, including working on custom hardware and silicon.
The game is afoot. Meta has shown they’re working on it. Apple remains characteristically silent. But there’s no one right way to play the game… and the clock doesn’t even start ticking until someone ships a product that people can buy.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
1Password wants you to understand the details about how laws like GDPR can affect your business. The EU enacted GDPR in 2018, and the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over.
You need to comply, and it’s not the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or
scheduling a training session. You need to collect only the data you truly need to function, and secure the data you have. Starting with common breach culprits like compromised passwords might be a good idea—sensible advice from the maker of a fine password manager.
For more about GDPR compliance and other good advice, check out the 1Password blog.
Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin reporting on the latest guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology about good passwords:
A section devoted to passwords injects a large helping of badly needed common sense practices that challenge common policies. An example: The new rules bar the requirement that end users periodically change their passwords. This requirement came into being decades ago when password security was poorly understood, and it was common for people to choose common names, dictionary words, and other secrets that were easily guessed.
Thank god. Back when I worked at a large institution that required password changes, the game was trying to figure out how similar you could keep your new password without it rejecting it. It was a bad game.
Other proposed changes: no restriction on which special characters can be used, a minimum required length of 8 with a minimum suggest length of 15, and hints that are not accessible to unauthenticated users.
I maintain hope that passkeys will continue their march to make passwords obsolete, though adoption feels mixed so far: several big providers sites have started using them, though the exact manner of implementation varies widely from company to company, and even within sites and services from the same company.
These updates are in public comment phase for the next couple weeks, but will hopefully be put into place before too long. While they aren’t binding, there are a number of places (including government agencies) that do tend to adhere to them as best practices.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Pour one out for the venerable Apple-focused website iMore, which is ceasing publication:
Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.
iMore was one of the major Apple-focused websites for a long time, especially when led by Rene Ritchie and then later Serenity Caldwell. (Both are now gainfully employed by, er, larger companies.) The parent company, Future media (which also publishes Tom’s Guide, Tech Radar, Android Central, and Windows Central), says the site will remain online as an archive.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I’m happy to announce that the latest edition of my ebook about Apple’s Photos app, Take Control of Photos, Fourth Edition is now available.
This new edition covers the new stuff added by Apple this year, which turned out to be a lot—especially on the iOS and iPadOS side. (I think that the changes are largely good ones, given the difficult line Apple has to walk between utility and discovery.) There’s stuff in this edition about the new Collections views, including People and Pets groups, Recent Days, the upgraded search system, and more. There will also be a free update to this edition later this fall that covers the stuff Apple rolled out with the iPhone 16, as well as any breaking Apple Intelligence features.
The book is $14.99, and you can buy it straight from Take Control.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Some interesting news regarding Masimo, the company that is locked in disputes with Apple over its patents for blood oxygen sensors that has led to that feature being removed from the Apple Watch in the U.S.: Joe Kiani, the company’s firebrand founder and CEO, has resigned as CEO after losing a shareholder vote and being kicked off the company’s board of directors. Reuters reports:
Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management. The company named veteran healthcare executive, Michelle Brennan, as interim chief.
Bloomberg’s excellent financial columnist Matt Levine has some extra analysis about the series of steps that could lead to a founder and board chair to completely lose control—it involves unhappy shareholders and freezing out a board you disagree with.
Hanging in the air is this question: With Kiani gone, will Masimo’s board be more willing to cut a deal with Apple to end its dispute over the Apple Watch? If this whole thing has been a cold-eyed dispute over cash, maybe not. But if personal animosity was involved, maybe this change will shake things up.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We have the new phones. And we have thoughts on the new phones.
Go to the podcast page.
Which Apple Watch faces we use, our feelings on Apple tying the new iPhone to AI features, where we get our phone wallpapers, and how we’re using the Action button.
Go to the podcast page.
Last year, Apple introduced the Action Button to the iPhone 15 Pro, and leaned hard into its use as a button to take pictures. This year, though, the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro both have a new dedicated Camera Control button. So what’s an Action Button—also now on the iPhone 16!—to do?
While the Action Button can be assigned numerous tasks, including setting a Focus mode and toggling the flashlight on and off, I can see Apple struggling with ways of making the Action Button seem less than an afterthought, overshadowed by the new Camera Control.
For example, Apple has suggested on a few occasions that the Action Button is a bit of a chameleon. It can turn on the flashlight at night, but toggle Do Not Disturb during the day, for example. Or it can turn on the flashlight when your iPhone is held horizontally, but launch an app when held vertically!
This all sounds clever, but unfortunately, Apple hasn’t actually added any functionality that lets users easily assign different tasks based on time or orientation. If you want to know how to do that sort of thing, you’ll need to use Apple’s Shortcuts app to get it done.
I know Shortcuts is intimidating to a lot of people, so here’s a very simple guide to creating a basic Action Button shortcut with behavior that varies based on some specific parameters. (For more, much more on this concept, check out Federico Viticci’s MultiButton project.)
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to
see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting…and waiting…but the Great
European Privacy Crackdown never came. For a while it seemed like the only way you’d get
slapped with a GDPR fine was to do something truly egregious or be named Mark Zuckerberg.
(Or preferably both.)
But the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over.
Recently, EU member nations (plus the UK) have started taking action against data controllers
of all sizes–from the big (Amazon), to the medium (a trucking company), to the truly miniscule (a
Spanish citizen whose home security cameras bothered their neighbors).
So what changed between 2018 and 2024? Perhaps the biggest factor was the EU cracking
down on companies putting bogus “headquarters” in countries with friendly regulators,
particularly Ireland. But it certainly didn’t help that the last few years have seen an unending tide
of data breach stories, and the public’s relationship with tech has increasingly soured. There’s
an appetite for enforcement these days, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
If you’re an IT or security professional, you may be wondering what to do with this information.
Unfortunately, GDPR compliance isn’t the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or
scheduling a training session. The best place to start is to adopt a policy of data minimization:
collect only the data you truly need to function, on both customers and employees.
After that, your second priority must be securing the data you have. Of course, that’s easier said
than done, but you can start with doing more to protect against common breach culprits like
compromised passwords. (Call us biased, but getting a password manager for every employee
really is table stakes for good security.) You also need to monitor where all your data is going,
so PII doesn’t disappear onto Shadow IT apps and unmanaged devices.
We’ll close with a 2022 quote from John Edwards, the UK Information Commissioner:
“The biggest cyber risk businesses face is not from hackers outside of their company, but from
complacency within their company. If your business doesn’t regularly monitor for suspicious
activity in its systems and fails to act on warnings, or doesn’t update software and fails to
provide training to staff, you can expect a similar fine from my office.”
In other words: it’s time to get serious about GDPR.
To learn more about GDPR compliance, read the full blog.
Jason and Myke share their first thoughts about the iPhone 16 Pro and Apple Watch Series 10, live and in person!
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to StopTheMadness Pro for sponsoring Six Colors this week. (Big week!) StopTheMadnessPro is a major upgrade to the beloved Safari extension StopTheMadness that stops website annoyances and privacy violations. When websites try to block your copy and paste, block your contextual menu, block your keyboard shortcuts, play videos without your permission, or track your link clicks, it’s time to stop the madness!
Made by indie developer Jeff Johnson, StopTheMadness Pro is a one-of-a-kind Safari extension with a huge number of unique features, too many to list them all! Here are a few more:
- Show Safari’s native video controls, including Picture-in-Picture.
- Set video speed on websites.
- Set video quality and subtitles on YouTube.
- Redirect URLs to alternative websites. In macOS Safari, redirect URLs to alternative web browsers.
- Force links to open in the same tab, or force links to open in new tabs.
- Customize fonts on websites.
- Add your own CSS and JavaScript to websites.
In addition to Safari on iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness Pro supports Firefox and Google Chrome on macOS.
StopTheMadness Pro is a one-time universal purchase for iOS and macOS in the App Store. Previous purchasers of StopTheMadness can get a discounted upgrade to StopTheMadness Pro. For more details, see the StopTheMadness Pro website.
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the green room at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, getting ready to start this year’s 12-hour podcast telethon in support of St. Jude’s mission to stop childhood cancer and other devastating childhood diseases. I’m one of five co-hosts along with Myke Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Kathy Campbell, and fresh-faced newcomer Casey Liss.
We’ve got a lot of silly fun and nonsense planned, along with some looks into the mission of St. Jude. It’s Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, this is an incredibly worthy cause, and I hope you’ll consider giving to St. Jude as a part of the Relay podcast network’s campaign.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Look, I’m not ungrateful. But the truth remains that nothing stokes the imagination of what Apple could do with its products more than the release of its latest hardware and software. As iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and all the other latest OSes arrive, we not only end up picking through all of the new features and capabilities to see what’s new but also coming to grips with what’s not there and the limitations of what is.
That’s no different this time around. Even though I’ve been using iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia for several months throughout the beta process, there are things that I’d like to see improved or expanded upon in future releases. Because nothing whets the appetite like seeing what’s possible. So here are just three places where Apple seems poised to build on this year’s features to do more in the coming years.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Mediterranean, the European Commission and the DMA are back:
Today, the European Commission has started two specification proceedings to assist Apple in complying with its interoperability obligations under the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’). Under the DMA, Apple must provide free and effective interoperability to third party developers and businesses with hardware and software features controlled by Apple’s operating systems iOS and iPadOS, designated under the DMA.
In general I’ve been supportive of the EC’s attempt to level the playing field. This proceeding, however, definitely made me raise an eyebrow, if for no other reason than it feels extremely vague. Here’s how the EC details it:
The first proceeding focuses on several iOS connectivity features and functionalities, predominantly used for and by connected devices. Connected devices are a varied, large and commercially important group of products, including smartwatches, headphones and virtual reality headsets. Companies offering these products depend on effective interoperability with smartphones and their operating systems, such as iOS. The Commission intends to specify how Apple will provide effective interoperability with functionalities such as notifications, device pairing and connectivity.
The upshot seems to be to allow third-party accessories to have the same benefits as Apple’s own accessories, like the Apple Watch and AirPods. Some of this is work Apple’s already done with iOS 18’s new accessory pairing feature, which it’s now incumbent upon third-party developers to embrace. Ultimately, the experience for third-party accessories should be much closer to that of AirPods.
But at the end of the day, a lot of what makes AirPods better is the fact that it’s using Apple designed hardware, like the H-series chips instead of standard Bluetooth. I have difficulty imaging that the EC would require Apple to make that hardware available to third parties. (Or that other companies would choose to use it, even if they did, given the relative expense.) It seems like eventually that’s a brick wall that this legislation would run into.
All of this depends precisely on how you slice it: it’s one thing to afford all third-party developers the same opportunities, but there’s a fine line between that and forcing Apple to do additional work for those competitors or degrade its own experience.
On the other hand, the iOS 18 changes may be enough to meet the DMA requirements. We’ll have to see if the EC can walk that line.
The second part of the proceeding is a little more straightforward, mandating “transparent, timely, and fair” communication with third parties over interoperability requests, which seems perfectly reasonable to me—we could all hope for as much.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Verge’s Victoria Song writes the only black Apple Watch Ultra 2 review you need:
This is the Apple Watch Batman would buy. Never mind that it’s a mini brick on my wrists. Sliding it on for a photoshoot, I feel something wash over me. No longer am I a sleep-deprived tech reviewer hunched over an overpriced coffee. I’m a leather-clad vampire assassin calmly sipping espresso on a cobblestone street.
If the only difference is the color, you go deep on the color. Great read.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Our view on Instagram’s new “Teen Accounts” and their direction, thoughts on Qi2, charging speeds, and MagSafe, our favorite new feature in Apple’s latest platform updates, and the update we like least or will need time to adapt to.
Go to the podcast page.
Independent journalist Tim Culpan reports that TSMC, Apple’s Taiwan-based chipmaking partner, is now producing A16 chips at its new fab in Arizona:
TSMC’s first Arizona chips are now in production, and Apple is ready to be the first cab off the rank with mobile processors made using the foundry’s 5nm process.
Not sure what those A16s will be used in—maybe the iPhone SE? A low-end iPad? Apple TV? But as Culpan writes, this is a milestone in the U.S. government’s attempts to increase chip production and capability in the United States.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Here at Six Colors, we dropped our iOS, iPadOS, and macOS reviews, along with a piece about Photos, on Monday. Our good colleagues at MacStories are also busy releasing stuff that’s worth your time:
- Federico Viticci on iOS 18
- John Voorhees on macOS Sequoia
- Jonathan Reed on watchOS 11
There’s a whole lot here. Federico’s review is incredibly personal (with some delightful artwork), and is always a treat to read after I’ve finished writing all of my stuff for OS release week.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Will Carroll re-joins for a mega Sports Corner episode. We discuss the power of the NFL and the future of highlights. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: sports rights, Diamond bankruptcy, Venu doom, and tangents.]
Go to the podcast page.
All of Apple’s new operating systems are here, and we discuss our favorite new features—and acknowledge the elephant waiting in the wings. We also spend a little time celebrating the tenth birthday of both Upgrade and Six Colors.
Go to the podcast page.
Left to right: The new initial Photos view, which combines the Library (top) and Collections (bottom); the new Collections area provides ample opportunity for discovery; each Collection comes with a Movie and a curated selection of photos.One of the biggest changes to Apple’s devices this fall is the release of a new version of Photos, one that contains some pretty major interface changes—especially on the iPhone and iPad. I’ve spent the summer working on a new edition of my book about Photos and so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what Apple’s trying to do here.
Put simply, Apple continues to grapple with the fact that the Photos app serves two very different purposes.
On the one hand, the app is the definitive media library for people using Apple’s ecosystem of devices, as represented by the Library view. This is the app you go to to find an image you’ve captured, whether it was 10 seconds or 10 years ago. It’s a reference library and a utility, and if you need to quickly grab a picture you just shot in order to send it somewhere, you need to be able to do it quickly and easily.
But on the other hand, for a decade Apple has invested a lot of effort into making Photos a vehicle for discovery of the amazing stuff that is contained in those same voluminous media libraries. Apple has been using machine-learning technology, suddenly the talk of the tech world, for a decade in Photos, identifying the people and objects in photos so that it can better understand what it’s got. And then it has spent even more work trying to build systems that can organize and recommend those photos and videos to you, the person who took them.
Back when I started taking lots of digital photos (in the early 2000s), there was no way to do this. You had to go through your photos and apply tags or keywords to each one manually. Organization was by time stamp alone, and geotagging was an unheard-of concept. Thanks to GPS stamps on smartphone photos, and the machine-learning stuff in Photos, it’s now child’s play to say “show me pictures of my kids in Hawaii” and get hundreds of images within seconds.
And yet I think Apple realized that since the Photos app always launched in Library view, a lot of people had no idea that behind the scenes, Apple had built an entire curation system that was designed entirely to delight users with pictures and videos of loved ones from across decades of history. And, really, what’s the point in building a giant media library if you never revisit those photos and videos?
So the new version of Photos doesn’t launch to the Library view, with a bunch of tabs at the bottom that apparently few people clicked on. Instead, it launches to a new hybrid view (thankfully simplified and tweaked since the original iOS beta earlier this summer) that displays the familiar Library grid in the top two-thirds of the screen, with a series of Collections in the bottom third. When you scroll up, you’re in classic Library view. When you scroll down, you’re seeing the multitude of ways that Photos can automatically carve up and re-serve you the contents of your Library in ways that make sense and are pleasing.
I know that these changes made a lot of people cranky this summer, but I think the app ended up in a great place. Sure, if you are someone whose idea of using Photos is to launch it and only see the very latest items, I guess this update adds clutter. And Apple should probably let people say “I don’t want to launch in this view” and honor that request. But for the vast majority of iPhone users, Collections are a boon, a way in to your library that offers major improvements over long scrolls through the Library.
The default top Collection, Recent Days, is remarkably utilitarian: it’s literally a way to quickly browse through recent days of images and videos, so you can jump back to that thing you shot three days ago. And then there are Collections featuring people and pets (and, for the first time, user-definable groupings of those people and pets), Photos-generated Memories and Featured Photos, collections of trips you’ve taken (applying dates and geotagging information in a smart way), and even suggestions for good images to use as wallpapers.
In past versions of Photos, Apple focused a lot of its energy on auto-generated collections called Memories, which collected together photos and videos on somewhat random subjects (“at the park!” “pet friends!”) on a somewhat random basis. They were pretty sophisticated collections, offering an automatically generated slideshow movie and a curated view of photos rather than every single item that matched the theme.
Memories still exist, but what Apple has done is taken the entire Memories concept—a slideshow movie and a curated collection of items—and applied it to every single Collection in the Collections view. So whether you’re looking at a Recent Days collection of last Tuesday, a Trips view of your summer visit to the shore, a People & Pets group, pretty much whatever, it ends up in a Collection view, complete with that slideshow movie. It’s a pretty rich collection of stuff, and just as important, it’s a consistent interface, which Photos lacked before.
Apple has also boosted Search in Photos again. You can still search for keywords and locations and dates, and it’ll work. But if you just want to natural-language search for “Julian at the beach in Oregon,” that’ll do the trick. It works really well.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/cleanup-ios18.mp4Clean Up will be very useful, once it ships with Apple Intelligence.As with everything else this fall, the other shoe to drop involves Apple Intelligence. Photos will gain a feature where you can just type a suggestion and Photos will build a Memory of that for you, on demand. But more importantly, Photos is finally getting proper background removal support across iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the introduction of Clean Up, another Apple Intelligence feature. In general, it works really well. I just wish Apple hadn’t waited until 2024 to launch this feature—and limit it to devices powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence—since you could use the Photomator app to do this on the iPad five years ago.
It’s a consequential year for Photos on iPhone and iPad. (The Mac is updated too, but there’s no real interface overhaul—you can get to Collections via the Sidebar, as always.) I think I understand Apple’s moves here and I support them. Yes, people who prefer Photos to be an utterly utilitarian look into your camera roll will probably feel that Collections is poking its nose in where it doesn’t belong. But the benefits of showing off the contents of the Library in more creative ways than a grid of your most recent entries are just too powerful to be ignored.
Apple’s design changes will mean that more people will discover great stuff in their Library. That’s the whole idea. I think it’s the right thing to do.
Perhaps more than any of Apple’s other operating systems, iOS is about balance. For many people, their iPhone is their primary computer—in some cases, their only computer. Every year, Apple rolls out new features to the platform, but it wants to do so in such a way that it enhances the experience of using its phones without getting in the way of users who rely on the device.
This year’s update, iOS 18, walks that line carefully. There are new improvements that range from those that won’t really affect you unless you seek them out (big changes to home screen customization, for one) to those that will impact every single person who uses a phone (a brand new interface for Photos). The good news is that most of these features also come to the iPad too.
Perhaps the strangest part of this year’s update, however, is what’s not there. Apple has spent several months talking up Apple Intelligence, its suite of generative AI features that do everything from help enhance your writing to create imagery for you, and lots of other stuff in between. It even launched several ads about the features last week. But Apple Intelligence won’t start rolling out until iOS 18.1 arrives in October—which means, yes, I suppose we’ll be back to talk about them when they do eventually show up.
While those features—or their lack—might overshadow some of the other announcements in iOS 18, when you strip them away, you’re still left with a nice—if not mind-blowing—set of updates. At this point in the iOS life cycle, there’s nothing wrong with some modest improvements. And the benefit of lots of smaller features means that there’s a little something for everybody in iOS 18.
Your home screen is your castleIn recent years, Apple has gradually released its grip on the iPhone’s monolithic look and feel, allowing an increasing number of choices for those who want to customize their devices: widgets, the App Library, lock screen custmoization, and so on. That trend is alive and well in iOS 18, which adds a couple new features for those who want to tweak the appearance of their iPhones.
I’m not sure that I’d want to do this, but now I can.The first is to put apps “anywhere” you want on the home screen. I say “anywhere” because your icons are still constrained to the same grid that they’ve snapped to since you’ve been able to reorganize apps—don’t start getting visions of piles of documents on a Mac desktop. But you can now leave open spaces in that grid if you want things just so.
If you’ve already got a full homescreen, this can still lead to some trickiness—it’s like doing one of those puzzles where you slide around tiles into one open space. Far better, in my testing, to start with a blank home screen and arrange things to your liking—that’s aided by something I discovered while playing with this feature: you can have the same app on multiple home screens. So maybe try building a new one from the ground up to your liking.
More radically, Apple has now taken the step of adding different color “themes” to your icons. Yeah, those quotes are still hanging around, because unlike the broad customization options you might get from a third-party app like Widgetsmith, Apple’s are limited to a few options, including light and dark versions, small and large (the large icons forego the labels beneath the apps for a bold aesthetic look), and yes, the ability to tint your icons any color you like. (You can also choose whether your background is in “light” or “dark” mode, independent of your icons; the latter dims your wallpaper, making your icons pop more.)
I have found myself enjoying dark mode icons, especially the ability to shift automatically between light and dark with the system appearance, although I still occasionally run into glitches where icons get stuck in a certain appearance for a little while.
Over the past several months, I’ve played around with the tinting options and I’ve yet to find a color option that I love so much that I want everything tinted that way. Perhaps this is a deficiency in my own tastes: I like the way certain icons or widgets look in a specific color, but applying it to everything often feels overwhelming, like I’m suddenly drowning in a sea of purple. It’d be nice if you could be a little more granular about which icons got tinted and how, but I also understand the complexity inherent in that decision.
Matters may improve somewhat as third-party developers tweak their app icons to be more tint-friendly—the same goes for dark mode, though I do appreciate that Apple is doing some clever work to enable it even for those apps that haven’t specifically jumped onboard—but I’m skeptical that picking an arbitrary color is for me. Then again, perhaps I’m simply mired in seventeen years of iPhone usage!
The most Six Colors of clocks.My favorite new customization feature in iOS 18 is a minor one: on the lock screen, there’s now an option to set the clock to a rainbow color. It’s a nice way to add a splash of color to your phone, even when the Always On display is in its dimmed setting.
I think overall, Apple’s customization options here strike a pretty good balance. There’s enough to let those who want to play with the looks of their homescreen have a wide variety of options without losing the inherent identity—and usability—of an iPhone. Bottom line: your iPhone is even more yours now than it’s ever been.
You’re in controlControl, control—you must learn control!We’ve gotten the ability to customize our home screens and lock screens in previous years, so this year Apple has ventured into new territory: Control Center.
What started life as a way to quickly access certain phone functions has now morphed into a multipage affair that you can configure to your specific needs. That includes not only being able to add or remove controls of your choosing, but also place them where you want and even (in some cases) choose what size they are. Plus it adds a ton of new controls and even unlocks the ability for third-party apps to provide their own options. If that’s not enough, you can even swap out the flashlight and Camera controls on the lock screen, and users of iPhones with an Action Button can choose to use it to trigger some specific controls.
This kind of flexibility is extremely welcome, but the biggest challenge is the same one that keeps me from taking full advantage of that Action button: muscle memory. Frankly after all these years I’m just used to where certain controls are, and the idea of moving them just makes me wonder whether I’m really better served. Change is hard is what I’m saying. though I feel like it will take some time for me to rework my memory—both mental and muscle—to get the most out of the feature. That goes double for the Lock Screen: I still haven’t figured out what else I’d even want there now that I have the option. However, with the imminent arrival of the iPhone 16 and the new Camera Control button, I’m starting to think maybe I can afford to diversify a bit.
Of the new controls available, the one that I find especially handy is a home widget for a specific device. Previously you had to rely on HomeKit’s algorithm to figure out which smart home gadgets you likely want to access at any given moment, which sometimes meant you ended up having to launch the Home app anyway. You can even have multiple instances of this Home widget for different accessories or scenes. I also appreciate Apple’s concession to the sometimes frustrating nature of having multiple pages of controls: by not lifting your finger as you swipe down from the top of the screen, you’ll continue on through the various screens until you get to the one you want. By default the screens are organized in Favorites, Media, Home, and Settings, but you can add or subtract these as you like.
There are still some limitations, of course. While you can resize widgets, most of them have only two or three possible sizes at max, and it’s sometimes tricky to figure out what’s actually possible. I’m still not sure why I can’t have a two-by-four set of home widgets if I want one. There’s also some bugginess here: resizing widgets sometimes makes them jump around, including to the next screen if there’s not enough room, and sometimes my controls seemed to end up in an almost random order. I also noticed that when I added a control for a Shortcut it sometimes picked up the custom icon from Shortcuts and sometimes only showed the generic icon.
The Action button configuration is also only limited to certain controls. And as with most features requiring third-party buy-in, it’ll be interesting to see just how much this ends up being something that developers adopt. I’ve yet to try out any that really take advantage of the feature.
One other nice tidbit from the new Control Center: there’s now a dedicated power button in the top right corner, which lets you quickly shut down the phone without having to remember which physical buttons to press and hold. (It’s also an accessibility affordance for those who have trouble with that kind of motion).
I’m glad to see Apple buying into Control Center as a more customizable area. Like Shortcuts it encourages people to try and do more with their phones, and as with the new home screen options, it provides people with the ability to make their phones work the way they want.
Get the message?Messages continues to get a lot of love from Apple—no surprise, as it’s probably one of the most used apps on the platform; I know it’s one of the apps I use the most, day in and day out. This year brings a slew of improvements, from under-the-hood protocols to flashy new effects to the ability to send a message from, well, pretty much anywhere.
I can already tell I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of the new tapbacks.I’m going to start by celebrating the best new improvement in Messages, the one that took a surprising amount of time but was ultimately worth the wait: sending any emoji as a Tapback. I’ve wanted that feature almost since the moment Apple introduced the ability to react to a message, and I’m glad to say that it works just as well as I’d hoped. Apple even tweaked the existing tapbacks by adding more splashes of color as well as adding a second selection of half a dozen of your most recent emojis (on a per-chat basis) when you swipe to the left. This has turned out to be just as great as I’d hoped it would be, with the caveat that so many of the people I was sending messages to weren’t on the beta—I look forward to all of them getting in on the fun. (If you send a message to someone whose device doesn’t support this feature, they’ll get the old “Dan reacted emoji to the message” text.)
Messages now has not only simple text styling like bold, italics, and underline, but animated effects that feel like something out of Keynote.Messages in iOS 18 also adds new text effects, which include both styled text (bold, italics, underline), as well as animations where your words—or even just a specific word—shake, ripple, explode, or more. Like message effects before them, these features try to ride that line between fun and annoying, and I think mostly succeed, though even amongst those early adopters I didn’t see them used that much.
Scheduling a message is straightforward and works pretty well.On the utilitarian end of the scale, Apple’s added a couple new features to Messages, such as the ability to queue up a message to send later. You access that in the same strange pop-up menu as stickers, Check In, and the rest of those forlorn iMessage apps, at which point you get a little blue bar at the top of the message that you can tap to pick a date and time to deliver the message. In true Apple attention to detail, the little analog clock icon even correctly shows the time the message will be delivered, because of course it does.
From my tests, it seems relatively precise—within twenty seconds or so of your scheduled time—although I did discover that you can only schedule a text up to two weeks in advance. It also doesn’t have to be limited to text—you can include an image or a GIF from iMessage’s #images tool or even a message effect for those times you want to prep some birthday balloons.
However, let it be known that all of these capabilities are still tied exclusively to iMessage—this despite the fact that Apple has made improvements to the experience of texting those not on its platforms with the addition of Rich Communication Services (RCS).
The RCS descriptor is so subtle, you might not even notice it.RCS is the successor to SMS, and while it improves on some of that very old technology‘s limitations, these are more on par with Steve Jobs’s “glass of ice water to someone in hell” than to any sort of parity. It has a few notable—and welcome—advantages, including message delivery and read receipts, typing indicators, better image and video quality, and the ability to send via data instead of the traditional phone network, meaning you can text when you have Wi-Fi but no cell signal. Plus, yes, the end of those dreaded “reacted with” messages, even in your group chats. It’s worth noting that RCS uses the same old green bubbles as SMS; the only indicator to tell you which one you’re using is in the text field, which now appends RCS or SMS to “Text Message” when the field’s empty.
For most users, the switch to RCS will be utterly transparent in the best way—texts with those not on Apple platforms should silently improve. I’m still looking forward to the improvement to group texts, which will really hit when the rest of the iOS users I message with upgrade to iOS 18 too.
Finally, there’s the class of feature that just feels like Apple showing off. The company first rolled out its Emergency Satellite SOS feature back in 2022 with the iPhone 14 line, but why should we have to wait to use a cool feature until an unfortunate emergency? As of iOS 18, any capable iPhone can now send text messages via satellite when you’re out of Wi-Fi and cell range. That comes complete with a new animation in the Dynamic Island that helps you make and maintain the satellite connection by telling you which way you need to point your phone. (While I didn’t get a chance to try this out for real, there’s a Demo mode that you can use to at least get the experience, but you really need to have no cell or Wi-Fi signals to use feature.) Satellite texts work for iMessage and SMS—but not RCS, as Apple says that the packet sizes are too large.
I don’t think most people need this feature, but there’s no denying it’s cool. I’ve gone on occasional hikes with no cell service available, and if nothing else, it gives peace of mind that I can stay in touch with people—even if it’s not to tell them that I need to be rescued from an ill-advised walk in the woods.
Apple has said that its satellite services will be available free for two years after activation of a iPhone 14 or 15 model; those first two-year periods start expiring in November, but we have no information as of this writing as to what Apple will charge—or if the company will kick the can down the road so as to avoid looking like their life-saving features are only available to those who pony up.
Photos go off the gridWhat would an iOS update be without a big (and potentially contentious) app redesign? This year, that mantle is bestowed upon Photos, which has gotten a stem-to-stern overhaul that offers a lot more power and customization, while also forcing most users to relearn some aspects of an app that’s remained largely unchanged for several years.
I think you can best sum up this approach with the old aphorism about not pleasing all of the people all of the time. Used to be we all had the same Photos app, and while there might have been some people who felt just fine about it, it ultimately didn’t matter, because there was really only one experience: take it or leave it.
Now everybody can tweak the Photos app, customizing which sections appear in what order, which is bound to make some people happier. But as with Apple’s home screen customization options, it only works up to a certain point, so those people who were perfectly fine with how the old app worked might find themselves feeling a bit at sea in the new world order.
Gone is the bottom toolbar with its Library, For You, Albums, and Search options. In its place is a new combined view: your grid of photos at the top and a modular set of items—dubbed “collections”—below. If you swipe down on the library grid, it turns into the classic library view, now with controls for filtering and sorting. If you swipe up, you scroll through your collections.
Which collections show up at the bottom are up to you. They can be arranged or hidden as you see fit using the Customize & Reorder button at the bottom, although there are some limits to the granularity: for example, there’s a Shared Albums section, but you can’t select a single shared album. (You can, however, put a single Shared Album in the Pinned Collections item…confused yet?)
Newness seems to pervade every corner of the app: when you’re viewing an individual photo or video, the old toolbars have been replaced with redesigned ones; in some cases—screenshots and videos—the image itself no longer reaches to the edges of the screen, instead hovering against a white background until you tap on it to enter a full-screen mode. There’s also, for the first time, an option to toggle the appearance of the screen when you’re editing a photo—it was previously always against a black background, regardless of whether you were in Light or Dark system appearance, but now you can choose to have it be always light, always dark, or follow the system appearance.
The redesign has taken some time to get used to, but after a few months with it I’ve found I really do appreciate the changes for the most part. Yes, I do primarily want to get to my Photos, but a grid isn’t always the best way to view them. I have a Shared Album of my kid, and I love being able to pin it to a place I can easily get at it. (I also like that activity from all my Shared Albums pops up in a visible place in between the library grid and the collections.) More easily accessible filtering and sorting are also great—an endless grid of squares to scroll back through is very 2007 and, honestly, kind of overwhelming.
Some of the smaller touches in Photos are also handy. The profile icon in the top right, for example, also doubles as a sync indicator: a yellow dot appears on it where there’s unsynced content, and when it’s actively syncing, there’s a progress bar that rings your icon. That’s a feature that many folks—me included—have long wanted, and a welcome concession to Apple’s traditional approach of trying (often unsuccessfully) to make syncing transparent.
Apple’s also added a few new automatic categorization features to Photos: for example, in addition to people and pets it can now recognize groups of people. I have to say that’s proved effective for me: the fact that it collects all the pictures of, say, me and my son or me and my wife or all three of us is pretty great. And, as Jason points out, given that every collection has its own automatically generated Memories-style video makes it easier than ever to enjoy your pictures.
The other major new category is Trips. In the past these might have surfaced as Memories, but I do think there’s something to the idea of collecting pictures specifically from your travels—I’m old enough to remember my parents digging out the slide projector to show off photos from a specific trip. If you tap through to Trips, it allows you to filter by years, but I feel like there’s a missed opportunity here by not having a map-based interface to see all your trips (though, to be fair, you can easily view each trip’s photos on a map). You also, weirdly, don’t seem to be able to rename a trip; I have a couple that have ended up with some weird automatic tagging that I’d like to change.
Apple’s goal with Photos’s auto-generated collections is clearly to reduce the dependence on searching, but just in case it doesn’t automatically surface what you’re looking for, search has also been improved, allowing more natural-language-based searches. So, for example, if I wanted to find pictures from travels with two of my friends, I can search for “trips with Jane and Evan” and I’ll get the expected results. (I’m a little surprised that’s not part of the Trips function, to be honest.)
There’s a ton more in the Photos app: filtering more types of images like QR codes and handwriting, a redesigned Activity view for Shared Albums, and a new Recent Days collection, just to name a few.
One risk with so much new stuff is that most users won’t delve deep enough to check out everything they could be doing. There will no doubt be a bit of a learning curve in people adjusting to the new interface, but overall I think the Photos changes are broadly positive. They bridge the gap between being a familiar interface and new features in a way that helps ease people in. Making the collections interface more prominent is a good thing, in my opinion: I don’t collect pictures in order to be Smaug sitting on a huge horde of thousands of photographs from over nearly three decades—I want to see and enjoy them. This year’s updates will hopefully help even more people revisit photos they may have even forgotten they’d taken.
Additional bitsAs with every year’s iOS updates, Apple has also sprinkled plenty of changes throughout the entire OS, some of which you probably won’t run into unless you go looking for them. But there are a few that I found particularly worth calling out.
Remote Control lets you not not only draw on someone screen’s remotely, but use their device.Camera: The Camera app has a handful of new small features, including the ability to pause video as you’re recording—hey, you can do your own in-camera jump cuts now! You can also change flash settings by touching and holding; tapping just turns the flash on or off. There’s also a five-second timer, and heavens above, Bluetooth audio will still play even when you’re taking a photo or video. Small enhancements all, but appreciated.
Remote Control: You’ve been able to share your iPhone’s screen over a FaceTime call for some time, but this year Apple added some significant improvements. First of all, when you initiate a screen sharing session, you can use your finger to draw on the screen—colorful lines that evaporate after a few moments—or tap to issue a “ping.” That’s handy for troubleshooting, since it makes it easier to indicate to the person on the other end what you’re looking at (not to mention providing a more accessible experience for those who are deaf or hard of hearing). And if that’s not enough, you can remotely control the other person’s screen, though they’ll be prompted before allowing it to help prevent the feature form being abused. Jason and I were able to try this out in a session and it worked pretty well. Is it too much to hope that we could some day have remote control between our own iOS devices? iPhone Mirroring would seem to point the way.
Passwords has graduated from a preference pane to become a full-fledged app. While I’m hopeful that this bodes well for its future development, it’s not a seismic change. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Passwords app, because there really isn’t much reason to—most of my interaction remains via the AutoFill features in Safari, which continue to work as they have for some time. I do appreciate some of the categorization filters in the Passwords app—it’s useful to be able to sort by recency, for example, to find that password you just created—and I hope that it means we might see more types of data—secure notes, identities, etc.—in there in the future.
Calendar gets a slight redesign that makes it easier to view items, especially in the Multi-Day view. You can also pinch to zoom in the Month view, in case you need more or less detail, and fully interact with Reminders: creating them, deleting them, and so on.
Files gets some much needed control over managing cloud-based files. You can now choose to keep files downloaded or remove their downloads by tapping and holding on an item and selecting the option from the pop-up menu. (My kingdom for a way to do that with apps.)
Maps adds hiking directions. Notes continues on its quest to be the everything app. Now you can have audio recordings with automatically generated transcripts, collapsible sections, or highlighted text. Even without the Apple Pencil, iOS’s version of Notes has Math Notes functionality (also accessible via the Calculator), letting you quickly type in equations or variables and get answers or insert graphs. Notes can already do a lot of what Pages can do, now it’s taking shots at Numbers. Is Keynote next?
Maps goes outdoors for this update with hiking suggestions, including the ability to make custom walking routes and view topographic maps. I haven’t had a chance to give it a thorough testing—my only recent hikes were in the UK and the hiking routes are currently U.S.-only. While Maps does give the highest and lowest points of a hiking trail, I do wish it gave you an overall elevation change instead of making you do the math yourself. There’s also a new Saved Places interface for keeping track of locations, including guides and routes, but I still wish you could have a collaborative guide that let multiple people add to it.
The Podcasts app builds on its relatively new transcripts features to allow you to send a share link tied to a specific timecode, which is very handy for when you’re trying to tell someone about a specific moment in an episode. Chapters also now show up when you’re scrubbing through.
In Settings, in addition to new, more descriptive headers at the top of each section and moving all app settings—including Apple’s own—to a new sub-section, the Privacy section has gotten a substantial overhaul that makes it easier to manage. Now each separate section (Location Services, Calendars, Contacts, etc.) has a little subheading that tells you how many apps have access to that particular section. The same goes for hardware features like Bluetooth, Camera, and the Microphone. It makes it far easier to audit a specific set of permissions and make sure that only the apps you explicitly want to give permission to have it. You can also lock and hide apps from the home screen, for those moments when you might hand your phone to someone else, though it’s certainly annoying to have to do that on an app by app basis—it’d be nice if there were a unified “guest mode”, à la the Vision Pro.
There’s also at long last the ability to have a Bilingual Keyboard, which you can configure in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards. If you frequently switch between languages or just, like me, get frustrated when you want to type a sentence or word in another language only to have autocorrect “fix” it, then you can now select two (but only two) languages. This is then denoted with an overlay on your spacebar, just in case you wonder why some of your English words are being changed to French. This is probably most useful to people who really do switch between two languages though—more casual users, like myself, stand to be frustrated when autocorrect mistakes your words into similar words in the wrong language.
18 going on 19iOS has become remarkably mature in recent years. While it still may not have the freedom of the Mac, it’s become harder and harder to find things that you can’t do with your phone.1 Just to put things in context: by the time the classic Mac operating system was the age iOS is now, its successor—Mac OS X—was just coming out. iOS, by comparison, doesn’t seem to have a replacement coming any time soon.
Or does it? With Apple Intelligence hanging on the horizon, we’re poised for a major shift in how we interact with our devices. I say “poised” because until these features start arriving, we won’t really know whether they’ll change our lives or end up being another evolutionary cul-de-sac. But in some ways, iOS 18 seems to be about Apple checking off some long-awaited features before Apple Intelligence changes the game.
iOS 18 is, in many ways, a work in progress. Perhaps more than any update in the past, we’re in for several months of significant platform updates—it’s the roller coaster that never ends. Buckle up.
- Seriously, if they added the ability to use a microphone for two apps at once, I think I could do everything I do on a regular basis. Come on, Apple. ↩
Handwritten notes can now be edited, copied and pasted, and more (left). Writing out math equations is easy (right).This year, there’s good news on the iPadOS front: A bunch of features that in recent years might have been limited to iOS are also available in iPadOS 18! For example, the ability to customize home screens is going to change the look of iPad screens—and iPad users won’t have to wait until the fall of 2025 to get what iPhone users got the year before. I like this trend. (See Dan’s full review of iOS 18 for more on the full details of that release.)
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that’s special for iPad users. There are really only a handful of new features. They’re interesting, and very iPad, but there aren’t a lot of them. And, of course, the iPad joins the iPhone in waiting for Apple Intelligence features, whenever those arrive.
Handwritten notesI have terrible handwriting and I hate writing by hand. But for you, dear reader, I have picked up my Apple Pencil and written many paragraphs in Notes on iPadOS 18.
Apple has given handwriting a serious upgrade in iPadOS 18. It’s treating text written with the Apple Pencil as text, essentially. You can select words and copy the text, sure, but what’s new is the ability to edit that text. Misspelled words will be marked and can be tapped to correct them, and words can be deleted and inserted.
This is all enabled by a new subsystem that learns your handwriting, meaning it can insert or change words without giving the corrected text an incongruous look. It’s not perfect—Apple unbelievably was not able to perfectly synthesize my unreadable chicken scratch—but it’s close enough not to seem jarring. Apple’s engine also works to realign what you write, cleaning up messy words or lines so that it’s all more readable—again, something it couldn’t do if it wasn’t able to generate a synthetic version of your handwriting.
I can’t speak to what the experience will be like for people with good handwriting, but I was pretty impressed with what iPadOS managed to do. It recognized most of my words (and let me copy and paste them as plain text) and even cleaned up a little bit of my messy writing. I could’ve used though maybe not enough—it was still pretty illegible).
Let’s be honest: I’m never going to be the target audience for this feature. I’m very impressed that it works, and for people who prefer to take notes in longhand, this will make the entire experience better.
Calculator and Math NotesThe iPad has, for some reason, not had a built-in calculator app since its inception. I have no idea why this was the case, and there have been many third-party apps to fill the gap, but in iPadOS 18 Apple has finally included an iPhone version of its basic calculator app. It’s silly it took this long, but it’s a good move.
Of course, Apple couldn’t leave it at that. So the Calculator app has added a new iPad-only feature, Math Notes. (You can also use it inside Notes.) In Notes across iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia you can type math problems and get them answered by typing the equals symbol, but only on iOS can you write them out by hand as you would on a piece of paper, and watch in awe as they are solved for you by a magical elf that lives inside your iPad.
Math notation is hard to type, but it’s easy to write, making it a perfect fit for the Apple Pencil. And it worked pretty well for me, allowing me to change variables and watch as the answer changed. This is a great idea, and I want Apple to keep pushing in this direction, because (especially for students) it’s a much more natural way to do math than using a calculator or typing equations in with a keyboard.
Tabs or sidebars?In Music, you can edit the sidebar and drag items into the Tab Bar (left) so that they display when the sidebar is closed (right).With iPadOS 18, Apple has introduced a new interface convention for iPad apps to use. It’s a new floating tab bar that appears at the top of the screen, replacing the longstanding convention of having individual tab buttons at the bottom of many apps. Depending on the app, the tab bar can also include a sidebar icon that hides the tabs and instead displays a sidebar. In the Music app, for example, users can add views and even playlists directly to the tab bar, and those items appear in the bar when the sidebar is minimized.
I’m not convinced that this idea is fully baked. It feels like Apple is introducing a new iPad app interface style, but it’s not really done so they’re not getting rid of the old style. A few Apple apps have the new style, but others don’t. The TV and Photos apps remain old school — there’s a sidebar you can hide or show — while Music has the collapsible sidebar tab accompaniment.
The tab bar being customizable is fun, but it fills up really fast, especially if you’re using a language with lots of long words.
The Clock app has top tabs and no sidebar.As someone who uses the largest iPad Pro primarily in a horizontal orientation, I’m also not a fan of approaches that seem—as this one does—to prefer that sidebars disappear “to make more room for content.” Some content — most notably textual content — does not need to be any wider on an iPad held horizontally. The sidebar serves a useful secondary purpose as a frame that reduces the width of the content area in some apps. (I dislike apps that will only display the sidebar as a temporary item that floats over content, for related reasons.)
I’m also not convinced that moving items that used to be tappable at the bottom of the screen up to the top is actually better. Don’t most people hold their iPads in their hands or maybe prop the bottom of the iPad up on their chest or knees or legs? I sure do. Less movement is required to tap at the bottom of the screen than the top. Also, reaching to the top of the screen causes my arm to cover all that precious content Apple’s making space for. Over-relying on top tabs on an iPad interface doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
And if you do like top tabs, you’ll start looking at all the other sidebars in iPadOS with a little bit of suspicion. Why can’t I pin my three most used mailboxes in Mail in a top tab, so I don’t need to keep the sidebar open there? Well, because it’s using the old sidebar style and Apple doesn’t think these tabs are fit for that app, I guess? It’s a sidebar, but not the right kind of sidebar. (Photos also has a “classic” sidebar, and I’m glad it does, since it’s a pretty good way of navigating that’s not offered on iOS.)
I’m also a bit disappointed that Apple didn’t use this opportunity to make iPad tabs more functional. Not only do they lack glyphs, but they also lack any sort of hierarchical option—think tap-and-hold to drop down additional functionality—that might make them serve more like an iPad equivalent of the Mac menu bar. Instead, they’re just dumb tabs that swap between content views. Again… that’s fine, I guess, but this is the big iPad interface addition Apple chose to roll out for iPads? It’s a strange decision.
When I go to concerts, I always feel bad for the opening acts. No matter how good they are, no matter how hard they try, they’re just not the reason the audience is there. At one memorable show in my hometown music venue, the opening act asked the people at the bar to kindly keep their conversations down a little bit while she was performing. (They continued to ignore her.)
What I’m saying is, macOS 15.0 Sequoia is here, but all anyone wants to know about is version 15.1. As with iOS and iPadOS, this fall’s release is the one that will begin to deeply integrate machine-learning models, dubbed Apple Intelligence, throughout the operating system. But the point-oh versions entirely lack those anticipated features, which won’t arrive until point-one.
This is not to say that there aren’t a bunch of new Mac features in macOS Sequoia 15.0. This release contains some classic Apple moves, like adding a feature found in third-party Mac utilities for years, but with a simplified “now it’s for everybody” feature set. It’s got some surprising (to me, anyway) and useful integrations with the rest of its ecosystem that make the Mac and iPhone work together like never before. A useful OS feature has gotten promoted to a full-fledged utility app, hopefully with the end result of more people using it. One of my favorite Messages features, left for years to dry on the vine, has finally gotten a long-deserved expansion. Safari has received a bunch of updates that should help users cut through the distractions and confusion of the Web.
And this release also features Apple’s continued ratcheting up of its macOS security and privacy procedures—which isn’t a bad thing on its own, but comes with associated degradations of the user experience that Apple doesn’t seem appropriately concerned about mitigating.
There’s a lot here, even without Apple Intelligence. And those features—modest though they’ll be, at least to start—will be along soon enough. The rock star is back stage, diving into a bowl of green M&Ms. But you bought the ticket, you’ve got a drink in hand, and this opening act is going to sing its heart out for you.
Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall”—er, I mean, here’s macOS Sequoia 15.0.
iPhone mirroringiPhone mirroring even rotates automatically for horizontal content—but won’t let you rotate it yourself.Every so often, Apple comes out with a new operating system feature that takes me completely by surprise. So it is with iPhone Mirroring, a new app that lets you view and operate your iPhone from the comfort of your Mac.
This is one of Apple’s Continuity features, which means that in order to connect to your iPhone, it needs to be within Bluetooth range of your Mac. Once the connection is established, I’m led to believe that the rest of the conversation between the two devices happens over Wi-Fi. I work about 20 feet away from where I keep my iPhone docked, and I was able to use the iPhone without any problem. Initially connecting to it was a little unreliable, however—sometimes it worked perfectly, and other times I needed to retrieve my iPhone and bring it closer, or unlock it and then re-lock it, in order to get it to work.
It’s the iPhone, on your Mac.When you’re connected to the iPhone, you see its interface on your Mac’s screen—but the iPhone screen itself remains locked, either at the Lock Screen or in StandBy mode. (If you try to take over an open iPhone, it won’t let you. And when you go back to your iPhone after a sharing session, your iPhone will alert you to the fact that it was being remotely operated, as a precaution.)
When you connect, the Mac’s keyboard and trackpad are interpreted just as you would expect, right down to swipes and scrolling. Requests for authentication can be handled by Touch ID on the Mac. When you move the pointer over the top of the iPhone Mirroring window, a window frame appears, giving you standard Mac window controls (you can minimize the app to the Dock, for instance) as well as two buttons to bring up the App Switcher or go to the Home Screen.
The screen appears flawless, operating at high frame rates and even transmitting audio back to the Mac. I was able to click around and play games as if I were running the apps right on my Mac. I could play podcasts in Overcast and the audio came right out of my Mac speakers.
I was also impressed with the feature that sends iPhone notifications straight to my Mac. They appear as normal Notification Center alerts, but when I clicked on them, they automatically launched iPhone Mirroring, connected to my iPhone, and launched the correct app on the iPhone. It all seems perfectly logical and not a big deal—until you start to think about what has to happen behind the scenes to make all of that work smoothly.
That said, I did encounter some issues. Apple says that the screen will automatically rotate into horizontal orientation when an app requires it, which I found to be true, but there seems to be no way to force a rotation when you’d prefer to use an app horizontally that also works vertically. I also couldn’t seem to bring up Control Center or watch video (presumably due to anti-piracy features?).
Still, this feature is awesome. As someone who sits at my Mac all day, it makes my iPhone and my Mac far more useful to me by making them work even better together.
Put windows in a cornerYou can tile windows via drags, keyboard shortcuts, menu items, or straight from the green button in the title bar.Over the years, Apple has added numerous ways to organize your windows to macOS, from Spaces to Split View to Stage Manager. In macOS Sequoia, it’s finally offering an approach similar to what Microsoft has offered on Windows for a while now: simple window tiling.
Yes, it’s a feature that’s been implemented by numerous macOS utilities over the years, and those utilities will almost certainly offer users more options and customizability than the basic functionality Apple offers. But most people don’t seek out UI-customization utilities, and adding tiling to macOS will help those people. And as usually happens, Apple’s basic implementation will eventually lead to those users seeking out a third-party app that gives them more control.
In any event, Apple’s tiling is certainly basic. You can drag a window to the top, side, or corner of the screen in order to make it quickly resize and fill that half or quarter of your display. By default, nothing happens until you drag a window and your pointer hits a boundary, at which point you’ll see a ghostly rectangle that indicates where your window will be placed. If you want to see it more quickly, you can hold down Option, which makes the ghostly rectangle appear right away (and if you like what you see, you can release your click and the window will be immediately resized, no boundary needed).
I was impressed with one little detail: If you drag a window back out of its tiled place, it resumes the size and shape it had before it was tiled.
Window tile commands abound.You can click and hold on the green “stoplight” button in the window’s title bar to choose from a few different arrangement options. There are also keyboard shortcuts that let you arrange windows in a hurry. These are bound to an item in the Windows menu called Move & Resize that offers shortcuts for many basic moves. The idea here is that you’ll build up some muscle memory about using keyboard shortcuts to send your windows left, right, up, or down.
Unfortunately, Apple seems to have bound these commands to the Globe key, and if you don’t use an Apple keyboard you can’t access those shortcuts without third-party add-ons. Also, there are no keyboard shortcuts at all for the quarter-screen-based tiling commands.
I’m also disappointed about just how basic Apple’s window-tiling options are. I don’t expect Apple to replicate Moom—in fact, I’m glad they didn’t try—but as an inveterate “put the window in the center” person, I’m surprised that Apple only seems to think people want to divide windows in halves or quarters, rather than thirds.
Still, this is a good addition to macOS. Given that most Mac users are using laptops these days, though, I’m not sure how many of them will find tiling to be the solution to their problems. Users with Macs attached to larger displays, however, may find it quite refreshing.
Videoconference boostsLook, ma, I’m on the Rainbow Stage! (Not really.)One of the areas of macOS that’s seen the most improvement in recent years is how the system processes video input. Rather than passing through webcam video directly to apps like Zoom and FaceTime, that video is processed by macOS, using a lot of the same techniques Apple uses to process video and still images on the iPhone.
In 2021, the Mac got support for Portrait Mode. In 2022 it was Continuity Camera, which threw iPhone-quality optics into the mix. And last year, macOS Sonoma brought a slew of layered animated effects, reaction, and presentation overlays.
This year, Apple’s added background replacement to the mix. This is a feature that you’ve seen in a million different apps, in which your background can be replaced entirely with a different image. (I use this when I’m playing D&D—for atmosphere!—or when I’m traveling and want it to look like I’m still in my home studio.)
In a way, Apple’s late to the game with this feature, but its presence means that you can replace your background in any app, not just ones with their own replacement feature. And you may well find that you’ll prefer to turn off the app’s background feature and use Apple’s instead. Apple is clearly using its very good machine-learning-based subject detection algorithm to separate you from your background.
It’s the same technique it uses for portrait mode and its clever cut-out presenter overlay feature, but background replacement does expose the flaws of this technique better than just about any other feature. Apple’s implementation is great, better than I’ve seen in any videoconferencing app, especially in good lighting. Apple supplies some background images (pretend you’re at Apple Park!) and color gradients, but you can also add in your own.
Safari additionshttps://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/annoying.mp4Make those annoying elements disappear.Apple has rolled a bunch of new features into Safari this time out, and there’s none with more potential than Hide Distracting Items. It’s sort of like an ad blocker, but I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. If you’re not someone who uses an ad blocker, you’ve undoubtedly run into a page that you want to read—but there’s a blinking ad, or an auto-playing video, or something else that makes staying on that page deeply unpleasant. When you click on the Reader icon and choose Hide Distracting Items, you can click on any annoying item and have Safari make it disappear in a shower of particles as if Thanos had snapped it away.
Yes, this means you can arbitrarily block ads—and on some sites, they won’t come back for quite a while, if ever. I know that a lot of people get upset about the idea of ad blocking—I definitely make a good portion of my income from ads on various websites and in various podcasts—but in my opinion, Apple’s taking the right approach here. Sure, you can use Hide Distracting Items to block anything you want, but what it’s made to do is get rid of that awful thing that makes it hard for you to read a page. I know it’s hard out there on the Internet for publishers, but beyond a certain point, distracting items are a violation of the contract between publisher and reader. I have no qualms in hiding an animated ad or a video when it’s so obnoxious that I can’t focus, and nobody else should, either.
Safari Viewer forces embedded video to fill the window.Apple has expanded Safari’s Reader feature to be a lot more than just a reader. When a page has more information to offer, the new Highlights icon appears at the left side of the Smart Bar, where the Reader icon has lived up to now. (To use Reader, you now need to click on Highlights and then click again on the prominent blue Show Reader button.)
A local restaurant’s website automatically showed Maps links.Apple says the Highlights pane will be populated with useful information gleaned from the page and site you’re on, such as a summary of an article, the location of restaurants and other businesses, and even links to movies, TV shows, and music when you’re browsing relevant articles. This all is powered by Apple’s own search engine, the same tool that has powered Spotlight searches for a while now.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag right now, though since this feature is driven by Apple’s own cloud services, I get the sense that the company will continue expanding the scope of sites that are covered over time. I was able to visit the website of a local restaurant and get a direct Maps link, and when I visited a Wikipedia page about a favorite album, it linked to the album on Apple Music. But it also unhelpfully reprinted the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page as the page’s “summary.” Yeah, Safari, I know. I’m looking right at it.
Likewise, Reader has been updated to add a sidebar featuring a table of contents and summary on some articles. I’m somewhat dubious about the utility. If I’m choosing to use Reader on an article, do I need a summary? Is Reader for readers, or people who don’t want to read? Is the summary in the Highlights pane not enough?
Then there’s the new Video Viewer feature, which is essentially the video equivalent of Reader. When Safari identifies embedded video on a page, it displays a Video Viewer command in the menu that appears when you click on the Reader icon. Video Viewer lets you expand the video to fill the entire Safari window. It’s meant as an antidote to sites that embed video but surround it with garbage and don’t let you expand the video yourself.
It’s a nice idea, and when it worked for me, I could see its appeal. It dropped out everything else on the page, provided standard macOS video controls, and even automatically popped out into Picture-in-Picture mode when I switched to a different app, and returned to the Safari window when I went back to Safari.
Passwords becomes an appIt’s a full-featured password manager, bringing in features from Settings and Keychain Access.After several years of building a full-featured password manager inside the Settings app (not to mention the separate repository of information in the Keychain Access utility), Apple has gone all-in on building a free-standing Passwords app, and it runs not just on the Mac, but on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. (You also have access to passwords on Windows via the iCloud app. It feels like one platform is missing here, somehow.)
So, the good news: the Passwords app puts Apple’s password management front and center in a way that it never was going to be when it was locked inside Settings. It’s got a nice, modern interface—think Reminders, but for passwords—and shows not just standard web logins but things like Wi-Fi passwords and rotating time-based codes and Passkeys. And since Apple lets you share passwords with other people—you can create a seemingly unlimited number of arbitrary groups and then move passwords into those groups—it’s really a full-featured option that will suffice for many users. (To share an item with a group, just drag it out of the list and drop it onto the group, which appears in the app’s sidebar, or right-click and choose Move to Group.)
When I imported my 1Password file—a couple thousand passwords that, I admit, could stand to be pruned back—Passwords bogged down. It would say it had imported my file, but then not show any evidence that the new items had been added—and inevitably, once I attempted to import the items again, it would end up importing them twice. I guess the first import was in progress? But there was no indication that an import was still going on. The app needs to do a better job of showing the current status of imports, and probably should not import duplicates of existing items. Deleting items also took a very long time.
The Passwords app is missing some features that you might expect from using other password apps, though in most cases it’s because Apple offers a different approach to solving the same problem. Password doesn’t offer secure notes, because that’s what Notes is for. It doesn’t save credit cards, because that’s what the Wallet settings panel does, sort of, though it doesn’t do nearly as good a job as 1Password. I also use 1Password to save all sorts of other information—passport numbers, software serial numbers, even SSH keys—in a sort of digital junk drawer. Should Passwords do all those things? Probably not, but I do think that there probably should be an answer for more disordered important information that’s not just “put it in a Secure Note.”
Messages finally gets meEmoji reactions (and colored tapbacks), at long last.Across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, Apple is upgrading Messages to let people express themselves better. That’s a good impulse, and after a false start last year (in which Apple attempted to catch up with literally every other messaging service by misguidedly repurposing its sticker functionality), the company has really delivered.
Yes, in addition to slapping a fresh coat of (color!) paint on the classic set of Tapbacks icons, Apple has finally introduced proper support for any emoji to be used as a reaction to an iMessage. When you tap back (or control-click/two-finger-click on Mac) to a message, you now get two lines of reaction options: the first contains the more colorful classics, and the second features the emojis you’ve most recently used to react. You can, of course, use the emoji picker to find the right one.
(When you react, people with older versions of Apple’s operating systems will see a new message that says something like reacted 🚡 to “HAHA”. Inelegant, but it maintains backward compatibility.)
There’s also support for per-character text formatting, so you can finally use bold and italic in messages, as well as apply animation effects to individual words instead of the entire message. Giving people a broader palette to use to express themselves is always a good choice.
There’s also one more pragmatic new feature: Send Later. You can now tell Messages to send a message at a later time. Last night I remembered, just before going to bed, that I wanted to send a few pictures of a new addition to the family to my mom. It was way past her bedtime and I didn’t want I disturb her. With the new Messages, I could’ve set that message to send in the morning when she was certain to be awake.
This appears to be a server-side feature; Apple says that if your device isn’t connected at the moment when the message is set to send, it’ll still send. Another good choice. After years of Apple seeming to take Messages and iMessage for granted, these are all welcome updates.
Security that fails the testIt’s a multi-step process to open an unsigned app for the first time.One unwelcome trend in macOS design the last few years has been an increased level of interference with the user in the name of privacy and security. As I’ve argued before, I admire Apple’s attempts to add modern security approaches to the Mac, a system designed in a very different environment decades ago. I just think that Apple has tended to make users pay for the decisions Apple makes, when it should be Apple investing in better ways to interact with users about security issues.
This year, the biggest issue involves apps that haven’t been notarized by Apple. In other words, these are apps that have refused (for whatever reason) to submit to Apple’s process of scanning and cryptographically signing before distribution. While Apple lets the user choose whether to run apps only from the App Store or also allow apps that are outside of the App Store but notarized, there’s no option to also allow apps that aren’t notarized. It used to be that a savvy user could right-click on a new, unsigned app and choose Open to kick off a quick approval process to launch that app for the first time.
That loophole has been closed, which seems unfortunate. (You had to know the shortcut and still validate that you wanted to open the app.) Now you’ve got to take quite a few more steps. On first double-click, Apple warns you that “Apple could not verify [the app] is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.” Your options are Done or Move to Trash. That’s it. Your Mac will refuse to run the app that you downloaded and tried to run, and it won’t even tell you what to do to fix it.
Here’s what you have to do: Open the Settings app, click on Privacy & Security, scroll all the way down to the Security section at the very bottom, and you’ll see a note that reads “[App] was blocked to protect your Mac.” There’s an Open Anyway button here you can click.
It still doesn’t open the app.
Instead, you now have to return to Finder and double-click the app, at which point you’re greeted with a warning: “Apple is not able to verify that [the App] is free from malware that could harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. Don’t open this unless you are certain it is from a trustworthy source.” You are once again strongly encouraged by a default button to move the app to the trash, but you can choose to “Open Anyway” if you really want to.
The app still won’t open, though.
The next step is an authentication. A user with administrative privileges must authenticate to make sure that you’re triple-dog sure that you want to launch the app. Once that authentication is done, the app will launch—and you never have to go through this rigamarole again with that app. At least, until the next time you update it.
Once again, I don’t doubt that unsigned apps are a vector for malware and scamware and that Apple has the best intentions in trying to prevent people from launching them unawares. But this new approach, which involves nearly a half-dozen steps, goes way too far. It crosses a line, I think, between Apple trying to protect the user and Apple aggressively trying to poison any app that would defy its notarization scheme.
It’s on Apple to work with developers to stop this dialog from ever appearing.Apple has promised to let you run any software you want on your Mac, but it never promised it wouldn’t make the process painful, I guess. I don’t like it. This is just too much.
I haven’t even mentioned what Apple has done for apps that need to capture your entire screen. Apple has built a new window-sharing API that’s more private and secure, which is great—but some apps need more access than that, and Apple has apparently decided that most of them don’t deserve it. Instead, they trigger a user-hostile warning to authorize the app—but only for a month—before they’ll be asked again.
Once again, it’s not that the impulse is bad, it’s that Apple has put the burden on the software developer and the user rather than doing the work itself. If some notable utility apps need more than Apple’s API can deliver, it’s on Apple to figure out how to work around that problem, and forcing monthly approvals by the user is not the way to do that. I hope Apple reaches out to all the developers who have slipped through the cracks and figures out a way to allow useful utilities to safely and securely continue to do their jobs—without alienating them from their users.
In the name of making the Mac a safer place to be, right now Apple’s also making it a worse place to be. This is not an acceptable trade-off. It’s incumbent on Apple to make the Mac safer without compromising usability.
Put bluntly, macOS Sequoia fails this test.
More new featuresOf course, in addition to the bigger attractions, there are always a large number of assorted new features that are sprinkled throughout Apple’s platforms. Here’s a brief peek into those:
You can plan hiking routes, view them on topographical maps, and save them to refer to later on an iPhone.Apple Maps has added trail navigation and topographic maps, across Apple’s major platforms. Letting hikers plan out their hikes and navigate on trails is a great upgrade. Apple has also loaded in hikes for U.S. National Parks. All of this is going to be more relevant on an iPhone, but people do build hiking plans on their Macs and iPads, so it’s good to cover all bases.
Notes now will let you record audio and generate a transcript of the recording, which you can display in a column alongside your notes. I feel like there’s more to be done here in terms of taking notes during a lecture or meeting and linking the comments to the transcript, but it’s a start. You can also now do math inside a note automatically, just by typing an equation followed by the equals sign. And at long last, you can now expand and collapse sections in a Note based on the header, which can keep things tidy in a long, complex document.
Photos has changed dramatically on the iPhone and iPad, but it hasn’t changed much on the Mac. The sidebar has been rearranged a bit, with a new Collections section that helps surface some new automatic groupings of photos. You can now create groups of People and Pets, so you can organize all photos with a collection of people without building a Smart Album. The new Trips feature uses location and time data to intuit when you’ve been traveling and build collections automatically based on that.
New classic Mac-inspired desktops, screenavers, and lock screens are gorgeous.Desktop and Screensavers get an injection of fun with the new Macintosh screen saver and wallpaper settings, which generates dynamic, colorful artwork based on classic bitmap graphics images from old Macs. The results are gorgeous. The other day, my desktop wallpaper featured the classic System Error bomb icon and a bright green background. Chef’s kiss.
But what about Apple Intelligence?So, now, to the headliner of the season. One of the biggest strategic moves in Apple’s history is jumping on the Artificial Intelligence train, which it is doing with the launch of Apple Intelligence—later this year. Only Apple Silicon Macs will support these features.)
I’m not going to over-cover these features in this article, because they’re still in beta and aren’t part of the 15.0 release. I’ve been using macOS 15.1 alongside macOS 15.0 this summer, and can report that the Apple Intelligence tools thus far run the gamut from useful to unimpressive.
The built-in Writing Tools have a lot of promise, most especially in offering corrections to your writing to make it more correct, though the interface was pretty messy the last time I checked. I’m less sold on the tools that re-word your writing and change its tone, but again, it’s got some applications—as long as it’s used responsibly.
I really like the idea of using summarization functionality to do things like summarize emails in Mail before you open the message, summarizing collections of notifications for things like group chats, and building a new Priority Notifications Focus mode that intelligently filters what you’re allowed to see.
Photos is a big beneficiary of Apple Intelligence features too, with a new ability to create on-demand Memories collections based on text input—you type “days at the beach with Jamie” and it generates a collection and a movie automatically. But the star feature is Clean Up, which lets you erase items from the backgrounds of images. It’s a feature that has been available in third-party apps for ages, but Apple has finally built it into Photos, and it works quite well.
Other features promised by Apple Intelligence—an enhanced Siri and image generation among them—will appear later and weren’t available in beta form, or weren’t good enough to evaluate. I look forward to trying out these features when they ship to the general public, and watch as they involve and improve. Until then, we’ll all have to sit tight and wait.
And now, an intermissionSometimes an opening act can surprise you. Yes, it’s often a nameless band that faded into obscurity, but sometimes you end up catching someone remarkable at a late stage of their career, a cult band gone before their time, or even a future hall-of-fame singer just as her first hit is breaking wide.
All the stuff in macOS Sequoia 15.0 might not be what we remember in five or ten years—we’ll remember the headliner, for good or for bad, after Apple Intelligence arrives and makes its impression on us. But there’s still a lot of here to enjoy in the moment, as we wait for the rest of it to arrive. Like the last few macOS releases, this one seems quite gentle. There aren’t major refigurings happening in macOS—it’s still the Mac we know and love. A few features have gotten a bit nicer, some items have gotten a good glow-up, and the whole thing feels pretty solid and stable.
As for what happens next? We’ll have to wait for the roadies to clear the stage, set things up, and anticipate what will happen when the lights start to dim.
StopTheMadness Pro is a major upgrade to StopTheMadness, the beloved Safari extension for iOS and macOS that stops website annoyances and privacy violations.
When websites try to block your copy and paste, block your contextual menu, block your keyboard shortcuts, play videos without your permission, or track your link clicks, just stop the madness!
Made by indie developer Jeff Johnson, StopTheMadness Pro is a one of a kind Safari extension with a huge number of unique features, too many to list them all! Here are a few more:
• Show Safari’s native video controls, including Picture-in-Picture.
• Set video speed on websites.
• Set video quality and subtitles on YouTube.
• Redirect URLs to alternative websites. In macOS Safari, redirect URLs to alternative web browsers.
• Force links to open in the same tab, or force links to open in new tabs.
• Customize fonts on websites.
• Add your own CSS and JavaScript to websites.
In addition to Safari on iOS and macOS, StopTheMadness Pro supports Firefox and Google Chrome on macOS.
StopTheMadness Pro is a one-time universal purchase for iOS and macOS in the App Store. Previous purchasers of StopTheMadness can get a discounted upgrade to StopTheMadness Pro. For more details, see the StopTheMadness Pro website.
The Verge’s Emma Roth reports:
Apple’s new sleep apnea detection feature has received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration — and Watch Series 9 or Watch Ultra 2 owners can use it starting today.
This comes on the heels of the FDA’s approval of AirPods Pro 2’s hearing features. As in that case, Apple was clearly very confident these features would get signed off on. As the company is planning to roll out the apnea detection in 150 countries, however, it may take a while before it shows up in every locality.
I did find it interesting that these features are apparently available now; as far as I can tell, the hearing health features of AirPods Pro 2 aren’t available yet (at least on my devices).
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Flying home. Taken with an iPhone 6, a few hours before Six Colors launched.Ten years sure seems like a long time.
Ten years ago the iPhone got physically big for the first time. (In the ensuing decade, iPhone revenue has doubled.) Ten years ago Apple announced the Apple Watch.
Ten years ago I found myself without a job for the first time.
After leaving IDG (which, along with two predecessor companies, had offered me continuous employment for more than 20 years), I really should have taken some time off. But in their infinite wisdom, IDG’s bosses decided that the right day to lay off a huge chunk of staff was the day after an Apple event. (Well, technically they wanted to lay people off the day of the event, but I helped convince them that it would be a stupendously terrible idea.)
The iPhone event was then, as it is now, the biggest single Apple event of the year. And after it was all over, after we crammed into the Flint Center in Cupertino, and saw Bono touch Tim Cook’s finger as they gifted a U2 album to everyone whether they wanted it or not, and went out into the temporary building where Stephen Fry—Stephen Fry!—was admiring new Apple stuff, I was summoned into a back room and Apple’s PR folks gave me an iPhone 6 briefing and handed me review units under embargo.
“So, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said to my Apple PR contact. She knew immediately, and very kindly expressed shock and dismay. I told her we’d work something out and the phones would get reviewed somehow, and in the end I made a deal with the editors back at IDG to write them a review so long as they’d link to my first post at Six Colors, which was a supplement to the review. Apple got the Macworld review they expected, and I got promotion for my new thing.
But what it meant was that there was no way I was going to take time off. The truth is, the best time in the Apple sphere to launch anything new is probably iPhone time, because it’s the peak of attention for the entire year. So I took the phones, wrote reviews, recorded the first episode of Upgrade, went off to the XOXO Festival, and flew back home on September 16, 2014 to wish my wife a happy birthday and press the button that put Six Colors, the site I’d been working on in the background for about a month, into the world. (The next day, my past and future collaborator Dan Moren made his first post.)
Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted). Lauren and I agreed we’d spend six to nine months giving it a try before judging if it was a success or a failure, but it all started succeeding so quickly that we never really even got to the point where we needed to have the conversation. All of a sudden, Six Colors and Upgrade were my primary jobs… and they still are, here in 2024.
A lot of the assumptions I made in 2014 don’t apply in 2024. It became clear pretty quickly that relying on advertising alone wasn’t going to work, and so we added memberships for Six Colors a year later. These days, direct support from readers and listeners makes up a very large proportion of my salary. Thank you all for helping me continue to do this. I honestly can’t imagine working for someone else.
I’m doing exactly what I dreamed of doing ten years ago. I got to be home when my son was in middle school and when both my kids were in high school. I get to collaborate on projects with all sorts of great people, including Dan, Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett, and the entire Incomparable gang.
My last few years in corporate media were deeply unhappy. The last year of my father’s life, he would keep asking me how my new job was going, and I told him it was fine—but I was lying and I think he could tell. Over the years I had shouldered more management burdens because I wanted the challenge and because I figured somebody had to do it, but by the end I had given up too much of what I got into this business to do, save the occasional new Apple product review. I should have walked away earlier—I even tried once, and was talked into staying by people who incorrectly thought things would get better.
What I’m saying is, my last ten years in this business have been entirely happy. I didn’t need to take time away to go from purely miserable to happy. That iPhone 6 review, which was originally just a way to keep myself connected to the one work thing I actually liked, transformed into the whole thing. It connected directly to my first post here, and to the first episode of Upgrade. I have been moving forward on its momentum ever since.
I’m happy to be here. And happy you’re reading this. Thank you for the last ten years. Here’s to thousands of new posts and links and podcast episodes to come.
Matt Birchler ran a lot of battery tests and found that the conventional wisdom that Chrome kills Mac battery life just doesn’t hold up:
Using Chrome would leave you with 54% of your battery remaining, and Safari would leave you with about 50% left in the tank. Is that a difference? Sure, but if I work all day and see my battery is at 54% or 50%, I’m impressed either way.
I’ll be interested to see if others try to do more comprehensive tests and validate or invalidate these claims, but if Matt is correct, blaming Chrome for battery drain seems to be more received folk wisdom than reality.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn. This is something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On (SSO), often by lumping it into a product’s enterprise tier.
So the enterprise tier is priced only for large companies… but companies of all sizes need access to SSO. In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.
Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager like 1Password, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, check out 1Password’s blog post.
When Apple says it expects regulators to approve something soon, it means soon.
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the first over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid software device, Hearing Aid Feature, intended to be used with compatible versions of the Apple AirPods Pro headphones. Once installed and customized to the user’s hearing needs, the Hearing Aid Feature enables compatible versions of the AirPods Pro to serve as an OTC hearing aid, intended to amplify sounds for individuals 18 years or older with perceived mild to moderate hearing impairment.
No surprise: a multibillion dollar company is not going to announce a feature like this unless it’s really confident that it’s essentially all signed off on.
Of the health-related announcements at this week’s Apple event, this was the one that I find the most intriguing. Both my parents have some form of hearing loss and while these features probably aren’t enough for them, I have to imagine it might be in my future as well. I’m also interested in seeing how the broadening of hearing aid technology to over-the-counter options in the U.S. will put pressure on makers of traditional hearing aids, devices that are generally much more expensive than, say, a pair of AirPods, even if they are more capable.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
How we open our phone cameras, our post-Apple event spending plans, whether we want a robotic smart speaker, and what a new iPhone button of our dreams would do.
Go to the podcast page.
For the second year in a row, Apple has added a button to the iPhone. New iPhone buyers will have two different hardware buttons to get familiar with, both the Action Button (introduced on the iPhone 15 Pro, and now on all iPhone 16 models) and the all-new Camera Control button.
For those of us who remember the era where Apple attempted to strip buttons and ports off of all its products—reaching a low point with the completely buttonless iPod shuffle—it’s a remarkable turnaround. I got to spend some time trying out Camera Control this week, and while it’s not guaranteed that everyone will love it, I think it’s got a lot of advantages that will make the iPhone a better camera.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The BBC’s Charlotte Edwards and Theo Leggett on the European Court of Justice’s ruling in a long gestating case about Apple paying (or not paying) taxes in Ireland:
The original decision covered the period from 1991 to 2014, and related to the way in which profits generated by two Apple subsidiaries based in Ireland were treated for tax purposes.
Those tax arrangements were deemed to be illegal because other companies were not able to obtain the same advantages.
Ireland, for its part, was trying to avoid collecting on these taxes, deeming the subsidies beneficial for bringing big businesses to Ireland. Though given that much of Apple’s Irish entities were reputedly present in name only, it’s a question of how much they actually created in jobs and revenues. (A question raised in general about localities offering tax incentives to large corporations.)
Apple expressed disappointment with the ruling in a statement, but said “This case has never been about how much tax we pay, but which government we are required to pay it to. We always pay all the taxes we owe wherever we operate and there has never been a special deal.”
European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager hailed the ruling as a victory, calling it ” a win for the level playing field in the Single Market, and for tax justice.”
One thing worth noting: the money in question has been in an escrow account during the legal wrangling, meaning that it’s not a fine, per se. Instead, that money will now be released to Ireland.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I’m just back from Cupertino and a morning spent at Apple Park, including a visit to the Steve Jobs Theater. You didn’t get to see it, but we were greeted by Tim Cook, who came out on stage to say “Good Morning” at least six times (!) and then express his excitement at showing us the big new iPhone announcement.
The video we saw, you saw. But I did get to ascend the stairs afterward and enter a packed hands-on area, where I picked up a few tidbits about the new announcements. Presented here, in no particular order, are some observations and notes about Monday’s big Apple announcements.
This is Tim on stage.Welcome (again), Apple Intelligence. Those who pay close attention to Apple will know that Apple Intelligence was announced in June at WWDC, and that portions of Monday’s video were essentially a rerun. But the fact is, Apple’s iPhone event is the single Apple event that most of the world pays attention to, and it’s not even close. Apple can’t assume that the general public knows anything about iOS 18 or Apple Intelligence, at least not before today. (The marketing blitz over the next few months will continue to spread the word.)
It’s what they needed to do, so they did it. But the late arrival of Apple Intelligence does put the company in a bit of a tricky spot. They’re promoting a key feature of their new iPhone… that won’t be there if you order one for delivery on September 20. Maybe it’ll be there, in beta, a few weeks later. But only some of it. The rest of it will come in December, or maybe early next year, or maybe next spring. In dribs and drabs over time. Apple risks annoying new iPhone buyers who are expecting more substantial functionality from Apple Intelligence, and it also risks not selling new iPhones because the currently shipping AI features are meager.
It’s an awkward time. It was always going to be like this, really, as Apple scrambles to catch up to its competitors in the race to differentiate their smartphones via AI-related features. We’ll see how it goes, but I suspect it’ll be at least a year before selling the iPhone and Apple Intelligence together isn’t awkward.
Camera Control in action. I got to spend some time with Camera Control, the second button Apple has added to the iPhone in as many years. I should say up front that I’m a huge fan of adding physical buttons to the iPhone, because physical buttons build muscle memory that software interfaces can never quite build in the same way. Taking a picture on the iPhone should become second nature, just as it is with point-and-shoot cameras. The Camera Control button should enable that—and, by the way, it allows the Action Button to officially become a “do whatever you want” button.
The button itself feels really good. It’s a real button—if you push it all the way down, you can feel it depress with a pleasing tactile response. But it’s also a touch- and pressure-sensitive button that lets you “push halfway” to bring up another set of options, for things like zooming in or switching between photographic styles. If you keep your finger on the button and half-push twice in quick succession, you’ll be taken up one level in the hierarchy and can swipe to different commands. Then half-push once to enter whatever controls you want, and you’re back to swiping. It takes a few minutes to get used to the right set of gestures, but it’s a potentially powerful feature—and at its base, it’s still very simple: push to bring up the camera, push to shoot, and push and hold to shoot video.
The button appears to support third-party camera apps via an API, so it’s not going to be a waste if you prefer to use Halide or Obscura or even Snapchat, as Apple’s video suggested. No sign of support for the button for other apps—it’s called Camera Control, after all—but again, the Action Button can serve for a second input for whatever you want.
Ultramarine, I love you.The Color Czar comes for the iPhone 16. One of the advantages of going to the iPhone event is being able to see the products close up, especially the colors, which don’t always come across in event photography. I’m here to applaud the choices Apple made in the regular iPhone 16 models this year. That Ultramarine color is lucious and beautiful. The Teal really pops, too, but as a survivor of the 1980s it just screams “prom dress” to me. Your mileage should probably vary. I have it on good authority that the Pink phone is very nice, but Pink’s not a color I see very well, so don’t take my word on that. (On the iPhone 16 Pro side, welp, it’s monochrome and Desert Titanium, which looks… sort of gold with tan? Even more colorless than last time, alas.)
I’ll give some praise for the styles of the Apple Watch, even though they’re not colorful. The Jet Black aluminum Series 10 is shiny and beautiful, and the Slate Titanium model also looks gorgeous. (There are also other gold and silver shades, should you prefer.) The Apple Watch Ultra might not have gotten an update, but they added a black version of the Ultra 2 that looks very good, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Presenting… “Intelligence.” Despite the event being a re-introduction of Apple Intelligence as a concept, some products just can’t do Apple Intelligence. What’s an Apple Watch to do? The answer is to put up a box that highlights “Intelligence”—unbranded, generic “Intelligence”—to show off machine-learning-derived features like crash detection, voice enhancement, and even sleep apnea detection. The problem with creating a brand around Apple Intelligence is that it creates a quandary when it comes to describing machine-learning stuff that isn’t in that particular bucket.
And more broadly, Apple’s going to need to figure out a way to explain how Apple Intelligence can interface, if it can, with products like the Apple Watch, Apple TV, and HomePod that are unlikely to get the specs to run Apple Intelligence themselves for quite a while. I’d be satisfied with a simple statement that my Apple Watch kicks queries to my iPhone for use with Apple Intelligence. In any event, this issue will only become more noticeable as time goes on.
Photographic Styles forever. Three years ago Apple introduced Photographic Styles, which let users dial in their preferred photographic looks deep down in Apple’s photographic pipeline, letting them choose just how they wanted all the photos they took to look. The iPhone 16 and 16 Pro get a new generation of Photographic styles that’s different in some notable ways.
First off, it’s editable after the fact. They mentioned this in the video, and I have to admit that I sat there kind of baffled. How can you… edit something generated from deep down in Apple’s photography pipeline… after the fact? Isn’t that just what we’d call a “filter”?
It turns out, not so much, as Camera and Photos Product Marketing Manager Della Huff told me afterward. These new iPhones actually save additional data every time they take a photo, giving Photographic Styles the ability to reconstruct and rebuild photos after capture. Huff shot a picture using a black-and-white Photographic Style, then jumped into Photos and moved it to a different style, one with color—and color appeared in the image. This extra data takes up some extra space in the image file, but it allows users to make creative changes to their photos after the fact, which is pretty amazing.
Still, isn’t applying looks to photos what the Filters feature in the Photos app is all about? Isn’t this duplicative of that? Well, yes, and that’s why for iPhone 16 and 16 Pro users, that Filters interface is gone—because now Photographic Styles are all you need. Given all the presets as well as the fine adjustments you can make to styles, I’m not sure most users will mind.
A strange lack of detail. I was puzzled by the lack of detail in a few portions of Apple’s video. The two different sizes of Apple Watch were never mentioned or detailed. There was a superlative—the largest Apple Watch screen ever!—but without any detail. At least they mentioned the new thickness of the Apple Watch.
On the iPhone side, Apple mentioned the size of the new iPhone 16 Pro screens, but not the overall size changes of those models. (Greg Joswiak said something about holding back “product growth”—or was it “bloat?”—by reducing the bezels around the display, but never actually said more than that.) Even more puzzling, all iPhone models got battery boosts, allowing Apple to make a claim that we’re seeing the longest battery life ever in iPhones—but never followed up that superlative with an actual number, either. It’s weird. Has Apple just decided not to quote specs at all in event videos? Boasting about long battery life sure connected better with an audience if there’s something tangible, like a number, attached.
Product updates that aren’t updates. I’m not sure I understand the state of the AirPods Max, which got an “update” that amounts to new colors, a USB-C port instead of lightning, and a single software feature—support for personalized spatial audio. That’s not an update. It doesn’t have the H2 chip that’s in the other AirPods. It doesn’t support all the new adaptive audio modes, the nod/head shake gestrues, or really anything introduced with the AirPods Pro 2 that’s also now on both AirPods 4 models.
And if the AirPods Max isn’t an update, are the AirPods 4 two updates in one? Apple is shipping two distinctly different models—one with noise cancellation, one without—but has decided to call them both the same thing. The product line is simpler this way, I suppose, in the sense that there are only AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max, but it’s not really simpler since one of those products is actually still two products. Still, if those $179 AirPods 4 really do a good job at noise cancellation, that strikes me as a pretty nice value. (Meanwhile, the old AirPods Pro 2 are also hearing aids now, via a free software update? Now that’s an upgrade.)
Expected clearance. Speaking of using AirPods Pro 2 as hearing aids, it’s interesting that Apple went ahead and pre-announced that feature, as well as the Apple Watch’s sleep apnea detection, despite not receiving final approvals from regulators. Apple announces products on its schedule, so it expressed extreme confidence that the two features will be approved—and I’m sure regulators are well aware when one of the world’s biggest companies makes statements like that. Hopefully there are no hiccups, because again, it would not be great if you bought an Apple Watch for sleep apnea detection, or AirPods to use as hearing aids, only for a regulator in your country to put the kibosh on the whole thing. (And again: this is Apple announcing hardware and selling features that aren’t actually shipping on the hardware, but enabled via a software update. I understand why it’s happening, but it’s a dangerous game.)
From the iPhone 16 to the Apple Watch Series 10 to the AirPods 4 to the other AirPods 4, and with the release of Apple Intelligence hanging over it all, we break down the announcements from the September Apple Event.
Go to the podcast page.
Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn.
Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class.
Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax.
The SSO tax is the name given to the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier.” The jump in price can be astonishing–one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.
In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.
To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with charging some extra for SSO–it’s not free for vendors to build or maintain–but putting it out of the reach of so many companies is irresponsible, and makes us all less safe.
Still, until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for the apps that aren’t integrated with SSO.
To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read the full blog.
Larry Ellison’s ownership of Paramount and what it might mean for CBS News; why Netflix and Apple just don’t get movies; Hallmark’s new streaming service; the rise of Tubi and FAST; and streaming’s lack of curation.
Go to the podcast page.
Fall can be relied upon for a few things: baseball playoffs, the changing of the leaves, the emergence of pumpkin spice, and, of course, new iPhones.
This year Apple’s holding its annual special event on the rare Monday (probably so as to avoid conflicting with a presidential debate on the Tuesday) and the company is expected to making a number of announcements.
In the past, Apple’s phone events have varied from those at which it felt like we’d heard rumors about everything going in, to those where it seems like we knew nothing at all. This year feels somewhere in the middle: the rumors are out there, but there’s enough of an “is that it?” feeling that it’s hard not to imagine Apple having something else up its sleeve.
So in advance of the “It’s Glowtime” presentation next week, here’s a rundown of what to expect (and not) when the video starts rolling.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
In the old days, we knew about what Apple would do so far in advance, they’d print it and mail it out and it would still be breaking news.When Apple was a small company that few people cared about, it leaked like a sieve. Sources like MacWEEK printed the company’s plans far in advance. These days, Apple is much bigger and more important, and journalists like Mark Gurman and analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo are experts at relaying the details of Apple’s future products around the world instantaneously.
Even so, there are always surprises at Apple events. On Monday, I’ll be sitting in the Steve Jobs Theater watching the same video the rest of you are watching at home, and while we can probably all sketch out the broad scope of the event, there will inevitably be little stuff that will make us scratch our collective heads. When all the big reveals are expected, the delight is in the details.
Leaks from the supply chain mean that we tend to know certain basic physical things about new Apple hardware: the shapes, the sizes, and the components with their accompanying specs. But it’s harder (not impossible, but harder) to get all the details of the software that Apple’s planning to take advantage of that new hardware.
A great example this year is the rumor of the Capture Button, a touch-sensitive area on the side of the iPhone 16 that will apparently let you open and control the Camera app. But the details are a bit hazier on exactly how it will work and what it will do. Will it control modes (video, still, etc.) or allow you to zoom or control autofocus? Will those gestures be at all customizable?
I’m looking forward to the story Apple tells around the Capture Button. This brings me to another feature of an Apple product roll-out that is very hard for leaks to get right: the narrative that Apple spins around its products. Yes, it’s all marketing, but the design choices are a part of the storytelling. Why did Apple decide last year to add a physical Action button and this year to add another button dedicated to the camera? Why is this feature different? What problems is it trying to solve for its users? The stories Apple tells around features like this tend to be quite informative about how Apple’s approach and philosophy. I find it interesting and helpful, a rare (albeit self-serving) peek behind the curtain.
Back in June, Apple spent a lot of time talking up Apple Intelligence. I’m sure a lot of people are wondering if there are going to be further Apple Intelligence announcements to come, perhaps tied specifically to the iPhone 16. I can’t see it. I think Apple is working hard to play catch-up when it comes to AI, and it played all its cards at WWDC. In fact, it played all its cards, and showed some other cards it’s planning on playing next year. If there was some other feature left in the tank, I think we would’ve seen it in June. What we’re getting is what we already know.
However, one area of Apple’s AI strategy was suspiciously vague back in June: where third-party chatbots fit in. In Apple’s world, the company’s own models use their knowledge of your personal context to help you on your device or by using Apple’s private cloud. But if you want to search for what the company calls “world knowledge,” it has said that it will (optionally) kick you out to a chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But the unveiling of that ChatGPT relationship was underwhelming, given that it was plastered with disclaimers, warnings, the ability to turn it off… and the fact that Apple executives kept insisting that it was merely the first partnership to be announced and that support for other chatbots would undoubtedly come in the future. They even mentioned Google Gemini once or twice, which is not something that’s usually done unless you have some confidence that you’ll get a deal done.
So here’s a possibility for Monday: Might Apple have some additional chatbot relationships to announce? Is it possible that Google Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude might be added to the list of chatbots coming soon to the iPhone? It would be a bit of a shot to OpenAI’s confidence, but given the flak Apple’s taking in the EU for not offering consumer choice, launching its chatbot functionality with a bunch of choices might be a smart move.
Monday marks the tenth anniversary of the original Apple Watch announcement, and I expect at least some interesting Apple Watch news. There’s plenty of heat around the idea that the new Apple Watch models will be bigger, and I’m really interested in hearing Apple’s storytelling about why this is a good thing. I know people enjoy having a smaller watch, and if Apple’s expanding the small watch to be the size of the (current) large model, what does that mean? Does it wear differently? Will it not seem huge? Or does Apple just have confidence, based on its market research, that it can make the Apple Watch larger and people will still buy it?
I’m also fascinated by the rumor about the Apple Watch SE, which might be getting a revision that could potentially include some lighter and cheaper materials, such as plastic. Would Apple, a company that mostly gravitates toward muted colors (or no colors at all), dare to make some eye-popping, brightly colored plastic watches, perhaps targeted at younger people?
Among the most opaque areas for Apple reporters who are trying to break news are the ones that come from a small group of people deep inside the marketing group: product names and prices. The Apple Watch SE price is a bit of a mystery, but an interesting one. Could Apple possibly get an Apple Watch under $200 for the first time? Or will it just slide into the existing price point?
And with all the buzz about Apple Intelligence, what’s Apple’s story regarding A.I. and the Apple Watch? Obviously, the hardware can’t support it in the same way as other devices and probably won’t be able to for years to come. But is there some sort of mitigation that Apple could promise for the near future? Will the Apple Watch be able to talk to an iPhone that’s powered by Apple Intelligence and use it to relay queries to a more intelligent assistant than on-device Siri? No idea, but Monday would be an opportunity to provide some reassurance, if any is on offer.
Finally, there’s the question of the blood-oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch. This will mark the first launch event after Apple was prevented from selling the device in the U.S. with the oxygen sensor turned on. Does the company really want to launch new models without being able to use that feature in its home market? Does it have any choice?
I see three possibilities: Apple could use Monday to announce that it’s reached a detente with Masimo, and that the oxygen features are once again available. It could announce that it’s somehow built a new oxygen sensor that its lawyers feel does not infringe on Masimo’s patents. Or it could just… do nothing, ship the new watches, not talk about the oxygen sensor, and people buying new Apple Watches in the U.S. will actually take a step back, assuming they’re upgrading from an older model with the oxygen sensor intact.
One last hardware marketing detail I’ll be looking for is how Apple defines the AirPods line, assuming some new AirPods are on the way. How many AirPods models are going to be for sale? Are there new low-end models that are replacing older models, or are we doing the tried-and-true Tim Cook thing of selling the older model for a cheaper price while the new model slots in at a slightly higher one? And what AirPods Pro features might creep into the lower-end model AirPods? What differentiates a “low-end” set of AirPods with noise cancellation from the AirPods Pro, and does that differentiation make sense?
One of the final mysteries of most Apple events comes from timelines. Only Apple knows exactly when the new iPhone preorders will go online, when the devices will ship, and when all the new OS versions will drop. Hopefully, we’ll hear all those dates on Monday—along with, if we’re very lucky, a better idea of when Apple Intelligence will ship to the general public.
In any event, there’s plenty to watch for on Monday, even if the big points have been spoiled. I look forward to watching the video, getting my hands on the products afterward, and relaying it all to you when I’m back home from my day trip to Cupertino.
Our preferred external storage solutions, favorite collaboration tools, motivations for smartphone upgrades, and thoughts on the potential for a Skynet-level AI scenario in our lifetime.
Go to the podcast page.
Dan wrote last week about how reports that Apple had laid off 100 people in the Books group. The news seemed to strike most observers as a regrettable, but understandable business decision. Apple Books has never really been able to topple, or even challenge, Amazon’s dominance in the ebook world, As a writer who sells books directly via Apple Books, I have some thoughts.
I sell iOS Access for All: Your Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility for iPhone and iPad via my Web site, and on Apple Books. I publish a new version of the book for each year’s iOS update. The majority of books are sold directly through my own site. I’ve promoted the book that way, and made sure the site is accessible for blind readers and others. Readers have told me they want both ePub and PDF formats, so that’s what I offer. But there’s a subset of readers who want be able to get the book from Apple Books, so I link there. Whether it’s the familiarity of doing business with Apple directly, or the desire to store and sync purchases with the Books app on all their devices, I’ve heard loud and clear that Books is a place I need to be. A couple of times I made kindle versions of the book and attempted to sell them on Amazon. I got very little traction there – perhaps because I didn’t promote its availability well, but more likely because people with accessibility needs don’t gravitate toward the Kindle platform. The Apple Books app not only offers a lot of flexibility in text formats and themes, it works flawlessly with the VoiceOver screen reader and other Apple speech tools. All of this makes my book a bit of an unusual beast, but it keeps Apple Books on my radar.
From a production standpoint, the Books store is easy-peasy for me, too, since I create the book as an ePub – the format supported by Books and the one I prefer to offer directly because of its native accessibility. All I have to do is load the book into iTunes Connect and submit it for publication in as many country-specific stores as I want. And while I’m at it, I can choose whether or not to apply DRM. I’ve chosen not to do so.
The issue with transferring Apple Books to another platform is not the existence of DRM, but the opacity of knowing exactly how to get the book out, and move it to another ePub-compatible platform. But once you dig in under the hood in iCloud, it’s certainly possible for a committed user to drag a file where you want it, assuming there’s no DRM.
There’s a tendency to focus on the condition of the Books app when we try to understand Apple’s decision to lay off staff. And because many of those let go work on the engineering side, that’s fair. But the cuts also hit the Books store, which maintains the book approval process, gets authors paid, and provides support. I’ve relied on that infrastructure more than once, and been pleased with the speedy turnaround those teams offered. I worry that could change after these cuts, and I hope I’m wrong.
When developers began the first uproar over the 30 percent “Apple tax” on their apps, I was painfully aware that as an indie book publisher, I was paying it, too. In fact, when I promote my book on podcasts or have a chance to speak to buyers in person, I remind them that I get all of the profits (minus a small per-month fee I pay to store and distribute the book files) when you buy a book directly from me. Apple Books returns just 70 percent to me, which makes things painful when I sell books in bulk to an agency or school district whose financial managers are more comfortable buying from the Books store. If I sell 50 books at 24.95 US$, I get $873.25 back from Apple. If I sell those same 50 books myself, it’s $1247.50. Ouch!
So is the “tax” worth it? I’m forced to think so, because the Apple process has been so easy for me and 25-or more percent of my customers prefer Apple Books. But ask me again when I publish my iOS 18 edition later this fall, and I’ve had a chance to experience the slimmed-down Books regime firsthand.
Jason and Myke preview what will happen at next week’s Apple event. What new features will the new iPhones have? How will the Apple Watch transform? How will Apple Intelligence be featured? To the winner goes the glory.
Go to the podcast page.
Wired‘s Kate Knibbs reports that many major publishers are blocking Applebot-Extended, the company’s crawler bot that helps train Apple Intelligence:
WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training.
This isn’t a huge surprise, as the story points out later on that many of the publishers are automatically blocking crawler bots (including Apple’s) until and unless they strike a commercial deal with AI companies.
Remaining unanswered is the question of just what was already used to train Apple’s LLM before people were aware of the ability to block it, and whether blocking the crawler now has any effect after the horse is out of the barn.
The Wired piece’s money quote, however, comes from a The New York Times executive:
“As the law and The Times’ own terms of service make clear, scraping or using our content for commercial purposes is prohibited without our prior written permission,” says NYT director of external communications Charlie Stadtlander, noting that the Times will keep adding unauthorized bots to its block list as it finds them. “Importantly, copyright law still applies whether or not technical blocking measures are in place. Theft of copyrighted material is not something content owners need to opt out of.”
Bingo.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
AppleVis won’t shut down August 31 as announced earlier this summer. The highly-regarded site, which provides news, community forums and a directory of accessible apps aimed at blind and visually impaired Apple users, has been acquired by Be My Eyes, which plans a September relaunch.
The potential loss of AppleVis saddened the community of blind and visually impaired Apple enthusiasts, who have relied on the site since its founding in 2010 for accessibility-focused coverage of all of Apple’s platforms. A new AppleVis blog post promises full coverage of Apple’s expected fall announcements:
We will reopen the AppleVis website on September 9, 2024—right in time for Apple’s Keynote and fall software releases. We will share all of our traditional content concurrent with the releases of iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, including an article detailing what’s new for blind and DeafBlind users in iOS 18; podcasts; and blogs detailing new and resolved VoiceOver bugs in both iOS and macOS.
Be My Eyes provides human- and AI-based assistance with visual tasks, via its app. The service is free to users. By giving the app camera access, then calling a volunteer from a worldwide network, a blind or visually impaired user can get help reading text, locating objects, navigating their environment, and more. Be My Eyes also posted a statement about the AppleVis acquisition, quoting CEO Mike Buckley:
“From the first call with the AppleVis team, we not only learned that we shared the same values and mission, but that we also had similar ideas for how to grow AppleVis and make it even more useful in the future. As always, we will listen and learn first, and then continue to build AppleVis with the direct input and leadership of the blind and low-vision community.”
Be My Eyes says it has acquired the AppleVis Web site and brand, and that it will employ two paid staff members to run it. The company says AppleVis will report to Be My Eyes Vice Chairman Bryan Bashin, a former CEO of the highly-regarded San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind. The company promises that AppleVis will be editorially independent from its parent.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Jason talks to Stephen Hackett about his recent deep dive into the world of the Macintosh Performa line, which was sold from 1992 to 1997. Over that time period, nearly 50 models were sold wearing the name. Things got messy.
Go to the podcast page.
How we purchase and read e-books, pet tech we’ve tried, our favorite accessibility features, and the tech features we’d add or remove with our magic wands.
Go to the podcast page.
One of Apple’s greatest fears has come to pass. Fragmentation has come for the iPhone and iPad. By the end of the year, users in part of the world will be able to harness the power of Apple Intelligence for various tasks—while users in the European Union will be able to set default apps, delete stock Apple apps, buy from alternative App Stores, play Fortnite, use a clipboard manager, and more.
Get ready for the debates over which flavor of iOS is better—the EU version or the AI one. But that debate isn’t what Apple should be concerned about. No, it’s that after years of insisting on locked-down iOS policies, users will see what’s going on in the European Union… and rather than feeling grateful that Apple keeps a close watch on their iPhones, they feel envy.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The next chapter of Apple Books’s life is looking a little bleak.
In a report at Bloomberg (paywalled, naturally), Mark Gurman says that the company has laid off about a hundred people, primarily in the team behind Apple Books and the Apple Bookstore.
Apple Books has become less of a priority for the company, which doesn’t see it as a major part of its services lineup. The Books app is still expected to get new features over time, according to the people.
Books has long been a weird business for Apple. The company made a big push back at the time of its introduction to try and steal market share from Amazon, courting publishers with terms that included better prices and an agency model split. It subsequently got slapped by the Department of Justice for some ill-advised business decisions related to that pricing, and then seemingly got scared off from trying anything in the market ever again.
Which is a shame, because in the intervening years Amazon has only continued to consolidate its market share and desperately needs a serious competitor to shake things up.
Sharing a little of my own data here: I’ve self-published my own short stories across most major ebook market places. Amazon makes up the bulk of those downloads and sales—53 percent and 66 percent, respectively. Apple comes in a solid second place in sales, with 21 percent, and third place in downloads with 11 percent.1 My literary agency has also published my novel All Souls Lost in ebook across those platforms, and Apple Books sales are also in second there, accounting for 18 percent of sales to 63 percent for Amazon.
I suspect my numbers are probably skewed by the fact that my audience—that’s you all reading this, in large part—are overrepresented by users of Apple products.2 That said, to my eyes, Apple has managed to achieve itself a comfortable, if distant second place in ebooks without really spending much in the way of time and effort. Which perhaps explains why they’re looking to cut costs and reduce focus—if the business works “fine” as is, then why invest more?
My disappointment stems from the fact that Apple is better positioned and equipped than anyone else in the industry to take on Amazon head-to-head in ebooks. But doing so would require the company to do something different. And I don’t mean its misguided attempts to reinvent the reading experience as it’s tried in the past—most avid readers are pretty happy with their the way they consume books.
One move would, obviously, be for Apple to release its own dedicated e-reader device with an e-ink screen. Kindles and Kobos are so successful because they replicate several of the best things about physical books—high contrast screens that are easy to read in all conditions, long-lasting battery life, and extreme light weight and portability—while bringing plenty in the way of convenience—to wit, a nearly infinite amount of books in a tiny device.
Do I expect Apple to do this? Absolutely not. Cupertino seems pretty comfortable with saying its e-reading devices are iPads and iPhones. Which is clearly understandable from the company’s perspective: for one, the company already makes these devices and they are passable for reading. For another, the most popular e-readers are generally low-cost, low-margin devices—not the kind of market Apple likes to play in. I’m sorry, nobody wants a $500 e-reader.3
So if embarking upon a new hardware product is out4, the biggest opportunity Apple has is to change the business side of things. I can think of two primary options there: the first is to provide some sort of, yes, subscription program. Amazon already offers a version of this with Kindle Unlimited, which provides access to an all-you-can-eat model—but only for certain content, as its terms for publishers require a window of exclusivity for electronic copies, which generally counts out traditionally published books. That’s certainly been a boon for Amazon, which not only picks up recurring subscription revenue, but has provided an entirely separate marketplace of content. (Albeit one that has its own game to play.)
While that deal might benefit some voracious readers and might bolster both Apple’s books business and its services revenue, it comes with some potential limitations for authors and publishers, depending on how the terms and royalties are structured.
The second option, to my mind, is one I’ve advocated for before: taking a page from Apple’s own digital music market of the 2000s and figuring out a way to make the Apple Books the premiere purveyor of ebooks without digital rights management. Ideally it would be combined with a seamless process to deliver those DRM-free books to your third-party e-reader of choice.5
The potential here is to expand the market beyond those people who will only ever buy and read ebooks on Apple’s own devices. Which is clearly not a huge chunk of the market, because if it was, the company would probably not be looking to cut costs by laying off people. If it’s about growth, this is how you do it.
Do I think Apple will make this move? I’m not optimistic, especially since it would require publishers to get onboard. There are a few who already sell DRM-free ebooks, including a major imprint of the big five and my own mid-size publisher, but fear of piracy runs deep.6
Perhaps eight years isn’t long enough in Apple’s institutional memory to have erased the sting of its defeat in the ebooks case, or maybe it’s just made the company gun-shy when it comes to trying anything else in the market. I think that’s a shame, because this is a great chance for Apple to change the narrative.
Updated on 8/28: A previous version of this article misstated the terms of Apple’s push with publishers when it first launched its ebook marketplace.
- It’s beat out in downloads by the fact you can download the short stories right from my website. ↩
- I don’t have information from my publisher about my Galactic Cold War books, but anecdotally I can say that I’ve been on more bestseller lists on Apple Books than any other platform, which both speaks to my audience and how few sales it takes to move the needle there. 😂 ↩
- Aside from Scott McNulty, who will probably buy any ebook reader. ↩
- Setting aside something weird like an iPhone or iPad with an e-ink screen. ↩
- This is already something more tech savvy readers have been doing for years. ↩
- Though to be clear, most readers I know are more than happy to pay for books, and if readers want free books, well, public libraries are right there. Piracy certainly abounds, but DRM isn’t really slowing it down, any more than it did with digital music or video. ↩
Finn Voorhees broke his iPhone screen and Apple fixed it. All of a sudden he was banned from Snapchat:
After restoring from a backup and beginning to log back into all my accounts, I encountered an unexpected problem. When trying to log in to Snapchat, I received an “SS06: Device Banned” error message. This was surprising, as I had no issues signing in on a different device. According to Snapchat’s support documentation, the SS06 error code indicates that the device has been banned due to abuse or repeated violations of their Community Guidelines. The support document also stated that Snapchat Support cannot unban a device once it has been banned.
I began to suspect that Apple had given me a refurbished iPhone as a replacement, and the previous owner had been banned for violating Snapchat’s guidelines. Searching the web led me to various forum posts from people who had been banned for posting pictures of illegal drugs, and contacting Snapchat support led to automated messages saying I was banned for violating guidelines and they cannot lift device bans.
A wild story. Snapchat shouldn’t be doing this, but Apple should probably also start laundering the IDs of refurbished phones.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Almost nobody who follows Apple for its products (rather than its stock performance) will care, but the company announced on Monday that longtime CFO Luca Maestri is ascending to godhood, er, leaving his job as CFO to become something different:
Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial Officer and join the executive team.
I know what you’re thinking: One bean counter out, another one in. But I have spent many hours making charts and proofing transcripts of Apple’s financial performance. It’s created a very strange parasocial relationship between me and the people on that quarterly call. If I somehow ran into one of the many analysts who populate the call out on the street one day, I’d get unreasonably excited. (“Katy Huberty, what have you been up to lately?”)
So I’ll miss Luca Maestri on the calls. I’ll miss his Italian accent, which used to flummox English language speech-to-text algorithms. In an impressive endorsement of modern AI models, his words are now transcribed with almost no accent-induced errors. I’ll miss his occasional turns of phrase, like when he described the company facing a “cocktail of headwinds.” I’ll miss his occasional enthusiastic response to an analyst picking data out of the company disclosures, as when he practically lit up when Richard Kramer (“Richard! How are the kids?!”) of Arete Research asked him about the most exciting possible topic for a CFO… free cash flow margins.
I hope Maestri takes advantage of his new retire-promotion to spend at least a little time cheering on his favorite Serie A soccer squad. A little birdie tells me he’s a big fan.
And welcome, Kevan Parekh. You will be judged by everyone else in the world based on how you handle Apple’s finances and deal with major issues. As for me, I’ll be watching how well the transcription algorithm handles your voice and hoping that you can occasionally embrace your CFO nerdiness or coin a quotable phrase. Remember, always disclaim your forward-looking statements, make sure Tim identifies himself by name, and don’t let any analyst trick you into revealing Apple’s next big product launch.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s time once again for the biggest event in Apple’s calendar. Apple on Monday announced a special event kicking off at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern on Monday, September 9. Few other details are known, beyond the fact that the event will be broadcast from Apple Park. This year’s event iconography features a neon, glowing animated Apple logo and the event includes the tagline “It’s Glowtime,” so make of that what you will.
The expectation, of course, is that Apple will use this event to announce the iPhone 16 line, which is rumored to bring the usual updates to the iPhone’s camera system, a new line of processors, and external design tweaks (including some new colors). We may also see updates to the Apple Watch line, new AirPods, and, of course, official release information for iOS/iPadOS 18 as well as the company’s other software updates.
Start your speculation engines now.
We bring the Summer of Fun to a close with our opinionated rating of 60 different Apple app icons.
Go to the podcast page.
Nellie Andreeva and Peter White reporting for Deadline:
Ted Lasso fans, this is not a drill. In a major step toward the long-awaited fourth season of Apple TV+’s hugely popular soccer comedy, the series’ studio Warner Bros. Television has picked up the options on the three original cast members who had been contracted under the aegis of the UK acting union Equity, sources tell Deadline.
Contract options differ on different sides of the Atlantic, but Apple has picked up the options of Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, and Jeremy Swift, suggesting that it is moving forward with making more “Ted Lasso.” The strong implication is that series creator Jason Sudeikis is onboard with extending the series in some fashion.
Given how successful “Ted Lasso” was, it was all but certain that Apple would want it to continue if Sudeikis could find a path forward that satisfied him. Apple’s money presumably also provided some motivation.
This is far from a done deal, though. All the American cast members are out of contract, just for starters, and many of them have been given huge career boosts by the show and are working a lot.
Still, no matter how you feel about the series and how it ended, its success made its return close to inevitable. And now it’s closer still.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
The folks at 1Password recently attended the RSA conference in San Francisco and were struck by how infatuated everyone was with the promise of new, shiny solutions to fix new, shiny problems.
But there are a lot of non-shiny, foundational problems still out there. In the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, accidental breaches caused by human error or victimization in phishing attacks was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials.
Yet in 1Password’s 2022 State of Access Report, only 29% of respondents said they used a password manager at work. This needs to change, and the Verizon’s report offers a clear look at where the industry is falling short and where it goes from here. To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full blog post.
The Verge’s Sarah Jeong on the Google Pixel 9’s new “Magic Editor” generative AI feature, and the future it will deliver:
Even before AI, those of us in the media had been working in a defensive crouch, scrutinizing the details and provenance of every image, vetting for misleading context or photo manipulation. After all, every major news event comes with an onslaught of misinformation. But the incoming paradigm shift implicates something much more fundamental than the constant grind of suspicion that is sometimes called digital literacy.
I’m reminded of the old Hemingway quote about how one goes bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” We’ve been watching the gradual erosion of images (and even video) due to AI, deepfakes, and the like, but I can’t help but feel, as Jeong does, that we are on the precipice of the “sudden” part as these tools become even easier and even more widely available.1
Despite Apple’s attempt to forestall some of these risks with the guardrails and restrictions it has built into its forthcoming Image Playgrounds feature, I still think that it would be wiser for the company not to wade into this market at all. Reject the premise that this is something that users want or need; there is something to be valued in standing up for responsibility in technology when so many of its competitors seem to abrogate it. 2 While you might not be able to disinvent something, you can at least choose not to make such questionable tools widely and easily available rather than throwing up your hands in helplessness. “If we don’t do it, someone else will” is an argument not worth the air spent evincing it. Choose better.
- And yes, photos have always been fake. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get worse. ↩
- Kudos, in that, to Procreate for taking a strong stance on refusing to to follow the crowd. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
A judge puts a stop to the launch of Venu, bringing the entire economics of the cable bundle into question. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Paramount’s sale complication, Disney+ success metrics, Olympics wrap-up, and theatrical’s revival.]
Go to the podcast page.
Emma Roth and Jay Peters of The Verge have a nice overview of the current state of affairs for app developers and alternative app marketplaces in the EU:
Epic’s game store may offer better terms for developers, but every developer, Epic included, is still subject to fees from Apple, even outside the confines of the App Store. And Apple’s terms and fees for apps on alternative marketplaces are so onerous that Epic has a big hill to climb to convince developers that it’s worth the time and money to list their apps at all.
This is the thing about how Apple has constructed the rules for alternative app marketplaces in the EU: It has built a system of mandatory fees that reduce (or even entirely remove) any incentive about offering apps outside the App Store. Other than apps with very specific business models and apps in categories that Apple refuses to approve, many mainstream apps will find that leaving the App Store doesn’t make sense financially.
I would argue that this is all by Apple’s design. Whether the European Commission regulators think it fails to establish the competitive marketplaces that the Digital Markets Act was attempting to create, well, that’s for the EC to decide.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I know all the cool kids are on 18.0 and 18.1 for ~~brat~~ beta summer, but I never want to roll the dice with iOS betas on my iPhone. So imagine my surprise after a perfectly normal iOS update (17.6.1) arrived, and the Siri location permissions changed.
The first time I asked Siri for the temperature, it made me unlock my iPhone first, then prompted me with “You’ll need to turn on Location Services for that. Want to turn it on just this once or when using Siri?”
This was confusing for a number of reasons, but mostly because that’s never happened before. We’ve all been talking about the imbalance in Apple’s pervasive permissions requests over user experience, so it shouldn’t be shocking to see a completely new level of permissions inserted into the mix.
I want to dissect this specific addition, because it seems to make the least sense to me out of all of them, and it’s not a beta release, but shipping software intended for every normal person.
It’s just a sleepy summer releaseNowhere in the release notes for iOS 17.6.1 does Apple say that they’re going to do anything with changing permissions on your iOS device. Here’s what Apple says: “This update includes important bug fixes and addresses an issue that prevents enabling or disabling of Advanced Data Protection.”
Bug fixes? I love that for me.
Digging into the 17.6.0 security release notes on Apple’s web site (they do not have notes for 17.6.1), there’s no announced change for location services, and the only time “location” is mentioned is for a Family Sharing-related issue. There are other changes that do mention Siri, but none of them mention this permissions change. If there was a specific exploit related to this change it’s not spelled out anywhere, and none of the tech blogs that comb through releases even mentioned it. Which adds to the surreality where you doubt whether you changed it yourself, somehow.
Then I started to wonder if I ever had 17.6.0, or if it was 17.5.1 straight into 17.6.1. I couldn’t tell you, which adds to the feeling that someone from Apple silently entered my house and replaced my shoes with identical ones that were a half size bigger overnight.
The inability to pinpoint when something that used to work changed in the blink of an eye, or even an acknowledgement that it’s different, doesn’t make a person feel especially secure.
Let’s unlockIf your iPhone is locked and sitting on a nightstand, and you asked “Hey Siri, what’s the temperature,” it will say, “You’ll need to unlock your iPhone first.” You pick it up and stare at it and maybe it unlocks or you have to swipe it to get it to try FaceID again. Congratulations, you’re really taking advantage of having a hands-free digital assistant.
Once your iPhone is showing your unlocked lock screen, it informs you it can’t perform the action you requested. It says you need to turn on Location Services. That’s confusing, because it is on in general. You also are aware that you didn’t change any of your permissions since the last time you did this action causing further confusion.
The new default setting Apple chose for you didn’t exist before. It’s located under Settings: Privacy & Security: Location Services: Siri (Siri & Dictation in older versions of iOS). Prior versions had “Never” or “While Using the App,” with the user default being the latter. In the update, Apple has changed it from “While Using the App” to “Ask Next Time Or When I Share”.
If your iPhone is unlocked and active, you’ll get the modal location warning on top of the modal Siri dialog. I don’t know why you’d ask while you’re actively using the phone instead of just looking at your many weather widgets, but the point is that it is not consistent. This modal dialog offers clearer choices than the Siri dialog, but the two together aren’t helping.
Again, the big problem is that Apple’s update has reset the setting on your behalf, and it’s up to you to change it back without any understanding of why Apple wanted to change it, or how your privacy and security is affected if you change it back.
It can’t possibly be the new default, because Apple expects people to unlock their iPhone to ask for the weather. Apple can’t expect you to put up with a confirmation about sharing data each time you ask, despite that being the default setting. That would be ludicrous.
Apple will sometimes reset a permission to motivate developers to move away from a deprecated or unsafe system, but… this is Apple’s own Siri we’re talking about here. Sometimes Apple does this sort of thing to make it clear that personal data is being used for certain things. But if I asked for the weather at my location, then I know that.
Consider: Siri can change the setting for you, but you have to unlock your iPhone beforehand, not after you make your selection. Do we not teach people how to make flowcharts any more? Why would unlocking the phone be the first step?
Asking the user a compound question is also a terrible idea, so that’s why the boffins on the security and privacy team choose it.
- Want to turn it on just this once?
- Or while using Siri?
If you say “yes” it counts as an answer to the first part of the question and will show you the requested information without changing the setting. If you awkwardly respond, “while using Siri,” then it will change the setting to what you presumably were using before 17.6.1: “While Using the App.”
If you say “no” or “never” it’ll change the permission setting to “Never” and say that it can’t tell you your location because of your settings, then ask you to say what location you’d like to hear the weather for.
This is a poorly worded prompt with multiple possible answers and no logical, practical use case other being an obstacle for the iPhone owner.
At Least They Don’t Ask When You’re DrivingIf you happen to be in a car, and your iPhone is connected to CarPlay, and ask it for any directions, then it will prompt you with “Allow ‘Siri’ to use your location?” It won’t ask to unlock the iPhone to change the permission, because your iPhone has to be unlocked on a periodic basis to work with the car. That gives it the authority to change your settings.
Again, this will perplex anyone that used CarPlay prior to the permissions change, because it never used to ask this. At least the three possible options on this screen are clearly written and correspond to the three permissions, like the modal iOS dialog, and unlike the Siri dialog. Allow Once is the new, sucky permission that the interface defaults to selecting.
Is my life safer or more private?I don’t understand why this disruptive change happened. It doesn’t seem to offer any tangible security or privacy benefit. If we assume that there was a reason, mysterious though it may be, why did the user experience have to be so bad? I don’t see an ounce of care in the execution.
If this is happening to lay the groundwork for Apple Intelligence, now seems to be the wrong time to push out such a change—when users can’t possibly make an informed decision about features that won’t ship for months. Presumably the permission I assign today will carry through, unless Apple resets my choice again.
Maybe the new policy is to reset this switch after all updates, or certain updates? I definitely didn’t expect it, but maybe that’s just the first time of many and I’ll be periodically derailed from my thought process because I have to make a choice again, all because I made the bad decision to update my phone.
This is merely one minor example—though given the size of the iPhone market, it will impact millions of Apple customers. How did it come to be? If it’s important, why was it done this way? Maybe Apple could explain itself somewhere. Like, say, the release notes.
A third-party app we consider essential for everyone, the first app we use in the morning, a piece of tech in our lives that needs an upgrade, and a tech product or concept we initially doubted but which later became successful.
Go to the podcast page.
There was a brief shining moment where it seemed like Apple might really have cracked the automotive industry—and it wasn’t necessarily for the reasons you might think. Yes, the company tried hard for years to build its own car in a variety of ways, everything from designing the underlying automotive systems to building the whole thing from the ground up.
But it wasn’t Apple’s own ambitious car project—now by all accounts dead and buried—that saw it make inroads into the automobile sector; it was the relatively more modest addition of CarPlay.
The question of where CarPlay is heading has become increasingly murky in the wake of Apple’s car project’s demise. The comapny has announced a next-generation push for that can use all of a car’s displays, with an interface tailored to each specific maker, but it’s been slow to garner adoption amongst its partners.
So, as CarPlay embarks upon its second decade, what might its future hold? Well, before you head forward, it always helps to know where you’ve been.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Moom 4’s expanded interface. (Courtesy Many Tricks.)When I covered the macOS Sequoia Public Beta, I made the point that while there’s now a built-in feature for quick window tiling, it’s the typical Apple system-level offering:
Yes, it’s a feature that’s been implemented by numerous macOS utilities over the years, and those utilities will almost certainly offer users more options and customizability than the basic functionality Apple offers. But most people don’t seek out UI-customization utilities, and adding tiling to macOS will help those people. And as usually happens, Apple’s basic implementation will eventually lead to those users seeking out a third-party app that gives them more control.
The app I was particularly thinking of when I wrote that paragraph was Moom from Many Tricks (led by my old Macworld pal Rob Griffiths!), which just got updated to version 4. Yes, if all you want is some basic window arranging functionality, you’ll be able to get it from Sequoia—but if you want customizability and functionality that goes way beyond what Apple will ever provide, the $15 Moom will deliver.
New in Moom 4 is a resizable interface (imagine that, for a window-resizing app!), a massively customizable and expandable pop-up palette, customizable drop zones, and the ability to move windows (even if they’re not in the foreground) with a keystroke and the use of your mouse or trackpad. There are plenty more.
If you’re someone who has experimented with Sequoia’s window management in this summer and found it to be too basic, it’s worth giving Moom a try.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Netflix announced that Monument Valley 3, a (surprising?) sequel to the classic indie platformer, is coming December 10. It’ll be in the App Store, but exclusively for Netflix subscribers.
Netflix has been slowly rolling out a big catalog of games, tied to a Netflix login. There are loads out now, including the excellent Lucky Luna and Laya’s Horizon (both from Snowman, developer of the excellent Alto’s series of iOS games).
If you are a Netflix subscriber and haven’t been paying attention to Netflix games—I know it’s hard, they’ve taken over my AppleTV Netflix login screen—you might want to check out that catalog and see what your subscription gets you. You can also see games on the iOS Netflix app by swiping to the Mobile Games row and browsing that way.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Fortnite and Epic return to the (not your) iPhone, Apple opens up NFC and enacts new restrictions on Patreon, Spotify posts a link, and we discuss what is and is not a ‘Tabletop Robot.’
Go to the podcast page.
I recently attended the RSA conference in San Francisco–security’s biggest event of the year– and I was struck by how infatuated everyone was with the promise of new, shiny solutions to fix new, shiny problems. On some level that’s not surprising–tech is constantly driving toward the future, and security is one of the fastest-moving areas of tech.
But on the other hand, it seems like the security industry is walking away from some of its most foundational problems before they’ve actually been solved. People would rather talk about AI-powered behavioral analytics that can detect when a worker’s mouse is moving strangely than the decidedly un-glamorous work of rolling out patches and managing permissions.
This disconnect was especially clear in the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). This year’s report found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials. The 2024 DBIR found that “use of stolen credentials” is the number one initial action during a breach, and that credentials are the number one way attackers get in in non-error, non-misuse breaches, followed by phishing and vulnerability exploits.
What’s frustrating about the persistence of credential-based attacks is that they are eminently solvable! Roll out a password manager to your end users, put SSO and MFA in front of sensitive applications, and implement passkeys when possible. Yet in 1Password’s 2022 State of Access Report, only 29% of respondents said they used a password manager at work.
The same narrative about credentials is also true about compromised devices and, especially, employee training. The DBIR’s authors said as much in a webinar about the report, claiming that “You can address two-thirds of these breaches by training and equipping your employees appropriately.”
But at RSAC, it was tough to fill a room for a talk on employee training or credential management. The popular talks tended to focus on things like the dangers of AI deepfakes, which is ironic, since the 2024 DBIR said that GenAI hasn’t made much of an impact on breaches so far.
This needs to change, and the 2024 DBIR offers a clear look at where we’re falling short and where we go from here.
To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full blog.
AppleI haven’t written a lot about the Vision Pro for a pretty simple reason: I haven’t actually had a lot of opportunities to use one. But earlier this week, Apple invited me down to New York City to spend an hour with not only Apple’s spatial computer, but also the forthcoming visionOS 2 update.
The demo session I ran through was not dissimilar from the in-store experience1, though I did probably get a slightly longer session that most customers. It gave me enough time to get re-acclimated to using the device, as well as a little more input on what I want to look at. I’ve jotted down my impressions of my time, as well as some of the thoughts and questions I had along the way.
Gestures of good faithA lot of what Apple is bringing to visionOS 2 is designed to make it a smoother experience overall. For example, the revamping of Guest User now lets you save someone’s data so they don’t have to go through the training for eye-tracking and hand-tracking every time they want to use the device. That’s a big plus, though I find it a little eye-rolling2 that it can only store data for a single other person. We’re still fundamentally talking about a $3500 device, so if you have a household with say, both a partner and a kid who want to use the Vision Pro, you have to pick your favorite? It feels shortsighted and artificial. While I’ve kind of given up holding out for true multi-user support on the iPad, the Vision Pro really feels like it calls out for it.
Though I haven’t spent a lot of time with the original visionOS, I did particularly appreciate version 2’s new gestures for accessing the home screen and bringing up Control Center; the less time you have to spend reaching up and using the Digital Crown—good as it is—the more you can sustain the illusion.3 I’d speculate that some of the other things that you need to use the crown for might be controllable via gestures in the future, as Apple’s technology continues to improve. (It’s also challenging to identify discrete movements that can’t be misinterpreted, as I experienced with one gesture that lets you view all your tabs in Safari—it took some patience and a few attempts on my part to get it to work correctly.)
The new Bora Bora environment—available in both day and night versions—is really great: the temptation to stand up and try to run into the water is strong. The environments remain one of the most compelling elements of visionOS, and anything Apple can do to bring in third parties or allow you to make your own would surely be a big hit.
Finally, yes, Apple is letting you rearrange all your apps now. I’m not sure you can issue a “finally” after just a few months, but it’s certainly going to make life easier for most Vision Pro users.4
A picture’s worth a thousand whoasI’m going to cut to the chase: there’s a killer feature in visionOS 2 and it’s the ability to turn any of your photos into spatial photos. Not only did I get the chance to check this out for several pictures that Apple provided, but I also got to bring along a few of my own photos and have them converted. The results are nothing short of astounding: subjects that pop out of pictures, environments that look like they have real depth, objects that you feel like you could reach out and touch.
What’s most impressive about this feature is just how easy it is: the simple tap of a button and a second or two of work and bam, you’ve got yourself a three-dimensional image. You can view it in place, but for the best experience you want to switch to the immersive mode provided. In the handful of my own pictures I tried, most worked very well—the exception was a landscape of a lake that lacked a strong foreground element. But a picture of my kid on the beach—taken by my wife on a trip that I wasn’t on—felt like I really was there, and even a fairly flat image of a glacier in Iceland felt like it had a real presence to it.
It’s hard to even write about the feature; it’s one that begs to be experienced for yourself, but what I think is perhaps most important aspect of it is that it simply doesn’t translate to any other Apple device. Is it reason enough to buy a Vision Pro? Probably not, but it’s certainly cool enough to put into the column of reasons you might want to.
Tabletop stakesSpatial photos may be the killer built-in feature, but Apple’s not ignoring the opportunities for third parties. For visionOS 2, the company introduced the new TabletopKit framework, a set of tools that makes it easier for developers to create board game style apps and experiences.
And holy cow is it impressive. I got to check out the Haunted Chess board game (which, though I didn’t get to actually play, appeared to be a mix of chess and Clue). The virtual game board was incredibly high quality and rendered so wellthat my brain wanted to believe it was a physical object sitting in front of me. I got up close and personal and it still looked great. Pieces could be picked up and moved with realistic shadows generated, cards could be drawn and moved around…it all felt very cool and very real. A big part of that is, I think, how static it looked. It had a solidity to it and didn’t flicker or move, even when I changed my perspective. It’s a subtle cue, but an important one.
Even more than spatial videos, this is what I want a Vision Pro for. I play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons5, and the idea that I could have a shared experience with my friends sitting around a virtual tabletop on which we could see our three-dimensional miniatures (maybe even imported from popular sites like HeroForge?) and move them around, or even roll some virtual dice, well, that’s a future that I would like to sign up for.
Quality, comfort, and price (how nice)This isn’t really a visionOS 2 specific thing, but given that this was my longest stretch using the Vision Pro, I wanted to talk briefly about actually wearing the device.
In preparation for the experience, I had been asked to use the Apple Store app’s feature for figuring out the right Light Seal and strap sizes. We started off using the Solo Band but found that it wasn’t quite holding the Vision Pro at the right angle for my face, so we swapped to the Dual Band. That was better, but still not quite perfect; if I had a few more minutes to play around with getting it positioned, I feel like I could have done a bit better—after half an hour or so, I was definitely feeling the weight on my face.
This convinced me that, more than anything, one of the company’s priorities in developing the next version of its spatial computing hardware should be making it smaller and lighter—and good news, that’s a thing that Apple loves to do!
I also noticed some light leakage that caused minor reflections at the bottom of my vision, which was distracting at times. Maybe a different seal size could have fixed that problem, but I only had the one available to me. Apple should certainly emphasize sizing and try-on service in stores before people walk out as well as making it easier to swap for a different size if you need one; it feels like that certainly might help minimize some bad experiences.
Vision of the futureI can hear you wondering, so I won’t leave you in suspense: no I did not immediately run to a nearby Apple Store to plop down three and a half grand on a Vision Pro.
But I did come out of my session thinking that I’d still love to spend more time with the Vision Pro. It’s a fascinating product and even if it’s not perfect, it has managed to wow me several times on both occasions that I’ve used it.
What I found most heartening is that Apple is taking its time-honored iteration approach here; we’re just six months from the Vision Pro’s initial launch, and visionOS 2 is already imminent. When visionOS 3 likely appears next year, I imagine we’ll be seeing even more significant improvements.
People often wonder if Apple can walk and chew gum at the same time, and the Vision Pro has currently receded a little bit in the attention of the masses. (Thanks, Apple Intelligence!) But I’m convinced that Apple is confident in its long game here. The next Vision product may still be a ways off, but when it gets here, I think it’s going to make a much bigger splash. But in the meantime, visionOS 2 is staking out some ground for the future of the platform, and not unlike a sandy beach by a crystal clear blue ocean, that future is bright.
- Though that was, for me, the very first day that demos were available. Apple has reportedly revamped the process since, which probably means I’m due to go back! ↩
- No pun intended, probably? ↩
- Honestly, having to interact with the hardware itself is kind of like having to summon the arch in the holodeck. ↩
- Perhaps my favorite aspect of this is the reminder that “jiggle mode” is not just a thing that we say, but the actual manner in which Apple refers to the mode for reorganizing your icons. This makes me laugh every single time. ↩
- I can see. You’re surprised. ↩
Pile-Up Poker is a part of Puzzmo.Zach Gage, creator of such Six Colors favorite games as Good Sudoku, Typeshift, Pocket-Run Pool, and Really Bad Chess, recently took everything he’s learned from building great iOS games and began building Puzzmo, a daily puzzle and game website owned by Hearst.
Fans of Gage’s previous games will find a bunch of the games on Puzzmo to be familiar—there are web versions of SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, Typeshift, and others—but it’s also got games you’d expect from a web puzzle site that’s also a collaboration with a newspaper publisher, most notably a daily crossword.
I caught up with Gage last week to talk to him about the latest game in the Puzzmo stable, Pile-Up Poker, and what it’s like to design for a subscription-based game website rather than an app. The most interesting thing I learned is that, with Pile-Up Poker, not only did Gage need to resist some of the darker patterns of poker-based gambling but also the darker patterns of designing game apps that must be ready to offer an infinite amount of engagement.
If Pile-Up Poker were an app, you’d be able to play it forever. On Puzzmo, you can only play five hands per day. “I’ll be honest, five hands is even more than I am sort of into,” Gage told me. “We played this game as much as we wanted during development, and we saw what it felt like… It’s a kind of game that you could play a lot, and you could burn out on.” So the website just won’t let you—instead, it encourages you to branch out and play different games or, y’know, get back to work. One of those.
Here’s my conversation with Gage, edited for length and clarity:
Jason Snell: So, why poker?
Zach Gage: We have a lot of games on the website right now that are very cerebral and based on you and trying hard and being at your peak. And for me, thinking about how we balance a portfolio of games, I really wanted to have something in there that would be a lot more random every day and would still fit the guidelines that we have for Puzzmo. The game should be healthy. It should be a thing where you are creative and clever and improve your strategy. It should be something that anybody at any skill level can play and win, but people who are really highly skilled can play at a super high level and really compete.
Poker is one of my favorite games ever. I think it’s a magical game. For me, the biggest trick of poker is that you can play poker with your friends for 20 years and then someone can show up and have never played poker before and win. And that is something that doesn’t exist with, I don’t think, any other game. So it felt like the right kind of game to bring to Puzzmo to find something that fits that space. It would be super approachable, but also there’s a depth.
The other thing I really like about games with high randomness is that they support a huge variety of approaches. You can play them in a really intense way, or you can be like today, I’m just going to caution to the wind. And that’s a really positive experience to be able to play games like that. That isn’t always supported by games that have a lower amount of randomness.
So how do we take something like poker and try to make it more less less sort of dangerous? The big thing was that we knew we were going to limit the number of hands you could play. And we know that we are not putting money on the table as any part of it. And for us, that really eliminates all of the big problems with poker. Like, we are not building a poker game that can ruin your life. We’re not building a poker game that can suck up all your time. Like, we have put hard limits around that stuff.
But what I wanted to do was maintain the depth of risk taking that poker has that comes from betting strategy. And the big trick for how to do that came from an idea from Jack Schlesinger early on in development and then was sort of further reinforced by Brooke Cusick, our crossword editor, sort of close to the end of development, which basically was just this idea of, let’s make it a lot easier to get a great hand. Let’s take something like a royal flush and make it a hand that you could potentially get every single game you play. And we do that in Pile-Up Poker by really shortening the deck.
And so what happened is this thing that feels really hard suddenly becomes really easy, but you still want to do really hard stuff. So then you start going, well, could I get two straight flushes in a game? Could I get three? And so it feels really approachable because everything you know about poker is telling you you’re doing really well because you’re getting these super tough hands. And so you end up getting that feeling that you get in poker where you’ve like kind of made a bet on one kind of thing that you’re pretty sure is going to work out. And then you have this other side bet where you’re like, oh, maybe I could get this card, or if it doesn’t work out, any of these cards would be just fine. Maybe it’ll pay out a little bit less. And so you end up structuring all the kinds of bets you would make with betting, but you’re doing it just like with the actual mechanics of the game instead of two separate worlds.
There’s this talk from a long time ago that’s sort of famous in game design that I actually really hate from Sid Meier, the guy who did Civilization. And his thing is that randomness just doesn’t work for human beings. If you tell someone they have a 90% chance of something happening, you need to give them a 100% chance of it happening because they’ll never feel like it was justified. And I feel like that’s like just not correct. He has framed it for you in a way where you feel like it needs to happen 100% of the time. But we understand, if you roll a 10-sided die and you say you’re going to succeed here unless you roll a one, if you roll a one, you’re not going to be like, “Randomness is broken!” You’re going to be like, “I can’t believe I did that.”
Was the thought process about building four-card hands instead of five-card hands really just a matter of trying to simplify the game further?
We did it because the game felt complicated when we were designing it. It felt like it was a little bit too much. And for a moment, we were even thinking about three-card hands. But it was too simple. And so we moved it up to four-card hands. But I think four-card hands, it does the same thing that the shorter deck does. It just makes these hands so much more approachable.
I’ve tried to make so many games with poker. And one of the things that’s annoying about poker is there’s an enormous gulf between the low hands and the high hands. It’s pretty easy to get a pair. It’s pretty easy to get two pair. But once you start going for five-card hands, suddenly, it’s really hard. That distance is huge. And it’s intentional, but in a strategy game, having that gulf is a huge problem. Four-card hands just dramatically reduce the difficulty. It doesn’t make it easier to get a pair, but it makes it way easier to get a straight.
When we usually think about poker, we think about casinos and betting and winning and losing money. That’s not happening here, so what are your priorities? You show money in the game, but it’s not real money and there’s nothing you can do with it.
We went with money because it has a really good flavor to it, and it relates to poker. For me, every game on Puzzmo has the same priority, which is, I think that one of the big contributing factors to the current sort of hellscape bad timeline that we live in is that most of what I’ve noticed I talk about with people is either gossip or I’m sharing a piece of information that I’ve received. So, “I learned an interesting fact from a podcast and I’m telling it to somebody.” Or, “I heard something upsetting on the internet, and I’m telling them how I feel about it.” And to me, those things are perfectly fine things to be taking from an experience. But that should not be the entirety of the way that I’m relating to other people. When you’re only sharing information or emotions and opinions about things that you hear, you’re not living a fulfilled social experience, and you’re only bonding with people around shared opinions and shared emotions.
And what I think is really important that people have kind of lost a little bit of is having discoveries and sharing discoveries, creating things and sharing creations with other people. Like, there’s an entire other zone of ways that you can relate with other people and share and interact that’s built around being curious, being creative, making things, trying things, discussing things. And that world ends up creating bonds and interactions with people around shared interests, as opposed to shared opinions and emotions.
I guess the thing that I’ve noticed about the Internet is that pretty much what people do is they do the thing that you put in front of them. If you put something interesting in front of them, they’ll engage with it. If you put an article in front of them, they’ll read it and talk about the things that they learned from the article before they talk about how they feel about the article.
So what we’re trying to do with Puzzmo and what I’ve been trying to do, basically, my whole professional career, is put things in front of people that encourage them to engage in a way that I feel is super healthy, that are appealing but also challenging and interesting, that require you to be creative and curious and find discoveries and try things and feel clever. And then you go to your friends and talk to them, not about the opinion of the person who made it, but just, “Here’s a thing I tried,” or “Here’s the score I got,” or, “Wasn’t it interesting that today my strategy was really weird?”
That was something that I thought was so healthy and cool about watching the way that Wordle bounced around the internet was seeing all the different ways that people were playing the game and how interested people were in hearing about that. People actually cared about like, “Oh, this person’s creating poems with their Wordles.” What a refreshing kind of thing to be seeing on a Twitter feed. And so that’s what we’re trying to do with Puzzmo. We’re trying to build these things that like feel fun and enjoyable and give you space to back off from the world and be a little bit creative and think and be and have a community of people who are interested in doing that. And trying to do that means trying to do that in as broad a way as possible and be as inclusive as possible.
It’s not super impossible to make a game that is enjoyable to a certain kind of person, but the thing that you have to do is make it enjoyable by as low a skill level as possible and as high a skill level as possible at the same time. I don’t think a game that only targets a really small level of skill is super great. I think the magic of a great game is that it targets a big swath. A game has a responsibility to educate its players and turn low-skill players into high-skill players. And that creates the best experience of the game for everybody.
Explain why it’s limited to five hands a day. You could have built Pile-Up Poker to let somebody sit there and play it forever. And you didn’t. So why?
I’ll be honest: five hands is even more than I am sort of into. I would like it to be three. We picked five for some technical constraint reasons, but pretty much the reason why we have five is because we think it’s important for you to be able to play three on your first time. So we picked five so that we could have a sort of build-up to multiple hands but still allow you to play three. Anyone could play three on their first time.
And the reason that we did that is because we played this game as much as we wanted during development. And we saw what it felt like. I played for an hour from midnight until 1 a.m. It’s a kind of game that you could play a lot and you could burn out on. I don’t want people to have an experience. I never want people to be playing one of my games and go, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now?”
If this were an app, you’d have you make it able to play infinitely.
Using derivative strategies in a game about luck goes infinite if you can play infinite. The less and less you can play, the more you have to be clever about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
When I was playing Spelunky a long time ago—Spelunky is a roguelike platforming game. One of my friends and I had this structure that he and his old roommate had created, where instead of playing this randomly generated platforming game a million times, we would each only play one game a day, and they would watch the other person.
And what I found that was amazing was that I started mediocre at this game, but I played one game a day for six months, and I became incredibly good because I was really focused on what I was doing. It was a deep, meaningful thing. It was such a shocking experience for me that my friend Doug and I went to the person who created the game, and we said, “You have to make a daily mode when you make this a PC game because it’s a totally different kind of experience to only be able to play one round and have a leaderboard for this one round.” And he did. And then daily modes became like a giant thing in all these roguelike games.
And that same kind of thinking sort of takes place here. If we let you play a thousand games, it wouldn’t be interesting. It becomes more interesting the more constricted it is. If I made it an app, I would have to make it so you could play as many times as you wanted. But I would put a lot of focus into some kind of daily challenge or a tournament or something like that that focuses all of the high-level players. Sure, there’s this place you can go and grind if you want to, but I really want you to be thinking about this other place. I would situate all of the interesting high-level experience somewhere else.
Apple squeezes Patreon, a new Mac mini and travel tips and troubles.
Go to the podcast page.
For nearly a decade, Apple has been progressively growing the revenue it makes from services—not just its search-engine deal with Google and its cut of App Store revenue, but everything from AppleCare support plans to iCloud storage to TV+ and News+ and Fitness+. Apple generated more revenue during its last quarter from Services than from its Mac, iPhone, and Wearables categories put together. Its total profit on Services came the closest it’s ever come to Apple’s total profit on products.
Even if recent U.S. court rulings threaten the quarter of Services revenue that comes directly from Google, there’s still an enormous and growing part of Apple that is dedicated to selling us services to go with our iPhones, iPads, and Macs. It’s a huge growth driver, which makes Wall Street happy. But what does the future hold for Apple’s services?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
A smaller Mac mini, Apple vs. Patreon, our notification habits, and the future of CarPlay.
Go to the podcast page.
With the 2024 Paralympic Games set to take the spotlight in Paris next week, Apple has released a new short film called “The Relay”. Though paralympians compete against others with disabilities, the film showcases several athletes with disabilities competing alongside athletes without them. (As you might expect, you’ll also see plenty of ways they all use Apple tech in their daily lives and on race day.)
Competition that includes both athletes with disabilities and those without happens all the time, but it’s not what most of us expect. In “The Relay,” eight athletes compete in two teams. There’s a track cyclist with an upper limb difference, a wheelchair racer, a low-vision swimmer and a blade runner, all shown both on the field (or in the pool) and at home, getting ready for the day with an assist from the Apple Watch or iPhone. Some athletes featured in the film are hopefuls for the L.A. games in 2028.
The film shows off Apple Watch fitness features, including wheelchair workouts and sleep-tracking, along with accessibility options like Assistive Touch and iPhone Spoken Content, which announces notifications and other information. Magnifier and its Point and Speak feature give a swimmer with low vision the information needed to locate a lane in the pool.
Third-party apps GoSwim, which helps swimmers analyze their technique on iPad; MATLAB on Mac, which visualizes aerodynamic data; and the my i-limb app for the iPhone, which provides users the flexibility to control the grip of their bionic prosthetics, all get quick shoutouts in the film.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
This episode has a lot of layers, as we discuss the Olympics, the Google antitrust ruling, Apple’s new EU fee plan, a tiny new Mac mini, macOS dialog disasters, and the tech world of a decade ago.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Strings of data breaches and other cybersecurity failures have forced greater investment in vulnerability management. The SEC now requires companies to report on how their managers and board of directors deal with vulnerabilities. This is good news for IT and security teams; in a 2023 survey, 50% of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent.” But obviously, that still leaves the other half out in the cold.
If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, you’ll need to come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing and a clear plan to remediate them. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources available to help prioritize your needs. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s full blog post.
Meg James of the Los Angeles Times joins Jason to discuss Paramount and WBD results, the WBD/NBA conundrum, Peacock and the Olympics, Venu’s price, the NFL dodging the antitrust bullet, a Disney price hike, and the high cost of prestige TV.
Go to the podcast page.
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reports that the M4 Mac mini will be much smaller than previous models:
Apple Inc. is planning a new version of the Mac mini that will be its smallest desktop computer yet, part of a broader overhaul of the Mac line with AI-focused chips. The new model — due later this year — will mark the first major design change to the mini since it was revamped under Steve Jobs in 2010, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The device will be far smaller than its predecessor, approaching the size of an Apple TV set-top box, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is secret.
I have been hoping for a more Apple TV-sized Mac mini since 2017, during the dark final days of Intel Macs. Could it finally happen? I dabbled with a small Intel NUC for a little while, and I love the size.
The Mac mini is made to be a Mac that fits into the cracks of various workflows, a utility knife of a Mac that often gets shoved in a closet or under a desk. Making it physically smaller just seems fitting.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
In an attempt to protect Mac users from getting themselves into trouble, Apple introduced numerous permissions pop-ups into macOS Catalina. In the years since, the company has accelerated its approach, adding ever more situations where users must grant specific permission. Often multiple times, in multiple places. (It can be magnified by migrating to a new Mac and getting those requests all at once.)
Microsoft has grappled with this same issue in Windows, allowing Apple to roast Windows Vista in an ad that modern Apple people probably regret. And it doubled down at WWDC 2009.
Now comes the news that things may be getting worse, not better. 9to5Mac reports that macOS Sequoia beta has introduced a new prompt that doesn’t allow a user to permanently grant permission, but requires an occasional re-authorization.
It’s part of a general trend for Apple to continue placing barriers in the way of users who are trying to use software on the Mac. As I noted when I covered the Sequoia Public Beta:
Security prompts appear to have been ramped up a bit, much to my chagrin. When I tried to launch an app that Apple didn’t notarize, I was unable to force it to open by right-clicking and then choosing Open, which was the old standby. Instead, I had to open the Settings app, go to the Security pane, and click through a warning dialog that the app in question was “blocked to protect your Mac.” Once I clicked Open Anyway, I could open the app—but even then, I was forced to put up with another alert, and then forced (as an administrator with full privileges!) to enter my password before the app would launch.
(Apple confirmed this is intentional in a developer note released Tuesday.)
For the past decade, Apple has been trying to tighten the screws on the Mac in order to bring it closer to the level of security offered on iOS. And on iOS, it’s also restricted software features, including a (supremely annoying) feature that repeatedly asks you if you want to continue allowing apps to track your location.
To serve and protectHere’s Apple’s problem: Apps that track your location, record the contents of your screen, or access your video camera or microphone have the potential to be deeply invasive and violate your privacy in innumerable ways. Since those features are also useful, Apple has built a system of permissions that Apps must request, and then users are prompted to be sure that an app should be granted that kind of access.
You can imagine the scenarios: A domestic abuser installs an app on their partner’s device and grants blanket permission without their knowledge, giving them access to everything they do. Or a scammer convinces a user to install software via social engineering, including clicking exactly the right permissions buttons to grant their software complete control over the user’s system.
One clear way to combat these abuses is to not allow permanent approval but prompt the user later, when they might realize what’s been happening without their knowledge. I get it. It’s a smart approach.
But here’s the problem with what Apple’s testing in the latest macOS Sequoia betas: There’s no end to it. It’s a subscription you didn’t buy and can’t cancel. Yesterday, I was prompted to give temporary permission by an app that I’ve used since the 1990s to read my screen. Apparently, if I want to use that app, I will just need to keep approving it every so often. Numerous other screen-reading utilities may also be affected.
Asking for permission a second time is not unreasonable for the reasons I mentioned above. But at some point the user must be in charge. When I complain that moves like these by Apple are condescending and insulting because it’s my computer, and I’ll do what I want with it, I’m often confronted by people on social media who insist that Apple’s just looking out for me. What if I agree to something dangerous? Shouldn’t Apple protect me?
My answer is that Apple should try to protect its users but must find a balance between that and the overall experience of using a Mac (or other device). A barrage of permissions dialogs rapidly creates dialog fatigue, where the user will agree to anything if it’ll just let them get back to what they were doing. This sends a subtle signal that the user or the user’s software is doing something that’s potentially wrong. (And if the solution is for developers to update to newer, more privacy-protecting APIs, maybe Apple should tell developers and document them properly.)
Some users will make bad decisions. That’s just reality. The wrong reaction is to take the decision out of every user’s hands to protect the ones who might do something stupid. Apple needs to find that balance, that protects people but gives users freedom to do what they want, however dangerous it might be.
Apple’s recent feature changes suggest a value system that’s wildly out of balance, preferring to warn (and control) users no matter how damaging it is to the overall user experience. Maybe the people in charge should be forced to sit down and watch that Apple ad that mocks Windows Vista. Vista’s security prompts existed for good reasons—but they were a user disaster. The Apple of that era knew it. I’d guess a lot of people inside today’s Apple know it, too—but they clearly are unable to win the arguments when it matters.
Not quite neutralSome of Apple’s recent behavior also makes this entire situation seem more sinister and frustrating than it should. When Apple introduced a new security regime for macOS in 2018, adding a middle path for apps that were outside the Mac App Store that would allow Apple to cryptographically sign them and scan them for malware, people freaked out that it was the beginning of the end for the Mac as an open platform.
But the advent of app notarization didn’t change the fundamental premise of the Mac: You can still run any software you want on the Mac, if you want. It was a promise an Apple representative made on stage at WWDC 2019, and the company has stuck with it. Unfortunately, the fairly simple workaround to launch non-notarized apps is getting junked up in macOS Sequoia, requiring a visit to System Preferences and approval by the user on launch, which, last time I checked, required entering your password. That’s just overkill. But at least it’s still possible.
Still, Apple’s developer note on this feature gave me pause:
In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn’t signed correctly or notarized. They’ll need to visit System Settings > Privacy & Security to review security information for software before allowing it to run.
If you distribute software outside of the Mac App Store, we recommend that you submit your software to be notarized. The Apple notary service automatically scans your Developer ID-signed software and performs security checks. When your software is ready for distribution, it’s assigned a ticket to let Gatekeeper know it’s been notarized so customers can run it with confidence.
It seems reasonable at first glance. If developers want to make it easier for users to launch their apps, they should just get them notarized! It’s a middle path that doesn’t require App Store approval, but does keep users safe via quick scans and a cryptographic signature. Sounds great. And in the last five-plus years, Apple has treated notarization as it promised, as a neutral scanning system that’s meant to keep users secure, not as a way to extend Apple’s App Store rules elsewhere.
Except back in June, Apple used its iOS notarization process in the EU to make App Store-style policy rejections. Yes, it’s a different process in a specific region, and the whole issue seems to have been cleared up… but it exposed the truth, which is that if Apple wants to use its seemingly neutral notarization process to suppress an app it doesn’t like, it can. It has.
Solving the puzzleWhen I discuss this issue on podcasts and social media, most people who respond sound just as frustrated as I am. But there’s also a group who, to their credit, understand the difficult situation Apple is in here. Does Apple not want to make it harder for people to install spyware? Is that not a benefit that outweighs the rest of us having to click through alert dialogs every week?
I appreciate the empathy of those arguments, but they miss an important point: This is Apple we’re talking about. I believe Apple is entirely able to solve difficult problems like this in ways that balance the user experience and the need for protection. I just think, for whatever reason, the company isn’t really trying. The result is a platform that’s teetering on the edge of becoming a user-experience joke akin to Windows Vista.
The tech everyone should have, our device strategies for planes, Apple’s new Distraction Control feature, and the apps we want to control via Siri.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s AI ambitions might seem big, but they’re modest—and that’s the right approachIf you, like me, skim through the technology headlines most days, then you’ve probably been bombarded with what feels like every other headline featuring some permutation of artificial intelligence and how it’s going to change everything.
That includes Apple. Since announcing its Apple Intelligence push back in June, the company hasn’t exactly been quiet about its AI goals. And it’s clear that the industry is likewise interested—every other question on Apple’s recent quarterly results call was about Apple Intelligence.
But it’s only now that we’re getting our first taste of how these capabilities will really integrate into Apple’s platform. Late last month, Apple rolled out the first developer beta incorporating Apple Intelligence features and even though they won’t arrive for all users until later this fall—and other Apple Intelligence features will continue to roll out over the course of the next year—we’re now getting a better sense of the philosophy that Apple is embracing. And, at present, it seems overwhelmingly…modest?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Flighty 4.0 in action (courtesy of Flighty).The excellent flight-tracking app Flighty has been updated to version 4.0 with a bunch of new features designed to anticipate and explain flight delays.
The new version analyzes more aviation data to understand delays caused by airport issues and late-arriving aircraft. (That covers about 65% of delays—Flighty isn’t able to explain some other sorts of delays… at least not yet.) The idea is that Flighty will be able to give you a heads-up about these issues, and explain them, perhaps quite a bit before your own airline does so.
I’ve been using Flighty for years and I’ve already seen Flighty beat the airports and airlines by quite a bit—I’ve been informed of delays, gate changes, and even gate assignments long before any push notifications from official airline apps or PA announcements at the gate. It’s gotten me the jump on changing flights and allowed me to proceed to European gates at airports that hide the gate number until the last minute. This new update should add even more data to Flighty’s toolset—Flighty’s developers say that it could be as much as six hours in advance.
Flighty isn’t cheap—it’s a $48/year subscription—but I consider it the best in its class. And it’s got a pretty sweet deal for less frequent fliers: you can subscribe for $4 for a week, so you can just use it when you’re traveling and then turn it back off.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Myke has a mostly positive Apple Intelligence experience (except for Siri), Apple results make us consider the power of Services, and the Color Czar may be up to their old tricks.
Go to the podcast page.
Now you can watch Ant-Man (and the Avengers) in 3-D in Iceland.Disney+ has been at the forefront of offering unique environments on its Vision Pro app, so you can watch movies at Avengers Tower or on the Monsters Inc. Scare Floor. On Monday, the company is rolling out another one: Iceland! In conjunction with Disney-owned National Geographic, the new Disney+ environment is based on imagery from Thingvellir National Park in Iceland. In the daytime view, snowflakes fall around the rocky mountain scene. In the nighttime view, there’s a spectacular aurora above you.
According to Disney, the immersive environment was built from high-resolution 3D models captured on-site, as well as gigapixel panoramas, captured by National Geographic. Then Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology took it across the finish line.
In addition, Disney has announced the addition of four more 3D movies to the Disney+ app: the first two “Avengers” and “Ant Man” films. This joins a fairly large collection of 3D movies already in the app, including several added over the months since Vision Pro first launched.
I think environments may be one of the very best features of the Vision Pro. It’s great that Disney has gone to the trouble of building so many—and a shame that they can only be appreciated inside the Disney+ app. I hope Apple is working on some sort of system that would allow apps like Disney+ to contribute environments to the entire system. Getting some writing done in Iceland as the snow falls would be a nice change of pace from my time among the rocks at Joshua Tree.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
There’s a line in Titanic that any IT or security professional can relate to. The ship’s architect
explains that he wanted to include enough lifeboats for all the passengers, “but it was felt the
deck would look too cluttered.”
That decision takes on a tragic significance in the second half of Titanic, and yet it’s a choice
that’s replicated (although with less dire consequences) in companies to this day. It’s a constant
challenge to get leadership to invest in breach prevention–many leaders would prefer to pay for
cybersecurity insurance and hope for the best.
Yet, just as the famous shipwrecks of old inspired today’s laws about lifeboats, there are signs
that the endless parade of data breaches is forcing greater investment in vulnerability
management. (To be clear, we’re talking about “vulnerability management” in the broadest
sense; not just patch management.)
In the past few years, NIST, the SEC, ISO, and PCI DSS have all published updated guidelines
that mandate more proactive vulnerability management. Many of those guidelines specifically
call out the role of leadership, such as the SEC, which now requires companies to report on how
their managers and board of directors deal with vulnerabilities.
This is good news for IT and security teams; in a 2023 survey, 50% of respondents said that
their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a
large/great extent.” But obviously, that still leaves 50% of respondents out in the cold.
If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the
risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. Thankfully there are plenty of
resources available to help prioritize your needs. And if you’re still not getting through, you’re
welcome to borrow the Titanic analogy.
To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read the full blog.
Apple Pay and Apple Card are among Apple’s growing services.Apple’s latest quarterly results were about as boring as you can get whill still featuring $21.4 billion in profit and setting an all-time third-quarter record. Most categories were flat, with the exception of a one-time bump in iPad sales (amazing what actually introducing new products can do!) and the continued, relentless increase in Services revenue.
Another quarter, another record-setting total for Apple’s Services line—$24.2 billion in revenue. And yet, the more I looked at that number, the more I started to ask myself some fundamental questions about Apple’s business, today and in the future.
Service identityLet’s start with defining what’s encompassed by the Services line, because it’s more than you think. When Apple talks publicly about its services, it really leans into the high visibility of services like Apple Music and Apple TV+. Emmy awards and Oscars are glamorous, and it’s great to be associated with beautiful, famous creative people.
But Apple’s Services line is powered by less glamorous businesses. The company’s cut of App Store revenue, AppleCare support subscriptions, Google’s payment for being the preferred search engine in Safari, Apple’s cut of Apple Pay transactions, and iCloud services are all a part of the category, and most of them contribute more to Services revenue than Reese Witherspoon and Adam Scott do.
Led by the Google deal, a lot of these services are incredibly profitable for Apple. Over the last three years, Apple has averaged a 72% profit margin on Services revenue. You can afford to lose a lot of money paying for TV+ content if you’re generating $20 billion a year in almost pure profit from Google payments.
Here’s what Apple CFO Luca Maestri said about Services in Thursday’s conference call with analysts:
We continue to have great momentum in Services as the growth of our installed base of active devices sets a strong foundation for the future expansion of our ecosystem, and we see increased customer engagement with our Services offerings. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double digits year over year. Also, paid subscriptions showed strong double digit growth. We have well over one billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. And we’re constantly focused on improving the breadth and quality of our services. From critically acclaimed new content on Apple TV+ to new games on Apple Arcade and the many latest features we previewed during WWDC for iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Music, and more.
Even if a quarter of the Services revenue is just payments from Google, and a further portion is Apple taking its cut from App Store transactions there’s still a lot more going on here. Apple is building an enormous business that’s based on Apple customers giving the company their credit cards and charging them regularly. And that business is incredibly profitable and is expected to continue growing at double-digit percentages.
What about products?Most people still consider Apple a products company. The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sauce as the combination of “hardware, software, and services.”
My reaction the first time I heard that was shock, but for years now Apple has been pointing out that it expects explosive growth from Services, and it hasn’t been wrong. Consider how large Apple’s Services business has become:
In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line than Services.
But what about the bottom line? While Apple’s Services gross margin was 74% last quarter, products was only a measly 35%. (I’m kidding—35% margin on hardware is actually a really great number. It just can’t compare to Services, because hardware has some fundamental costs that services just don’t.)
Let’s look at total profits:
Last quarter, Apple made about $22 billion in profit from products and $18 billion from Services. It’s the closest those two lines have ever come to each other.
This is what was buzzing in the back of my head as I was going over all the numbers on Thursday. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be a quarter in the next year or so in which Apple reports more total profit on Services than on products.
When that happens, is Apple still a products company? Or has it crossed some invisible line?
Remember where you came fromLook, I don’t want to overplay this. Apple is still a hardware company, fundamentally. It continues to grow its installed base across all its products, and every time there’s a major new iPhone buying cycle—the arrival of Apple Intelligence will probably prompt another round of purchases, and there are rumored slim and foldable iPhones coming in the next few years—there’s a huge spike in revenue that Apple manages to convert into a new plateau of sales.
Wall Street wants to see growth, and Apple’s Services line gives the company’s executives something shiny to point at, even when hardware sales are growing very slowly.
But let’s make no mistake about where the strength of the Services business comes from: Apple’s hardware. Services work because Apple has succeeded at growing its installed base, selling more Macs and iPads and iPhones, getting users into the ecosystem so they can buy all the different hardware products on offer and tie them all together with Apple services.
Without good hardware and software, Apple’s services would be irrelevant. I hope everyone in a position of authority at Apple understands that. Services are a way to help make Apple’s hardware even more profitable than it already was. But services can never, ever take precedence over Apple’s hardware. If Apple ever begins to see its hardware as merely a vessel for selling more subscription services, the game will be over.
It’s that time again — Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spoke on a conference call and took questions from financial analysts. Here’s our complete transcript.
Tim Cook’s opening statementGood afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5% from a year ago, and better than we had expected.
EPS grew double digits to $1.40 and achieved a record for the June quarter. We also set quarterly revenue records in more than two dozen countries and regions, including Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, the UK, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. And we set an all-time revenue record in services, which grew 14%.
At our Worldwide Developers Conference, we were thrilled to unveil game-changing updates across our platforms, including Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence builds on years of innovation and investment in AI and machine learning. It will transform how users interact with technology, from writing tools to help you express yourself; to image playground, which gives you the ability to create fun images and communicate in new ways; to powerful tools for summarizing and prioritizing notifications. Siri also becomes more natural, more useful, and more personal than ever.
Apple Intelligence is built on a foundation of privacy, both through on-device processing that does not collect users’ data, and through Private Cloud Compute, a groundbreaking new approach to using the cloud while protecting users’ information, powered by Apple Silicon. We are also integrating ChatGPT into experiences within iPhone, Mac, and iPad, enabling users to draw on a broad base of world knowledge. We are very excited about Apple Intelligence, and we remain incredibly optimistic about the extraordinary possibilities of AI and its ability to enrich customers’ lives. We will continue to make significant investments in this technology and dedicate ourselves to the innovation that will unlock its full potential.
Recently, we’ve also been excited to bring Apple Vision Pro to more countries, giving customers the chance to discover the remarkable capabilities of this magical device. Vision Pro users are customizing their own workspaces, watching movies on 100-foot screens, and exploring entire worlds with just a pinch of their fingertips. With more than 2,500 native spatial apps and 1.5 million compatible apps for visionOS, the developer community continues to pioneer stunning spatial experiences that are only possible with Vision Pro.
Last month, we announced that we’re bringing some amazing new immersive content to Vision Pro, including new series, concerts, films, and more, and we’ve seen great interest for Vision Pro in the enterprise, where it can empower companies large and small to pursue their best ideas like never before. With each innovation, we’re unlocking new ways of working, new ways of learning, and new ways of tapping into the unlimited promise of human potential. We’re doing that across every product and every service.
Now let me share more detail on our June quarter results, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue was $39.3 billion, down 1% year over year. On a constant currency basis, we grew compared to last year. Customers continue to praise the iPhone 15 lineup for its incredible battery life, exceptional cameras, and unmatched power and performance, and we are excited to bring incredible new features to the iPhone with iOS 18, making it more personal, capable, and intelligent than ever before. This update includes the biggest redesign of the Photos app, new customization options for the home screen, messages over satellite, and the introduction of Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence utilizes the power of our most advanced iPhones, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, offering a transformative set of capabilities.
Mac revenue was $7 billion, up 2% from a year ago. Customers are loving the latest M3-powered 13 and 15-inch MacBook Air. With back-to-school season upon us, MacBook Air is the perfect companion for students on campus. And small business owners, developers, and creatives of all kinds depend on Mac to do more than they ever could before. Powered by Apple Silicon with its neural engine and privacy built in at the chip level, Macs are simply the best personal computers for AI, and every Mac we’ve shipped with Apple Silicon since 2020 is capable of taking advantage of Apple Intelligence with macOS Sequoia. We also know the importance of security for our users and enterprises, so we continue to advance protections across our products.
Turning to iPad, revenue was $7.2 billion, 24% higher year over year. During the quarter, we had an incredible launch where we unveiled the all-new 11- and 13-inch iPad Air, the perfect device for education, entertainment, and so much more, and with the new iPad Pro, we pushed the boundaries of power-efficient performance with the remarkable M4 chip, the engine behind this incredibly thin device. By leveraging the latest in Apple Silicon, video editors and musicians can take advantage of the cutting-edge AI features in Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, and we’re very excited that iPad Pro and iPad Air models, powered by the M-series of Apple Silicon, will be able to utilize the powerful capabilities of Apple Intelligence.
In wearables, home, and accessories, revenue was $8.1 billion, down 2% from a year ago. Apple Watch is empowering users to live a healthier day with a range of tools to take charge of their wellness journeys. At the core of Apple Watch are powerful AI features that are helping users get help when they need it most, from irregular heart rhythm notifications, to walking steadiness, to crash detection and fall detection. I’ve heard time and again how meaningful these features are for users and their loved ones, and their stories motivate us to keep pushing forward on this vital work.
As I mentioned earlier, in services, we set an all-time revenue record of $24.2 billion with paid subscriptions climbing to an all-time high. We achieved revenue records in the majority of the services categories with all-time revenue records in advertising, cloud, and payment services. Apple TV+ productions are delighting audiences on screens large and small. We’re sharing powerful works of imagination with series and movies like Presumed Innocent, the upcoming Disclaimer, and The Instigator, starring Matt Damon, and we can’t wait for returning fan favorites with new seasons of The Morning Show, Slow Horses, and Severance. Apple TV+ productions also continue to earn accolades with nearly 2,300 nominations and 500 wins to date. That includes 72 Emmy Award nominations across 16 programs, our best-ever showing for the upcoming awards event.
During the quarter, we also expanded tap-to-pay on iPhone to more markets, including Japan, Canada, Italy, and Germany, enabling more businesses to use the power of iPhone to accept contactless payments. And we announced new updates to our services coming this fall, including U.S. National Park hikes and custom walk routes in Apple Maps, the ability to pay with rewards using Apple Pay, collaborative listening with Apple Music, and a redesigned Apple Fitness+ experience to help users make the most of our library of workouts and meditations.
Turning to retail, we continue to expand in emerging markets with our first-ever location in Malaysia. Customers from all over the country came together with our team members to celebrate this special moment. Elsewhere in the world, our teams have been sharing the magic of Apple Vision Pro in demos that delight, inspire, and deeply move customers exploring the wonders of spatial computing for the first time.
At the heart of all of our innovations are the values that guide everything we do. We believe fundamentally that the best technology is technology that works for everyone, and in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we introduced all-new capabilities to give users more ways to take advantage of all our products can do. These include eye tracking for users to control iPhone or iPad visually, music haptics to give those who are deaf or hard of hearing a tangible way to experience music, and vocal shortcuts that tie tasks to a user’s voice.
And we are committed as ever to shipping products that offer the highest standards of privacy for our users. With everything we do, whether it’s offering a browser like Safari that prevents third parties from tracking you across the internet, or providing new features like the ability to lock and hide apps, we are determined to keep our users in control of their own data. And we are just as dedicated to ensuring the security of our users’ data. That’s why we work to minimize the amount of data we collect and work to maximize how much is processed directly on people’s devices, a foundational principle that is at the core of all we build, including Apple Intelligence.
And we continue to make significant progress on the environment. We are proud to say that all of our data centers, including those that will run Private Cloud Compute, operate on 100% renewable energy.
At Apple, we’re constantly accelerating our pace of innovation. We are a company in relentless pursuit of big ideas. Time and again we’ve seen how a spark of creativity can reach breakthrough velocity, reach across previously unexplored dimensions, and ultimately take flight in ways that can change the world. It’s why we’re going to keep investing in the meaningful innovation that enriches the lives of all of our customers. We have a busy time ahead of us, and I couldn’t be more excited for all the amazing things yet to come. With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s opening remarksThank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone.
We are very pleased to report a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5% year-over-year, despite 230 basis points of negative foreign-exchange impact. We achieved growth in the vast majority of our markets, with June-quarter revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and Rest of Asia Pacific.
Products revenue was $61.6 billion. up 2% year over year, driven by the launch of the new iPad Pro and iPad Air. Our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and geographic segments thanks to our unmatched levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty and a large number of customers who are new to our products.
Services revenue reached an all-time record of $24.2 billion, up 14% year-over-year, with an all-time record in developed markets and a June quarter record in emerging markets. Company gross margin was 46.3%, near the high end of our guidance range, and down 30 basis points sequentially, driven by a different mix within products, which was partially offset by a favorable mix shift towards services and cost savings. Products gross margin was 35.3%, down 130 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by mix, partially offset by favorable costs. Services gross margin was 74%, down 60 basis points from last quarter.
Operating expenses of $14.3 billion were at the low end of the guidance range we provided and up 7% year-over-year. Net income was $21.4 billion. Diluted EPS of $1.40 was up 11% year-over-year and set a June quarter record. And operating cash flow was very strong, at $28.9 billion, also a June quarter record.
Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $39.3 billion, down 1% year-over-year, but grew on a constant-currency basis. We set June quarter records across several countries, including the UK, Spain, Poland, Mexico, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and the iPhone active installed base grew to a new all-time high in total and in every geographic segment. During the June quarter, many iPhone models were among the top-selling smartphones around the world. In fact, according to a survey from Kantar, iPhone was the top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, the UK, Germany, Australia and Japan. Customer satisfaction on the iPhone 15 family continues to be extremely high, with 451 Research measuring it at 98% in the U.S. in their latest reports.
Mac generated $7 billion in revenue, up 2% year-over-year, driven by the MacBook Air powered by the M3 chip. We saw particularly strong performance in our emerging markets, with June quarter records for Mac in Latin America, India, and South Asia. The Mac installed base reached an all-time high, with half of MacBook Air customers in the quarter being new to Mac. And customer satisfaction for Mac was recently reported at 96% in the U.S.
iPad revenue was $7.2 billion, up 24% year-over-year, driven by the launch of the new iPad Pro and iPad Air. Customers are loving the latest iPad lineup for its new design and display, unparalleled performance, AI capabilities, and much more. The iPad installed base has continued to grow and is at an all-time high, as half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. Also, customer satisfaction was recently measured at 97% in the U.S.
Wearables, Home, and Accessories revenue was $8.1 billion, down 2% year-over-year, a sequential acceleration from the March quarter. Watch and AirPods continue to face a difficult compare against prior-year launches of the AirPods Pro 2nd generation, the Watch SE, and the first Watch Ultra. Apple Watch continues to attract new customers, with almost two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product, sending the Apple Watch installed base to a new all-time high. And the latest reports from 451 Research indicate a customer satisfaction of 97% for Watch in the U.S.
In services, total revenue reached an all-time record of $24.2 billion, growing 14% year over year. We continue to have great momentum in services as the growth of our installed base of active devices sets a strong foundation for the future expansion of our ecosystem, and we see increased customer engagement with our services offerings. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double digits year over year. Also, paid subscriptions showed strong double digit growth. We have well over one billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. And we’re constantly focused on improving the breadth and quality of our services. From critically acclaimed new content on Apple TV+ to new games on Apple Arcade and the many latest features we previewed during WWDC for iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Music, and more.
Turning to enterprise, we continue to see businesses leveraging our entire suite of products to drive productivity and creativity for their teams and customers. USAA, a leading insurance and financial services company, recently expanded beyond their existing iPhone and iPad deployments to provide their employees with the latest MacBook Air. And American Express has continued to add to their fleet of over 10,000 Macs to enhance their employees’ productivity, security, and collaboration. We’re also excited to see leading organizations such as Boston Children’s Hospital and Lufthansa using Apple Vision Pro to build innovative spatial computing experiences to transform the training of their workforces.
Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with 153 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $4.3 billion in maturing debt and paper by $1 billion, leaving us with total debt of $101 billion. As a result, net cash was $52 billion at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we returned over $32 billion to shareholders, including $3.9 billion in dividends and equivalents and $26 billion through open market repurchases of $139 million Apple shares.
As we move ahead into the September quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasani referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we’re providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter.
We expect foreign exchange to continue to be a headwind, and to have a negative impact on revenue of about 1.5 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. We expect our September quarter total company revenue to grow year-over-year at a rate similar to the June quarter. We expect services revenue to grow double digits at a rate similar to what we reported in the first three quarters of this fiscal year. We expect gross margin to be between 45.5% and 46.5%. We expect OPEX to be between $14.2 and $14.4 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative 50 million excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16.5%.
Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.25 per share of common stock, payable on August 15, 2024, to shareholders of record as of August 12, 2024. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Q&AEric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Tim, I thought some of the color you provided before the call about iPhone 15 performing better than the iPhone 14 was interesting. So just with that context, can you maybe help us understand where you see iPhone replacement cycles today, where do you think the size of the base of iPhones that are aged and likely to upgrade are, and what that translates to in potential pent-up demand as we enter a new iPhone cycle?
Cook: Yes. Hi, Eric. The installed base hit an all-time high during the quarter, and so we were very happy about that. iPhone in general grew in constant currency and the 15, as you point out, if you look at the same number of weeks of the 15 from launch and compare that to the 14, the 15 is doing better than the 14, and so that’s kind of a state of where we currently are. In terms of upgrade rates, it’s very difficult mid-cycle to call upgrade rates. I would just say that with Apple Intelligence, we are very excited about the level of value that we’re going to provide to users, and we believe that that presents another reason for a compelling upgrade.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Okay, that’s very helpful. Thanks, Tim. And then, second to that, can you maybe dig into the China dynamics a bit? Sales down 6% this quarter, 3% in constant currency. An improvement from last quarter on a tougher compare, you know, that came on the back of some iPhone discounting. So can you maybe just share color on the China market as a whole, how much you believe promotions helped in the quarter, how sustainable this improvement is, and if this performance really changes any of your approach to the China market as we look forward.
Cook: Yeah, Eric, as you point out, we decreased by six and a half percent year over year for the whole of greater China, and if you look at it on a constant currency basis, we declined by less than three. So over 50 percent of the decline year over year is currency related. That is an improvement from the first half of the fiscal year and so we’re happy to see the acceleration. If you look at iPhone in particular for Greater China, the installed base set a record. We also in mainland China set a June quarter record for upgraders and so that’s a very strong signal, and in fact, the survey from Kantar this quarter showed that iPhones were the top three models in urban China. Also, one of the things we look at is the 15 family compared to the 14 family for the same number of weeks from launch. So this goes all the way back to September of ’23. If you if you look at that, the 15 is outperforming the 14, and and so those are some of the some of the color I would provide. In addition, one of the things that we’re very focused on is the level of new customers buying our products, and so if you look at this on the Mac and iPad, in mainland China the majority of customers buying are buying that product for the first time, and the Watch, the vast, vast majority of people are buying the product for the first time. And during the quarter, I should say also, that iPad returned to growth in greater China as it did around the world. And so we continue to be confident in the long-term opportunity in China. I don’t know how every chapter of the book reads but we’re we’re very confident in the long term.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Hey, Tim, you know, now that you’ve launched or announced Apple Intelligence, do you have any ideas on how it might impact services? Do you feel like it’ll accelerate your services business, augment it, and maybe folks will need to buy more storage and some other things? How are you thinking about it as a catalyst for services in the next year?
Cook: You know, we started the roll-out of Apple Intelligence this week with developers. So, some of the features are out there as of Monday, and we couldn’t be more excited about getting them out there. Obviously, this will enable developers to take their apps to the next level, and so we’re taking this first step in getting the beta out there, and we can’t wait to see what kind of amazing things they do with it.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Okay, thanks, and then, Luca, with regard to gross margin, there’s been some component price inflation and mix. Do you mind just, you know — giving us a little more color on how you’re managing that sequentially and how you feel about the current component environment as an impact on margins?
Maestri: Sure, Ben. I think I’ll give you a bit of the walk for the June quarter, and then get into the outlook that we provided for the September quarter. At the total company level, we’ve reported 46.3 percent. It is down 30 basis points sequentially, and it was really driven by a different mix within products. Of course, you know, we launched a very important product like the iPad during the course of the quarter, but we had an offset from a shift in mix toward services and we got some good cost savings. And so when you look at it on a year-over-year basis, we are up significantly on the margin front. And keep in mind that foreign exchange continues to be a bit of a headwind for us. As we go into the September quarter, we are guiding 45.5% to 46.5%, which is kind of within the guidance that we provided last quarter. Again, similar dynamics. We expect a slightly different mix. We expect foreign exchange to have a minimal impact sequentially, although a more significant impact on a year-over-year basis. On the commodities side, I think that’s what you’re referring to, yes, we’ve seen some increases on the memory front, but the rest of the commodities, we see a continuous decline. So in general, we feel we’re well positioned and as you know well, these are very high levels of gross margin for us and we’re pleased where we are.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: I was wondering if you could talk about whether or not you’ve seen a shift in demand for iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max models since WWDC that could potentially foreshadow consumer demand for Apple Intelligence-enabled phones.
Cook: You know, we just announced the sort of the requirements at the system and the silicon level in June, and so we had very limited time during the quarter. So, it’s really too early to tell.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: That’s fair, and then, you know, with the focus on upgrader potential over the next several years, I was just wondering if you could talk about what you’re expecting from the U.S. promotional environment from your channel partners, U.S. wireless carriers, given the importance of device sales for those partners during an upgrade cycle, or any retail support on what could be a very strong smartphone upgrade period.
Cook: You know, we are very excited about Apple Intelligence and what it brings, and it’s another compelling reason for an upgrade. I’d leave the promotional question for the carriers themselves to answer, but I believe it will be a very key time and a compelling upgrade cycle.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Tim, maybe back to the Apple Intelligence dynamic. There’s really a lot of excitement from consumers around what Apple Intelligence could mean for them. Can you just touch on, do you think the intent is to launch all the Apple Intelligence features at the same time to consumers, or do you think they end up getting staggered a bit? And if they are staggered, do you think it impacts how consumers come out and buy the next-generation iPhone?
Cook: The rollout, as we mentioned in June, we’ve actually started with developers this week. We started with some features of Apple Intelligence, not the complete suite. There are other features like languages beyond U.S. English that will happen over the course of the year, and there are other features that will happen over the course of the year, and ChatGPT is integrated by the end of the calendar year. And so, yes, so it is a staggered launch.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Got it, and your services growth rates have been extremely impressive for several quarters and it seems like it’s accelerated recently. Can you just talk about, when you look at this double-digit growth, how much of that do you think is coming from the installed-base growth versus better ARPU or better monetization of the installed base? And how do you kind of see that mix changing as you go forward?
Maestri: Yes, Amit, it’s Luca. It’s a combination of a number of factors. The installed base growth is very important, of course, because we have a larger pool of customers that uses the ecosystem and uses our services. We are seeing—and we’ve seen this consistently for many, many quarters now—we see continued growth in the level of engagement that our customers have with our ecosystem. We have more transacting accounts every quarter, so more people using the ecosystem, both the free elements of the ecosystem and the paid elements. We see paid accounts growing double digits, and we’ve seen that for many, many quarters now. We look at our paid subscriptions on our platform, and they’re growing strong double digits as well. So obviously, the growing level of engagement helps us both from an ARPU standpoint and just a volume standpoint. Obviously, as you’ve seen over the last several years, we launched new services over time and we’ve launched many new services fairly recently. You know, obviously, our payments business is relatively new. Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Fitness+, so many other services we’ve added, and so we’re providing more and more opportunities for our customers to interact with the ecosystem, and we believe we’re doing also a very good job at improving the quality of these services and improving the amount of content that we make available. We continue to make significant investments on TV+, on Apple Arcade, we’re launching new shows, new games all the time, and I think you will continue to see that as we go forward. We’re very, very happy with the 14% growth that we had this quarter, because particularly if you look at the performance that we had in services a year ago, the compares for us tend to get a bit more challenging in the second half of our fiscal year, but in spite of that, we delivered a level of growth that was better than what we were expecting at the beginning of the quarter.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, you announced Apple Intelligence, but you also announced partnerships with OpenAI and presumably more coming down the road. How should investors think about the monetization models around these partnerships where the CapEx investments are clearly being made by these potential partners, but they’re leveraging your distribution to your very attractive installed base. So in the long term, do you see the services growth from Apple Intelligence being the largest contributor over time or do you see these partnerships becoming a larger contributor over time?
Cook: You know, the way that I look at it is that Apple Intelligence is the on-device processing and the Private Cloud Compute, and a lot of that will be things with a personal context, and then for world knowledge, we are integrating with ChatGPT initially, and that will be focused on world knowledge, as I said. And so the monetization model, I don’t want to get into the terms of the commercial agreements because they’re confidential between the parties. But I see both aspects as being very important. People want both.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Just stepping back to the gross margin discussion again, if I look at calendar ’23, you had on average 150 basis points increase in product gross margins on a year-on-year basis. In 2024 so far, it would be more flat year-on-year. When we think about that, is the incremental headwind, I mean, there was FX headwinds throughout the last several years. So, ex-FX, are there other incremental headwinds that are either temporary or structural in nature that are perhaps limiting further upside to what are obviously very strong gross margins?
Maestri: Yeah, of course, as you said, you know, the foreign exchange continues to be, this is incremental on a year-over-year basis, and it’s one of those things that is outside of our control. We try to hedge our exposures but it is what it is. We know that when the dollar is strong, our gross margins are affected. The other element that I think it’s always important to keep in mind is that within the products business, our products have different margins profiles and depending on their relative success in the marketplace our products gross margin tends to move, and so the mix of our products has an impact on gross margins, right? And so we need to pay attention to that. Of course you know we just launched an iPad and that is one of the factors. But we want all our products to in the marketplace and that’s why we always look at gross margin dollars as the first order of priority and gross margin percentage tends to follow from that. The other factor that obviously has an impact, a significant impact, is the state of the commodity markets and, you know, they tend to go in cycles, and so we’ll see how that plays out over time. But in general we feel good about the level of gross margins that we have for our products business and we think we’re in a good position there.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: We keep hearing about this increasing silicon content for AI edge devices. And also, I think Luca, you spoke about increasing commodity costs. So I’m curious how to think about margin for these new AI devices, and Tim, do any of these Apple Intelligence features need more hardware updates than what we have today?
Cook: Maybe I’ll take the second one first and then pass it over to Luca. In terms of the requirements to run Apple Intelligence, there are system requirements and there are silicon requirements. And so, from an iPhone point of view, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will run Apple Intelligence and the successor products, obviously. If you look at the Mac, it starts with the M series of silicon that started in 2020, and the iPad is the same, and so it starts with the M-series of silicon. And so there are system requirements and silicon requirements that go with each of those.
Maestri: And from a gross margin standpoint, as you know, we don’t provide any color past the current quarter and we just provided guidance for the quarter, 45 and a half to 46 and a half. It is essentially broadly in line with what we reported for the June quarter, so we’ll take it quarter by quarter, and we’ll report as the time goes by.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Thanks for the color on China. We’ve also seen many other consumer discretionary and luxury brands talk about it in China. And I think Tim, you said half the weakness was FX related. I’m curious, the other half of the weakness, was it more China macro related? Or do you think it is kind of, like, specific to Apple with domestic competitors? Any other color you could give would be very helpful.
Cook: Certainly the competitive environment there is the most competitive in the world. You know, I’ve said that before and and that remains to be the case. The macroeconomic factors have been in the press too, and I’m not an expert on those. I can only tell you what we’re seeing, and we were pleased that the business showed improvement from the first half of the year.
David Vogt, UBS: Tim, first one for you. I know it’s early days and you talked about the developers just getting their hands on Apple Intelligence. But when you think about the categories that are currently in the app store and kind of what you think app developers could do with this new technology, what’s your instinct say in terms of, are these going to be iterative applications to currently available applications? Is there any sort of category that you think lends itself more naturally to Apple Intelligence? Is it games? Is it more creative? I’m just trying to get a sense for how you’re thinking about it.
Cook: If you look at how we’ve deployed Apple Intelligence or are deploying Apple Intelligence, we’ve really thought about it at pretty much all of the apps that you use every day, and so we’ve thought about it from Notes to Mail to Messages and all the rest, and so there’s been a deep level of thinking about how it affects those apps, and that’s going to surface Apple Intelligence in a way that is natural to the user and in a way that will, I think, get them very excited about it and get usage. Similarly, I think the developers will do that on a broad basis with their apps as well. And so I think it’s profound, and we’ll see what the developers do, but we’re very excited to get the initial seed out there this week and see what they do. I think it will be amazing. Yeah.
David Vogt, UBS: I appreciate it, and Luca, just maybe – I know you didn’t give a full rundown of product categories in your prepared remarks, but if I kind of take your comments at face value, I guess what I’m trying to think about is for the next quarter, It sounds like with services being relatively strong and FX easing a little bit, you’re effectively saying that product revenue in the September quarter is going to basically be flat with the September quarter last year ahead of a product launch, and so I’m just trying to get a sense for what are the puts and takes in that sort of outlook, particularly as you have Apple Intelligence hopefully stoking the fire for demand going forward.
Maestri: Let me repeat what we provided. We think that we’re going to be growing total company revenue at a rate that is similar to what we reported, so the plus 5%, right? In spite of the fact that we’re going to have some foreign exchange headwinds, and we said about 150 basis points in the December quarter. And we said that… digits at a rate that is similar to what we’ve reported for the first three quarters of the fiscal year. We are not going into the other categories. I think there’s a lot of good math that you can do from what we’ve given given you here. Keep in mind on the Mac that we will have a challenging compare from a year ago given the fact that we launched and we had the full quarter impact of the launch of the MacBook Air 15 inch a year ago. And also on the iPad we reported 24% growth in the June quarter, clearly we had the benefit from the launch in the June quarter of the new products, the iPad Air and the iPad Pro so important to keep that in mind on a sequential basis.
Atif Malek, Citi: Hi, thank you for taking my question. The first one is for Tim. I know it’s early days. The feedback on Apple Intelligence software features like notifications summary and reduced interruption focus from the developers who have tried the iOS 18.1 beta version this week is very positive. My question is, in response to an earlier question, you talked about a staggered launch on some of these software features. So are you expecting most of the features that you announced at WWDC to be part of iOS 18, or we should be thinking that some of these features could potentially be part of iOS 19 next year?
Cook: Our objective that we set in June is to roll out U.S. English starting in the fall, and that’s to users, and then proceed with more functionality—more features, if you will—and more languages and regions coverage as we proceed across the next year, and so we sort of gave a time frame and we’re tracking to that.
Atif Malek, Citi: Luca, the services growth momentum seems very strong. Are you seeing any impact from changes made to comply with the DMA rule?
Maestri: Well, as you know, we’ve introduced some changes to the way we run the App Store in Europe already in March, and we have seen a good level of adoption from developers on those changes. We are, on an ongoing basis, discussing with the European Commission how to ensure full compliance with the DMA. It’s obviously early stage, but in general our results for the services business and for the App Store have been pretty good until now. Again, to just provide you a frame of reference, the percentage of revenue that we generate from the European Union on the App Store is about 7% of the total.
Samik Chatterjee, JP Morgan: I guess, Tim, if I can just ask you about Apple Intelligence as well. There’s a regulatory aspect as well in certain geographies. You mentioned the staggered launch that you’re aiming for and the timelines you’re thinking. How are you thinking about the complexity of the regulatory process, in particular, like EU and maybe China? And in terms of your timelines of the rollout, are you sort of embedding in the regulatory aspect here? And how should we think about timing then including that?
Cook: We’re engaged, as you would guess, with both regulatory bodies that you mentioned. And our objective is to move as fast as we can, obviously, because our objective is always to get features out there for everyone. We have to understand the regulatory requirements before we can commit to doing that and commit a schedule to doing that, but we’re very constructively engaged with both.
Samik Chatterjee, JP Morgan: And a quick one on the wearables category, Luca, I know you mentioned the acceleration there on a sequential basis. Maybe you can just sort of parse that out in terms of what, which category is true of the acceleration, because that’s been a category that has been lagging a bit in terms of revenue trends for the past couple of quarters. So just curious what is starting to sort of drive it to accelerate on a sequential basis.
Cook: Yeah, I’ll take that one. I think the important thing to remember when you look at the wearables, home and accessory categories is that we have a difficult launch compare, and we’ve been running that for a few quarters and we still have that because last year had the continued benefit from the AirPods Pro second generation, the Watch SE, and the very first Watch Ultra, and so it’s important to keep that in mind. If you sort of take a step back, however, and look at the business across the trailing 12 months, the wearables, home and accessory business has grown to almost $40 billion, which is double what it was five years ago.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Tim, you referenced the investment in innovation, and your R&D sales ratio reached what I think was a June quarter record, even before launching Apple Intelligence. Do you see the rollout of these features requiring further increases in R&D or increases in OpEx or CapEx for cloud compute capacity? And is it even possible to forecast the services usage as they roll out, given that they’re so new for consumers?
Cook: Clearly, we have increased R&D over time. We’ve been investing in AI and ML for years. And in addition to investing more, we’ve also redeployed certain skills onto AI and ML, and so the growth in sort of embedded in our numbers that we’ve shared here is, you know, it’s increasing year over year. On the CAPEX part, it’s important to remember that we employ a hybrid kind of approach where we do things internally and we have certain partners that we do business with externally, where the CAPEX would appear in their respective businesses. But yes, you can expect that we will continue to invest and increase it year-on-year.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: When we look at the free cash flow margins for the first nine months, they’re up materially. And given this year’s product mix, can you describe to us what exactly in the services mix or cost controls is driving what seems to be structurally higher free cash flow margins across the business.
Maestri: Yeah, I’m glad you noticed that. We are pretty pleased with that fact. And I think you probably also noticed that we’ve increased our return of capital to shareholders this quarter. This one was a record quarter for us. Well, it’s the combination of a number of things. Of course, an improvement in the top line helps. The margin expansion that we’ve had over the last several years and several quarters obviously has helped, and so that is driving better operating cash flow on the CapEx front. As Tim said, we employ a hybrid model. Some of the investments show up on our balance sheet, and some other investments show up somewhere else, and we pay as we go. But in general, we try to run the company efficiently. We continue to think that capital efficiency is a good thing, and therefore we’re pleased with the fact that our free cash flow is doing well this year.
On Thursday, Apple announced results for its financial third quarter. Total company revenue was $85.8 billion, a record for its fiscal third quarter, which is traditionally the company’s quietest quarter. Services revenue reached an all-time revenue high of $24.2 billion.
iPhone revenue was down 1%, iPad revenue spiked 24% after major new product releases, and Mac revenue ticked up 2%.
Check out our transcript of Apple’s quarterly conference call with analysts and our video recap of the results.
And now, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the charts…
Neil Long of Mobilegamer has a new report about a survey of Apple Arcade game developers that paints Apple as slow to respond, clueless about tech details, and generally not paying enough attention to the service:
Two other sources told us that they had been approached by Apple to make a Vision Pro game but were offered no compensation to make the title, and no guarantees it would be promoted or marketed in any way. Unlike Meta, which funds a lot of VR development, Apple offers indies no financial incentives at all to develop for Vision Pro – an approach a source described as “utterly baffling”.
Not surprising, really, but also not great.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Like Dan, I’m also back from a trip to Scotland. His piece covered most of the issues regarding the life of a modern international traveler, but I had a few bonus observations to share.
The best thing I did for this trip was track it all in a single note in Apple Notes. I created the note back in February, shared it with my wife, and began sketching possible itineraries (with the help of Rick Steves) in the note. Lauren and I would talk and then I’d revise, finally coming up with a day-by-day itinerary that made sense.
When it came time to implement the plan, I put flight information in the note, and then began adding hotel reservations beneath every day. (Including information about the one B&B that wanted us to pay in cash.) The rental car details went right under the information about our arrival at Inverness airport.
At some point, I sought hiking advice from David Smith, who has spent a lot of time hiking in Scotland. His response, sent via Slack, went right under the day I had reserved for walking around the Isle of Skye.
When our tour company sent me bus and ferry tickets for the Isle of Mull as PDFs, I inserted those into the note at the day we were taking the tour. And later on, when Lauren made a few dinner reservations in advance, those details also went into the Note.
The final detail before we left was also the final detail I used when we returned: our parking space at the off-airport parking lot at San Francisco airport.
Oh, and to facilitate quick access, I added a Notes widget to my home screen, and set it to point to my specific 2024 UK Trip note, so I had one-tap access to everything in that note, without any messing around inside the Notes app.
A few additionsDan mentioned USB charging, and I did find a lot of it—in hotels, in the rental car, and on our airplane. Without fail, all of the USB ports I saw were USB-A—which is a tragedy, given that I’ve fully converted to the USB-C lifestyle. Fortunately, I had enough foresight to bring an inline USB-A-to-C adapter (sort of like this one, but not that actual model). I’m going to be packing these in all my traveling bags going forward, because while my house is no longer Dongletown, the larger world certainly is.
On the advice of the tour company we used at Mull, I also brought an external battery—and used it a couple of times at the end of a long day when we weren’t anywhere to plug in. The problem was that all my available batteries at home charge via micro-USB and offer power via USB-A. I packed a cursed micro-USB and used the inline adapter and managed to make it work, but I think I’m going to pick up a modern USB-C based battery for next time.
I share Dan’s frustration with using an international eSIM with Messages. eSIMs are great (all our data was covered for $20 when our American cellular carrier would’ve charged us $240), but it wreaks havoc on iMessage. People with their numbers attached to Contacts were constantly identified by their phone numbers. Why?! So frustrating.
Finally, with both of my kids out of the house, Lauren and I traveled alone for most of the trip and therefore we didn’t need to use FaceTime as a conduit for a baby monitor, as Dan’s family did. That said, we did find a bittersweet use for FaceTime on this trip. At about 4 a.m. in Glasgow, our daughter rang us on FaceTime. Her elderly cat was suddenly, unexpectedly injured and Jamie and a friend were going to need to make the hard decision pet owners have to make sometimes. Even bleary-eyed and thousands of miles away, we were able to give her some support and wisdom in a difficult time, live, via FaceTime. I’m glad we were able to have that conversation, as difficult as it was.
What else? I paid for everything (except the B&B that demanded cash!) with Apple Pay via my Apple Watch. It was my first time using Apple Pay with Transit for London, and tapping to enter and exit the turnstiles was special. Apple Maps excelled at letting me navigate around London, including which lines to take, which trains to board, and which station exits to take.
If and how we use Find My, the tech we haven’t upgraded, how Apple Intelligence will impact our Siri usage, and our latest tech travel tips.
Go to the podcast page.
Good connection, great view.And we’re back! After a week and a half abroad, I’ve returned, with that weird combination of tired and wistful that always seem to accompany the end of a trip. It’s good to be home, but I’ll miss traveling.1
As I looked back over the last couple weeks, I found myself thinking about the ways that technology has improved the travel experience over the past many years.
There have been a lot of changes in tech since my first trip abroad in 2000, where I lugged along a PowerBook G3 and a relatively early Olympus digital camera. (I had to struggle to even find a compatible memory card reader when I was getting ready to leave!) These days, I rarely leave home without an iPhone and an Apple Watch, and for longer trips, I take either an iPad or MacBook along for the ride. Not to mention a slew of associated apps and accessories.
Overall, I think technology has helped make travel smoother and more pleasant, but that said, there are always a few things that remain a bit tricky. I figured it might be interesting to take a look at what I learned from this most recent adventure.
eSIM cityMy mom always says that the only important things to remember when traveling are your wallet and your medications: everything else is replaceable. I’d add to that your smartphone: as long as my iPhone has access to the internet, I can handle pretty much anything else that life throws at me.
For most of my last twenty-plus years of international travel, I’ve favored grabbing a local SIM card for my smartphone. It usually has better service than staying on my home provider and it’s pretty much always substantially cheaper than my carrier’s international rates. As a result, I’ve amassed a ziplock bag full of plastic cards from a multitude of countries, ranging from as nearby as Canada to as far as India.
But I guess it’s time to toss those cards in the trash, because eSIMs are here and they make everything way easier. No longer do I have to dive into a local shop and sort through a bewildering array of options: instead, I just purchased a data-only eSIM with 5GB of data via the Airalo app before leaving home, turned off my AT&T service while I was on the plane over, and turned on the local line when landing. (There are, I should note, several other eSIM purveyors on the App Store; Airalo was simply the one I was recommended.)
While it was largely a simple process, the experience wasn’t quite seamless: I tried to activate the eSIM a couple days before I left, but without a local network to connect to it ended up in kind of a paused state; when I landed I had to flip the cellular data on and off for it to finally connect. After that point, it worked flawlessly, and Airalo even alerted me when I was about to run out of data and easily let me top up with more.
There was, however, one single caveat that prevented my eSIM experience from being as smooth as I’d like.
You can’t spell “iMessage” without “mess”Ah, Messages. Why are you still so weird?
Despite improvements to Apple’s messaging system, using a different SIM abroad still holds the potential to throw a wrench in the works. I’ll caveat this complaint by saying, yes, I am running the iOS 18 beta on my phone, which could have caused some of my issues, but I’ve also run into similar problems in the past.
The main thorn here seems to be that much of iMessage is still linked to your phone number. That’s despite the fact that I’ve long set all of my devices to send messages from my email address—something that Apple has allowed since the earliest days of iMessage, but which never seems to work quite as well. At some level, it seems like iMessage still needs a phone number associated with it. And even though I got a data-only plan, using a different SIM meant that I was technically using a different phone number.
This meant I ended up with at least one group conversation where the other people saw messages about them removing and re-adding me to the group (without them doing anything), and I also had a couple cases where friends messaging me from home showed up with just their phone numbers instead of their names. Not dealbreakers, perhaps, but annoying nonetheless.
Upon my return home and the deactivation of my eSIM line, that one group conversation got even trickier as I started receiving notifications on one of my devices for messages I was sending. My attempt to remove the duplicate version of me then somehow removed the text entry box (and thus my ability to send messages) on some devices. Ultimately, I had to abandon that conversation thread and start a new one. Far from ideal.
Another issue I encountered—which isn’t Apple’s fault, I should say—was that the deactivation of my home phone line meant that I couldn’t receive SMS messages. (Nor does it seem that iOS 18’s support for the new RCS protocol changes that in any way, despite its ability to send messages over the data network—given that it’s still linked to your phone number.) Some of those texts seemingly disappeared into the ether, never to be seen again.
The lack of SMS was only really a problem in one instance, when I tried to sign up for a local parking app that required a phone number for verification. I tried a few approaches, including sending to a Google Voice Number, using a temporary number service online, and even eventually turning on my home cell line, sadly accepting the single-day international charge. Unfortunately, none of those things worked. This is the upside and downside of tech standards: SMS is universally accepted, yes, but it’s also old and tied to one particular way of doing things.
Pay as you goAt this point, I feel like Apple ought to co-opt the old VISA slogan—”It’s everywhere you want to be”—for Apple Pay. I think I reached for a physical credit card maybe twice during my trip, and had to scramble to find cash only a single time.
The infamous parking machine.Of course, the real winner here is the contactless payment standard. The U.S. was slower to adopt it, though it’s come a long way in the past five years; in the UK, though, it’s ubiquitous: everything from a cafe in a remote town to the transit systems in London takes contactless payments, which means never having to worry about exchange rates or ATM fees.2 For transit in particular, just being able to tap my watch to get on and off was a delight—and as that system is shortly due to come to my hometown transportation system, I’m even happier.
The one exception to all of this was the aforementioned parking incident. Since I couldn’t use that parking app, I ended up going down a rabbit hole to convert some old paper bills that I had, with no luck. Ultimately I just ended up withdrawing a handful of pounds from an ATM so that I could pay a parking meter. (Which didn’t even give change!) Frustrating, to be sure, but an isolated experience.
Get around, get around, I get aroundTransit was easy with Apple Maps, though some of the bus drivers are a bit young.I had great luck with Apple Maps while driving our rental car and taking public transit, but I particularly wanted to call out the latter in London. I managed to navigate several tricky train changes on the London transit system thanks to very clear and concise directions on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, spelling out which direction I would be going in, what platform I needed to be on, and so on. In fact, the only time I ended up going in the wrong direction was when I panicked last minute that Apple Maps was wrong (it wasn’t) and ran across the street to get on a different bus.3
Having CarPlay available in our rental car was also clutch, even if it took a little while to figure out how to use the car’s own interface to turn it on. Being able to not only have access to all of our data—including music we’d downloaded before the trip—but in a familiar interface saved us a lot of time and trouble.
We did run into one small issue, though: the relatively new SharePlay feature of Music, which is supposed to allow multiple people in the car to manage the current playback queue, only allowed my wife to use it briefly before it kicked her out and wouldn’t let her reconnect. It may have been an issue with my phone running the iOS 18 beta, but it’s also never allowed her to automatically join the session—she’s always had to use the QR code. I’m honestly curious how many people use this feature and whether it’s generally wonky.
FaceTime: You know, for kidsTraveling with a small child is a special kind of vacation.4 My two-year-old still takes a nap most afternoons and goes to bed before us, which meant that we were going to need a solution for watching him while we were out of the room. (Because if we are in the room, he will just want to talk to us and will never ever go to sleep.)
So I packed our home baby monitor, the Eufy SpaceView Pro, which we often bring on trips. It’s an RF-based setup with a plug-in camera and a battery-powered display that’s served us pretty well…except that when it comes to hotels, the range is limited enough that we’d generally have to sit outside in the hall. Less fun than, say, going down to the lobby or hotel lounge.
During naptime, this problem turned out to be easy enough to solve. I just got my iPad on the hotel wi-fi, positioned it to see into the travel crib, and initiated a FaceTime call to my wife’s iPhone (which was on mute with the camera off). That way we could see and hear him while we got to sit in front of a nice fireplace or have afternoon tea.
At night, matters became more challenging. As good as night mode on Apple’s devices is, it doesn’t work on live video, so there was no way we were going to be able to see the kid in the dark.
However, our monitor has an infrared camera, which led me to exploit the good old analogue loophole: I set up the monitor’s camera, and then simply placed the iPad with its own camera facing the monitor’s display unit and did the same FaceTime trick. Voilà! Instant internet-enabled infrared camera.
This trick proved pretty reliable for the majority of our trip, excepting a few times where we had connectivity issues and I had to sneak in and restart the call. (At first I’d tried to use the ancient iPad Air 2 I had set up for my kid, but in the end it proved simpler to use my iPad Pro, overkill though it may have been.)
In the future I think I’d perhaps just grab a spare webcam with an infrared camera to make life easier all around.
Charge itOf course, none of our devices are any good if we can’t charge them, but I’m relieved that this obstacle too has become much easier to hurdle. I mostly relied on a good old plastic adapter for UK plugs, along with my Anker multiport charger.
A few places we stayed had convenient USB ports, though only our relatively new London hotel had USB-C. Likewise, the car we drove had a USB-A port for charging. But I brought along enough cables in my travel bag for any and all of those eventualities, plus a couple backup batteries for topping up our devices when in need.
Overall, though I ended up running down my iPhone and Apple Watch most days, I never really ended up in a scenario where I couldn’t get power if I needed it, which helped me feel more comfortable and less anxious when it came to our travels.
OverallThe last thing you want when traveling is to have your reliance on technology make you more stressed, and I’m pleased to say that the state of the world is such that it generally smooths things over instead—and, in some cases, actually makes traveling even more of a joy. I appreciate that I can both stay connected to home and get the most of out the country I’m in.
- Good news: I have to go back to the UK in another week. 😅 ↩
- I’ve enthused about this elsewhere, but I love that in so many other countries, the servers bring the payment terminal to you at the table instead of disappearing with your card. This makes so much sense and yet is for some reason almost non-existent in the U.S. It’s honestly really weird, the more you think about it. ↩
- Fortunately I only rode one stop and was able to then hop off and change onto a train that still got me home in a reasonable time, a testament to London’s excellent public transit. ↩
- Namely, not really a vacation. ↩
In the nearly ten years since Apple first unveiled the Apple Watch, it’s become clear that the product excels at being a health and fitness accessory. Apple has added new health sensors over the years and is rumored to be working on more, and every watchOS release seemingly adds new health features on the software side.
And yet, a decade in, it’s worth considering that maybe the Apple Watch can’t carry the full load of Apple’s health ambitions. It may be time for other accessories—some already in existence, others yet to be devised—to join the Apple Watch in a larger family of health-related Apple products.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
After recapping their excitement about the Relay 10 event in London, Jason and Myke discuss the arrival of Apple Intelligence in a surprising beta release and imagine some interesting new directions for the iPhone product line.
Go to the podcast page.
AppleIf you’ve been looking forward to injecting a little intelligence in your Apple devices, the time is now. Apple on Monday rolled out developer beta releases of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, which include access to several—but notably, not all—of the company’s previously announced AI-powered features.
Apple Intelligence was undeniably a central push at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. But Apple also said at the time that many of these features wouldn’t ship until later this year, and sure enough when the first beta releases rolled around, they were conspicuously absent.
Not all features, as I said, will be available to try out in this release. Among those included are the systemwide Writing Tools features to help proofread and rewrite text; inbox prioritization, summaries, and smart reply in Mail; the new Reduce Interruptions focus mode; natural language search for photos and videos as well as the ability to create Memories movies on demands; summaries for transcriptions; and, perhaps most enticingly, improved Siri functionality, including the ability to move between voice and typing, more resilient requests for when you stumble over your words, and answering questions about Apple products.
As for what you won’t find here, don’t expect the contentious image generation features like Image Playground, the ability to clean up and remove unwanted details from photos, and integration with ChatGPT. It’s unclear if those will appear in future builds of these betas, or as subsequent updates after public release. Also unclear is whether there will be a public beta of these versions down the road for non-developers.
Apple previously said that these features would require and iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or an M1-based iPad or Mac, and those requirements stand for this beta. Once you install the beta, you’ll also have to opt in by joining a waitlist—due, presumably, to manage demand on the servers running Apple’s Private Cloud Computer. Apple says it expects the wait to be only a matter of hours, though times could vary.
Releasing a second set of betas for its platforms before the release of a new major version is unusual for Apple—I don’t recall having seen it in my almost two decades of career—but it certainly speaks to the demand and interest these features have clearly generated. Moreover, giving developers time with these features before their release helps make sure they and their apps are prepared.
This move isn’t without its risk: like any beta, these releases are still in active development, meaning that there may be bugs and other issues—particularly a challenge when it comes to AI-based features. Expect to see plenty of attempts to challenge and subvert any guardrails Apple’s put in place to try and ensure these features live up to their standards.
AppleVis is shutting down. The site has been a crucial resource for blind and visually-impaired Apple users since iOS accessibility was new, though it’s alway covered all Apple platforms. It’s a news site, an informed but opinionated blog, a place to track OS releases and their accessibility features, an accessible app directory, and a lively community forum. AppleVis has long served newer Apple users along with those of us who own the moniker “power user.”
In a post on the site on Saturday, AppleVis founder David Goodwin said he is no longer able to keep the all-volunteer project going.
Maintaining AppleVis has essentially been a full-time responsibility for me since I founded it in 2010 — a commitment I’ve undertaken entirely on a voluntary and unpaid basis. This level of dedication has demanded countless hours of work encompassing nearly every aspect of AppleVis’ operations, often starting or ending well outside what many would consider a typical workday. While I’ve been largely happy to make this commitment, driven by our mission and the positive impact we’ve had on the community, it has come at significant personal cost.
Goodwin also wrote that moderating the site’s increasingly volatile forums had become a challenge he wasn’t able to surmount. He also said the technical demands of a site with such a broad mandate had become too much.
AppleVis doesn’t look flashy—it was designed to meet the needs of people who do not primarily rely on vision to gather information. But it has always been important. If you needed to know whether an app was accessible to VoiceOver before buying it, the AppleVis app directory could probably tell you. If you wanted a full list of feature updates and bug fixes in the latest macOS beta, AppleVis had it, relying on a tenacious team of in-house sleuths, and sometimes a bit of encouragement from within Apple. And the site’s community-driven approach meant that accessibility bugs and limitations got a public airing when they needed it. In recent years, AppleVis took inspiration from Six Colors’ annual Apple report card to develop its own community-driven Apple Vision Accessibility Report.
The community of blind Apple users has been mourning the loss of AppleVis on social media and on podcasts. The site is currently in read-only mode, and as of August 31, it will go offline, taking 14 years of archives with it. Though several individuals have come forward to propose ways of saving it, Goodwin and his team haven’t yet indicated that they’re open to a rescue.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
1Password wants you to understand the details about how laws like GDPR can affect your business. The EU enacted GDPR in 2018, and the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over.
You need to comply, and it’s not the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or
scheduling a training session. You need to collect only the data you truly need to function, and secure the data you have. Starting with common breach culprits like compromised passwords might be a good idea—sensible advice from the maker of a fine password manager.
For more about GDPR compliance and other good advice, check out the 1Password blog.
Our experiences with purchasing tech insurance like AppleCare and its benefits, our approach to managing battery levels and charging devices, the tools and apps we use for iPhone photography, and a non-Apple tech gadget we’ve enjoyed.
Go to the podcast page.
When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to
see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting…and waiting…but the Great
European Privacy Crackdown never came. For a while it seemed like the only way you’d get
slapped with a GDPR fine was to do something truly egregious or be named Mark Zuckerberg.
(Or preferably both.)
But the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over.
Recently, EU member nations (plus the UK) have started taking action against data controllers
of all sizes–from the big (Amazon), to the medium (a trucking company), to the truly miniscule (a
Spanish citizen whose home security cameras bothered their neighbors).
So what changed between 2018 and 2024? Perhaps the biggest factor was the EU cracking
down on companies putting bogus “headquarters” in countries with friendly regulators,
particularly Ireland. But it certainly didn’t help that the last few years have seen an unending tide
of data breach stories, and the public’s relationship with tech has increasingly soured. There’s
an appetite for enforcement these days, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
If you’re an IT or security professional, you may be wondering what to do with this information.
Unfortunately, GDPR compliance isn’t the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or
scheduling a training session. The best place to start is to adopt a policy of data minimization:
collect only the data you truly need to function, on both customers and employees.
After that, your second priority must be securing the data you have. Of course, that’s easier said
than done, but you can start with doing more to protect against common breach culprits like
compromised passwords. (Call us biased, but getting a password manager for every employee
really is table stakes for good security.) You also need to monitor where all your data is going,
so PII doesn’t disappear onto Shadow IT apps and unmanaged devices.
We’ll close with a 2022 quote from John Edwards, the UK Information Commissioner:
“The biggest cyber risk businesses face is not from hackers outside of their company, but from
complacency within their company. If your business doesn’t regularly monitor for suspicious
activity in its systems and fails to act on warnings, or doesn’t update software and fails to
provide training to staff, you can expect a similar fine from my office.”
In other words: it’s time to get serious about GDPR.
To learn more about GDPR compliance, read the full blog.
Isle of Skye, Scotland. (Shutterstock)Summer is the time for travel. And this summer, thanks to the Relay 10 event in London, a lot of your favorite podcasters and writers in the Apple world are using the event as an excuse to take an European vacation.
Consider both Dan and I among that group. Separately, Dan and I planned vacations for our families and ended up both choosing Scotland! The highlands, even. And yet despite that, I don’t think our itineraries come anywhere near one another until we get to London for the Relay event.
In any event, Dan and family are already in Scotland and my wife and I are heading to the airport tomorrow. I wouldn’t expect many updates here in the intervening week and a half, though since we couldn’t get John Moltz on a plane, he’ll be posting his weekly This Week In Apple columns for members on Fridays.
I hope you’re all having a great summer (or, in the case of our southern hemisphere readers, winter!) and have the opportunity to take a trip of your own sometime soon. We hope to see some of you at the Hackney Empire theatre in London on July 27. (A few tickets still available!)
We should be back the week of July 29. See you then.
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?Immersive content for the Vision Pro—one of the device’s best features—has been frustratingly slow in coming. But Apple just announced a bunch of new stuff:
Starting this week, Apple is releasing all-new series and films captured in Apple Immersive Video that will debut exclusively on Apple Vision Pro. Apple Immersive Video is a remarkable storytelling format that leverages 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio to transport viewers to the center of the action.
There’s a new series, Boundless, that will finally show more of that spectacular hot air balloon footage from the earliest demo reels. More wildlife documentary installments (elephants!), a new series of high-altitude immersive clips, an “immersive experience” (presumably involving a music performance) from The Weeknd, a scripted short film (!), and more sports highlights including the NBA All-Star Game and big wave surfing, are also promised.
This is good. I want more, the more the better, and I’m glad Apple is announcing this stuff in advance instead of leaving us to wait and wonder why there isn’t more content available for the Vision Pro.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Sportswriter Will Carroll joins Jason for an all-Sports Corner edition. We discuss the NBA TV deal, the NFL lawsuit, and the future of sports broadcasting. [Downstream+ members also get: the post-RSN world, Netflix and live sports, and more.]
Go to the podcast page.
My podcast player of choice for the last ten years just celebrated, yep, its 10th anniversary. Here’s Overcast’s sole proprietor, Marco Arment:
Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast 1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully beyond.
Speaking as someone who got antsy writing about Apple betas for a couple of weeks before being able to release my work this Monday, it’s absolutely amazing to think of the restraint Marco went through over the last 18 months, working on entirely rewriting his app without anyone seeing the fruits of his labor.
I highly recommend this week’s episode of ATP, in which Marco details the highs and lows of the process of rewriting his app.
The trick in writing about this update for broader audiences is that, well, it’s still really just Overcast. Users don’t care if a developer spent tens or hundreds or thousands of hours working on the code; all they care about are new features. This new release of Overcast is surprisingly familiar: the design’s a bit different, but not too much, and almost every feature is there. I’ve been using the new Overcast for a few weeks and it was easy to get used to the interface changes. It’s still my Overcast.
What’s exciting is that, by rewriting the app in Swift and using SwiftUI, Marco has given himself the opportunity to stop maintaining an elderly code base, and instead has a fast, modern app that he can iterate on quickly. Marco suggests that “some of your most-requested features over the last decade” are going to be rolling out soon, enabled by the rewrite. See, that’s me being a user. It’s all about those new features.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Where we primarily do our text entry (smartphone, tablet, or computer), our involvement with user groups either as speakers or attendees, the apps we keep in our iPhone dock and why, and how we use Apple Pay.
Go to the podcast page.
The future of technology sometimes goes in surprising directions, taking an obvious path and then suddenly doubling back to go down a road less traveled. There was a time when The Future was underpowered client devices powered by remote servers, until it wasn’t—and then (thanks to cloud services and AI) it was again.
The rise of AI as a force in the tech industry—for good or ill, be it snake oil or world-changing (it’s probably in between on both counts)—has upended a lot of assumptions about how tech works and where it’s going. The conventional wisdom has held that Apple is behind, and AI puts it at a disadvantage. That might be true, but… maybe it isn’t?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The iPadOS 18 Public Beta is here. Dan Moren has his first impressions of all the features it shares with iOS 18, but there are a few that are exclusive to the iPad.
The good news: A bunch of features that in recent years might have been iPhone-only are rolling out for both platforms this year. For example, the ability to customize home screens is going to change the look of iPad screens—and iPad users won’t have to wait until the fall of 2025 to get what iPhone users got the year before. I like it.
The bad news: There’s not a whole lot that’s special for iPad users. There are really only a handful of new features to speak of, and I’ve got questions about several of them.
And the other bad news: If you’re most excited about Apple Intelligence, well, you know the drill. None of that stuff is in the Public Beta and most of it won’t be shipping until later this fall or even sometime next year.
But still, let’s look on the bright side. Here’s a first take on the new features that are available in the iPadOS 18 Public Beta.
Handwritten notesI have terrible handwriting and I hate writing by hand. But for you, dear reader, I have picked up my Apple Pencil and written many paragraphs in Notes on iPadOS 18.
Apple has given handwriting a serious upgrade in iPadOS 18. It’s treating text written with the Apple Pencil as text, essentially. You can select words and copy the text, sure, but what’s new is the ability to edit that text. Misspelled words will be marked and can be tapped to correct them, and words can be deleted and inserted.
This is all enabled by a new subsystem that learns your handwriting, meaning it can insert or change words without giving the corrected text an incongruous look. It’s not perfect—Apple somehow was not able to perfectly synthesize my unreadable chicken scratch—but it’s close enough not to seem jarring. Apple’s engine also works to realign what you write, cleaning up messy words or lines so that it’s all more readable—again, something it couldn’t do if it wasn’t able to generate a synthetic version of your handwriting.
I can’t speak to what the experience will be like for people with good handwriting, but I was somewhat let down by what iPadOS could do for my handwriting. I noticed some words being “corrected” into incorrect words, and messy writing not being cleaned up. Perhaps I’ve just defeated Apple’s system—it wouldn’t surprise me. But it wasn’t as impressive as I had hoped.
Let’s be honest: I’m never going to be the target audience for this feature. I’m very impressed that it works, and for people who prefer to take notes in longhand, this will make the entire experience better. But I wasn’t as impressed as I thought I’d be.
Calculator and Math NotesHandwritten Math Notes have potential, but I found them frustrating.The iPad has, for some reason, not had a built-in calculator app since its inception. I have no idea why this was the case, and there have been many third-party apps to fill the gap, but in iPadOS 18 Apple has finally included a version of its basic calculator app. It’s silly it took this long, but it’s a good move.
Of course, Apple couldn’t leave it at that. So the Calculator app has added a new iPad-only feature, handwritten Math Notes. (You can also use it inside Notes.) In Notes across iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia you can type math problems and get them answered by typing the equals symbol, but only on iOS can you write them out by hand as you would on a piece of paper, and watch in awe as they are solved for you by a magical elf that lives inside your iPad.
When it works it’s spectacular. Math notation is hard to type, but it’s easy to write, making it a perfect fit for the Apple Pencil. However, I had some issues. Perhaps it’s my terrible handwriting, but even when I was very diligent, quite frequently I found that Math Notes just didn’t understand what I had written and wouldn’t give me an answer. And while sometimes it would display a little dotted-line box that I could tap on to get “autocorrect” suggestions that would allow me to indicate what I had written, sometimes those choices were themselves a bit baffling to me—and other times, no choices were offered and I couldn’t get an answer.
Still, Math Notes is a great idea and I want Apple to keep pushing in this direction, because (especially for students) it’s a much more natural way to do math than using a calculator or typing equations in with a keyboard. But I also hope it gets a little more consistent in recognizing what I’m writing—and more understandable when it’s asking for clarification.
Tabs or sidebars?With iPadOS 18, Apple has introduced a new interface convention for iPad apps to use. It’s a new floating tab bar that appears at the top of the screen, replacing the longstanding convention of having individual tab buttons at the bottom of many apps. Depending on the app, the tab bar can also include a sidebar icon that moves the contents of the tab bar into a sidebar, and users can customize which items appear in the floating tab bar when the sidebar is minimized.
Which… is fine as an idea, I guess? But I’m a little baffled about the plethora of different floating tabs and sidebars on display on the iPad, and why this change was necessary. I guess Apple is trying to combine the tabbed navigation concept with the sidebar, so there can be a single, flexible approach to expose both concepts.
But there are a bunch of issues with this approach, including the removal of glyphs (which many people prefer to navigating by text), the issue of long words (German, anyone?) polluting the tab bar, and some limitations in what’s possible in the resulting sidebar.
As someone who uses the largest iPad Pro primarily in a horizontal orientation, I’m also not a fan of approaches that seem—as this one does—to prefer that sidebars disappear “to make more room for content.” Some content — most notably textual content — does not need to be any wider on an iPad held horizontally. The sidebar serves a useful secondary purpose as a frame that reduces the width of the content area in some apps.
I’m also not convinced that moving items that used to be tappable at the bottom of the screen up to the top is actually better in general. Don’t most people hold their iPads in their hands or maybe prop the bottom of the iPad up on their chest or knees or legs? I sure do. Less movement is required to tap at the bottom of the screen than the top. Also, reaching to the top of the screen causes my arm to cover all that precious content Apple’s making space for. Over-relying on top tabs on an iPad interface doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
And if you do like top tabs, you’ll start looking at all the other sidebars in iPadOS with a little bit of suspicion. Why can’t I pin my three most used mailboxes in Mail in a top tab, so I don’t need to keep the sidebar open there? Because it’s using the old sidebar style and Apple doesn’t think these tabs are fit for that purpose. It’s a sidebar, but not that sidebar.
I’m also a bit disappointed that Apple didn’t use this experience to make the tabs more functional. Not only do they lack glyphs, but they also lack any sort of hierarchical option—think tap-and-hold to drop down additional functionality—that might make them serve more like an equivalent of the Mac menu bar. Instead, they’re just dumb tabs that swap between content views. Again… that’s fine, I guess, but this is the big iPad interface addition Apple chose to roll out for iPads?
Early daysAs always, betas are called betas for good reasons. Things can change over the summer. I hope Apple can clean up some of the issues with its handwriting-based features this summer. I’ll be watching carefully to see how the new iPad sidebar/tab combination gets used in apps not from Apple. And of course, I’ll look forward to using some of the features rolled into iOS as well as iPadOS this fall—as we all wait for the slow roll-out of Apple Intelligence over the next year.
macOS Sequoia, out in public beta now and due to be released this fall, is more of a work in progress than most macOS beta versions come July. Not to say that it’s a mess—it’s very much in the tradition of recent macOS releases, which have been fairly solid and lacking in drama—but that its most promoted feature, Apple Intelligence, isn’t ready for public view.
There are numerous other features that I’ve gotten the chance to try, and that anyone can now test drive over the summer if they desire a head start on future features.
Overall, this is a pretty light load of features for this time of year—entirely understandable, given that so many of the features announced in June are works in progress that are likely not to ship until late fall or even next year. Even some features promised for this fall aren’t visible yet. Still, there are some handy features that are already available. Keeping in mind that we’ve probably got more than three months before this operating system ships, here are some of my first impressions of macOS Sequoia.
iPhone mirroringiPhone mirroring even rotates automatically for horizontal content—but won’t let you rotate it yourself.Every so often, Apple comes out with a new operating system feature that takes me completely by surprise. So it is with iPhone Mirroring, a new app that lets you view and operate your iPhone from the comfort of your Mac.
This is one of Apple’s Continuity features, which means that in order to connect to your iPhone, it needs to be within Bluetooth range of your Mac. Once the connection is established, I’m led to believe that the rest of the conversation between the two devices happens over Wi-Fi. I work about 20 feet away from where I keep my iPhone docked, and I was able to connect and use the iPhone without any problem.
When you’re connected to the iPhone, you see its interface on your Mac’s screen—but the iPhone screen itself remains locked, either at the Lock Screen or in StandBy mode. (If you try to take over an open iPhone, it won’t let you. And when you go back to your iPhone after a sharing session, your iPhone will alert you to the fact that it was being remotely operated, as a precaution.)
When you connect, the Mac’s keyboard and trackpad are interpreted just as you would expect, right down to swipes and scrolling. Requests for authentication can be handled by Touch ID on the Mac. When you move the pointer over the top of the iPhone Mirroring window, a window frame appears, giving you standard Mac window controls (you can minimize the app to the Dock, for instance) as well as two buttons to bring up the App Switcher or go to the Home Screen.
The screen appears flawless, operating at high frame rates and even transmitting audio back to the Mac. I was able to click around and play games as if I were running the apps right on my Mac.
The feature that will make iPhone Mirroring the most useful on the Mac is the ability for notifications from the connected iPhone (which appear in Control Center) to launch their respective iPhone apps when you click on them. I was able to react to push notifications sent from iPhone apps, via those apps, all while staying in the context of my Mac. That’s a big productivity boost, says the guy who works 20 feet away from his iPhone most of the time.
That said, I did encounter some issues. Apple says that the screen will automatically rotate into horizontal orientation when an app requires it, which I found to be true, but there seems to be no way to force a rotation when you’d prefer to use an app horizontally that also works vertically. I also couldn’t seem to bring up Control Center, enter “jiggle mode” to move or remove apps or widgets. And when I was in horizontal orientation, I kind of wished I could make the window bigger—even if all it did was blow up the content from the iPhone.
Apple also says that you’ll eventually be able to drag and drop files from the Mac straight into the iPhone via iPhone Mirroring, but that’s a feature that’s not yet available in the beta.
Put windows in a cornerYou can tile windows via drags, keyboard shortcuts, menu items, or straight from the green button in the title bar.Over the years, Apple has added numerous ways to organize your windows to macOS, from Spaces to Split View to Stage Manager. In macOS Sequoia, it’s finally offering an approach similar to what Microsoft has offered on Windows for a while now: simple window tiling.
Yes, it’s a feature that’s been implemented by numerous macOS utilities over the years, and those utilities will almost certainly offer users more options and customizability than the basic functionality Apple offers. But most people don’t seek out UI-customization utilities, and adding tiling to macOS will help those people. And as usually happens, Apple’s basic implementation will eventually lead to those users seeking out a third-party app that gives them more control.
In any event, Apple’s tiling is certainly basic. You can drag a window to the top, side, or corner of the screen in order to make it quickly resize and fill that half or quarter of your display. By default, nothing happens until you drag a window and your pointer hits a boundary, at which point you’ll see a ghostly rectangle that indicates where your window will be placed. If you want to see it more quickly, you can hold down Option, which makes the ghostly rectangle appear right away (and if you like what you see, you can release your click and the window will be immediately resized, no boundary needed).
Window tile commands abound.You can click and hold on the green “stoplight” button in the window’s title bar to choose from a few different arrangement options. There are also keyboard shortcuts that let you arrange windows in a hurry. These are bound to an item in the Windows menu called Move & Resize that offers shortcuts for many basic moves. The idea here is that you’ll build up some muscle memory about using keyboard shortcuts to send your windows left, right, up, or down.
(Unfortunately, Apple seems to have bound these commands to the Globe key, and if you don’t use an Apple keyboard you can’t access those shortcuts without third-party add-ons.)
This is all good stuff, though given that most Mac users are using laptops these days, I am not sure how many of them will find tiling to be the solution to their problems. Users with Macs attached to larger displays, however, may find it quite refreshing. I did find the dragging to corners to be a little finicky—sometimes I felt like I really need to wiggle my windows to get the tile preview to appear, especially in the corners. Hopefully that’ll be tweaked as a part of the beta process.
Videoconference boostsApple’s background replacement is very good. (I was outside in a camp chair when I took this screenshot.)One of the areas of macOS that’s seen the most improvement in recent years is how the system processes video input. Rather than passing through webcam video directly to apps like Zoom and FaceTime, that video is processed by macOS, using a lot of the same techniques Apple uses to process video and still images on the iPhone.
In 2021, the Mac got support for Portrait Mode. In 2022 it was Continuity Camera, which threw iPhone-quality optics into the mix. And last year, macOS Sonoma brought a slew of layered animated effects, reaction, and presentation overlays.
This year, Apple’s added background replacement to the mix. This is a feature that you’ve seen in a million different apps, in which your background can be replaced entirely with a different image. (I use this when I’m playing D&D—for atmosphere!—or when I’m traveling and want it to look like I’m still in my home studio.)
In a way, Apple’s late to the game with this feature, but its presence means that you can replace your background in any app, not just ones with their own replacement feature. And you may well find that you’ll prefer to turn off the app’s background feature and use Apple’s instead. Apple is clearly using its very good machine-learning-based subject detection algorithm to separate you from your background.
It’s the same technique it uses for portrait mode and its clever cut-out presenter overlay feature, but background replacement does expose the flaws of this technique better than just about any other feature. Apple’s implementation is great, better than I’ve seen in any videoconferencing app, especially in good lighting. Apple supplies some background images and color gradients, but you can also add in your own.
Safari additionsSafari Viewer forces embedded video to fill the window.Apple has expanded Safari’s Reader feature to be a lot more than just reader. When a page has more information to offer, the new Highlights icon appears at the left side of the Smart Bar, where the Reader icon has lived up to now. (To use Reader, you now need to click on Highlights and then click again on the prominent blue Show Reader button.)
Safari Highlights is still a work in progress.Apple says the Highlights pane will be populated with useful information gleaned from the page and site you’re on, such as a summary of an article, the location of restaurants and other businesses, and even links to movies, TV shows, and music when you’re browsing relevant articles. This all is supposedly powered by Apple’s own search engine, the same tool that has powered Spotlight searches for a while now. Unfortunately, the feature seems to not be functional yet, so I have no opinions about the utility of that information.
Likewise, Reader has been updated to add a sidebar featuring a table of contents and summary. This is also a feature that’s not currently functioning, but it’s one of those areas where I am dubious about the utility of applying AI functionality. If I’m choosing to use Reader on an article, do I need a summary? Is Reader for readers, or people who don’t want to read? Is the summary in the Highlights pane not enough?
Fortunately, there is one Safari feature that I was able to try: Viewer. This is the video equivalent of Reader. Viewer identifies embedded video on a page and displays a Viewer icon in the Smart Bar that lets you expand the video to fill the entire Safari window. It’s meant as an antidote to sites that embed video but surround it with garbage and don’t let you expand the video yourself.
It’s a nice idea, and when it worked for me, I could see its appeal. It dropped out everything else on the page, provided standard macOS video controls, and even offered a quick built-in way to send the video into picture in picture mode! Unfortunately, it worked quite inconsistently. But it’s beta season. I hope it’s more consistent in the future.
Passwords becomes an appIt’s a full-features password manager, bringing in features from Settings and Keychain Access.After several years of building a full-featured password manager inside the Settings app (not to mention the separate repository of information in the Keychain Access utility), Apple has gone all-in on building a free-standing Passwords app, and it runs nut just on the Mac, but on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. (You also have access to passwords on Windows via the iCloud app. It feels like one platform is missing here, somehow.)
So, the good news: the Passwords app puts Apple’s password management front and center in a way that it never was going to be when it was locked inside Settings. It’s got a nice, modern interface—think Reminders, but for passwords—and shows not just standard web logins but things like Wi-Fi passwords and rotating time-based codes and Passkeys. And since Apple lets you share passwords with other people—you can create a seemingly unlimited number of arbitrary groups and then move passwords into those groups—it’s really a full-featured option that will suffice for many users.
The Passwords app is missing some features that you might expect from using other password apps, though in most cases it’s because Apple offers a different approach to solving the same problem. Password doesn’t offer secure notes, because that’s what Notes is for. It doesn’t save credit cards, because that’s what the Wallet settings panel does. I also use 1Password to save all sorts of other information—passport numbers, software serial numbers, even SSH keys—in a sort of digital junk drawer. Should Passwords do all those things? Probably not, but I do think that there probably should be an answer for more disordered important information that’s not just “put it in a Secure Note.”
While the Passwords app existing is a very good thing, based on this first beta it’s got some work to do to become a good app. I can’t drag an item out of the list and drop it on a Shared Group to assign it to that group, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a Mac app to allow. And when I imported my 1Password file—a couple thousand passwords that, I admit, could stand to be pruned back—the app slowed to a crawl. Deleting items would sometimes just not stick, search results appeared and disappeared, and even small tasks like deleting a few selected items generated a beach ball pointer. I sure hope these are beta growing pains, because if this performance persists to the fall, the Passwords app runs the risk being branded a dog. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one all summer and hoping for some serious improvement.
Messages finally gets meEmoji reactions (and colored tapbacks), at long last.Across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, Apple is upgrading Messages to let people express themselves better. That’s a good impulse, and after a false start last year (in which Apple attempted to catch up with literally every other messaging service by misguidedly repurposing its sticker functionality), the company has really delivered.
Yes, in addition to slapping a fresh coat of (color!) paint on the classic set of Tapbacks icons, Apple has finally introduced proper support for any emoji to be used as a reaction to an iMessage. When you tap back (or control-click/two-finger-click on Mac) to a message, you now get two lines of reaction options: the first contains the more colorful classics, and the second features the emojis you’ve most recently used to react. You can, of course, use the emoji picker to find the right one.
(When you react, people with older versions of Apple’s operating systems will see a new message that says something like reacted 🚡 to “HAHA”. Inelegant, but it maintains backward compatibility.)
There’s also support for per-character text formatting, so you can finally use bold and italic in messages, as well as apply animation effects to individual words instead of the entire message. Giving people a broader palette to use to express themselves is always a good choice.
There’s also one more pragmatic new feature: Send Later. You can now tell Messages to send a message at a later time. Last night I remembered, just before going to bed, that I wanted to send a few pictures of a new addition to the family to my mom. It was way past her bedtime and I didn’t want I disturb her. With the new Messages, I could’ve set that message to send in the morning when she was certain to be awake.
This appears to be a server-side feature; Apple says that if your device isn’t connected at the moment when the message is set to send, it’ll still send. Another good choice. After years of Apple seeming to take Messages and iMessage for granted, these are all welcome updates.
More new featuresBut that’s not all! There are even more features on the way this season:
You can plan hikes using the new topographical map feature.Apple Maps has added trail navigation and topographic maps, across Apple’s major platforms. I was disappointed to discover that a trail near my house that’s been closed for five years still shows up in Apple’s maps. What sources is it using? Still, letting hikers plan out their hikes and navigate on trails is a great upgrade.
Notes now will let you record audio and generate a transcript of the recording, which you can display in a column alongside your notes. I feel like there’s more to be done here in terms of taking notes during a lecture or meeting and linking the comments to the transcript, but it’s a start. You can also now do math inside a note automatically, just by typing an equation followed by the equals sign.
Photos has changed dramatically on the iPhone and iPad, which is notable because it hasn’t changed at all on the Mac. There’s a new Collections section in the sidebar, which helps surface some new automatic groupings of photos. But after several years in which Apple aggressively merged the Mac and iOS Photos apps so that they were pretty close to equivalent, this year’s interface changes are entirely on iOS.
Depending on how you feel about the new Photos app interface—and it’s definitely got some issues—it might be a blessing that Apple has passed over the Mac. Also, at last, Apple’s building a proper tool for removing background clutter for images! Third-party apps have been able to perform these kinds of tasks for years, but Apple has chosen to roll that feature into Apple Intelligence (which bars older Macs). What a frustrating turn of events.
New classic Mac-inspired desktops and screenavers are gorgeous.Desktop and Screensavers get an injection of fun with the new Macintosh screen saver and wallpaper settings, which generates dynamic, colorful artwork based on classic bitmap graphics images from old Macs. The results are gorgeous. The other day, my desktop wallpaper featured the classic System Error bomb icon and a bright green background. Chef’s kiss.
Security prompts appear to have been ramped up a bit, much to my chagrin. When I tried to launch an app that wasn’t notarized by Apple, I was unable to force it to open by right-clicking and then choosing Open, which was the old standby. Instead, I had to open the Settings app, go to the Security pane, and click through a warning dialog that the app in question was “blocked to protect your Mac.” Once I clicked Open Anyway, I could open the app—but even then, I was forced to put up with another alert, and then forced (as an administrator with full privileges!) to enter my password before the app would launch.
This is too much to ask just to launch a non-notarized app for the first time.It turns out that the second app I tried this with didn’t require a visit to the Settings app, so that’s something. But I still had to click through a scary dialog box and then authenticate on first launch of an non-notarized app. I appreciate Apple’s attempts to get in the way of social engineering designed to convince hapless users to install malware, but my Mac belongs to me and if I want to run software not approved by Apple, that’s my business. Throwing up a warning on first launch is reasonable. Asking users with full privileges to authenticate on top of that is unreasonable. Is there anyone at Apple who cares enough about user experience to stop warning dialogs and authentication requests from running rampant? If so, they should speak up.
AI, eventually, maybeTheoretically, Apple Intelligence is coming to macOS starting this fall, and then rolling out throughout the next year. None of those features appear in the betas I used, though—it sounds like a late summer/early fall thing, if that. Improved Siri and some new AI-powered writing tools as well as the new Image Playgrounds image-generation tools are all on the agenda, at some point. There’s no way to tell what sort of state they’ll be in when they ship, so I’ll withhold all judgment until then. Other than to say that if the new Photos Clean Up feature and AI-driven Memory Movies aren’t on the Mac for some reason, I’m going to riot.
Beta adviceThe usual advice applies: Don’t install macOS Public Betas on Macs you absolutely rely on to get your work done. If you do want to take the plunge, make sure mission-critical apps are compatible. Keep a backup. Consider installing on an external drive instead of your main boot drive. These are all smart strategies.
Thus far, I’ve found the Sequoia beta to be pretty stable. It even works with some of my mission-critical software that previously proved resistant to beta testing, which is exciting. Still, I’ve been using it on a laptop that’s not my main computer—and I don’t regret that one bit. Be wary, be prepared, and have fun out there, kids.
Six takes on one Home Screen: eat your heart out, Andy Warhol.Ultimately the reaction to 18’s initial public beta may be more about what’s not there than what is. When Apple first announced its latest annual update to the mobile software platform back in June, most of the attention went to a suite of features—the top-billed ones if you look at the company’s iOS 18 Preview Page—collected under the aegis of Apple Intelligence. These marked the company’s much anticipated foray into artificial intelligence and promise everything from image generation to a reinvigorated Siri.
But those features are planned to roll out over the course of iOS 18’s lifetime, which, according to some reports, means that many won’t be arriving until this fall or even next year. That even applies to other features not explicitly called out as Apple Intelligence, including the new Mail categorization and summaries, the ability to remove unwanted people or objects in photos, and summarization features in Safari.
While those features—or their lack—might overshadow some of the other announcements in iOS 18, when you strip them away, you’re still left with a nice—if not mind-blowing—set of updates, including deeper home screen customization, new capabilities in Messages, and a significant overhaul to the Photos app. There’s plenty to kick the tires on here, so let’s dive in, albeit with the caveat that since many of those marquee features are missing, we can’t really speak to them at all. And as usual, this is a public beta, so with apologies to Paul Thomas Anderson, there will be bugs. But that’s just part of the deal.
Your home screen is your castleIn recent years, Apple has gradually released its grip on the iPhone’s monolithic look and feel, allowing an increasing number of choices for those who want to customize their devices: widgets, the App Library, lock screen options, and so on. That trend is alive and well in iOS 18, which adds a couple new features for those who want to tweak the appearance of their iPhones.
I’m not sure that I’d want to do this, but now I can.The first is to put apps “anywhere” you want on the home screen. I say “anywhere” because your icons are still constrained to the same grid that they’ve snapped to since you’ve been able to reorganize apps—don’t start getting visions of piles of documents on a Mac desktop. But you can now leave open spaces in that grid if you want things just so. I struggled a little bit with this feature, as it still wants to reflow all your apps to fit, and that can lead to difficulty getting the precise open space you want—I had much better results starting with a new, blank home screen than trying to rearrange my current chockful one.
More radically, Apple has now taken the step of adding different color “themes” to your icons. Yeah, those quotes are still hanging around, because unlike the broad customization options you might get from a third-party app like Widgetsmith, Apple’s are limited to a few options, including light and dark versions, small and large (the large forego the labels beneath the app icons for a really wild aesthetic look), and yes, the ability to tint your icons any color you like.
I have found myself enjoying dark mode icons, especially the ability to shift automatically between light and dark with the system appearance. But though I’ve played around with the tinting option, I have to say that I haven’t find a color option that I love so much that I want everything tinted that way. Perhaps this is a deficiency in my own tastes: I like the way certain icons or widgets look, but picking what felt like a fun green to my eyes made my phone look like I’d stolen it from The Riddler1. It’d be nice if you could be a little more granular about which icons got tinted and how, but I also understand the complexity inherent in that decision.
Matters may improve somewhat if third party developers buy in by tweaking their app icons to be more tint-friendly—and I’d say the same for the dark mode, though I do appreciate that Apple is doing some clever work to enable it even for those apps that haven’t specifically made one—but I’m skeptical that picking an arbitrary color is for me. Then again, perhaps I’m simply mired in seventeen years of iPhone usage!
Actually, my favorite new customization feature in iOS 18 is kind of a small one: on the lock screen, there’s now an option to set the clock to a rainbow color. It’s a nice way to add a splash of color to your phone, even when the Always On display is in its dimmed setting.
You’re in controlControl, control—you must learn control!We’ve gotten the ability to customize our home screens and lock screens in previous years, so this year Apple has ventured into new territory: Control Center. What started life as a way to quickly access certain phone functions has now morphed into a multipage affair that you can tweak to your liking. That includes not only being able to add or remove controls of your choosing, but also place them where you want and even (in some cases) choose what size they are. Plus it adds a ton of new controls and even unlocks the ability for third-party apps to provide their own actions. If that’s not enough, you can even swipe out the flashlight and Camera controls on the lock screen if you want, and iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max users can choose to trigger a specific controls via the Action button.
This kind of flexibility is extremely welcome, though I feel like it will take some time for me to rework my memory—both mental and muscle—to get the most out of the feature. I’m so used to where the controls have been (in many cases, for years) that it will probably take time to get used to my newfound freedom. That goes double for the Lock Screen: I still haven’t figured out what else I’d even want there now that I have the option!
Of the added abilities, one that I find especially handy is that I can now have a home widget for a specific device, rather than relying on HomeKit to figure out which I might want access to at any given moment. I also appreciate Apple’s concession to the sometimes frustrating nature of having multiple pages of controls: by not lifting your finger as you swipe down from the top of the screen, you’ll continue on through the various screens until you get to the one you want.
There are still some limitations, of course. For one, there isn’t quite the same freedom to arrange controls as there is on the new home screen—no leaving open spaces here. Also, while you can resize widgets, most of them have only two or three possible sizes at max, and it’s sometimes tricky to figure out what’s actually possible—the key is to watch and see if the widget’s appearance morphs while you’re resizing it. The Action button configuration is also only limited to certain controls. And as with most features requiring third-party buy-in, it’ll be interesting to see just how much this ends up being something that developers adopt.
One other nice tidbit from the new Control Center: there’s now a dedicated power button in the top right corner, which lets you quickly shut down the phone without having to remember which button to press and hold (which is also an accessibility affordance for those who have trouble with that kind of motion).
Get the message?Messages continues to get a lot of love from Apple—no surprise, as it’s probably one of the most used apps on the platform (in the U.S., at least). This year brings a slew of improvements, from under-the-hood protocols to flashy new effects to the ability to send a message from, well, pretty much anywhere.
I can already tell I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of the new tapbacks.I’m going to start by celebrating the best new improvement in Messages, the one that took us a surprising amount of time but was ultimately worth the wait: sending any emoji as a Tapback. I’ve wanted that feature almost since the moment Apple introduced the ability to react to a message, and I’m glad to say that it works just as well as I’d hoped. Apple even tweaked the existing tapbacks by adding more splashes of color as well as adding a second selection of half a dozen of your most recent emojis (on a per-chat basis) when you swipe to the left.
Messages now has not only simple text styling like bold, italics, and underline, but animated effects that feel like something out of Keynote.By comparison, I haven’t spent as much time with Messages’s new text effects, which include both styled text (bold, italics, underline), as well as animations where your words—or even just a specific word—shake, ripple, explode, or more. Like message effects before them, these features try to ride that line between fun and annoying, and I think mostly succeed, though the true test of time is whether people end up using them.
Scheduling a message is straightforward and works pretty well.On the utilitarian end of the scale, Apple’s added a couple new features, such as the ability to queue up a message to send later. You access that in the same strange pop-up menu as stickers, Check In, and the rest of those forlorn iMessage apps, at which point you get a little blue bar at the top of the message that you can tap to pick a date and time to deliver the message. From my tests, it seems relatively precise—within twenty seconds or so of your scheduled time—although I did discover that you can only schedule a text up to two weeks in advance. It also doesn’t have to be limited to text—you can include an image or a GIF from iMessage’s #images tool or even a message effect for those times you want to prep some birthday balloons.
However, let it be known that all of these capabilities are still tied exclusively to iMessage—this despite the fact that Apple has made improvements to the experience of texting those not on its platforms with the addition of Rich Communication Services (RCS).
The RCS descriptor is so subtle, you might not even notice it.RCS is the successor to SMS, and while it improves on some of that very old technology‘s limitations, these are more on par with Steve Jobs’s “glass of ice water to someone in hell” than to any sort of parity. It has a few notable—and welcome—advantages, including message delivery and read receipts, typing indicators, better image and video quality, and the ability to send over a data network instead of the classic cellular phone system. Plus, yes, the end of those dreaded “reacted with” messages, even in your group chats. It’s worth noting that RCS uses the same old green bubbles as SMS; the only indicator to tell you which you’re using is in the text field, which now appends RCS or SMS to “Text Message” when the field’s empty.
Then there’s the class of feature that just feels like Apple showing off. The company first rolled out its Emergency Satellite SOS feature back in 2022 with the iPhone 14 line, but why should we have to wait to use a cool feature until an unfortunate emergency? As of iOS 18, any capable iPhone can now send text messages via satellite when you’re out of Wi-Fi and cell range. That comes complete with a new animation in the Dynamic Island that helps you make and maintain the satellite connection by telling you which way you need to point your phone. (While I didn’t get a chance to try this out for real, there’s a Demo mode that you can use to at least get the experience, but you really need to have no cell or Wi-Fi signals to use feature.) Satellite texts work for iMessage and SMS—but not RCS, as Apple says that the packet sizes are too large.
I don’t think most people need this feature, but there’s no denying it’s cool. I’ve gone on occasional hikes with no cell service available, and if nothing else, it gives peace of mind that I can stay in touch with people—even if it’s not to tell them that I need to be rescued from an ill-advised walk in the woods.
Apple has said that its satellite services will be available free for two years after activation of a iPhone 14 or 15 model; those first two-year periods start expiring this fall, so we’ll have to wait and see exactly what it will cost—or if Apple will kick the can down the road so as to avoid looking like their life-saving features are only available to those who pony up.
Photos go off the gridWhat would an iOS update be without a big (and potentially contentious) app redesign? This year, that mantle is bestowed upon Photos, which has gotten a stem-to-stern overhaul that offers a lot more power and customization, while also forcing most users to relearn some aspects of an app that’s remained largely unchanged for several years.
I think you can best sum up this approach with the old aphorism about pleasing some of the people all of the time. Used to be we all had the same Photos app, and while there might have been some people who felt just fine about it, it ultimately didn’t matter, because there was only one experience.
Now everybody can tweak the Photos app, customizing which sections appear in what order, which is bound to make some people happier. But as with Apple’s home screen customization options, it only works up to a certain point, so those people who were perfectly fine with how the old app worked might find themselves feeling a bit at sea in the new world order.
Gone is the bottom toolbar with its Library, For You, Albums, and Search options. In its place is a new combined view: your grid of photos at the top in what Apple has dubbed “the carousel”2, and a modular set of items—”collections”—below. The carousel can be swiped through to show different sections that you choose or, if you swipe down on the library grid, it turns into the classic library view, with controls for filtering and sorting.
The modular collections below can be arranged or hidden as you see fit, although there are some limits to the granularity: for example, there’s a Shared Albums section that you can put there, but you can’t select a single shared album. (You can, however, put a single Shared Album in the Pinned Collections item at the bottom…confused yet?)
After several weeks of using the new Photos app, I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it. Newness seems to pervade every corner: when you’re viewing an individual photo or video, the old toolbars have been replaced with redesigned ones; in some cases—screenshots and video—the image itself no longer reaches to the edges of the screen, instead hovering against a white background until you tap on it. There’s also for the first time an option to toggle the appearance of the screen when you’re editing a photo—it was previously always against a black background, regardless of whether you were in Light or Dark system appearance, but now you can choose to have it be always light, always dark, or follow the system appearance.
So much of the experience of Photos is different…but I keep wonder if it’s better. Hard to say—there are a lot of trade-offs. For example, I’m not thrilled that it takes more steps for me to toggle between my Personal and Shared Libraries (I now have to tap on my icon on the top right corner, then scroll down, then select the other library, then exit out)—it seems like that toggle should be accessible from the filtering or sorting buttons. But, at the same time, I do appreciate that my icon also doubles as a sync indicator: a yellow dot appears on it where there’s unsynced content, and when it’s actively syncing, there’s a progress bar that rings your icon. That’s a feature that many folks—me included—have long wanted, and a welcome concession to Apple’s traditional approach of trying (often unsuccessfully) to make syncing transparent.
Apple’s also added a few new automatic categorization features to Photos: for example, in addition to people and pets it can now recognize groups of people. I have to say that’s proved effective for me: the fact that it collects all the pictures of, say, me and my son or me and my wife is pretty great.
The other major new category is Trips. In the past these might have surfaced as Memories, but I do think there’s something to the idea of collecting pictures from your travels—I’m old enough to remember my parents digging out the slide projector to show off photos from a specific trip. If you tap through to Trips, it allows you to filter by years, but I feel like there’s a missed opportunity here from not having a map-based interface (though, to be fair, you can easily now view each trip’s photos on a map).
Apple’s goal with Photos’s auto-generated collections is clearly to reduce the dependence on searching, but just in case it doesn’t automatically surface what you’re looking for, it’s also improved Photos’s search feature, allowing more natural-language-based searches. So, for example, if I wanted to find pictures from travels with two of my friends, I can search for “trips with Jane and Evan” and I’ll get the expected results. (I’m a little surprise that’s not part of the Trips function, to be honest.)
There’s a ton more in the Photos app: filtering more types of images like QR codes and handwriting, a redesigned Activity view for Shared Albums, and a new Recent Days view, just to name a few. But trying to wade through all those new features in an app that you use every day—while also sussing out whether it’s actually making life easier or harder—is a monumental task that’s going to take a bit more time.
Additional bitsAs with every year’s iOS updates, Apple has also sprinkled plenty of changes throughout the entire OS, some of which you probably won’t run into unless you go looking for them. But there are a few that I found particularly worth calling out.
Passwords has graduated from a preference pane to become a full-fledged app. While I’m hopeful that this bodes well for its future development, it’s not a seismic change. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Passwords app, because there really isn’t much reason to—most of my interaction is via the AutoFill features in Safari, which continue to work as they have for some time. I do appreciate some of the categorization filters in the Passwords app, and hope that it means we might see more types of data—secure notes, identities, etc.—in there in the future.
Calendar gets a slight redesign that makes it easier to view items, especially in the Multi-Day view. You can also pinch to zoom in the Month view, in case you need more or less detail, and fully interact with Reminders: creating them, deleting them, and so on.
Files gets some much needed control over managing cloud-based files. You can now choose to keep files downloaded or remove their downloads by tapping and holding on an item and selecting the option from the pop-up menu. (My kingdom for a way to do that with apps.)
Maps adds hiking directions. Notes continues on its quest to be the everything app. Now you can have audio recordings with automatically generated transcripts, collapsible sections, or highlighted text. Even without the Apple Pencil, iOS’s version of Notes has Math Notes functionality, letting you quickly type in equations or variables and get answers. Notes can already do a lot of what Pages can do, now it’s taking shots at Numbers. Is Keynote next?
Maps goes outdoors for this update, with hiking suggestions, including the ability to make custom walking routes and view topographic maps. I hope to give this a more thorough try on an upcoming trip, but it’s a smart addition. While it gives the highest and lowest points of a hiking trail, I do wish it gave you an overall elevation change instead of making you do the math yourself. There’s also a new Saved Places interface for keeping track of locations, including guides and routes, but I still wish you could have a collaborative guide that let multiple people add to it.
The Podcasts app builds on its relatively new transcripts features to allow you to send a share link tied to a specific timecode, which is very handy for when you’re trying to tell someone about a specific moment in an episode.
In Settings, in addition to new, more descriptive headers at the top of each section and all app settings—including Apple’s own—moved to a new sub-section, the Privacy section has gotten a substantial overhaul that makes it easier to manage. Now each separate section (Location Services, Calendars, Contacts, etc.) has a little subheading that tells you how many apps have access to that particular section. The same goes for hardware features like Bluetooth, Camera, and the Microphone. It makes it far easier to audit a specific set of permissions and make sure that only the apps you explicitly want to give permission to have it. You can also lock and hide apps from the home screen, for those moments when you might hand your phone to someone else, though it’s certainly annoying to have to do that on an app by app basis—it’d be nice if there were a unified “guest mode”, à la the Vision Pro.
There’s also at long last the ability to have a Bilingual Keyboard, which you can configure in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards. If you frequently switch between languages or just, like me, get frustrated when you want to type a sentence or word in another language only to have autocorrect “fix” it, then you can now select two (but only two) languages. This is then denoted with an overlay on your spacebar, just in case you wonder why some of your English words are being changed to French.
All of this only scratches the surface of what’s in iOS 18, and more improvements are sure to be added (or come to light) as the beta process continues. Perhaps more than any update past, that progress will keep rolling along even once the initial iOS 18 release drops. Get ready for a full year of platform updates—it’s the roller coaster that never ends.
- And Batman Forever‘s Jim Carrey incarnation, to boot. ↩
- Apparently Don Draper works at Apple now. ↩
Jason and Myke interview the writers of “What If…? An Interactive Story” for Vision Pro about the challenges of writing something that’s not quite a movie and not quite a video game for a brand-new platform. Also: hot dogs!
Go to the podcast page.
Apple touts a lot of things—vertical integration, interface design, the longevity of its hardware, the direct-to-consumer retail experience, and more—as part of the reason for its success. But there’s a fractured, bureaucratic, resource-constrained version of Apple, and it’s one we’ve been seeing more and more often. One Apple-designed app will do things their way, another app or piece of hardware will be stranded for years, bug reports disappear into an uncaring void, settings and warning dialogs get out of hand, notification spam goes out of control… the list goes on.
The people with the power to move mountains and get things done are at the top, but if a matter doesn’t arise to their attention—either by being something they’ve personally experienced, or were told about by a similarly influential person—then the matter is more likely than not to remain unresolved.
We need some people who can manage from the bottom up. Who can talk to developers directly about App Store issues. Whose responsibilities are the interrelated aspects of customer experience, not just the UX of a single product.
Decades ago, Apple changed its relationship with the community with Apple Evangelists. Maybe it’s time to do so again with a team of Apple Ombudspeople?
OmbudsdevApple’s behavior is frequently all over the place, contradictory and confused. It needs someone to smooth all this stuff out before it becomes a problem.
Take Apple’s recent back and forth with Epic Games in the EU: Epic applied to have a developer account and create an app marketplace in the EU, and were granted that. Then an executive found out about it and killed it. But then, after some saber rattling by European regulators, Apple had to reverse course. (Chapter two, ongoing: Some ridiculous stuff about button design.) Sure, Tim Sweeney and Epic have had a contentious relationship with Apple and some Apple pundits feel like it’s worth punishing them, but it really isn’t. Apple risks further regulatory action because of poor decision-making that is going unchallenged inside the company.
AltStore developer Riley Testut—who I think we can all agree has been a peach during the entire process of setting up his marketplace in the EU—faced a protracted review process. Meanwhile, Apple cooked up new App Store policies to permit “retro game console emulators,” presumably to diminish the launch of Testut’s Delta emulator on AltStore. Resilient Riley launched it in the App Store and AltStore. Then Apple just rejected an update to his emulator in the App Store because of the whims of App Review. This will surely be reversed, eventually, but why did it happen to begin with?
Where is the person inside of Apple who can look out for someone like Riley Testut and institute policies that prevent it from happening? Will anyone inside Apple ever define why a retro game console emulator is different from a retro computer emulator, and communicate it? Who can push inside Apple to keep the notarization system from being abused, and prevent Apple from coming across as a whimsical tyrant?
It’s called self-regulation, which is the best and safest kind of regulation, because it reduces the number of times Apple must spar with governments, the press, and its own developers.
Cross-device cross-purposesApple famously isn’t aligned around product lines, which is part of the whole “secret sauce” of Apple product development. Except it sometimes seems that nobody is asking the big questions about how Apple’s products interoperate. Do Apple products need their own internal ombudspeople?
Take Siri, which is due for big changes later this year, or maybe sometime next year. In some devices, anyway. What happens when you ask Siri to do something on this device? That one? What improvements will be made to the current Siri that’s going to still be in use for years and years to come?
This question can go to the heart of the user experience, and reflect Apple design decisions in unexpected ways. Sometimes there are dramatic issues with syncing data between Apple devices, and then other times there are the everyday inconveniences. Apple Intelligence relies on personal information compiled in the new semantic index, but (for example) Spotlight can’t index files that aren’t stored locally. Apple recommends people let macOS manage what files are on their Mac, but the potential side effect is that your Mac’s AI features will be cursed with swiss cheese memory if you follow Apple’s instructions.
Who is clearing their throat in the conference room and making sure everyone’s on the same page? And are they able to convey these decisions to the side of Apple that’s determining the base amount of storage space available on next year’s laptops?
Who supplies the balance?It’s easy to look at some of Apple’s interface decisions on the Mac in the last few years and imagine that the teams that focus on security and privacy have run roughshod over everyone who cares about providing good user experience.
It’s not the job of the security boffins to worry about balancing security with user experience. They’re thinking about making sure the user is safe, and that’s a fine role. But it has to be counterbalanced by larger considerations, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone is empowered to do that right now. If nobody’s got that kind of clout, maybe there’s room for an ombusperson who is empowered to pushing back on onerous features that train people to thoughtlessly approve or dismiss security warnings, thereby making things less secure.
Theoretically, executives should be concerned with these things—but I suspect they lack the bottom-up perspective required.
This ‘buds for youEverything is complicated, which is why it helps to have people inside Apple who are empowered to think critically1 about the overall Apple product experience. High overall Customer Satisfaction scores are great, but they don’t exactly find the pain points—nor does an iPhone survey root out a frustration with something on the Apple TV. And it’s easy to miss larger trends over time.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow to have an employee of your company point out all the ways something falls short when they don’t put in the time to work on it. But if that bitter pill is good medicine and it makes you better, you swallow the pill.
I guess I’m the doctor in this metaphor. Here’s my prescription, Apple: You need more people on the inside who can see the big picture and intervene before critical mistakes are made. The more the better.
- The actual definition of critical, not the common usage of it as a negative. ↩
Vulture’s Josef Adalian returns to discuss the ramifications of the sale of Paramount, and where the company might go next. We also once again consider that classic streaming question—to binge or not to binge?
Go to the podcast page.
European Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager has announced that Apple has committed to allowing third-party payment apps use the same NFC features as Apple Pay in Europe. This is the end result of an investigation launched by the body back in 2020, and, according to the release, has been the result of a back and forth between the EC, Apple, and interested third parties. The decision also has implications under the Digital Markets Act; the EC describes the solution as “more than what is required by the DMA.”
There are three major implications to this change: first, a secure payment method called “host card emulation mode.” This doesn’t seem to use the iPhone’s Secure Enclave, but the EC has accepted it as an equivalent solution. Second, the ability launch any payment app with a double-click of the iPhone’s side button, which currently launches the Wallet app. And third, the ability to set a default payment option.
This strikes me as a solid compromise. The EC did not, notably, mandate that Apple open the Secure Enclave aspect of Apple Pay to third parties, which might have been not only technically difficult (if not impossible), but could have potentially created other security risks. Perhaps most importantly, it illustrates that it is indeed possible for these two entities to come to a decision that is acceptable to both parties.
More to the point, the end result is ultimately good for users. If they want to stick with Apple’s Wallet app, nothing changes for them. If they prefer an alternative, they now have the option to use that seamlessly—just as, for example, iOS 18 will allow users to replace the Camera shortcut on the iPhone’s lock screen with a third-party camera app, if they prefer.
The changes will kick in as of July 25th and are to remain in place for ten years, which will be monitored by a trustee along with a mechanism for resolving disputes and independent review.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I don’t know what to say about this other than that it is technological insanity in the absolute best way.
This meant that on my next flight I could technically have full access to the internet, via my airmiles account. Depending on network conditions on the plane I might be able to hit speeds of several bytes per second.
DISCLAIMER: you obviously shouldn’t actually do any of this
Software engineer Robert Heaton essentially built a way to access the internet by updating the “name” field on his air miles account, which could be done without actually paying for the Wi-Fi. A home computer reads the updated “name”, fetches the relevant request, and returns it…also via the name field. It’s unquestionably the least efficient way to have internet access in flight, or, as he puts it “You will now almost certainly pay for wi-fi, because your curiosity has been satisfied and your time on this earth is very short.”
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Our interest in the new Amazon Echo Spot, our current charging setup and thoughts on Nomad’s new 65W GaN charger, thoughts on a HomePod with a display, and which dead property we’d like to see AI revive from any medium.
Go to the podcast page.
At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple gave a little bit of time to its major platforms: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS—even tvOS got some love. But one device was conspicuously absent: the HomePod.
Given that Apple spent a lot of time during its keynote talking about the future of Siri, one might be mistaken for thinking that the HomePod, with its reliance on Siri, would be at the center of such as strategy. But instead, it’s looking increasingly like Apple’s smart speakers will be left on the periphery as those developments roll out, or at the very least will be forced to find a workaround in order to stay relevant.
And yet, it seems like there might be something else brewing in the HomePod arena, something that moves the category forward instead of merely consigning it to an also-ran position. Something to keep your eyes on.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Camilla Hodgson and George Hammond, writing at the Financial Times (paywalled):
Apple had also been expected to take an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a deal to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone maker’s devices, but would not do so, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Apple declined to comment.
Microsoft, which has held a non-voting board seat since the Sam Altman fiasco last year, has also given up its position. Instead, both companies will be part of “regular meetings with partners”, along with some of OpenAI’s major investors. This seems to be, at least in some part, due to increased scrutiny related to antitrust concerns in both the European Union and U.S. Given that Apple and Microsoft have been subject to plenty of antitrust attention, especially in the EU, it’s reasonable they wouldn’t want to open themselves to more.
But this does make for a wild ride for Apple. It was just a few days ago that it was reported that Apple Fellow Phil Schiller would be taking the observer role as part of the company’s deal with OpenAI, but I guess Phil can go back to sparring with Epic in Europe full time.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Via Christina Warren, some jokers called Web Orange Limited have acquired The Unofficial Apple Weblog—a classic player in Apple blogging—and have turned it into a gross AI-generated garbage blog posting as a real one:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has been a cornerstone of Apple-related journalism since its establishment on December 5, 2004. Acquired by Web Orange Limited from Yahoo IP Holdings LLC in 2024 without its original content, our mission has been rejuvenated to continue providing Apple enthusiasts and tech professionals with authoritative and engaging content. We strive to serve as a comprehensive resource for news, credible rumors, and instructional content that spans the Apple ecosystem and beyond.
The tell? They’ve re-used the names of key historic contributors, but generated new bios and photos(!) and claim that new stories are written by these historic contributors.
I looked up my friend Scott McNulty, and found this laughable 360-word “deep dive” that references Mac OS X Jaguar and Tiger. It’s dated July 1, 2024. The bio bears no resemblance to reality, and the dude in the photo is not Scott McNulty. The very least these crooks could’ve done is give Scott a hot author photo, but no.
Anyway: Don’t go to TUAW.com. It’s a scam.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Analyst Canalys has updated its worldwide PC market share stats, and while the PC industry actually showed 3.4% growth year-on-year, Apple’s sales grew 6% during that period:
Apple secured the fourth position, shipping 5.5 million units and capturing a 9% market share, marking a 6% increase compared to the same period last year.
Mac market share is now 9% (okay, 8.8%, but who’s counting?) which seems small but historically is a pretty healthy number for Apple. And of course it doesn’t factor in revenue or profit, two areas where Apple generally out does the competition.
Apple has been outpacing the PC market for years now, but with the overall market now growing and the possibility of a sales spurt due to the introduction of Copilot Plus PCs, it’ll be interesting to see how Apple fares overall.
Speaking of figures (since Canalys’s are unofficial, of course), one other Apple-related note: Apple will announce its official results for its most recent quarter on August 1, so get ready for some colorful charts to kick off August.
[Via Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
There’s more news about Apple’s battles with Epic and the EU, and Apple tightens its ties with OpenAI, but all of the controversy gets us thinking about what makes us stay excited about technology during difficult times.
Go to the podcast page.
There’s a joke in one of my favorite movies, “Real Genius,” which feels directly applicable to a lot of AI discussions we’re having today. (It’s an ’80s movie, so it’s not a scene—it’s a montage, set to “I’m Falling” by The Comsat Angels.)
In it, our protagonist Mitch attends a normal math lecture, but over the course of the montage most of the class is replaced by tape recorders of various sizes.1 In the final shot, Mitch enters the lecture hall to discover that a large reel-to-reel tape player has replaced the professor himself. It’s just one tape recording being played into all the other tape recorders.
One of the announced features for Apple Intelligence, Smart Reply, will offer quick ways to respond to direct queries in email, asking you simple questions (“Do you like me? Check yes or no.”) and drafting a reply for you.
Apple is hardly the first company to suggest that in the future, your phone will write your emails for you. Gmail’s Smart Compose has been doing it for several years, and Apple’s been offering its own version of multi-word autocomplete for almost a year.
But with this latest round of AI announcements, once again, I’ve heard a lot of people making jokes about how, pretty soon, your AI will email my AI, and humans will never need to be involved anymore! It’s usually meant as absurdity, but I think there might be more to it than that.
Suppose our AIs end up emailing each other endlessly, striking up meaningless conversations and having their own inner lives. In that case, that might make for an interesting science fiction story, but I’m not sure it would really matter to us as humans. Think of it this way: email is just a communication pathway. It was built for humans to talk to each other, but for years now, we’ve received automated emails, newsletters, spam, and the rest.
If you know much about tech, you’ve heard of APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. APIs are, at their most abstract level, an agreed-upon method for software to use or communicate with other software. APIs are in the cloud, on the web, on our devices, everywhere. So why not in our email messages, too?
I realize that it’s absurd to consider that a free-form email message would ever be better than a programmed API, but email has a flexibility that other APIs don’t. Emails can be about literally anything. And a lot of times, APIs are just not well used because the people who would use them are lazy, busy, uninterested, or don’t know they exist.
Let’s say you need to find a common meeting time for you and four other people. Are there internet calendar APIs for this? Yes! Are there calendar apps that feature built-in support this sort of scheduling? Yes! Are there literally web apps that will do this work for you? Yes! (I use StrawPoll, myself.) And yet, I’d bet that most people just… send an email to everyone asking them if they can make a certain time and try again until they get it right. It’s not efficient, but it is convenient.
Now imagine that same scenario, but everyone is using an AI system that’s reading email and has access to each user’s calendar. The end result might be the same as using an existing API or web app, but instead email messages among AIs are sorting it out. Maybe some AIs know exactly when their person is available; others might need to ask. But instead of the onus being on the users to interface with other systems and bring it all together, the AIs handle most of it and the user just chimes in when it’s necessary.
I don’t think that’s an absurd scenario. (And yeah, if the AIs are particularly intelligent, maybe they’ll use an existing calendar service to solve the problem up front.) It’s the equivalent of each of those people having their own human assistant setting up the meeting—except none of them likely have the budget to hire a personal assistant.
In fact, where AI assistants really run into trouble is not when they’re talking to other AIs, but when they’re talking to human beings. Remember when Google showed off its service that pretended to be a human and called real people to verify Google Maps data or make reservations? That’s what I really dread: being battered by emails and texts and phone calls from AIs operating for people and organizations who want my attention but aren’t willing to give me any of their own.
As long as I, a human, don’t have to read a pile of AI-to-AI email communications, I don’t mind if they have them. The protocol doesn’t really matter—use iMessage or RCS, for all I care—so long as the job gets done and I’m not left to clean up the mess. Keep me out of it, other than answering questions or making my own requests.
Email and text messages may be a stupid way to build an interconnected web of AI software systems, but history has frequently shown us that sometimes the easiest solution is the one that’s available, not the one that’s the most elegant.2
- The scene is meant to satirize the apparent mid-80s proclivity of college students to tape their lectures, or to skip their lectures and have a friend tape them? I dunno. Three years after “Real Genius” came out, I went to college and discovered that there was an official student organization that would sell you the complete lecture notes of any major class. ↩
- My university’s Lecture Notes service was eventually replaced by—you guessed it—AI. ↩
Our app routines, how we feel about smart rings, the smartest other tech gadgets in our homes, and how we stay informed without spiraling into doom.
Go to the podcast page.
Hello, darkness, my old friend. We’ve come to talk technology again.
Go to the podcast page.
We’re about to enter the Apple Intelligence era, and it promises to dramatically change how we use our Apple devices. Most importantly, adding Apple Intelligence to Siri promises to resolve many frustrating problems with Apple’s “intelligent” assistant. A smarter, more conversational Siri is probably worth the price of admission all on its own.
But there’s a problem.
The new, intelligent Siri will only work (at least for a while) on a select number of Apple devices: iPhone 15 Pro and later, Apple silicon Macs, and M1 or better iPads. Your older devices will not be able to provide you with a smarter Siri. Some of Apple’s products that rely on Siri the most—the Apple TV, HomePods, and Apple Watch—are unlikely to have the hardware to support Apple Intelligence for a long, long time. They’ll all be stuck using the older, dumber Siri.
This means that we’re about to enter an age of Siri fragmentation, where saying that magic activation word may yield dramatically different results depending on what device answers the call.
Fortunately, there are some ways that Apple might mitigate things so that it’s not so bad.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Federico Viticci and John Voorhees of MacStories have published an open letter to EU and U.S. officials calling for stricter regulation of how AI models are trained that honors the intellectual property rights of creators:
The danger to the Internet as a cultural institution is real and evolving as rapidly as AI technology itself. However, while the threat to the web is new and novel, what these AI companies are doing is not. Quite simply, it’s theft, which is something as old as AI is new. The thieves may be well-funded, and their misdeeds wrapped in a cloak of clever technology, but it’s still theft and must be stopped.
It’s a good read and a solid argument. I hope someone, somewhere is paying attention.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
After some feedback about the future of the Vision Pro, we discuss Apple’s adventures in the EU, the inevitable fragmentation of Siri, and a curious new AirPods rumor.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to ListenLater.net for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
ListenLater.net is a clever idea—it turns your reading list into a podcast playlist. I collect longer articles throughout the week that I just don’t have time to dive into at the moment—and they often get lost in the shuffle. But I never lose track of my podcast queue. This is where ListenLater.net makes it easy: It turns articles into episodes of a podcast, so your reading list can be automatically transformed into a podcast in your queue. It all works via email, so you just share any article you want via your browser’s share sheet to your ListenLater.net email address. (This means you can also forward any email to Listen Later, even ones with attachments, and it will translate the whole thing into spoken audio.)
Listen Later uses some really high quality AI voices to read your audio. They’re really excellent narrators, and you can choose from numerous voice options. You can also have Listen Later auto-translate articles in other languages into your chosen language.
Head over to ListenLater.net and start your free trial today.
The Vision Pro isn’t a product many people should buy today, and that’s not really surprising. It’s an example of Apple playing a long game, trying to build a wearable computing platform over many years. You have to start somewhere.
Right now, it’s a development kit for developers who are willing to gamble or experiment with a platform that’s not going to be broadly adopted for a while, if ever. It’s a pretty intriguing niche entertainment product, but it’s desperately in need of more content. And it’s a productivity product for people with very specific use cases and work methods. Still, most people should not consider buying one—especially not at $3500—and most people are definitely not!
But at some point, long game or not, Apple needs to start progressing and growing the visionOS platform. Mark Gurman’s report that Apple is working on a $1500 model for late next year is a start. $1500 isn’t cheap, but it’s more than half the price of the current model, and therefore more likely to snag curious people and improve the viability of buying one just to watch immersive events or 3-D videos or whatever.
So, not cheap, but… cheaper. And that’s a good start. Right now, the high price of the product is the top gating factor in growing the platform. Even if you’re impressed by the demo, it’s hard to get over that price tag.
But price isn’t the platform’s only challenge. The lack of software and content is also huge. If there’s a cheaper Vision product coming in late 2025, that means Apple has a year and a half to beef up what’s available on visionOS so that it can put itself in the best position to grow the platform when the lower-cost model is released.
The Vision Pro is the result of a years-long development process, which means that the current product as shipped is the outcome of Apple’s initial thinking about the device. Presumably, the people working on Vision Pro have learned a lot, both during the final years of the project and in its first few months out in the real world.
That’s good, because it’s time to reconsider some of the early decisions about the product and the platform. Obviously, this is already being done, because there’s no way that Apple can make a $1500 headset without pulling out some “must-have” features. (The obvious one is the lenticular outward-facing display, but I’m sure there are other features that seemed incredibly important that, in hindsight, are wastes of money.)
On the entertainment front, Apple’s made some strides in at least announcing partnerships with makers of hardware that can shoot in 3D and Immersive formats. But it needs to invest more in getting developers to build their apps on visionOS, and since the size of the near-term market opportunity sure won’t, some other inducement—like maybe even money?—might be a good idea.
And if Apple wants to get serious about expanding and growing the Vision product line, it needs to get over one particular choice it made in launching it. The company was clearly so proud of its advanced hand-tracking interface that it shipped the Vision Pro with no additional input devices. And I get it! “If you see hand controllers, they blew it” could have been one of the catchphrases of the Vision Pro development process. A headset shouldn’t require add-on controllers to be usable.
But just as the Mac eventually got arrow keys (despite omitting them from the first Mac keyboard to encourage using the mouse) and the iPad got an Apple Pencil (despite being a touch-first interface), it’s time for Apple to get over itself, and either build precision hand controllers for visionOS or build an API and make a partnership with a third-party accessory developer.
The fact is, lots of games and game-adjacent apps require a level of precision that Apple’s (excellent) hand tracking just can’t muster. Every Vision Pro game I’ve played that featured hand tracking has been a sloppy mess. I get that Apple wanted to show off its hand tracking and lean into “spatial computing” to send the message that the Vision Pro is not a game console but a serious device, but in doing so, it turned its back on the most popular category of entertainment software in the entire VR headset category.
One way for Apple to entice people to the visionOS platform—especially if a much cheaper model is on the way—is to load up on entertainment content. 3-D movies and immersive video are great, and if Apple’s not trying very hard to cut deals and encourage more content that shines on Vision Pro, it’s going to have wasted all of its effort. But if the platform can play games, if developers can port their games to visionOS from other VR platforms, it increases the viability of the product.
I’ve got a Vision Pro and a Meta Quest 3. And yet the Quest 3, which costs about one-seventh of the price of the Vision Pro, is a vastly superior platform when it comes to playing certain kinds of games. Games just require precision positioning (through detailed movement tracking), and input (via on-controller buttons) that waving your hands and tapping fingers together in Vision Pro just can’t match.
So, does Apple want visionOS to succeed or not? If it does, it needs to build or support hand controllers by the time a cheaper visionOS device ships. It needs to fill the platform with fun, fast-twitch games, exercise apps, and other stuff that’s proven successful elsewhere. No, the Vision Pro is not a games console. But if it stands defiantly against that kind of use case out of some sort of dogmatic opposition, Apple will have made it that much harder for an already hard-to-sell platform to succeed.
TV critic Tim Goodman guests to discuss the WBD and Paramount messes and give an update about what he’s been up to over at his Substack. [Downstream+ subscribers get to hear us talk about a very weird New York Times article about media moduls on a yacht.]
Go to the podcast page.
Reliable features of voice-based virtual assistants, our hypothetical U.S. internet legislation, the impact of Apple’s new Passwords app on our password management, and our comfort level with sharing intimate thoughts with an LLM.
Go to the podcast page.
The Moaan InkPalm Plus and the Kobo Clara HD.It is probably not surprising that I, John Moltz, the world’s leading iPhone mini superfan would also want to ujse a small e-reader. That’s just science.
After spending years reading ebooks on my iPhones and iPads like a animal, I finally got a Kobo Clara HD three years ago. And I really like it. It’s reasonably small, reasonably priced, has a nice screen, and it helped me reduce my crippling dependency on Amazon.
So, why did I think I needed another e-reader? Because they started making even smaller ones.
So buttonsLast fall Jason reviewed the Boox Palma, a phone-sized e-reader that looked right up my alley. Not only would it be easy to hold with one hand, it also had physical navigation buttons, something my Kobo, like most of the smaller and more inexpensive readers, lacked. The problem is that it costs $280. I said up my alley, not not up my gated community. It’s not an unreasonable amount, it was just more than I wanted to spend since I already had an e-reader. Nothing to do but wait for prices to come down, I guess.
Or maybe I didn’t have to wait. A post on Mastodon got boosted into my feed that touted the Xiaomi Moaan InkPalm 5 which sells for about $95. Now you’re talking my kind of cheap. Looking into the Moaan lineup, I then found the InkPalm Plus which features a slightly larger screen, more storage and a more up-to-date version of Android, all for as low as $124 on AliExpress.
Sold.
Caution: rough edgesSo, what did I get for not that much of my money? The InkPalm Plus has 64 GB of storage, 2 GB of RAM, a 5.84-inch screen with a 1440 x 720 resolution and runs Android 11. All of the hardware specs are less than the Boox Palma but, again, see the price. And I’m reading books here, not playing Call of Duty. (Although, now that I say that I kinda want to try to play Doom on it.)
The device comes set to Chinese, but you can choose English during the setup process. Mostly. Some things, such as its version of Control Center, are just in Chinese (they do have icons, though, so it wasn’t too hard to get them sorted). Further, the apps loaded on it are in Chinese, which made figuring out which one was the browser a bit of an adventure.
You can’t really complete the setup process because it requires a Chinese phone number or an account number and password, presumably with Xiaomi. I just decided to ignore the account setup and the device seems to work fine. It will ask for the account login if you try to setup a lock screen PIN but you can cancel out of the login and still create one. I could root it and install another version of Android but that seems like a lot of work.
My first task was getting some apps I could use. Google would not let me install the Play store on this device so I installed F-Droid and the Aurora Store. I was then able to easily download several e-reading apps.
I easily logged into my Kobo account and downloaded a book. The reading experience in the Kobo app is fine, if not as nice as it is on a Kobo device, which I guess makes sense. Page turning was a little slow in the Kobo app until I turned off transitions and it doesn’t let you configure the progress indicator at the bottom.
The InkPalm Plus comes with version 8.69 of the Kindle app which, despite having two Chinese characters added to the end of the name, works fine in English. I downloaded version 8.103 from the Aurora Store but it was unusably slow and wouldn’t recognize the system setting to use the volume buttons for page forward and back, so I stuck with the stock app.
I was easily able to connect the InkPalm Plus to my Mac via Bluetooth and load several epub books. I tried a number of indie reader apps from the Aurora Store and, while Jason said he liked Moon+ the best, I found I preferred ReadEra, at least on the InkPalm Plus.
Looks aren’t everythingAs is typical of e-readers, the InkPalm Plus is plastic. You wouldn’t want that for a smartphone, but you do with a reader. And you can get it in any color as long as the color is orange (just the back plate). Nothing against orange, but it’s not really my jam. While it did help me find it easily among all my black and blue devices, I broke down and got a black case for it.
The lock screen doesn’t show what book you’re reading, at least when using third-party readers (perhaps one of the pre-installed ones would but they’re in Chinese) but it does have several Chinese-themed stock images to pick from and you can add your own via Bluetooth. I’m not saying I made a Starfleet delta insignia my lock screen image but I’m not not saying I did that, either. (I totally did that.)
The screen quality is good, but like some e-readers—as Jason noted on the Boox Palma—the screen refresh is insufficient, leading to some ghosting in the E Ink. You can force a refresh by swiping down to the device’s version of Control Center and tapping the circular icon near the top. (When I translated the Chinese characters under the icon, the label is apparently “Renovate.”)
The screen is, sadly, glossy… which will certainly be a non-starter for a lot of people.
There is also a feature called “Logo control” which, it pains me to admit, took me way longer than it should have to figure out what it did. It turns out that the Moaan logo in the bottom bezel is a capacitive button. Who knew? Not me. I did not know. This button is configurable and I was able to set it so that a short press took me back to the home screen and a long press refreshed the screen.
After futzing with the settings for a bit, I could get the screen of the InkPalm Plus to be very close to the Kobo in regular light. The differences were more noticeable in lower light where it appears as more backlit. The screen of the Kobo just seems more like paper. Still, I think the Plus’s screen is pretty good and obviously way better than a regular smartphone for reading. You can adjust brightness, temperature and contrast, so maybe more futzing will produce better results.
The InkPalm Plus fits OK.Not Mr. Right, but Mr. Right NowMy main attraction to the Boox Palma was twofold: it was easy to palm and it had physical buttons for page turning. These two things are ultimately what make the InkPalm Plus worth the warts for me.
A few weeks back I saw this TikTok by Jen Chae and was very tempted to emulate it. Chae’s setup involved a Boox Palma and a mini Bluetooth keyboard configured for page turning. The only thing that stopped me was reading about the short battery life of those little keyboards and knowing that keeping Bluetooth on all the time would be a drain on the InkPalm’s battery.
Speaking of batteries, battery life on the InkPalm Plus seems solid, if not quite as good as the Kobo’s. With WiFi and Bluetooth off, I get days of use out of it before needing to recharge (your mileage may vary) and it having a USB-C port rather than the USB micro on my Kobo is a plus.
The glossy screen is not ideal, obviously, but almost all my reading is done inside and usually at night, so it’s rarely an issue for me. (Amazon has a few different screen protectors for the InkPalm Plus for sale but it’s not clear if any will reduce glare.) I would probably prefer to have the cover of the book on the lock screen but the app you left off in is still going when you turn it on again, so you can pick up reading immediately.
I don’t think this is the ideal device for sure, even without the language issues. I would rather have a Kobo this size with buttons because their native setup just works better. But Kobo doesn’t make such a device and, for me, the Palma tries too hard by having a camera, a microphone and an SD card slot, all at the cost of a premium price. For now, I’m sticking with the InkPalm Plus, but I hope this smaller space is a place where existing e-reader manufacturers are going to get involved.
Though Apple Intelligence may have taken the spotlight at this month’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple’s big announcement of last year has not been completely forgotten. The company also debuted visionOS 2 with some important features lacking from the first release, as well as announcing the spatial computer’s imminent availability in several international markets.
But both of those may have been temporarily overshadowed by a recent report that the company is currently focusing its efforts on a less expensive version of the product—note that I didn’t say “cheap”, as the rumored price tag is still in the $1500 range, making it more economical only by comparison to the $3500 Vision Pro.
Prioritizing such a device over the Vision Pro 2 makes a lot of sense: the Vision Pro, by all accounts, was cutting-edge technology that was as good a product as Apple could make. As it is, it should continue to be very capable for several years—and I’m sure few of the early adopters would be happy to see their very expensive spatial computer superseded in short order. But such a strategy also raises questions about the future of the Vision line and what exactly Apple is planning for it.
The bare essentialsA lower price tag is one thing, but the big question is how Apple intends to slash costs on what is a very complicated and very advanced product. The natural inclination when Apple is making a less expensive version of a product is to, of course, cut features: we see this across the board with its lower-end offerings like the tenth-generation iPad, iPhone SE, Apple Watch SE, and MacBook Air.
The trick, however, is not to cut so many corners that it compromises the fundamental nature of the product. For example, the tenth-generation iPad and iPhone SE might lack Face ID, but with Touch ID built-in, it still checks the box of biometric authentication. The MacBook Air has more limitations on the number of external displays it can drive—a somewhat contentious issue—but at least still supports them. The Apple Watch SE lacks the ECG feature, but still does heart rate monitoring. In fact, this whole approach is best summed up by the marketing tagline the company uses for the Apple Watch SE: “All the essentials. Light on price.”
When it comes to the Vision Pro, a product that has only been on the market for four months, it’s hard to tell what users (or Apple) consider essential to the product. If this is all about distilling the product to its core features, what gets cut—or how do things get adjusted? The external EyeSight display, for example, seems like a prime target: it’s expensive, it’s heavy, and its primary function—telling others whether or not you can see them—is limited. Is there another way the same function could be accomplished with a simpler, more cost effective method? Because sometimes the first ideas aren’t always the right ones.
Driving forwardEven as Apple thinks about cutting features from the Vision Pro, it’s still worth thinking about a contradictory challenge: even if the next spatial computer isn’t a Vision Pro, it’s just the second device in the product category, and it still needs to push the state of the art forward.
That might be something as simple as an updated processor. After all, the Vision Pro sports an M2 and Apple’s already in the process of starting to move all its products to the M4. By the time a cheaper spatial computer is ready, we’ll likely be seeing at least some products with M5 processors, assuming Apple sticks to its current development pace. It’s not impossible that we’d also see a revised version of its R1 chip for processing input.
Likewise, displays will continue to get better and cheaper, battery life will hopefully improve, and the company may even be able to replace or reduce some of its sensors. All of these enhancements will eventually get bundled into a more expensive Vision Pro successor obviously, but if they can both help cut the cost of the product and continue to move the ball downfield, Apple’s in an ideal situation.
Leading by lossesEven with cheaper technology and less of it, Apple still may struggle to hit the price point it wants to. After all, the company holds itself to a high standard and doesn’t want a cheaper product to feel cheap. This is where my most anathematical idea to bring down the cost of Apple’s next spatial computer comes in: Apple should reduce its margins.
The company is famous for maintaining its comfortable margins across the board, and it’s part of what’s helped propel it to its current financial heights. But those same financial heights are what allows it to make an exception when it needs to, and if it wants to drive adoption of its Vision platform, I’d argue that it needs to. Even a $1500-ish headset is not going to pick up a slew of new users in an unproven category, so if the company is will to sell the product at break even—or perhaps even a little bit lower—as it attempts to bring costs into line, then it should. After all, what use is the massive amount of profit being generated by all those other Apple products if you can’t use to fund your riskier ventures.
This isn’t even the first time that Apple’s needed to be aggressive on pricing. The earliest iPhones were sold in part subsidized by the carriers, and even then they saw an unprecedented price cut within the first few months. After the first outrageously expensive fancy Apple Watch Editions, the company revised its pricing strategy to bring the wearable to more users. Sometimes you need to choose between making the most amount of money you can, and actually getting your products into people’s hands.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
I’ve been meaning to write up a comparison of menu bar utilities in the wake of Bartender being sold, but Niléane beat me to it:
If your trust in Bartender has wavered as a result of this series of events, you may be looking for alternatives. I have been, too. So, I’ve rounded up some of my favorite menu bar management utilities available right now and even a couple of macOS tips to help manage the menu bar without having to install any third-party apps at all.
I’ve been using Hidden Bar on my laptop without issue, but admit to being intrigued by Ice as well. Also don’t miss her article’s tips to compact your menu bar… because you might not need a menu-bar manager at all!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple’s App Intents slide from WWDC 2024.It’s going to be years before we can really see the impact of Apple embracing systemwide AI features via Apple Intelligence. Many of the features announced at WWDC 2024 won’t even ship until next year, and the keynote’s Siri segment alone was so full of future-tense descriptions and metaphors about the beginning of a journey that it’s quite clear this is going to take some time.
But let’s try to look out into the future. Let’s consider what the iPhone, in particular, might look like once Siri gets smart and Apple Intelligence takes hold. It’s a future that may dramatically change what we think of as apps—and that holds some serious threats (as well as opportunities) for app developers.
Tuning the orchestraOver the next few years you’re going to be hearing a lot more about a concept that Apple started to discuss at WWDC this year: orchestration. Broadly, the idea is that the machine-learning models on your Apple devices are going to be able to understand what you want to do, based on your commands and current context, and make it happen by using the combined resources of your device’s system software and third-party apps.
When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need it to do—without you having to specify all the steps it needs to take to get there.
This is, in many ways, the ultimate promise of user automation. For years I’ve been a fan of tools that let users create scripts or automations or workflows that connect up different aspects of their computing lives in order to save time and end busywork. Computers have eliminated countless sorts of drudgery, but if you use a computer every day, you probably still frequently find yourself doing some 21st-century drudgery, pasting this thing over here, clicking that thing over there, often in a mindless, repetitive sequence.
I can automate you out of that with some combination of AppleScript or Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro or shell script or some other macro language… and I have done so for myself, friends, and family. But the truth is, most people are never going to build even a simple Shortcut for themselves.
But… what if they don’t have to? In a world of properly orchestrated apps, they wouldn’t. They’d just say what they wanted, and their device would do all the work. If they needed to do the same task repeatedly, they could just tell Siri that, and at that point, you’ve basically built an automation workflow in zero steps.
That’s the holy grail of user automation, honestly. Tell your device what to do, and it does it—you don’t need to be involved at all. The drudgery evaporates. How civilized.
Intents and purposesOkay, so the automation utoptia may be upon us soon. But it’s easier said than done, and that’s because the functions in our apps on all our devices aren’t all magically known to Siri and Apple Intelligence. App developers have to specifically mark out the key functionality of their apps and bundle it up in a specific way so that it’s accessible to the broader system.
This is how AppleScript worked back in the day, and in today’s Shortcuts era, it’s enabled by something called App Intents. App Intents aren’t new—as I said, they’re what powers Shortcuts—but as of 2024, they’re much more meaningful than they used to be, because they’re how apps integrate with Apple Intelligence.
What Apple’s asking app developers to do is put in extra work in order to allow their apps to offer up their unique functionality to the system in an organized way. The result will be that the system will know those capabilities exist and will be able to use them as needed, based on whatever the user wants to do. If I’m looking at a photo and say I want to share that with Myke and Stephen in Slack, Apple Intelligence needs to understand what I’m looking at, export that photo in a format that’s reasonable for sharing in Slack, and then use Slack to choose the right venue for me to share with Stephen and Myke. (Oh, and based on context it also needs to intuit that I mean Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley—two people who are frequently connected—and not people I know separately like Steven Schapansky and Mike Gordon.)
It’s all tricky, but the potential is enormous. Apps are mostly islands unto themselves, and it can be a real effort to get them to work together the way you want them to. I once built a wild system that basically connected my email client to a database1—the apps didn’t know about each other, and they didn’t need to—but by connecting them, I got a huge productivity boost. With Apple Intelligence and App Intents (so many AIs!), the potential is there for your device to connect your apps with one another in all sorts of ways… without you even breaking a sweat.
The potential here is huge. Now, the big question: Will app developers buy in?
App self-esteemOn a device operated by Apple Intelligence and full of apps all tricked out with App Intents, what does “using an app” mean, anyway? I’m dubious that we’re not going to ever want to scroll through lists and tap things and perform other tactile acts on our phones, even if we can drive a lot of work with a voice assistant. But if you’re an app developer, there’s a real risk of feeling like your app is no longer a destination for users but a box of parts that will occasionally be rummaged through by the system while it’s passing through to a different destination. That’s scary.
I do think that if Apple’s idea of an orchestrated future comes into being, the importance of any individual app might be reduced. But there’s also huge potential here for different apps to work together, for them to amplify each other so that they’re far more important for individual users than they could possibly be now.
For some apps, though, the future might be more about supplying great actions and data sources to the big Apple Intelligence soup—presumably for a subscription price. It seems a little bit weird, but the future of iOS apps might be services that just tie into Apple Intelligence, with little to no interface of their own. I don’t know if you could even call them apps.
That’s all years away, but I think it’s already time for app developers to consider what makes their apps unique and useful in a world where a smart machine-learning model is taking user commands and then getting results. If competitors offer the same functionality, they should presumably be motivated to offer App Intents so that the system will use them, and they’ll become crucial, irreplaceable portions of a user’s workflow.
For some apps, that might mean becoming less of a bright, shiny interface in the face of users, and more of a behind-the-scenes workhorse that just makes life better. Developers who are used to having the spotlight may be disquieted by that notion, but it doesn’t mean that their software doesn’t have value—and won’t be able to command an appropriate subscription price.
Existential threatsApps and the App Store have been very, very good for Apple. I’m sure the company wants that to continue for as close to forever as possible.
But if the future of the devices that keep Apple in business is about to be transformed by AI models that orchestrate our software to do our bidding, there’s a serious risk that it could disrupt Apple’s standing in all of those device categories. That’s why the rise of AI is clearly an existential threat for Apple and why the company spent so much time talking about AI features at WWDC 2024.
It’s worth keeping that fundamental existential threat in mind. While it’s easy to say that apps and the App Store helped make Apple what it is, and therefore, the company will always be inclined to maintain the status quo… the fact is that if Apple thinks the best way for it to survive and flourish is to atomize app functionality into App Intents and drive it all with a user-driven AI assistant, it’ll do that. And it won’t think twice about it, no matter the consequences for app developers.
- Because it was the 90s, it was an AppleScript that connected Eudora and FileMaker Pro. ↩
Apple backs away from some financial services and changes its Vision hardware approach, and there’s a new phase in the company’s relationship with the EU. For the Summer of Fun, we look at our current iPhone home screens.
Go to the podcast page.
Imagine turning your reading list into a listening playlist. With ListenLater.net, your favorite reads become accessible as engaging podcasts in your preferred podcast app.Have you ever found an intriguing article but lacked the time to read it? Whether commuting, exercising, or relaxing, ListenLater.net makes it easy. Just email the article’s URL and Listen Later converts it into a lifelike podcast episode. You’ll be immersed in the experience as if listening to a real person.But it doesn’t stop at articles. Listen Later also enhances your email experience. Forward any email and Listen Later transforms its content into a personalized podcast episode—perfect for newsletters, lengthy reads, and PDFs.Concerned about language barriers? Listen Later offers multilingual translation and narration. Select your preferred language and enjoy a vast array of content, all available to your ears.Embrace convenience and versatility with Listen Later. Visit ListenLater.net to start your free trial today. Redefine how you consume information, one podcast at a time.
The European Commission has issued a preliminary ruling in one of its DMA non-compliance investigations launched in March:
Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.
At the root of this decision is the EC’s contention that Apple is overly limiting the way developers are allowed to send potential customers to their own storefronts. That includes both the actual design restrictions of external links, as well as Apple’s fee structure (the company takes a cut of any digital good or service up to seven days after the customer follows the external link). Such moves would seem to be in violation of the DMA regulation that developers can advertise and direct users to their own sites without cost.1
Given that this is a preliminary ruling, Apple has time to respond to the finding before the final decision is put into effect in March of 2025.
Simultaneous to this decision, the EC has also announced a new non-compliance investigation, its third into Apple. This action specifically looks into Apple’s developer terms in the EU, including alternative app stores and distribution methods. At the heart of this matter are three issues: whether the process for users taking advantage of alternative app distribution is too onerous, whether Apple is too restrictive in its eligibility terms (such as the rule that developers must be “of good standing” to qualify), and the existence of the Core Technology Fee.
That is…a lot. Should the EC find Apple to not be in compliance in these areas, it would require a substantial reworking of much of Apple’s EU terms. As with the previous investigations, it will likely take some time for a final ruling to be issued, though we may get a preliminary ruling such as the one above in a matter of months.
Apple’s business in the EU continues to be a thorn in its side as both Europe and Apple hash out exactly what the implication of the far-reaching DMA is. Most recently, Apple said that several of its new features, including Apple Intelligence, would not come to the EU this year due to implications of the DMA, potentially taking this battle to a new level.
- For reference, the relevant portion of the DMA (Article 5(4)) reads in full: “The gatekeeper shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions, to end users acquired via its core platform service or through other channels, and to conclude contracts with those end users, regardless of whether, for that purpose, they use the core platform services of the gatekeeper.” ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple has announced that some features it recently announced at WWDC won’t be coming to the EU this year because of European regularions. Bloomberg’s Samuel Stolton and Mark Gurman report:
Apple Inc. is withholding a raft of new technologies from hundreds of millions of consumers in the European Union, citing concerns posed by the bloc’s regulatory attempts to rein in Big Tech.
The company announced Friday it would block the release of Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing from users in the EU this year, because the Digital Markets Act allegedly forces it to downgrade the security of its products and services.
For shipping features, Apple needed to amend them to get them to work in the EU. This is the first shot in a new phase of Apple’s battle with regulators: withholding some highly promoted features from the EU and blaming it on regulations.
I’m curious if Apple intends to eventually ship the features, amended to work in the EU. This approach also gives Apple the opportunity to induce regulators to declare that Apple’s interpretation of the DMA is incorrect and that announced features aren’t restricted and could be shipped.
The European Commission ultimately serves and reports to citizens of the EU, and this is Apple telling Europeans that under the DMA, they will not get some of Apple’s best new features. Instead of the DMA granting Europeans new features like third-party marketplaces, it will reframe the DMA as something that limits what they get. I don’t know if that’ll make a difference in perception in the EU, but Apple’s going to give it a try.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is a great Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances, letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices. Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store, or via the Magic Lasso website.
During last week’s WWDC festivities, John Gruber interviewed Apple executives on stage for The Talk Show Live, as he’s done for years. This time it was different because people at home with a Vision Pro could watch the event live from the Theater app by Sandwich Vision, streamed by SpatialGen.
Sandwich is Adam Lisagor’s media empire specializing in commercial production, and Sandwich Vision is the Vision Pro development arm. I had the chance to talk to Adam, Andy Roth, and Dan Sturm. Andy is the developer for Sandwich Vision’s Television and Theater apps. Dan is the visual effects supervisor for Sandwich.
Disclosure: I am friends with Dan, and have worked for Sandwich as a freelance compositor on some projects, but I am not connected to Television, Theater, or The Talk Show Live in any capacity. The following was lightly edited for clarity and length.
For those that haven’t watched it in a Vision Pro, how would you describe the experience of viewing The Talk Show Live in the Theater app?
Adam: The experience is entirely unique. It’s a blend of different immersive styles and definitions that combine to create a unique kind of immersion that’s more than the sum of its parts.
- The user is immersed in an immersive space within visionOS (the theater inside the app, surrounded by theater seating, with a sense of scale and perspective—and the equivalent of a 76′ screen in front of them, so it’s the feeling of a typical huge AMC style multiplex theater with few enough cues from lighting, shape, and texture to break the illusion.
- The user sees a human-scaled “portal” to the stereoscopic capture of humans on a stage, separated forward from the big screen in z-depth about the same distance as the actual humans would be in a real theater environment. So the human scale is immersive, and the stereo capture is immersive.
- The user hears spatialized audio of the humans on stage combined with the audience captured in a stereo image, creating a sense of immersion in sound within the environment (as well as a sense of place in the community). This is a real psychological effect that happens when a person sits within a large group that’s having a communally similar reaction—we get a sense of overwhelm from the uncommonly emergent scale of the group of which we’re now a member.
- The user experiences the event in real time, which, in combination with the other immersion styles, is almost never experienced—we watch broadcast TV of live events all the time, but we never experience live events in real time with multiple styles of immersion.
All of this combined leads to a sense of nowness and thereness that is, as some social media users described, “magical.”
Off stage during the event. (Photo: Sandwich.)Before this, Sandwich also produced the 2D video for The Talk Show Live. That features a more traditional multi-cam setup, including cutting from camera to camera. Did you ever consider creating stereo camera pairs for all that traditional multi-cam work, like a stereoscopic 3D movie, or spatial video?
Dan: No, I don’t think so. This was always intended to be a new, experimental version of the show in addition to the traditional 2D version (which we did produce in parallel with the 3D version).
We wanted to recreate the feeling of sitting in a theater, watching the show live. That’s why we created a custom screen position and scale for the 3D video, and we even placed it on a small stage at the front of the virtual theater.
The goal was to let people around the world attend the live show in a way that was as close to the real thing as possible. The Theater experience is arguably a better experience than being there in person because you can sit wherever you’d like and change seats whenever you feel like it.
What were the design goals of the Theater app when it comes to immersive vs. spatial video? I hear people sometimes say “spatial” when they mean “immersive” and vice versa, so it must be difficult to set expectations for the people you’re collaborating with, as well as the audience, on the end result.
Andy: Theater started from our first app, Television. We wanted to try taking the systems we had built for Television and putting people into a fully immersive environment where they could watch movies on the big screen.
The first version of Television had supported spatial videos, but that support was dropped due to some technical changes when YouTube was added. When we started talking about the idea of streaming a live video in spatial, we quickly added that capability back to the app.
So from the start, the design goal was to create an immersive environment for 2D or 3D videos, and it made sense to support Apple’s spatial video format.
Adam: This nomenclature came up in our discussions with Apple, actually: the distinction between spatial, 3D/stereoscopic, and immersive. Apple wants us to think of spatial as not just stereoscopic capture but the UX experience of viewing the stereoscopic video within the UI that Apple has designed, meaning all the benefits of those softened edges that feather out into the borders so that separation does not jolt the user. We could call ours spatial probably if we could recreate the same UI effect, but Apple doesn’t give that API access to devs, so we’re constrained by the hard edges of the frame in stereoscopic; we can’t fairly call ours spatial.
We also don’t call it immersive video because immersive is defined (either colloquially or officially) as having a wide field of view, either 180° or 360°. We deliberately constrained our field of view with a 17mm (equivalent 35mm) lens to provide that constrained stage portal experience I mentioned above.
We’ll definitely move into immersive capture soon, but we wanted to constrain our approach for this maiden voyage to set ourselves up for the least technical hurdles. And we almost got to perfection 🙂
If this were an immersive video with a 180-ish degree camera in a seat, you’d see some of the live audience. With the 3D theater, you have the spatial audio of that audience, but the seats are empty. There’s no good way to put in a 3D audience, but did you consider spatial personas in the same space?
Andy: We’re currently working on SharePlay integration with spatial personas, which we built for Television, but that only lets you watch with a few people on a FaceTime call. We’re also discussing ways to include an audience in the seats so the theater isn’t so lonely.
Dan: Personally, I love my big, private movie theater. But the SharePlay experience with spatial personas is really great.
Adam: I’m with Dan. I hate going to the movies (I feel like there’s a Medium post coming soon about this), and I love sitting in a big movie theater by myself because it’s the scale of the experience that’s more important to me than the community. But I do love hearing the audience, especially because it’s a real, real time audience who is not spitting popcorn on me or yelling all the things they’ve just figured out to their friend and spitting popcorn on their friend.
And the undeniable thing about immersive video capture that shows real audiences is that it’s no-go for privacy. This isn’t the Jimmy Kimmel show, and we’re not about to start getting image releases for every event we livestream.
How was The Talk Show Live in the Theater app initially pitched, and did anything about the initial conception evolve in this fast-paced production cycle? An eight-week turnaround is asking a lot for an app, and a workflow Sandwich hasn’t taken on before.
Adam: This was my pitch to Gruber. The only thing that changed between the pitch and the event was that we pivoted away from capturing anything with iPhones; we shot with really good box cameras and lenses for the stereoscopic, and traditional 2D cameras for the multicam.
But you can see his reaction here, like I reported it—skeptical, but excited:
What preproduction steps did you take to figure out the theater space, the “seating” viewing angles, and where to place the stereo video on your stage?
Dan: We wanted the viewer to feel like they were sitting in the front row of the California Theatre, so we aimed to mimic that just-below-the-elevated-stage viewing angle. We set up our cameras low, right on the front edge of the stage, to create that effect.
When a viewer in the app sits in the front row of Theater, looking up at the 3D video sitting on its virtual stage, it really does recreate that feeling.
The California Theatre during The Talk Show Live in 2022. (Photo: Sandwich.)The viewing angle from the front row, where the stereo camera was positioned. (Photo: Sandwich.)Adam: Yep exactly. We knew we had two priorities: have the Theater app feel like actually being in the theater with the same angle and distance of perspective, and make the rig small and low enough to not block anyone’s view except Siracusa, which was very important to us. In the Siracusa-blocking realm, we absolutely delivered a world-class blocking experience.
The rig from the other side. (Photo: John Siracusa.)We also had to make sure that viewing that one perspective from the middle row and back row of the theater wasn’t too cognitively dissonant. And it’s not perfect of course, but it’s close enough for cognitive consonance. There were reportedly a few users who were unhappy that when they sat in the back row, the people were small.
The partnership with SpatialGen allowed for live-streaming the event, but what technical work went into making sure you supplied SpatialGen with the appropriate video and audio feeds and pipe them into your app? What tests did you do before the live event to make sure that there weren’t any codec or formatting errors? People have a hard enough time getting their video to work in Zoom meetings or live-streaming in 2D so I can’t imagine this was something you took for granted.
Andy: We found a good solution that leveraged OBS, which already has many live streaming features and could more easily pull in the show’s audio along with video. The easiest and fastest way for us to get 3D video was using a two-camera setup to create a side-by-side (SBS) video since SpatialGen was already set up to convert SBS to MV-HEVC.
As soon as we realized this solution could work, Dan put together a quick proof-of-concept with a couple of iPhones. Then we got on a call with SpatialGen, put all the pieces together, and had the first working version streaming to the app. It was pretty mind-blowing, and that was the moment we all thought, “Okay, we can really pull this off.”
After that, it was just a lot of fine-tuning to put together the right cameras and rig and optimize the stream configuration for the show.
Dan: The proof-of-concept was an iPhone 15 Pro Max and an iPhone 14 Pro Max (since they have the same 1x lenses)
The hardware rig for the event was, as far as I know, a one-of-a-kind assembly of cameras, lenses, and hardware. Can you describe the rig? What were you able to test with the rig before the live event, and what changes needed to be made?
Dan: The camera rig was a one-off side-by-side rig we had built specifically for the show. The cameras were Panasonic Lumix BGH1 Micro 4/3 cameras with Olympus 17mm lenses.
We used Blackmagic HDMI to Thunderbolt converters to get the camera feeds into a MacBook Pro running OBS, along with the audio feed. From there, we created the side-by-side stereo image that was sent to SpatialGen for conversion and streamed to the app.
The cameras were shooting 1080p 60fps to reduce motion blur. So, our final side-by-side image was 3840×1080, but was streamed at 30fps for bandwidth considerations.
The backstage set-up. (Photo: Sandwich.)How did you calibrate the lenses to make sure they were aligned, and was there any 2D testing you could do to check it on site?
Dan: Before the show, I created a calibration chart that helped us get the cameras into parallel alignment. Our rig had one fixed camera and one adjustable camera, so it was mostly a matter of aligning the chart to the fixed camera and dialing the adjustable camera to hit its target on the chart.
Of course, no camera rig or alignment will be perfect, so once we had the cameras physically aligned, we made final tweaks in OBS. We were able to overlay the two cameras to see how they were lining up. They were very close from the chart calibration, I think we nudged them maybe 1 pixel vertically and half a degree in rotation.
Since we were shooting parallel, we also used these same controls to adjust our convergence plane. We moved our calibration chart to the spot on stage where we wanted to converge, and aligned the images with software transforms. For this setup, we wanted everyone on stage to be in positive parallax, so we set our convergence plane a few inches downstage of everything.
Were there any technical issues that came up once you went live, or unexpected snags?
Dan: The only technical snag we ran into was a network issue that had nothing to do with the stereo3d aspect of the shoot. There was a stutter in the video transmission somewhere in the networking chain that we weren’t able to fully diagnose before show time. Something we didn’t encounter in any of our pre-production testing.
Adam: It was on the theater bandwidth side, regrettably. We paid for dedicated hard line to the Internet and it still wasn’t enough.
Adam on the left, and Andy on the right at The California Theatre. (Photo: Sandwich.)Reactions have been positive, so I have to assume that wheels are turning on doing this again for other live events, or at least The Talk Show Live 2025?
Adam: Yes the wheels are turning. In one case, Big Wheels actually. We’re extremely excited for what we’re building, based on the early promise of this live without-a-net proof of concept going so well.
Since this is both a production by Sandwich to live-stream this, and the Theater app venue to stream in, is Sandwich accepting pitches to stream events, or sell promotional space to events shot by other people?
Adam: Yes and yes.
Apple’s planning a cheaper Vision Pro, how we feel about covering CG advertising, managing subscriptions, and our favorite emoji.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple is a colossus. Some of us might remember back when it was doomed and nearly bankrupt, but these days, it generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every day and has a market capitalization of more than three trillion dollars.
And yet even the most powerful companies are fallible. Often they have a hubris that suggests that their success in one area means they can easily extend it to others—often with disastrous results.
This week, Apple got another reminder that even its mighty power might not be able to make it succeed at all its ambitions. Don’t be embarrassed, Apple — even the world’s most beautiful models still get pimples from time to time.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
This apparently happened just before WWDC, so I missed it, but it deserves everyone’s attention. Apple has rejected the UTM emulator app, not just from the global App Store, but from all third-party App Stores in the EU by refusing to notarize it. Michael Tsai’s site has the details:
This also seems inconsistent with the fact that the Delta emulator is allowed to be notarized outside the App Store. It doesn’t make much sense for the rules to be more lax within the App Store.
Steve Troughton-Smith put it more succinctly:
Apple needs to read the terms of the DMA again; Apple can’t reject UTM from distribution in third party marketplaces, in just the same way it can’t prevent Epic from building an App Store. App Review is going to land them yet another clash with the EU, and potential fine-worthy rule violation.
In other words, parts of Apple apparently think that they can enforce inconsistent and arbitrary rules even outside the App Store, which is contrary to the entire regulatory process that led to the DMA and the concept of alternative App Stores in the first place. (This also happened to the iDOS emulator.)
On top of all that, it took Apple two months to come to the decision. (AltStore developer Riley Testut has said that Apple is taking ages to notarize any apps for his marketplace.)
The whole point of the DMA is that Apple does not get to act as an arbitrary approver or disapprover of apps. If Apple can still reject or approve apps as it sees fit, what’s the point of the DMA in the first place?
[Hat tip to ATP 592.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Summer of Fun has arrived, but we’ve still got a lot of catch-up work to do after a huge WWDC. So this week we share more thoughts about Apple’s new AI strategy and discuss a lot of the feedback we got about what happened last week.
Go to the podcast page.
Chance Miller at 9to5Mac reports that Apple has shelved its “buy now pay later” feature:
The change goes into effect starting today, Apple says. Existing users with open Apple Pay Later loans will still be able to manage them via the Wallet app.
In its place, Apple is focusing on new features coming globally to Apple Pay later this year, including the ability to access installment loan offerings from eligible credit or debit cards, as well as Affirm.
Miller has a full statement from Apple in his piece, but what I wondered was whether this was the fastest a feature had been shipped and then canceled. The feature was first announced in March 2023, meaning it’s been around for just fifteen months.
It seems likely this feature was not much used, especially since it competes with lots of other similar (and more well established) features. Also worth noting, the loans were backed by Apple itself, via a subsidiary called Apple Financing, LLC—which at the time seemed to only handle this “buy now pay later” feature.1
Apple also recently announced during its WWDC keynote that it will incorporate loyalty/reward programs into Apple Pay as well as installment programs through your own bank. Perhaps the writing was on the wall at this point.
In any case, while Apple may have fancied itself a more reasonable purveyor of this particular service, I also can’t fault them for perhaps not wanting to be in a business that can feel a bit troublesome.
- Fun fact: while digging around in corporate records, I discovered that Apple Financing LLC is listed as a branch of “Bespin Capital LLC.” I can only assume they specialize in financing tibanna gas mines. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker. With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Vulture’s Josef Adalian joins Jason to discuss the fate of Paramount after the latest deal has fallen through, Warner Bros. Discovery moves to plan B on sports rights, and Joe walks us through his Vulture streamer rankings.
Go to the podcast page.
Author Andrew Leland, whose memoir, The Country of the Blind gained critical praise last year, is out with a feature for New York magazine on how the Apple Vision Pro is providing accessibility benefits for people with low vision, limb differences, and cognitive disabilities:
Neurodiverse users have also found value in the AVP. “I generally feel a lot better after having worn it for a while,” a user with autism and ADHD told me. “It’s like a reset for the brain.” When I chatted with them, they’d just drained their AVP’s battery by spacing out in the immersive lunar environment. “My brain just is hyperfocused on whatever stimulus comes in, so whatever I can do to manually cut those stimuli off helps me tremendously,” they said. “The Vision Pro is noise-canceling headphones for my eyes.”
Leland describes the joy a low-vision user finds with the headset, viewing windows the size of a garden shed, or not having to crane one’s to see a desk-mounted monitor. But he isn’t starry-eyed about Vision Pro, pointing out ways the people he profiled have struggled – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – with the device. He was also treated to the Apple Park experience, and came away impressed by what he saw and heard from the accessibility team there.
Leland’s piece is most notable, though, for its thoughtful take on the nature of accessibility, and the way he contextualizes it for a wide audience without dumbing things down.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
It’s easy to setup and easy to keep up to date. And Magic Lasso’s pro features enable you to block YouTube ads, craft your own custom rules and see ad blocking energy, carbon and data savings for any site.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
It was clear that Apple didn’t want to be a part of this.
For years now, the company has resisted using the phrase Artificial Intelligence to describe what it does. It’s facile and misleading and not what Apple is really about at all. So it’s been working on advanced computing techniques and the hardware to drive them, all using phrases like machine learning and Neural Engine.
Then, a couple of years ago, the AI buzzword exploded into the consciousness of… if not the general public, then the tech industry and press. The image creation and chatbot demonstrations were, yes, facile and misleading, but also quite a party trick. The narrative shifted: Was this the future of computing?
And there was Apple, churning away on its ML photo tagging in Photos and eye tracking in visionOS and image segmentation for silly video effects, suddenly caught flatfooted. The area it had looked on with some disdain—and not without reason—was suddenly the next big thing in tech.
And, of course, the scary part was: What if it was the next big thing? What if—after investing billions in visionOS and a car project that never even saw the light of day after a decade, all as a hedge against the Next Big Thing that might eclipse the iPhone—the technology that it had pooh-pooed was the real existential threat to the iPhone?
According to multiple reports, there was a moment in late 2022 or early 2023 when Apple realized that it needed to aggressively embrace AI or risk being seen as old and out of touch—not just by its industry but by the general public. The result was a prioritization of AI features all around the company, and the first fruits of that prioritization were on display at Monday’s WWDC keynote.
Three kinds of AIIt seems to me that on Monday, we saw three different kinds of AI features. Apple won’t ever say which was which, but the rest of us can guess at it. The three categories are:
- Features Apple would’ve done anyway. The company has been rolling machine-learning stuff into its software for ages now. Would smarter photo tagging and better Inbox organization in Mail have been announced regardless of Apple’s new, big AI focus? Almost certainly. Apple has always been about leveraging advanced technology in the service of customer needs.
- Features Apple would’ve done… eventually. It sure seems like Apple’s shift of priorities led to some features being announced that seem very much like the sort of thing Apple would’ve done, but at a slower pace and more conservatively. There seem to be more WWDC announcements than usual that ask for our patience because they won’t be ready until later this year or even sometime next year. But if it was an AI-related feature and was on the drawing board, it probably got pulled forward for introduction at WWDC 2024. Ready or not, here they come.
- Features Apple would never have done. There are some areas where Apple shows the strain of fearing they’ll be seen as burying their heads in the sand and resisting the trends. ChatGPT support and Image Playgrounds both feel like areas where Apple is stepping far out of its comfort zone in order to make it seem more tuned in to the zeitgeist.
We’ll see how these different features end up faring over the course of time.
The difficult choiceLast week, I wrote that Apple should see itself as the grown-up in the tech industry’s rush toward AI at any cost. For all of AI’s potential, it can be unreliable, the training data sources can be questionable, and it all just feels overhyped. (To me, AI manages to be simultaneously overhyped and potentially world-changing. Great potential… lots of snake oil. All at once.)
Apple’s WWDC announcements show that the company wrestles with this idea too. In its most thoughtful moments, it has expressed the desire to approach AI features with clear, important guidelines. The tools are meant to be intuitive, personalized, deeply integrated into Apple’s product experiences—they’re features, not tech demos—and build with privacy in mind.
In most cases I think Apple’s announcements showed those principles in action. This is a company that realized it was not going to be able to perform all the AI actions it wants to from a user’s device, so it built its own server hardware and operating system and is hosting them in its own data centers, all so that it can ensure that private user data isn’t ever misused. Nobody else does that, but Apple knew it had to.
Most of what Apple announced is really about solving problems for users. Rather than creating a model that has eaten the entire Internet but has a troubling tendency to hallucinate, Apple has focused on serving a user’s personal contexts. It seems to have avoided buying into the broader tech industry fallacy that the future of computers is asking questions to AI chatbots that respond with clichés and dissembling and hallucinatory answers.
Well. Avoided for the most part.
Apple has always been good at building features that play to its strengths, both technical and market wise. It owns your phone, it’s got your data in its ecosystem, it’s invested in building neural processing into its chips, and now it can put that all together to build a whole new Siri that knows your personal context and can put it into action.
But at the same time… all the cool kids are making weird AI art in Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, I guess? And even if Apple doesn’t have a chatbot that’s been trained on “world knowledge” (the official buzzphrase of WWDC 2024), I suppose you’re not in with the in crowd unless you’ve got a chatbot?
This is where Apple has compromised, a little, at a distance: Its Image Playgrounds feature makes weird AI-looking art, built around a nicer interface than any fill-in-the-text prompt, but still kind of weird and off-putting. And Apple has wired in ChatGPT, because if Siri can’t help you, maybe a chatbot can.
Warning labels and defaultsWhich brings me to Apple’s ChatGPT integration, which seems utterly necessary from the standpoint of making the iPhone not feel hopelessly behind Google, which is rolling its Gemini chatbot into Android. People who despise AI hype in general and chatbots in particular will probably be disgusted by Apple’s choice, but if you look closer, Apple’s clearly not comfortable with any aspect of the partnership.
Think about it. Apple made a much-ballyhooed introduction of its partnership with ChatGPT by showing off that every single time Siri offers to use it; it throws up a (scary?) alert dialog that asks if you’re sure you want to use the chatbot. When the ChatGPT results return, they’re appended with a warning label advising that you check all the information if it’s important!
That was just in the keynote. Before the day was done on Monday, Apple execs had also made it clear that the feature was turned off by default and that ChatGPT was just the first partnership of many. Google Gemini was mentioned by name as if it was only a matter of time before ChatGPT’s archrival would be integrated. They likened it to offering users different, interchangeable search engines in Safari. They also suggested repeatedly that the ultimate goal of the “external chatbot” feature wasn’t really general knowledge at all but chatbots trained on specific areas of knowledge, like medicine.
Now Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple’s not even paying OpenAI for ChatGPT. I get why OpenAI would do this deal—its biggest competitor has the home-field advantage on the world’s only other notable mobile operating system—but it really looks like they’re the one over the barrel here, not Apple.
I think that might say it all. The conventional wisdom going into WWDC was that Apple was the company that was flailing and desperate, trying to catch up to the giants of artificial intelligence and retain some level of relevance. What we saw this week, however, was a company that seems surprisingly confident in its own AI prowess, and one that continues to largely follow its own playbook rather than compromising its ideals.
The hottest company in tech, OpenAI, just gave its crown jewels to Apple for free, and Apple responded by introducing its integration as optional and tagged with numerous warning labels. So, who’s behind and flailing, exactly?
The truth is that Apple right now is like a duck: serene on the surface but paddling furiously underneath. It was clearly complacent about the pace of AI innovation and allowed itself to get a bit too comfortable, and now it’s hurrying to keep up. It will undoubtedly make a few mistakes along the way. We also don’t know how good Apple’s stuff is—note that most of the Siri section in the WWDC keynote was aggressively in the future tense—and have to take the company’s word for how private its cloud services really are.
There’s a lot to interrogate here, and if Apple can’t fulfill its promises, it will be in real trouble. That’s a story that will be written over the next year, but right now, I wouldn’t bet against them.
One of the more contentious announcements from Apple this week is that it trained its foundation models used as the basis for its forthcoming Apple Intelligence features via, among other content, the open web.
Obviously that raised a lot of eyebrows among those of us that publish content to the web. Using copyrighted material to train AI falls under fair use is a question still being hotly debated, and one that may ultimately be highly dependent on the exact circumstances. It’s also a behavior that people feel justifiably uncomfortable with.
Setting aside feelings on that issue for just a moment, it’s worth looking at the mechanics behind this. Apple also said during its announcement that it’s providing a way for publishers to exclude their sites from being used for training its AI models, via a long established system built originally for search engines: robots.txt.
Robots.txt or notIf you’re not familiar with robots.txt, it’s a text file placed at the root of a web server that can give instructions about how automated web crawlers are allowed to interact with your site. This system enables publishers to not only entirely block their sites from crawlers, but also specify just parts of the sites to allow or disallow.1
Apple’s own Applebot web crawler has existed for some time; it’s used to power search features in Spotlight, Siri, and Safari. For example, whenever you see a Top Hit in Safari or Spotlight, that information is coming from a search index created using Applebot. Podcasts are also fed by Applebot, though in those cases only via specific URLs registered with Apple Podcasts.
If you’re worried that blocking Applebot from crawling your site might impact your site showing up in traditional search results, good news: the new AI training element of Applebot uses a separate identifier, allowing you to block only that functionality without affecting your site’s appearance in Apple’s search features.
How to stop Apple from using your content in AI trainingApple provides a detailed support document about Applebot and the various directives to control how it interacts with your site.
To specifically exclude your whole site from being used for Apple’s AI training features, you can add the following to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /
To test this out, I’ve added those directives to my personal site. This turned out to be slightly more confusing, given that my site runs on WordPress, which automatically generates a robots.txt file. Instead, you have to add the following snippet of code to your functions.php file by going to the administration interface and choosing Appearance > Theme File Editor and selecting functions.php from the sidebar. (You can also do this via a plugin like Code Snippets, which I use.)
add\_filter('robots\_txt', 'my\_robots\_commands', 99, 2); // filter to add robotsfunction my\_robots\_commands($output, $public) { $output .= "User-agent: Applebot-Extended\nDisallow: /"; return $output;}
If you want to go beyond Apple, this same general idea works for other AI crawling tools as well. For example, to block ChatGPT from crawling your site you would add a similarly formatted addition to the robots.txt file, but swapping in “ChatGPT-User” instead of “Applebot-Extended.”2
Google’s situation is more complex: while the company does have a Googlebot-Extended that powers some of its AI tools, like Gemini (née Bard), blocking that won’t necessarily remove your site’s content from being crawled for use in Google’s AI search features. To do that, you’d need to block Googlebot entirely, which would have the unfortunate effect of removing your site from its search indexes as well.
Fait accompliOne challenge with these AI tools, however, is whether or not the damage has already been done. Many of these AI models have, of course, already been trained, and it’s not as though you can remove training data from them by blocking these crawlers now—it’s very much closing the barn doors after the horses have gotten out.
However, it does mean that you can prevent your site and content from being used for training going forward, so any material you publish from that point on will be excluded. If you feel like that’s cold comfort, you’re not alone.
- It’s worth noting that
robots.txthas no legal or technological basis for enforcement: it’s essentially a convention that companies have agreed to abide by. ↩ - To block both crawlers, you’d just add separate directives in the
robots.txtfor each of them. ↩
This week I got a chance to spend a little time with my pal Casey Liss, and he regaled me (and Stephen Hackett, since we are the three big college football fans in our larger tech nerd friend group) with the story of what he’s been up to this summer. It’s now a blog post:
During this off-season, I self-assigned a new project: The Tailgate Tub™.
If you are reading this site, you’ll probably enjoy this post—it’s all about a tech nerd with a problem to solve going above and beyond to solve it. I’m happy that my power outage that led to the purchase of an enormous battery inspired a small portion of Casey’s major tailgate upgrade.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Editing the Home View in Bora Bora.I’m just back from Cupertino, and there’s an awful lot to think about. But before all that, I thought I’d cover what absolutely everyone is talking about: visionOS 2.
More seriously, I installed the visionOS 2 developer beta this morning—this is the entire reason I have a Vision Pro!—and I’ve got a few quick thoughts before plowing on to developer sessions, thoughts about Apple Intelligence, and the rest.
Spatial photos. The most impressive single feature I’ve seen in visionOS 2 so far is the ability to create spatial photos from out of your old, mundane 2D photos. Load pretty much any photo in the Photos app and tap the Spatial icon in the top left corner of the image, and a fun sound effect plays as an animation sweeps across your photo, representing the system’s machine learning-driven software scanning your photo and building an artificial depth map to provide the illusion of depth.
You know, very few movies are shot in stereo anymore. It’s more expensive and cumbersome to shoot, and conversion to 3-D after the fact is good enough. Upon viewing Apple’s spatial-converted photos in visionOS 2, I had similar thoughts: I don’t see why we would ever need to shoot stereo images if machine learning is this good at faking it.
Seriously, whether it was a photo taken last week or 50 years ago, Apple’s algorithm does a staggeringly good job at building a depth map. You don’t need embedded LiDAR or other depth information—the algorithm does it, and it does in incredibly well. Pictures of my kids taken when they were little are suddenly given more depth (literally and figuratively). Pictures of me as a kid, even. A complex shot with a tower made of LEGO bricks in the foreground was scanned and mapped perfectly.
It takes about 15 seconds to spatialize a photo, so it’s unlikely that Apple will ever ask the Vision Pro to churn in the background through every single photo in your library, but I’ve yet to see a photo that failed to become more interesting after being converted.
Quick access to status!New gestures. Apple has added some new gestures to visionOS, which key off of you holding out your palm and looking at it. When you do that, a floating icon appears next to your hand indicating that you can tap your finger and thumb together to open the Home View. (There’s also a new Close button at the top of the Home View so you can close it again.) It’s a nice idea because as much as I’ve internalized reaching up and tapping the Digital Crown to bring up the Home View, the act of doing so is also jarring given that all other Vision Pro interactions are gestures happening in the air in front of me.
I’m actually more excited about the second gesture that keys off the first. After you look at your stretched palm (have you ever really looked at your hand?) you can flip your hand over to reveal a floating bubble that displays the time, battery percentage, and volume. Given how frustrating it was to quickly check the time in visionOS, this is a great new feature that I anticipate using a lot.
If you bring your fingers together while looking at the bubble, you can slide right or left to adjust the device volume quickly. And if you tap while looking at the bubble, Control Center opens. This, to me, is a much better way to access Control Center—though it’s certainly less discoverable than the little firefly that frequently hovers at the top of your vision.
Customize Home View. You can now move apps around in the Home View, and it works pretty much how you’d think: while looking at an app, bring your finger and thumb together to enter Jiggle Mode and then pinch the app to drag it around, even across pages. It worked exactly as I expected it to, and I’m happy to finally be able to put some of my favorite apps on page one.
If you’re a Magic Keyboard user, you’ll be able to see it now.Breakthrough keyboards. Typing on a keyboard in an Environment was previously very weird, because while your hands were visible, your keyboard itself was not. Apple has upgraded this in visionOS 2 so that it recognizes either the Apple Magic Keyboard or the keyboard on a MacBook, and that’s great.
But at least in the first developer beta, I found that it was a bit finicky—it needed the keyboard to be positioned just-so for it to appear, and even then it sometimes felt like the environment was eating away at the edges of the keyboard. I’m not even a hunt-and-pack typist, but being able to actually orient on the keyboard by seeing it is still valuable.
Also, I’m disappointed that Apple has limited this feature to its own keyboards. I realize it would be harder to generate a model that recognizes more generic keyboards, but most keyboards really do have some pretty obvious characteristics in common, don’t they? Alternately, maybe Apple should consider a feature like the one Meta offers, which lets you work in an environment but with a specific cut-out—like a tabletop—set to pass through.
Life’s a beach. Famously, visionOS shipped with two Environments marked as “Coming Soon”—one featuring a blurry beach image and another with fog-shrouded trees. The trees remain a mystery—Twin Peaks environment?—but the beach has arrived in the form of Bora Bora. As someone who loves beaches, it is spectacular. You can hear the sound of the waves, the palm trees gently blow in the breeze, and you can even see the color of the beach change as a thin cloud passes over the sun. I think I am going to be spending a lot of time in Bora Bora (the visionOS 2 environment, alas).
I didn’t get a chance to test out some other features due later this year, including support for a much larger display in Mac Virtual Display mode and multi-view support in the Apple TV app. In a Spatial Persona call with my podcast co-host Myke Hurley, the updated personas looked good (most notably hand gestures) but Myke’s mustache still prevented his persona’s mouth from moving. There’s more work to be done there.
Still, it’s exciting to get some major new features out of visionOS 2, despite the fact that visionOS 1.0 only shipped a few months ago.
Our favorite features of Apple Intelligence, the biggest missed opportunity at WWDC 2024, our most anticipated iOS 18 feature announced, and our reactions to the lackluster iPadOS announcements.
Go to the podcast page.
Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham catches a nice small detail from amongst the WWDC developer announcements:
As long as your host operating system is macOS 15 or newer and your guest operating system is macOS 15 or newer, VMs will now be able to sign into and use iCloud and other Apple ID-related services just as they would when running directly on the hardware.
This is a complaint I’ve heard from more than a few developers of my acquaintance and should help improve testing and other processes. As someone who usually installs a beta release of macOS at some point during the cycle (albeit not in VM), it’s clear how much iCloud integration is a part of the whole OS experience, and the previous prohibition is a big limitation in terms of testing real world usage.
However, there are still some restrictions in place: the feature is only supported if both the host and virtualized OS is Sequoia or later.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple, as a company, has always extolled the value of putting the “personal” in “personal computer.” From its earliest days pushing back at the monolith of IBM and beige boxes that all looked like one another to its more recent extremely personal devices like the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods.
But that ethos of “personal” technology has always been in fundamental tension with the company’s other overriding principle: Apple knows best. Whether it’s the design of its apps or how to use its features, the company has a strong streak imposing what it believes is the best approach on its users.
In the company’s latest platform updates, this tension is more apparent than ever. Apple announced several new features that allow users to bring their own touches to their devices—but it did so in a typically Apple fashion that still kept everything within bounds.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Live from Cupertino, Jason has his in-person reactions to Apple’s big WWDC announcements. And in London, Myke processes his feelings about some controversial Apple choices.
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want an to try an ad blocker that’s easy to setup, easy to keep up to date and with pro features available when you need them?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
With Magic Lasso’s pro features, you can:
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Craft your own Custom Rules to block media, cookies, and JavaScript
- Use Tap to Block to effortlessly block any element on a page with a simple tap
- See the difference ad blocking makes by visualising ad blocking speed, energy efficiency and data savings for any site
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
We’re on the verge, maybe, of something big. Apple broke ground with its voice-driven Siri assistant back in 2011, but over the years, Siri’s trajectory has been meandering and frustrating. It’s driven deeply into popular culture—”Hey Siri” is practically a catchphrase—but it’s still painfully inconsistent at best and a failure at worst.
The rise of AI chatbots, which (despite their tendency to hallucinate) manage to project the illusion of intelligent conversation, has really put Siri up against it. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had a faster, more conversational, and more accurate Siri waiting in the wings at least three years ago—but decided to go with a more modest upgrade code-named “Siri X.”
If the idea that someone inside Apple felt that Siri didn’t need to be more conversational and accurate makes you angry or confused or both, I’m right there with you. We can only hope that Apple has reconsidered its complacency over the last 18 months, since Apple executives reportedly realized that the rise of AI chatbots was destined to change user expectations.
I hope that the people who lost the arguments for a better Siri back then may have been winning those arguments for the past 18 months. And it’s made me optimistic—here in the shadow of WWDC, where everything’s possible, and nothing’s decided—that Apple might really be on the road to giving Siri the biggest upgrade it’s ever received.
That’s a big deal—and not just for the obvious reason, which is that I’d like to use Siri for something other than a tea timer or to add something to my shopping list. That’s because with a good, reliable, conversational Siri, a lot of Apple’s products can benefit.
When I’m running or walking my dog, I generally use just AirPods and my Apple Watch. Theoretically, I’m covered by Siri, but I generally avoid talking to it because it’s unreliable. I’ve also turned off all of the features that summarize messages I’m receiving because I find them awkward and unhelpful.
But imagine what a good Siri experience could unlock for users of AirPods, Apple Watch, or both. Humane built an entire product—the Ai Pin—out of a voice assistant that you carry around with you. But with a better Siri interface, Apple’s already most of the way there. The better the voice interface, the more useful your device can be when you need to interact with nothing but your voice.
Similarly, an upgraded Siri could be a huge step toward improving the CarPlay experience. As is the case with most contexts in which Siri is available, I’ve tried Siri in the car and learned my lesson—namely, to never use it again. When I’ve got to keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, being able to have a proper voice assistant that can summarize what’s going on, understand context, and follow up when I ask for it could be incredibly valuable. But Siri being unreliable has degraded that experience.
If there’s one place where the Humane Ai pin and those Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses have an edge over Apple’s stuff, it’s that they both offer a forward-facing camera to interpret the world around you. With an upgraded and competent Siri, it might make more sense for Apple to sell a pair of glasses or a clip-on camera pin as another accessory to help improve the data being input into Apple’s AI systems.
And then there’s the kitchen, where a device that combines a HomePod with a screen and camera might end up being quite welcome—I’ve used Google and Amazon devices in my kitchen for years—but it really needs to be rock-solid when it comes to voice commands. The Siri on my current HomePods doesn’t measure up.
Of course there are numerous ways that a better Siri and more AI-focused features can improve Apple’s core platforms. (I’d love a reason to use Siri on my Mac, for example, but I’ve never really found one.) But it strikes me that Apple’s biggest opportunity might actually be at the edges of our lives, where traditional interfaces are harder or even impossible to use. A useful Siri instantly makes the Apple Watch, AirPods, CarPlay, and HomePod better—and could facilitate even more interesting products to come.
But first thing’s first: Siri needs to get vastly better. I hope that we get the first sign of that on Monday.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari – stopping you from being followed by ads around the web. Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Howard Oakley says that there will be very little hype for a major change that will alter the fabric of apps on Apple’s platforms:
Don’t be caught by the marketing hype in Apple’s long list of new features coming in macOS 15. Just as Sonoma’s biggest change came not in its emoji count, but in how iCloud works, something glossed over at the time, there will hardly be a mention of this year’s biggest change, with the arrival of Swift 6 and its deep concurrency.
Apple devices all have many, many processor cores, so threading and concurrency is key to optimum performance.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
What we’re excited about at WWDC, the oldest tech we have in use, how we store our digital photos, and whether we journal.
Go to the podcast page.
Charles Stross writes a refreshingly skeptical column about AI hype, how Apple has been ahead of the game for a while now, and why Microsoft seems to be courting disaster by enabling its Recall feature:
Recall is already attracting the attention of data protection regulators; I suspect in its current form it’s going to be dead on arrival, and those CoPilot+ PCs due to launch on June 18th are going to get a hurried overhaul. It’s also going to be interesting to see what Apple does, or more importantly doesn’t announce at WWDC next week, which is being trailed as the year when Apple goes all-in on AI.
As I wrote recently, Apple has an opportunity at WWDC to announce AI features that are useful and measured and promote themselves as a responsible entity that’s not rushing headlong into the latest tech industry hype cycle. I hope they take it.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
No, not Meta’s social networking platform: Thread, the smart home radio chip.1 You know, the one Apple quietly put in its HomePods, iPhone 15 models and, ahem some Apple TVs. The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy reports that the company has also been sneaking it into all sorts of hardware since last fall, including the brand new iPad Pro and iPad Air, the latest MacBook Pros, and more:
While the company doesn’t list Thread on the specs of any of these products, FCC reports indicate that many of Apple’s latest devices have had Thread radios tested for compliance. Generally, you don’t test a radio that’s not there.
Yes, it’s a mystery that can best be exemplified by a Ryan Reynolds GIF. It’s unclear whether or not these radios are active and, if they are, what they’re being used for.
Thread is a mesh system, and adding the capability into more devices could help improve connectivity and coverage for smart home devices across your home, especially as the Matter standard (which supports Thread alongside Wi-Fi and Ethernet) continues to roll out. But it’s also possible that Apple’s just throwing them in there because, oh well, they could be useful at some point in the indeterminate future. Kind of like the Ultra Wideband chip. So I guess the company will probably just keep including Thread until it’s in all of their devices and product lines2, at which point…profit?
- Ah, branding. Not confusing at all! ↩
- Except the $129 64GB Apple TV for…reasons. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
WWDC 24 is almost here, and everyone expects it to be all about AI. As the eyes of the tech world turn back to Apple, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s got to establish that it’s been working on AI features for years, show off new features, catch up with AI features from competitors, and maybe even take the opportunity to show where it’s raising the bar.
But this isn’t just Apple’s chance to show it’s doing AI right. It’s also an opportunity to redefine the conversation about AI to make it more substantive and results-oriented—and, of course, to make Apple look better while doing it.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The Wall Street Journal‘s Joanna Stern describes how Apple’s Screen Time parental controls has a simple security vulnerability that allows unfettered web access:
I tried a number of Apple devices. With Screen Time enabled on iPads and iPhones running iOS/iPadOS 15, 16 and 17, I was able to visit porn sites, watch graphic, violent news footage on YouTube and Google “how to buy cocaine.”
I was able to do the same in Safari on a MacBook Pro running the latest MacOS, Sonoma. All I had to do was type the character string—which we won’t reproduce here so it isn’t abused—plus any web address.
I’ve only just started setting up Screen Time for my kid who, thankfully, isn’t old enough to even type a URL, much less try to work around the restrictions. (The biggest concern is accidentally leaving the app he’s in.) I’ve heard from plenty of other parents, though, who’ve found Screen Time frustrating and full of loopholes. And this is after Apple started pruning third-party parental control apps from its iOS store.
At the end of the piece, Stern details a number of other Screen Time bugs that she’s had reported by others. I’d add a few more, like, say, making a passcode that’s longer than four digits.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Tom Warren at the Verge has a nice summary of the security problems inherent in the new Windows feature Recall, which records everything you do (what could go wrong?) and is apparently quite hackable:
Microsoft may well find itself needing to rework Recall, or recall it, if you like. There are clearly some obvious holes in the way data is stored here that need to be addressed, and making this an opt-out experience has privacy campaigners concerned. Recall’s launch comes just weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called on employees to make security Microsoft’s “top priority,” even if that means prioritizing it over new features.
For the amazingly ugly details, you can read Kevin Beaumont’s Medium post, which explains how having an easily cracked plain-text transcript of pretty much every screen on your PC, downloadable in seconds, is probably a bad idea.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that venerable Mac utility Bartender has apparently been sold by longtime developer Ben Surtees, and that the new owner recently re-signed the app but otherwise hasn’t notified customers about the change:
The transaction came to light after some Reddit users saw a warning from MacUpdater letting them know that the company behind Bartender had been silently replaced. MacUpdater warned users that updates to the app from version 5.0.52 could be potentially unsafe due to the lack of transparency surrounding the situation.
These things happen—no developer should be chained to their software forever—but it’s odd that (anonymous?) new owners could appear without any communication to existing Bartender customers beyond a note saying a certificate had been changed. It’s Apple’s rules around signing app binaries, and the attention of MacUpdater, that brought this out into the open at all.
A glance around the Bartender website does reveal that while Surtees celebrated 12 years of Bartender in a blog post announcing version 5, posts from 2024 read more like SEO spam, with “key takeaways” summaries at the top, followed by unrelated Mac tips, followed by a pitch for Bartender.
Software companies don’t owe their users complete transparency, and it’s possible that there were extenuating circumstances in the transaction (from either side) that led to the lack of communication. But the inverse is also true: customers don’t owe software companies their loyalty.
Related: Hidden Bar and Ice both seem like straightforward Mac menu bar utilities, and Hidden Bar is even in the Mac App Store.
(Update: A note apparently from original developer Ben Surtees has been posted to the Bartender website, explaining the sale.)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s time for our ninth annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! What will be announced? Will it be all AI, all the time? And a new wrinkle is added to the draft format!
Go to the podcast page.
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web.
It’s a native Safari content blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac that’s been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.
Over 300,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Remove ad trackers, annoyances and background crypto-mining scripts
- Browse common websites 2.0x faster
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide helps its customers keep their devices in compliance, which keeps their company data safe.
Kolide has seen a rise in cyber liability insurance issues recently. Companies are investing more in security insurance and less in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Kolide has seen its cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years. It turns out that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software. Read Kolide’s full blog post to learn more about their findings.
Nick Heer, linking to a Jeff Johnson post about Apple’s onerous policies regarding replacing a MacBook battery, points out the fundamental truth of mobile devices:
…batteries eventually need replacing on all devices. They are a consumable good with a finite — though not always predictable — lifespan, most often shorter than the actual lifetime usability of the product. The only reason I do not use my AirPods any more is because the battery in each bud lasts less than twenty minutes; everything else is functional. If there is any repair which should be straightforward and doable without replacing unrelated components or the entire device, it is the battery.
There are a lot of trade-offs when it comes to the design of mobile devices, but making it easy to replace a device’s battery should always be a high priority.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I loved the Brr blog, which was written by an IT expert during a year in Antarctica. The author is home now, but here’s a surprise bonus post, full of information about how slow the Internet is in Antarctica and why modern software is terrible at working over slow connections:
Downloads are possible at the South Pole, but they are subject to unique constraints. The biggest constraint is the lack of 24×7 Internet. While I was there, I knew we would lose Internet access at a certain time!
It’s a frustrating reality: with most apps that do their own downloads, we were powerless to do anything about this known break in connectivity. We just had to sit there and watch it fail, and often watch all our progress be lost.
The details in this post are fantastic, though they won’t be surprising to anyone who has tried to use conventional apps and websites on a very slow satellite link. Apple’s method of doing macOS updates comes in for some justified criticism, as does the caching server built into macOS. I was surprised at just how many ways Apple’s processes failed under the strain of the slow connections at the South Pole.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Other strategies for WBD if it loses the NBA, we answer a bumper crop of listener letters, and Julia has some big career news. [Downstream+ subscribers also get to hear us discuss Netflix potential sports futures and the changing face of broadcast TV.]
Go to the podcast page.
Our video gaming preferences and habits, thoughts on Nomad’s new thin Qi-rechargeable tracking card with Find My, how we connect non-iPhone devices on the go, and our top three software wishes for the upcoming WWDC.
Go to the podcast page.
Fascinating blog post from Panic designer Neven Mrgan about the feeling of getting a letter from a friend written by AI:
Where exactly would I draw the line between helpful features (“make this red shirt green instead”) and offensive takeovers (“generate an album cover in the style of barney bubbles, award-winning”)? As I said, until this email I was more bored than enraged by AI, so I didn’t have an immediate answer. I use computer crap all the time—it’s pretty cool! So what was different here? I thought I’d come up with some comparisons that capture different aspects of my friend’s AI email, in order to see how I feel about them.
I think that more than maybe any other technology in my lifetime, AI is going to be profoundly divisive in how it’s received by users.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Marvel Studios and ILM’s “What If…? – An Immersive Story” for Vision Pro, launching Thursday as a free app, isn’t an immersive video or a game. It’s something in between—a mixed-media experiment, roughly an hour long, that tries to use every feature of the Vision Pro to make a compelling entertainment experience.
Based on the Disney+ animated series (and, more distantly, the Marvel comic), “What If?” is built around the premise of variant versions of famous Marvel characters. The “What If?” comic was doing multiverse stories decades before they were cool.
In the new “What If?” immersive story, you’re called by The Watcher (the narrator and main character of the TV series, filling Rod Serling’s shoes but with a bit more agency) to intervene in various multiversal crises, aided by Sorcerer Supreme Wong, who equips you with magic spells to use during your adventure.
The scenes with The Watcher and Wong don’t take place in a fantasy world—they’re augmented reality scenes set in wherever you’re using the Vision Pro. It’s pretty funny to see The Watcher towering above Wong, his head clearly too tall to fit in my house (but somehow doing it anyway). In addition to augmented reality, the app contains extended animated scenes (very much like segments from the TV show, but in 3-D and displayed via a sort of crystal shard floating in front of you) and quite a few immersive environments.
Watching TV on a crystal shard, as you do.I really enjoyed the environments, which are cleverly designed to resemble the style of the animated “What If?” TV series, but upgraded a bit so that they make sense in a 3-D, 360-degree context. I was especially impressed by a few surprising easter eggs littered around, and the design of a see-through pod containing something very interesting.
The environments are interactive in the sense that you can look around and drink them in, but you don’t really interact with them directly beyond that. You don’t move around, and your only interaction that effects the scene is when you cast spells. (If you want to revisit those environments later, and just look around, you can—the app lets you revisit any of its “chapters” from the main menu.)
Spellcasting works well with Vision Pro’s hand tracking.Oh, casting spells: The app makes the clever choice of building the entire interactive mechanic around magic, which makes sense because—like the Vision Pro itself—Marvel Universe magic is controlled via hand gestures. Wong will train you to shield yourself, fire power blasts, seal away dangerous objects, and collect others.
If this all sounds very much like a video game… it’s not. There’s a reason the app is subtitled An Immersive Story: Your actions (while very fun!) are really just there to make the story move along. There’s no way to lose. The story will wait for you to complete your task, and then it continues on. It’s all done in a very subtle way—the music plays, the action continues—but “What If?” is trying to be an engaging story that you’re present in, not a game. Consider that this app is from two Disney-owned companies, and consider it sort of like an interactive theme park ride. You can do stuff, but you can’t really change the ride.
That is, except for one point in the story, where you’re offered a choice. It’s a real, legitimate “final choice” that results in different endings depending on what you choose. It’s the lightest dollop of branching on a story that otherwise goes in a straight line—clearly the budget of this project was not high enough to create numerous scenes that will only be seen by the fraction of the viewers who make those specific choices—but it’s a fun moment nonetheless.
It’s hard to judge “What If?” overall, because it really does seem like a sampler platter of ways this sort of entertainment could evolve in the future. Is there room for something that’s more interactive than watching TV, but less interactive than a full-on video game? I have no idea. But I do know that the hour I spent with “What If?” was maybe the best hour I’ve spent on the device since I got it. If Apple is looking for a single app that demonstrates all the features of the Vision Pro at its best, “What If?” may be the answer.
The making of “What If…?”I got a chance to briefly talk to two people involved in making the app — Indira Guerrieri, technical art director, and Joe Ching, lead experience designer.
Guerrieri on translating the animated series to full environments: “At the beginning, it was all, ‘we’ve got this gorgeous artwork and these gorgeous characters, and we got to make them right.’ And then all sorts of discussion started happening around how much do we actually make it a little more realistic so that it feels like you’re in a 3D space? I remember the discussions were, do we want to make it more sort of toonish, do we want to add marks of a pencil from a toon-rendered drawing, or do you want to leave it? So we went somewhere in between.”
Ching on the level of interactivity in the app: “It was actually a very conscious decision that we made… we did not want any kind of a health bar where you say, ‘Oh, I died, and now I have to start this thing over.’ We really wanted it to be where the player could just do whatever they wanted in this world and not really have any sort of consequence to either not engaging or engaging. So that way, anybody at any skill level could really get through and sort of get the entire storyline.
“There are going to be particular players who are going to be focused on the narrative and going to want to sit there and watch everything that happens in front of them, and then there are going to be people who just want to, you know, take the time to look around. And that goes back to the no-consequences of, ‘If I don’t do anything, I’m not going to die.’ So that if a player only has 10 minutes and they just want to take a look at the environments, they can do that. There are some Easter eggs here and there. So, it’s really how the player wants to go through there, if they want to engage, and also the idea of replayability. You can play through the storyline the first time and then just go through and just appreciate everything that Indira and the art team have done. So, it’s sort of a play as you like.”
Guerrieri on targeting the Vision Pro: “We designed the project for a device that has so much range, that was the beauty of it. It’s like, you can go, ‘Yeah, I can do color. I can do, you know, nuance in the way things look.’ It’s pretty cool. That was a joy, to work with that range.”
Technology improvements are a bit like going to a movie or a magic show: you want to be wowed, but it works best when you don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t want to know about the trapdoor, or the strings holding people up as they soar through the air—even if it gives some appreciation for the difficulty of the production, it robs it of some of its power and awe.
Apple ends up having to ride this line a lot. At the root of its ethos has been the desire to provide technology that feels magical and amazing to its customers. With every year that goes by, every new device that comes out, Apple wants to boast about its impressive new functionality, but some of its biggest technological breakthroughs happen at a level that is totally invisible to its users.
It’s cases like that where the company has the difficult task of impressing how advanced some of these technologies are without belaboring the point. And with the onslaught of artificial intelligence features, it also means that the company has its work cut out for it if it wants to continue being the best example of magical, invisible technology.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Technology improvements are a bit like going to a movie or a magic show: you want to be wowed, but it works best when you don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t want to know about the trapdoor, or the strings holding people up as they soar through the air—even if it gives some appreciation for the difficulty of the production, it robs it of some of its power and awe.
Apple ends up having to ride this line a lot. At the root of its ethos has been the desire to provide technology that feels magical and amazing to its customers. With every year that goes by, every new device that comes out, Apple wants to boast about its impressive new functionality, but some of its biggest technological breakthroughs happen at a level that is totally invisible to its users.
It’s cases like that where the company has the difficult task of impressing how advanced some of these technologies are without belaboring the point. And with the onslaught of artificial intelligence features, it also means that the company has its work cut out for it if it wants to continue being the best example of magical, invisible technology.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
It’s time for a Vision Pro check-in. How are we using it, and how should Apple sell it? Also, some EU app marketplace developers just want to go home.
Go to the podcast page.
It’s time for a Vision Pro check-in. How are we using it, and how should Apple sell it? Also, some EU app marketplace developers just want to go home.
Go to the podcast page.
When MGM Resorts suffered a $100 million hack in September, CEO Bill Hornbuckle wasn’t too worried about the lost revenue, because cyber insurance would cover the tab. “I can only imagine what next year’s bill will be,” he joked.
Weeks later, on a call with analysts, Hornbuckle complained about the “staggering” rise of insurance costs in the past few years.
This story neatly illustrates the crisis in cyber liability coverage. For years, companies have invested more in security insurance than in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Some large enterprises are responding to the increased costs by creating their own “captive carriers,” insurance providers that exist only to serve them. But that’s clearly not an option for small businesses, which are more likely to go without insurance altogether.
According to Andrew Bucci, VP of Sales at Amplified Insurance Partners, “It’s going to come to a point where some people may have to self-insure, which means that they don’t take a cyber policy out and they just cross their fingers they don’t have some sort of breach.” That’s a huge gamble for SMBs, since they could be driven to bankruptcy by a single security incident.
At Kolide, we’ve seen our cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years, and we got curious about:
- What’s driving the increases?
- Who really needs cybersecurity insurance?
- How can the average company reduce their premiums?
What we found was that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software.
Read the full blog to learn more about our findings.
When MGM Resorts suffered a $100 million hack in September, CEO Bill Hornbuckle wasn’t too worried about the lost revenue, because cyber insurance would cover the tab. “I can only imagine what next year’s bill will be,” he joked.
Weeks later, on a call with analysts, Hornbuckle complained about the “staggering” rise of insurance costs in the past few years.
This story neatly illustrates the crisis in cyber liability coverage. For years, companies have invested more in security insurance than in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Some large enterprises are responding to the increased costs by creating their own “captive carriers,” insurance providers that exist only to serve them. But that’s clearly not an option for small businesses, which are more likely to go without insurance altogether.
According to Andrew Bucci, VP of Sales at Amplified Insurance Partners, “It’s going to come to a point where some people may have to self-insure, which means that they don’t take a cyber policy out and they just cross their fingers they don’t have some sort of breach.” That’s a huge gamble for SMBs, since they could be driven to bankruptcy by a single security incident.
At Kolide, we’ve seen our cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years, and we got curious about:
- What’s driving the increases?
- Who really needs cybersecurity insurance?
- How can the average company reduce their premiums?
What we found was that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software.
Read the full blog to learn more about our findings.
All my computing devices, save one, have color displays. The last time I regularly used a computer without a color display was probably in the mid-1990s. The only exception is my e-reader, which—since the very first Kindle I bought—has been a black-and-white E Ink screen that excelled at the boring job of displaying text. But… what if an e-reader added color?
We’ve reached the point where E Ink technology—which is unlike normal display technology found in our phones and computers, but allows low-power reflective displays that work more like actual ink on paper—can actually display color decently and affordably. And so now I’ve spend the last few weeks with my first color e-reader, the $219 Kobo Libra Colour.
In theory, color adds a new dimension to the e-reader. Highlights can be color coded, and book covers finally appear in full color. This is especially fun when I turn off the reader and a boldly colored book cover, designed for maximum marketing appeal, appears on the device’s screen. Unfortunately, a moment later the device’s backlight turns off and the colors become muted unless the screen is in bright light.
I love e-readers, and for the last few years my e-reader of choice has been the Kobo Libra 2. It’s a small (7-inch diagonal) device that’s easy to hold, with physical page turn buttons. It’s a winner. And now, there’s one in color!
But the truth is, most of what I use an e-reader for is text on a page. Color isn’t really part of the equation. I spent some time reading a color comic book using the Libra Colour, and it worked—but it wasn’t fun. The screen is just too small to read comfortably, and the colors were muted, feeling more like I was reading on newsprint (or a very old comic book) than on a bright, modern iPad display.
You can read comics on the Kobo Libra Colour, but I wouldn’t recommend it.And the ugly truth is that as miraculous as it is that E Ink displays can do color, the Libra Colour’s screen is actually inferior to the screen on the Libra 2. Up close, it’s clear that there’s some sort of visible background texture on the Libra Colour (sort of a yellowish-gray wash) that reduces contrast. And when I cranked the brightness up to 100% to read in bright sunlight, it was clear that the Libra 2 was brighter and clearer than the Libra Colour.
It’s hard to see, but the Kobo Libra 2 screen (left) is brighter and offers higher contrast, while the screen of the Kobo Libra Colour (right) has a patterned background that reduces contrast.Physically, the Libra Colour is almost identical to the Libra 2. It’s a little thicker at the grip edge and there’s a different plastic texture on the back of the case (which I found more pleasant) and it’s a few grams lighter than the previous model. Unfortunately, it’s still got a recessed screen, meaning dust and hair can collect around the edges of the bezel. That’s a negative, but it makes it easy to find the edge of the display to slide your finger up and down to adjust brightness without fiddling with a more complex user interface. I’d still rather have a flush screen, though.
In terms of software, Kobo has seen fit to enable Dropbox support on the Libra Colour—it was previously only available on higher-end Kobos, not the Libra—and added support for Google Drive as well. This means it’s a lot easier to sideload books, comics, and random PDFs from your collection without having to attach the Kobo via USB-C. In practice, though, I found myself still using the Calibre app to sideload files to my Kobo unless I was really in a pinch, because Kobo’s own Dropbox import doesn’t “dress up” ePub files in any way, while Calibre has some nice plug-ins that convert generic ePubs to use some Kobo-specific extensions that improve the presentation of the books.
Color book covers are fine (when they’re in bright light), but is that enough? (Pictured: Sarah’s Kobo Clara Colour.)The Libra Colour is not a bad e-reader, but it feels like a misstep by Kobo. Color isn’t really very necessary for reading text, and the color display offers a warmer color temperature and worse contrast. All for a $40 higher list price—though at least cloud syncing isn’t being withheld from the Libra line anymore. I wouldn’t mind the move so much—I’m sure some people want to view color comics and PDFs and would be willing to put up with the small screen, and users of the optional Kobo Stylus 2 might enjoy having different ink colors for their markup—if Kobo kept a non-color model around at a lower price. But as I write this, the Libra 2 is not available from Kobo.
If you’re a casual reader of eBooks and are barely motivated to buy a dedicated e-reader at all, the $120 base-level Kindle ($20 less if you let Amazon stick ads on it) is probably good enough, though it doesn’t have a flush screen, isn’t waterproof, and has no page-turn buttons, which I consider essential for pleasurable reading. The $130 Kobo Clara BW is similar, and has similar drawbacks. (My friend Sarah Hendrica Bickerton upgraded to the $150 Kobo Clara Colour, which was released at the same time—and she had the same issues with the screen being dimmer and off-color that I saw.) The Kindle Paperwhite also doesn’t have buttons, but it’s got a flush screen and is slightly cheaper than the Libra—$150 with ads, $170 without.
(Reader, I am filled with despair at the current state of e-reader options. More on this soon.)
In the end: I don’t mind the Kobo Libra Colour. It definitely fills a niche. But adding $40 to the price and degrading the screen quality a bit, all in the name of nice-but-not-necessary color is really frustrating. The Libra 2 was my go-to recommendation for the discerning eBook reader; the Libra Colour might still take that crown, but it’s an all-around worse value than its predecessor, and that’s really a shame.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
None of us are as good at clocking deepfakes as we think we are. Even your mom, or your boss, or anyone in your IT department might not be able to tell the difference. We all think we’re clever enough to spot a fake, but in real life, people only catch voice clones about 50% of the time.
That makes us all extremely vulnerable to attacks. They might be seeking an immediate payout or working a more sophisticated social engineering attack. A friend of a friend was almost convinced her son had been arrested and was in jail before they realized that it didn’t add up.
But the good news is that we can be trained to look past our vulnerabilities and recognize a suspicious phone call, even if the voice sounds just like someone we trust. Kolide has a blog post all about it. It’s a frank and thorough exploration of what we should be worried about when it comes to audio deepfakes.
Speaking to Chance Miller at 9to5Mac, Apple explained the issue (patched in the recent iOS 17.5.1 update) that caused old photos to spontaneously appear in some users’ libraries:
Apple confirmed to me that iCloud Photos is not to be blamed for this. Instead, it all boils to the corrupt database entry that existed on the device’s file system itself.
According to Apple, the photos that did not fully delete from a user’s device were not synced to iCloud Photos. Those files were only on the device itself. However, the files could have persisted from one device to another when restoring from a backup, performing a device-to-device transfer, or when restoring from an iCloud Backup but not using iCloud Photos.
In the release notes for 17.5.1, Apple had attributed the resurrected photos to “database corruption.” This didn’t seem unreasonable—databases can be finicky and corruption is not uncommon—but it also didn’t go far enough into explaining the issue for those who were affected. The further clarification to Miller does hold water, though, especially in terms of how photos moved from device to device. (The company did also say that the single much reported story about a photo cropping up on a device that had been erased and given to someone else was false, which also makes sense: as John Gruber pointed out, it didn’t pass the sniff test.)
Attention has understandably focused on sensitive photos that have showed up in libraries, though I think that’s more of a human bias: what kind of picture are you going to notice popping up? (More to the point: which pictures are people likely deleting the most?)1
While it’s good that Apple has now (after several days of requests) clarified the issue, this does speak to a larger point: why is the company not more proactive in talking about these issues when they come up? For example, there still doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement of the issue that locked users out of their Apple IDs/iCloud accounts last month. Some of this is undoubtedly an issue of scale—even a problem that seems widespread might only account for a tiny fraction of Apple’s overall user base. But when issues do hit the broader press, it still seems like the company only responds some of the time—and though the complaints may subside when the immediate issue is resolved (even if silently), it does all contribute to the feeling that Apple’s devices and services are a bit of a black box.
- Personally, the pictures I delete the most are screenshots I take for writing pieces. Would I notice if one from several years ago suddenly popped up in my library? Probably not. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
There’s been a lot of buzz lately involving a bug in Photos that caused some deleted items to reappear in libraries, including some (apparent) misinformation that blew the entire story out of proportion. Is Apple’s “Secure Erase” feature truly insecure?
No, it’s not. Howard Oakley has the technical details about why:
As far as I can tell, claims made about securely erased devices recovering old images originate from a single post on Reddit, since deleted by the person who posted it. Although that brought a series of cogent responses pointing out how that isn’t possible, it was picked up and amplified elsewhere, under the title iOS 17.5 Bug May Also Resurface Deleted Photos on Wiped, Sold Devices, which is manifestly incorrect. Sadly, even those who should know better have piled in and reported that single, retracted claim as established fact.
Good information and a useful lesson about not believing everything you read on the Internet.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Do we multitask on our iPads? What AI uses do we actually find helpful? Plus, the email apps we use and whether we’ve experimented with cloning our voice.
Go to the podcast page.
Picture this. (Photo illustration by Joe Rosensteel)For the past year, pressure has really been ramping up on the tech industry to do stuff with AI. What “AI” actually means can vary, but usually refers to a large language model (LLM) chatbot that takes natural language input.
While Apple has tried very hard to remind everyone that all the stuff they do with machine learning and the neural engine counts too, the fact is that Apple is perceived as being behind, because it has no LLM chatbot of its own.
LLMs are artificial, but not really intelligent. They can be quite wrong, or simply malfunction. They are far better at conversational threads, and in understanding context than original-recipe voice assistants, like Siri. It was enough to spook Apple’s executives and lead them to begin a crash AI program.
OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google—you name it. It’s a land grab. Everyone is trying to find a way around smartphone platforms, search monopolies, data brokers, ad sales, SEO, publishers, photographers, stock footage…. pretty much everything. The urgency, the sheer sweatiness of tech companies to show their AI relevance is palpable.
Apple doesn’t want anyone to see them sweat, but at WWDC they’re going to have to break out the AI buzzwords and show where they fit into the current zeitgeist. Here’s what Apple can learn from the mistakes other companies are making when it comes to demonstrating AI prowess.
Summaries and slopDon’t show off summarizing a conversation. I know Mark Gurman suggests this might be a new feature, but every demo of it from other companies has gone over like a lead balloon. Summarization demos say one thing: “How can I more efficiently ignore the nuance and humanity of the people around me?” Also, demos of summaries are just plain boring.
Google I/O featured several instances of summarization that were not useful and borderline disrespectful. There was a theoretical conversation between a power couple and their prospective roofer. Google’s “helpful” summary said a quote was agreed to, but didn’t actually say what the quote actually was! The actual price—seems like a key element of a quote—didn’t appear until a follow-up question. It also omits all the nuance of the roofer’s interactions with the husband in the scenario. Who would trust that summary?
LLM summaries remove words, collapse context, kill tone, and neuter meaning. Busy technology executives eat these demos up, though!
Don’t demo things that snoop on a user’s calls or their device’s screen. At Google I/O, a demo displayed a fraud warning during a phone call. That means there was an AI model listening to the phone conversation. Even if that’s happening entirely on your device, it’s still unnerving that Google is now listening to the contents of my phone calls. The same goes for Microsoft’s Recall, another on-device feature that watches everything you do—so long as you forget Microsoft’s lousy track record securing people’s devices.
Under no circumstances should there be a chatbot in a conversation with real people that’s jumping in to offering to help coordinate times or issue reminders. Fortunately, Apple doesn’t ship a workplace chat platform, so we’re unlikely to get Google’s demo of “Chip,” the nosy virtual chat kibitzer shown at Google I/O. But I don’t want that bot in my iMessage threads, either.
No generative slop. Don’t show off AI-written poetry or book reports. If people ask for help writing a cover letter, show them an example of a cover letter. AI should point users to vetted and approved templates. (But there should be an AI story with Xcode at WWDC, or why even have it be about AI? It just needs to be respectful of developers’ needs, and actually useful in helping developers with their jobs.)
I think Apple already learned a valuable lesson about visual metaphor when they smashed instruments of human expression into a thin iPad, but just to reiterate: Don’t do that again.
Speaking of creation: Don’t show off images generated out of nothing but a prompt. Any generative elements should be augmented from source images or video. Show off altering aspect ratio on an image, object and lens flare removal, creating thumbnail images, sharpening, denoising, or focus effects.
Even then, keep it grounded to what a reasonable person would want to do with their photos. The Photos app doesn’t need to become Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, and it certainly doesn’t need to use any models with opaque, legally questionable sources to augment a photo of you smiling at the beach. It should still be that photo at the end of the day.
As for partner demos, I would recommend against demonstrations from companies that have AI models that allow people to make a logo or icon for their company or product without using an artist. Under no circumstances should Midjourney, Dall-E, or any of the other generators that scraped art and photos off the internet be used as a demo. That sends the wrong message, even if it is absolutely a use case that can be demoed to show how the neural engine makes creating a logo 90% faster than on Intel.
Don’t demo video generators. These mostly scare people and impress weirdos. “Look, her hands are boiling!” They’re basically a substitute for artifacting stock footage, and Apple is not a purveyor of artifacting stock footage.
AI video tools that handle retiming, color grading, detail recovery, and noise reduction are all acceptable, especially if they can lean on Apple’s multifaceted imaging pipeline, or can use Apple’s depth data as part of the dataset in processing the footage.
For example: Apple is interested in customers shooting Spatial Video, but there are technical shortcomings with the different lenses. Show us how data can be transferred from one eye to the other to help reduce artifacts, and increase resolution. Do an easy-to-use version of something akin to Ocula.
It is possible to preserve AI/ML as a tool without having AI/ML take over the output. There should always be a kernel of reality in every demo to ground it. It should apply to real life, and not trying to compete in the crowded hallucination market.
Hey, SiriNow that the lede is good and buried, let’s talk about Siri.
We’d all love a senior Apple exec to get on stage and issue a mea culpa before launching the new version, but it’s probably going to be something more like, “Millions of people use Siri every day, which is why we’re excited to announce Siri is even better than before.”
Unfortunately, Mark Gurman has kind of burst the bubble:
The big missing item here is a chatbot. Apple’s generative AI technology isn’t advanced enough for the company to release its own equivalent of ChatGPT or Gemini. Moreover, some of its top executives are allergic to the idea of Apple going in that direction. Chatbot mishaps have brought controversy to companies like Google, and they could hurt Apple’s reputation.
But the company knows consumers will demand such a feature, and so it’s teaming up with OpenAI to add the startup’s technology to iOS 18, the next version of the iPhone’s software. The companies are preparing a major announcement of their partnership at WWDC, with Sam Altman-led OpenAI now racing to ensure it has the capacity to support the influx of users later this year.
Baffling. I have no idea what that demo will look like, but I hope it isn’t “Showing results from ChatGPT on your iPhone” and there’s a big modal window of ChatGPT output.
It is worth noting that not everyone is enamored with ChatGPT, despite the enthusiasm over the features ChatGPT has.
Apple certainly won’t be demoing the imposter Scarlett Johansen voice from OpenAI at WWDC like OpenAI did at their spring event. You know, on account of them being sued, and all.
That same OpenAI spring presentation had perhaps one of the best demos of an LLM voice interface I’ve seen where one presenter spoke in English, and the other spoke in Italian, and ChatGPT 4o acted as live translator. That was a great demo, and translation is definitely one of the areas Apple is playing catch-up in already. It’s not rumored to be a feature, but it would be a good demo.
Google demoed integration with Google Workspace (Drive, Sheets, Gmail, Gchat (lol), etc.) and Apple should show that Siri can pull in information and context from Mail, Messages, Calendar, Photos, Reminders, etc. Ideally, it would be great to work with apps beyond that, but it needs to be able to plug into at least that data.
That means there needs to be a privacy interface for what apps Siri can access, especially if it is relaying it to a third party, and a privacy story about how Apple won’t be looking into every app on your device if you don’t want it to.
I fear that Apple simply won’t address anything but ChatGPT basics shoved into Siri windows. Which is possibly worse than continuing to work quietly on whatever the hell it is they’re working on. I’ll still run through some examples I’d love to see:
Show us someone asking a HomePod or Watch to do something, and instead of saying it can’t, it’ll execute it on your iPhone. Tell us the story about how Siri is secure and functional across devices under your Apple ID.
Demo someone telling Siri to play something on TV. Then asking their Apple Watch to “pause the TV”. Where Siri can know “the TV” is the one I started playing something on (and my iPhone is near based on Bluetooth), even if there are many TVs attached to my Apple ID.
Put on a little show of someone asking Siri where something is in the interface, or how they can do something. “Hey Siri, where are my saved passwords?” It whisks the person right to the Passwords section of Settings. “Hey Siri, I turned down the brightness all the way but it’s still too bright, what can I do?” and it surfaces the Reduce Whitepoint control. Conversationally, “How can I only turn on Reduce Whitepoint late at night?” and it offers a Shortcut based around the sleep and wake-up times.
Demo someone using new Siri with CarPlay, an essential application of Siri, where someone can conversationally talk to Siri to “Play ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive'” and then follow that up with “Play the rest of the album” and it’ll queue up the tracks after instead of doing something completely random like it does now.
Absolutely demo someone pausing music on their Mac, and telling their HomePod to “play what I was last listening to” and it can go resume playback on the HomePod exactly as if you had just hit play on your Mac.
Demo Siri being able to understand what’s currently on-screen when asked. “Hey Siri, who is the actor in this video?” Then conversationally follow that up with “What have I seen them in recently?” Where it could look through what was recently watched through the TV app and check that against the roles that actor has played. That’s not putting anyone out of a job (Well, except Casey. Sorry, buddy.)
Above all else, demo to the audience that when Siri doesn’t know what to do, it’ll ask. Show us a graceful failure state that reassures people how Apple can behave responsibly.
Let me illustrate what not to do with a recent interaction I had with Current Siri:
Me: “Play the soundtrack for The Last Starfighter“
Siri: “Here’s The Last Starfighter“
[Opens TV app on iOS and starts playing The Last Starfighter from my video library.]
Me: “Play The Last Starfighter soundtrack.”
Siri: “Here’s Dan + Shay”
[Music app starts playnig Dan + Shay “Alone Together”.]
Me: “Play The Last Starfighter Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.”
Siri: “Here’s The Last Starfighter by Craig Safan.”
It seems, however, that nothing is really rumored along these lines. Oh well, guess, I’ll listen to some more Dan + Shay!
Ethics? Anyone?A very troubling aspect of these rumors is Apple partnering with OpenAI. They didn’t ethically buy rights to use information to train their models, just like they didn’t take Scarlett Johansen’s no for an answer. They’re in active lawsuits with various media companies.
Even companies that have struck a deal with OpenAI—like Stack Overflow, and Reddit—are getting bought off after their sites were already being scraped. Users, who generated all the value in the site, can’t even delete their posts in protest.
Is Apple going to endorse OpenAI by giving them a thumbs up and slotting them into their next operating system releases without comment? They absolutely shouldn’t show anyone from OpenAI in their WWDC presentation, especially not Sam Altman.
There’s an easy way to draw a parallel to Google. Companies sue Google all the time over rights, and Apple still includes Google.
Of course, they are taking money from Google to be the default search engine on iOS, and then trying to have Safari insert Spotlight suggestions to pretend there’s a privacy angle. That Google deal now means that the default search will go through Google’s AI Overview. So Apple is already going to endorse Google’s approach to AI too, even if they don’t strike a deal for anything more.
And let’s not forget the ethics of Apple’s climate pledge. There should be a point in the WWDC keynote where Apple communicates how they can harness AI and still stay on target for their climate goals. That probably seems like a small thing, but people are getting pretty hand-wavy about maintaining their commitments while also putting their models to use.
Regardless of what happens, I suspect there will be plenty of disappointment and outrage to go around in the aftermath of WWDC. These are the times we live in. I just hope Apple takes some lessons from that thing with the hydraulic press and the iPad and doesn’t step in it too badly, just to show that they’re keeping up with the AI hype from the bozos of the tech world.
It’s kind of hard to believe today, given how wildly successful the iPhone has been, but in the product’s early days there was only a single iPhone model for sale. It wasn’t until ten years ago, in 2014, that Apple introduced two different iPhone models, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. But that opened the floodgates, and Apple has spent the last ten years trying to find the right combination of new iPhone models to maximize the money it makes from its most important product.
If reports are true, next year Apple’s going to be switching things up again, dropping the iPhone Plus for a dramatic new model. After the discontinuation if the iPhone Mini after two years and the (apparent) death of the iPhone Plus after three, what does Apple have up its sleeve for 2025?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The Watcher is watching with a Vision Pro.
Today Marvel and ILM dropped the trailer for the forthcoming “What If?” immersive story, which was just announced a couple of weeks ago, and (surprise!) is launching next Wednesday in the visionOS App Store as a free app.
Marvel and ILM say the immersive story is about an hour long, and is directly connected to the “What If?” animated series on Disney+, which itself is a multiversal riff on various Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. (Lest you think that this multiverse stuff is new, “What If?” is based on a comic that I absolutely devoured when I was a kid. I still have my issue #1 in a box—what if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?—not too far from where I’m typing this.)
The story will feature the cosmic being The Watcher asking you, the Vision Pro user, for help in facing off with dangerous “variants,” alternate-universe versions of various Marvel characters. Sorcerer Supreme Wong will instruct players on how to cast spells (presumably with the Vision Pro’s hand tracking features) and use the Infinity Stones. Versions of characters such as Thanos, Hela, the Collector, and Red Guardian will appear.
Marvel and ILM describe the app as including both full virtual environments as well as mixed-reality scenarios which involve the real world around players. It sounds very much like an interesting mash-up of interactive and animated elements. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the “What If?” animation style translates into 3-D. I guess my wait will be over in a week!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Myke returns to the show to give his personal iPad Pro review, and we discuss Apple’s accessibility announcements, worrying Apple AI reports, and some mystifying rumors about future iPhones for this year and next.
Go to the podcast page.
Now, don’t get offended, but–you aren’t as good at clocking deepfakes as you think you are.
And it’s not just you–nobody’s that good at it. Not your mom, or your boss, or anyone in your IT department.
To make matters worse, you probably think you can spot a fake. After all, you see weird AI-generated videos of celebrities on social media and they give you that uncanny valley tingle. But it’s a different ballgame when all you’ve got to go on is a voice.
In real life, people only catch voice clones about 50% of the time. You might as well flip a coin.
And that makes us extremely vulnerable to attacks.
In the “classic” voice clone scam, the caller is after an immediate payout (“Hi it’s me, your boss. Wire a bunch of company money to this account ASAP”). Then there are the more complex social engineering attacks, where a phone call is just the entryway to break into a company’s systems and steal data or plant malware (that’s what happened in the MGM attack, albeit without the use of AI).
As more and more hackers use voice cloning in social engineering attacks, deepfakes are becoming such a hot-button issue that it’s hard to tell the fear-mongering (for instance, it definitely takes more than three seconds of audio to clone a voice) from the actual risk.
To disentangle the true risks from the exaggerations, we need to answer some basic questions:
- How hard is it to deepfake someone’s voice?
- How do hackers use voice clones to attack companies?
- And how do we guard ourselves against this… attack of the clones?
Like a lot of modern technologies, deepfake attacks actually exploit some deep-seated fears. Fears like, “your boss is mad at you.” These anxieties have been used by social engineers since the dawn of the scam, and voice clones add a shiny new boost to their tactics.
But the good news is that we can be trained to look past those fears and recognize a suspicious phone call–even if the voice sounds just like someone we trust.
If you want to learn more about our findings, read our piece on the Kolide blog. It’s a frank and thorough exploration of what we should be worried about when it comes to audio deepfakes.
Why the “great rebundling” isn’t the return of the cable bundle; recalibrating how talent is paid for streaming shows; Paramount twists in the wind; Spulu gets a real name; the NFL makes a deal with Netflix; and Diamond Sports meets with skepticism.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
You might have heard about the September 2023 MGM ransomware attack. But beyond the broken slot machines and other anecdotes is the fact that it’s an example of an emerging style of attack that we’ll certainly be seeing more of.
The dominant narrative has been that a single phone call hacked MGM, but that help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols. And there’s another factor that could have stopped the hackers in their tracks: it’s all about the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what Kolide learned when they researched the MGM hack (like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story), check out the Kolide Blog.
Yet another incredible story on Cabel Sasser’s blog, this one about a supposedly vintage Apple Employee badge:
Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially from one of the first ten employees.
How do you cover for a forged document? More forged documents!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Our Apple Watch interaction frequency, thoughts on Spotify’s “Daylists” and our ideal playlist name, interest in Google’s AI features at Google I/O, and essential travel tech for “One Bag Travel.”
Go to the podcast page.
Vision Pro’s live captions convert spoken words to text onscreen.This year’s accessibility feature preview from Apple, timed to get a one-day jump on the annual celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, continues last year’s expansion beyond the traditional sight, sound, and physical/motor categories. And without saying so explicitly, Apple seems to have teased the kinds of advances that AI and machine learning could bring to the company’s overall OS offerings.
Tell your phone what to doUse a vocal shortcut to access an app or a feature, and get an alert onscreen to let you know it’s been heard.Last year, Apple added speech as a major accessibility category, allowing someone to let their device speak on their behalf with Personal Voice and Live Speech. This year, new tools emphasize controlling the device itself with speech, even if speech is limited or difficult to understand.
Vocal Shortcuts will let you turn an utterance – it could be a word or phrase or even a saved vocalization – into a command that an iOS device will understand. Switch Control already recognizes utterances, like a “P” sound, an “F”, a “CH” or other letter or combination that speakers without fuller speech capability can make. With Switch Control, the sound is turned into a tap, a swipe, or other interface action. Vocal Shortcuts is intended to expand that metaphor to more specific tasks, including running a shortcut, opening a specific app, launching Control Center, and more.
Listen for Atypical Speech captures language that is recognizable as speech but might not be easy to understand. For years, Siri hasn’t done a great job at recognizing accented speech, and it’s worth speculating about how this focus on atypical speech could be applied to the wider voice recognition landscape in all of Apple’s OSes.
Personal Voice, an existing feature that people at risk of losing the ability to speak can use to create a synthetic version of their own voice, will expand to more languages, including Mandarin Chinese.
More access behind the wheelCarPlay will support Sound Recognition, with alerts tied to car horns, sirens and other traffic-related sounds. For the first time I can remember, Apple is bringing accessibility-specific features to CarPlay and naming them. The speech focus is apparent here, too, as CarPlay gets Voice Control – a step beyond using Siri to command CarPlay apps; Voice Control lets you speak interface actions, like “swipe” or “tap” while using CarPlay.
Sound Recognition for iOS flashes an alert when your phone hears a chosen noise, like a smoke alarm, a baby crying, or water running. That’s helpful if you can’t hear these sounds in your environment. The new CarPlay version of Sound Recognition will focus on traffic sounds, like emergency vehicles or vehicle horns, and get the driver’s attention via the car’s display. Then, there are visual enhancements, like color filters, to make the CarPlay interface easier to customize for your visual needs.
A new feature for passengers who are subject to motion sickness when using their phone in the car will place a set of dots onscreen. They form the equivalent of a horizon, so you can keep using the phone without feeling sick.
The eyes have itEye tracking is a marquee Vision Pro feature, and it’s now more fully integrated into iPadOS. Developers can currently use included eye-tracking APIs to make hardware accessories compatible with the iPad. But those special-purpose devices – often head-mounted pointers or switches – are expensive. This year, support is coming at the system level, meaning someone who can’t touch the screen can use eye tracking to control the iPad directly.
Within the Assistive Touch interface, there will also be a virtual trackpad feature for iPad users who don’t have a physical one but want to use Assistive Touch gestures. Just like support for physical mice and trackpads, could support for a virtual trackpad find its way to mainstream parts of iPadOS – this year or in the future?
More for Magnifier to doMagnifier’s new reader feature can display text in the font and color you choose.When Apple converted Magnifier from an iOS feature into a full-fledged app, it began adding seemingly disconnected accessibility enhancements to it, like People Detection and Door Detection. They’re both great features, but Magnifier isn’t necessarily the most intuitive place for them.
More logical is this year’s addition of a reader mode for blind or visually impaired users. Capture a document (like a restaurant menu or a piece of mail) with Magnifier and invoke the reader mode to have the text formatted in an easy-to-read layout that uses your preferred font and/or color. It feels a lot like Reader mode in Safari, and that’s a good thing.
More Vision Pro accessibilityThe Vision Pro itself will gain new accessibility features, including systemwide live captions and movable captions that are specifically applied to Apple’s immersive video content. Apple also promises new Vision Pro support for cochlear implants and other hearing devices. For low-vision users, visionOS fills in a few display options that were missing from version 1.0, including Smart Invert Colors.
Something for everyone?Most of what’s been previewed for accessibility this year is quite modern – even the tools that build on past features are based on relatively new categories, like speech. Enhancements to CarPlay and Vision Pro prove that the company continues to bring accessibility along when it innovates for the user base as a whole. Will we see enhancements to accessibility standbys like VoiceOver, especially on the Mac, where not much has changed in recent years? Perhaps, but probably not until beta time this summer.
The consensus about the new iPad Pro is in: the hardware is more powerful and impressive than ever, but it’s still largely hampered by software that just hasn’t managed to keep up.
Such has been the story of the iPad Pro almost since its inception almost nine years ago, and despite moves that would seem to augur good things for the platform—like forking iPadOS off from iOS—Apple hasn’t exactly done a bang-up job of assuaging users about its commitment to making the tablet a full-fledged citizen of its lineup.
But zooming out there’s a larger question at play here: what are the long term prospects of the iPad? Once heralded the future of computing, the iPad seems to have fallen short of that promise and, in the process, become Apple’s most at-risk product line. And compared to the rest of Apple’s offerings, the iPad increasingly looks like it may be the one left standing when the music stops.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
I linked to this in my iPad Pro review, but in case you missed that, Federico Viticci has done everyone who writes about iPadOS a service and written a detailed account of what we mean when we say “the iPad hardware is let down by its software”:
In our community, we often hear about the issues of iPadOS and the obstacles people like me run into when working on the platform, but I’ve been guilty in the past of taking context for granted and assuming that you, dear reader, also know precisely what I’m talking about.
Today, I will rectify that. Instead of reviewing the new iPad Pro, I took the time to put together a list of all the common problems I’ve run into over the past…checks notes…12 years of working on the iPad, before its operating system was even called iPadOS.
I’ve been stunned to see some reactions to our criticism of iPadOS this past week suggest that, somehow, people like Federico and myself just don’t “get” the iPad. We’ve spent years using the iPad and pushing what it can do. We get it all too well.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Steve Troughton-Smith details all the ways iPadOS lacks… and not for the first time:
You can summarize every iPad review for the past decade: iPad hardware is writing checks that its OS simply can’t cash. iPad silicon has so rapidly outgrown the limitations of the software that it has had ample time to break out and do three generational laps through the entire Mac lineup and back since the last time I wrote about it, and yet little has meaningfully improved about the iPad experience.
A solid list from a developer who cares very much about the iPad.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The new iPad Pro is here, and Jason is joined by Federico Viticci to discuss the new model, Jason’s review, and the limitations of iPadOS. Stephen Hackett also joins the show not to crush some creative dreams, but to answer your questions.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s hardware and chip teams are really at the top of their game. The new M4 iPad Pro is a sleek slab of concentrated computing power, tucked behind a spectacular OLED display. It arrives with a bundle of impressively updated accessories, which is appropriate given that the iPad is partially defined by its ergonomic adaptability.
As has seemingly been the case since the introduction of the first iPad Pro, the challenge is squaring the amazing hardware with the (relatively, compared to macOS) limited flexibility of iPadOS and its library of apps. iPadOS has improved in numerous areas in the past few years, but it’s hard to come close to the speed at which Apple’s hardware designs seem to move.
This all leaves 2024’s modern iPad Pro in a very familiar place: It is a remarkable piece of hardware that can handle pretty much any task it’s capable of executing without breaking a sweat, and thanks to its new display, it’ll look great doing it. But it’s let down by iPadOS limitations (and more than a decade of slow-paced iPad development) that preclude it from being the shining star of Apple’s productivity line-up that it should probably be.
A familiar design, refined
Apple calls the M4 iPad Pro an “all-new design,” and I’m sure its internals have changed dramatically, but from the outside it really does just look like a thinner version of the 2018-era design. It’s a good design that didn’t really need changing for change’s sake, as the iPad is already pretty far down the path of finding its ideal shape: a rounded glass rectangle with bezels big enough to grab with both hands without interfering with the touch-based interface.
Apple also boasts about the thinness of the device; I reviewed the 13-inch unit that measures in at 5.1mm, making it Apple’s thinnest product ever. But did the iPad Pro really need to be thinner? I don’t really think so. It could sure stand to be lighter, though, and the M4 model is only about 85 percent of the weight of its predecessor—a noticeable improvement. The larger iPad Pro has always been a bit awkward to hold, owing to that weight being spread out over a large surface area. It’s less awkward to hold in one hand now.
All the while, Apple has kept to its commitment to an ideal iPad battery life of around 10 hours. That commitment informs every other choice Apple makes about the iPad, in terms of the chip’s power efficiency and the size of the battery. I get the sense that the M4’s improved efficiency was enough that Apple was able to get away with reducing the physical size of the iPad Pro’s battery, thereby reducing weight while maintaining that benchmark battery life. I’m sure some people would prefer a heavier iPad with much longer battery life, but I think Apple made the right decision here.
Apple’s conservative approach to altering the iPad Pro’s design means that it’s bypassed some opportunities to expand the device’s connectivity. There’s still a single USB/Thunderbolt 4 port, which is probably plenty, but it does mean that you can’t connect an external device and charge the iPad unless you use a powered dock or are using a plugged-in Magic Keyboard. The magnetic Smart Connector port on the back seems pretty much the same, though it apparently supports faster charging speeds via the Magic Keyboard. The 12MP rear-facing camera is similarly unchanged, though Apple has removed its ultrawide companion (which I never, ever used—so no great loss).
In fact, the major physical change to the iPad Pro’s exterior is one that was prefigured by the release of the 10th-generation iPad in 2022: the FaceTime camera has been relocated to the horizontal side of the device. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s absolutely the right decision. I rarely use my iPad in vertical orientation, and it’s a lot harder to cover the camera with my thumb this way. (This goes for the Face ID sensor, too.)
There’s one other modest physical change, namely that Apple has officially left the physical SIM card era behind for cellular models. It’s eSIMs all the way down now. I’m okay with it.
OLED arrives on the iPadAs a longtime user of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, I’ve been spoiled the last few years by its Liquid Retina XDR display. It was good, but it added weight and thickness, and even its 2500 individual dimming zones couldn’t match the precision that an OLED display can bring. Apple has outdone itself with the new Ultra Retina XDR display, powered by a tandem OLED panel that offers dramatic contrasts and bright colors.
A longtime complaint users had about the Liquid Retina XDR is that with “only” a few thousand dimming zones, areas of an image with large amounts of contrast would display “blooming,” the appearance of a glow around a white point caused by the entire backlight for that area lighting up to represent the light pixels. OLED, of course, lights itself—one pixel per pixel—meaning that blooming is a thing of the past. I even noticed contrast improvements in the standard iPad user interface, where blacks seemed blacker, for example with black text on a white background.
I also watched all sorts of HDR content on the iPad Pro, including both movies and TV shows, and they looked uniformly great. The contrast will even be greater for those users who weren’t spoiled by the Liquid Retina XDR on the larger iPad Pro models, because it’s a huge leap from a more traditionally backlit display. If you want the ultimate handheld personal theater and are willing to pay for it, the iPad Pro will deliver.
While I didn’t test an iPad Pro with the new glare-reducing nanotexture option offered by Apple, I did get to use one briefly and I can offer this warning: You should only choose this option (available on high-end models only) if you regularly do work in extremely bright conditions and are willing to sacrifice some of the finer detail and contrast of the OLED display. Basically, if you don’t know that you’re that person, don’t do it.
An unexpected M4 debutPerhaps the biggest shock out of the announcement of this iPad Pro is that it also marks the release of the first chip in Apple’s next-generation Mac chip family, the M4. Apple has some complicated reasons to push its chips forward so quickly, but the result is our first glimpse of the processor that will be powering all sorts of Macs in the near future, and it’s pretty impressive.
A MacBook Air and iPad Pro share a whole lot of technology, but they’re different devices in different enclosures running different operating systems. So it’s hard to compare them like to like, though I’ll point out that Geekbench tests of the M2 iPad Pro and M2 MacBook Air came within a few percentage points of one another.
The M4 chip now maxes out at 10 CPU cores, up from eight in previous base M chips; Apple has added two power-sipping efficiency cores to the party. The two lower-end iPad Pro configurations are nine-core models with only three performance cores; the iPad Pro I tested was a 1TB model with the full boat of M4 features, as well as 16GB of RAM.
To be clear, Apple’s choices in configuring the M4 iPad Pro mean that not every iPad is created equal. The 256GB and 512GB models have just those three performance CPU cores as well as only 8GB of RAM, so if you think you might push the iPad Pro to its limits, whether it’s with CPU intensive tasks or just using lots of RAM, you may want to consider increasing the storage to reap the included benefits. I don’t have a problem with Apple segmenting the product line like this; people with those extra CPU and RAM needs are pretty likely to also have greater storage needs. But I do wish Apple would call out the differences even more prominently, given that there are an increasing number of them.
Regarding the M4 as a whole, the early returns are encouraging. The M4 single-core score was 24% higher than an M3 MacBook Air and 45% faster than the M2 iPad Pro. In multi-core operations, the 10-core M4 bested an eight-core M3 by 22%, and the eight-core M2 iPad Pro by 50%.
The M4 appears to have a similar GPU architecture to the M3, adding support for features such as hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing to the iPad for the first time. The M4’s Geekbench Metal score was 13% faster than the M3 MacBook Air and 18% faster than the M2 iPad Pro.
Essentially, this is the most powerful iPad ever by a long shot, and the M4 architecture should also serve the Mac well whenever it gets there. Apple’s pace of M-series chip development, which advances at least one aspect of the chip’s components every year, remains impressive.
Pencil, Keyboard, and FolioYep, the iPad is thinner than the Apple Pencil Pro.Isn’t the iPad all about the accessories? Being able to choose to work with an Apple Pencil or pop the device into a Magic Keyboard for laptop-like work—and then drop it all and let it become a light touch tablet again—is what makes the iPad unlike any other product in the Apple universe.
The physical redesign of the M4 iPad Pro may be subtle, but it’s substantial enough that it’s broken compatibility with previous models. If you buy a new iPad Pro and have a previous-generation model, you’ll need to buy a new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro (unless you bought last year’s USB-C Apple Pencil, which also works with these models).
I’m not the ideal reviewer for the Apple Pencil Pro, since I’m not much of an artist and my use of the Apple Pencil is limited to editing podcasts using Ferrite Recording Studio. I will say that I appreciate Apple’s approach to the pencil’s haptic feedback, which dramatically improves the double-tap gesture and also enhances the new squeeze gesture that brings up a contextual menu. I’m impressed with Apple’s standard array of PencilKit features for the Pencil Pro, which include a radial undo command that lets you step back and forth between edits without taking your hand off the pencil. (You can even modify the squeeze gesture so it triggers a Shortcut!)
The new Magic Keyboard is a solid evolution.Pencils may not be my strong point, but keyboards are definitely more my thing. The new Magic Keyboard is an improvement over the original model, introduced in 2020, in numerous ways. Perhaps the biggest improvement is the addition of a full function row, which allowed me to tweak display brightness, adjust volume, control media playback, and a whole lot more, all with one keypress.
The trackpad itself has also gotten larger, and follows Apple’s other trackpads in becoming a pressure-sensitive area that uses a haptic to inform you that you’ve clicked. The trackpad is good and the clicks feel natural, and Apple has sprinkled a few other haptic easter eggs into the iPadOS UI—reordering the songs in Music’s Up Next queue will provide a brief bit of haptic feedback as you slide a track around, as will longpressing on an item.
There’s also a big design change: the keyboard plane of the Magic Keyboard is now clad in color-matched aluminum (either silver or Space Black), making it feel a bit more like one of Apple’s laptops. The outsides of the case are still the rubbery material found in the last model, with the Space Black in a very dark gray and the silver model getting a white exterior. I think the white color is a mistake, but clearly Apple’s color czars and I have a strong difference of opinion about how color is deployed (or not) on Apple devices.
The new Magic Keyboard seems great. I do think it’s too expensive, at $349 ($299 for the 11-inch model), and the 11-inch model’s keys still feel too cramped to me, though I sure do like the size of that 11-inch model folded up like a laptop. Takes me back to my 11-inch MacBook Air days. I’m also a little concerned about the durability of the thing; there’s a somewhat awkward area where the rubber backing is attached to the metal base, and I am a bit worried that it might not wear very well.
There’s also no way to adjust the keyboard brightness—and yes, the Magic Keyboard has always had backlighting!—from the keyboard, or from Control Center. I usually leave my keyboard dark, mostly because I can’t be bothered to dig into Settings in order to adjust it.
In another big win for fans of the Magic Keyboard, this new model is lighter than its predecessor. My 13-inch Magic Keyboard weighs 667 grams, 38g down from the old model. Combine that with the weight drop in the iPad itself and the iPad-and-keyboard combination is only about 20 grams heavier than my MacBook Air. And I can’t rip the keyboard off my MacBook Air to save weight.
Finally, a quick note about the unsung hero of the iPad accessory world, the iPad Smart Folio. There are new models for the new iPad Pros, and they fold slightly differently—one of the three zones of the trifold design is a lot smaller. The result is a major win if you use the Smart Folio to prop the iPad upright, as there are now multiple magnetic “stops” you can use to adjust the angle from straight up and down to more of an artful lean. Unfortunately, if you use the Smart Folio to lay the iPad mostly flat with a slight downward incline—which I do, frequently—you may be disappointed to discover that the iPad now sits much lower and flatter in this configuration. This change will probably make more people happy than sad, but I’m in the sad camp on this one.
The state of iPadOSOne of my criticisms of the trajectory of the iPad in recent years has been that it’s just not advancing fast enough, while macOS has been revived with Apple silicon. As a result, I’ve begun traveling with a MacBook Air again. I realize that in various articles and on various podcasts, many people have lost track of the long, long thread of the experiences of those of us who have tried very hard to use the iPad Pro to get our jobs done for years now—and it’s true, you shouldn’t need to follow a ream of footnotes to get a quick summary of the current state of affairs.
I recommend Federico Viticci’s detailed summary of his iPadOS frustrations, posted simultaneously with this article. I’m going to mention some of my issues below, but Federico’s article goes into incredible depth with his own iPadOS journey.
In using the iPad Pro exclusively in advance of this article, I got to appreciate several of the ways that iPadOS has progressed in the last few years. When you consider the added support for external storage devices, the introduction of (and updates to) Stage Manager, and the release of Final Cut and Logic for the iPad, the iPad Pro is in a much better place than it was five years ago. In my four days of using just the iPad Pro, I found that I could do my work pretty well. Most of what I wanted to do, the device provided. In a few areas, I had to spend extra time due to limitations of the operating system or various iPad apps. And of course, there are some areas where the iPad simply won’t go—or at least, where Apple refuses to take it.
My workflow for building charts like the one that appears in my M4 processor section involves using Numbers to input test data and generate a chart. I export the result as a PDF, which I bring into Affinity Designer to tweak. I was able to get that entire workflow to work, eventually, but the process showed the pair of issues that continue to limit the iPad: individual apps and the OS itself.
Despite several claimed innovations, iPadOS remains essentially stupid when it comes to fonts. Instead of allowing users to, you know, add fonts, instead they’re encouraged to download “font apps” (which, at least on my iPad, linked to a nonexistent corner of the App Store), or use apps that allow you to sideload fonts inside them. My charts use a font, Proxima Nova, that doesn’t appear on the iPad, so I needed to install it. In macOS, this takes a double-click in Finder and then another click in Font Book, the Mac’s font manager app. On iPadOS, I kept getting the runaround. Adobe Creative Cloud said it could install the font, but failed to install most of it. Installing via the old-school method of using a Profile download also failed. I did eventually manage to load the font via Affinity Designer’s own font loading feature. It worked—but it took me 25 minutes to figure it out. This is painfully representative of the iPad experience.
But I can’t lay this all on iPadOS. Using Affinity Designer, an incredibly powerful app, was also frustrating—mostly because the app differs from its Mac version in a bunch of basic ways that forced me to act as a detective, trying to ferret out the features that would allow me to rebuild my workflow. Similarly, Numbers behaves mostly like its macOS version—except in the ways where it doesn’t. Due to the lack of a menu bar, commands are sometimes in very weird and unexpected places. I also am a bit baffled by the idea that Numbers defaults to a preview mode that lets me click around, but not actually edit the file. But these are different platforms, and while I always hope to leverage my familiarity with the Mac versions, sometimes that is just not possible.
I do want to mention the lengths I’ve gone to in attempting to use the iPad as a travel podcast rig. Yes, podcasting is a niche—but arent most professional workflows built out of a bunch of specific different niches? Professional tools provide the flexibility to get the needed work done.
In my particular niche, things have actually gotten way better in one area—thanks not to Apple but to Zoom, which has added cloud-based recordings of individual audio tracks from a call, providing the vital backup recordings I need to edit podcasts. And they’re even downloadable right to an iPad, where I can take advantage of Safari’s Downloads feature to save them to my device. I recorded my podcast, edited it on the iPad with the Apple Pencil Pro, and uploaded it to my server via a 5G connection from the back seat of a car headed down the interstate. Pretty great, right?
Unfortunately, the iPadOS audio subsystem remains embarrassingly primitive. In my particular instance, I’d like to be able to record my microphone audio using one app while talking on a Zoom call separately, but iPadOS isn’t built to do that. To record a podcast this weekend, I traveled with a microphone with dual audio outputs and an external audio recorder, so I could use USB to talk on Zoom while using XLR to record my audio directly to an SD card. (When everything was done, I was able to use Files to copy the file right from the SD card, which was once impossible.)
This has more mainstream knock-on effects. On my Mac, I can play songs in Music and click on videos on social media and both streams just keep on playing. On iPadOS, the initiation of any alternate media stream causes the currently playing stream to pause. iOS and iPadOS have had 17 years to address this, and it’s still comically bad.
There’s also no concept of true background tasks. Like the inane audio infrastructure, this shows the legacy of the iPad being built from assumptions made about the iPhone. The iPhone, being a very small mobile device with a tiny battery and very little RAM, was designed to run one app at a time. Over the years, multitasking has made things a little more flexible, but on today’s 1TB iPad Pro with 16GB of RAM you can’t export video from Final Cut Pro in the background.
Or consider the concept of background utilities, which perform innumerable helpful tasks on macOS. They’re banned on iPadOS, meaning there’s no way to use an alternative launcher like LaunchBar, or a file watcher like Hazel, or a clipboard manager, or a configurable launcher like the Stream Deck. You can’t even leverage the existing Shortcuts automation system by setting keyboard shortcuts! These sorts of functions are enormous productivity boosters, and while they might not make sense for the iPhone (and even that’s arguable), they absolutely make sense for the iPad.
Professionals multitask. Professional tools should, too. This is an area where the iPad Pro fails its users.
I will not travel without my iPad. I wouldn’t want to live without my iPad. It’s my device for reading and social media and games. Its optional built-in cellular connectivity is a game changer (that should really come to the Mac). I have such an affinity for my iPad that I have wanted to integrate it into as much of my life as possible. And for an increasing number of tasks, I can. But for many others, I am eternally bumping up against the severe limitations of the platform.
I am often told that the iPad is just a media tablet, so why do I get so worked up about this issue? First, I don’t consider it just a media tablet. Second, why does Apple sell a keyboard and trackpad for it if it’s just a media tablet? Third, why can you spend upwards of $2000 on something that’s just a media tablet? Fourth, why is something that’s just a media tablet called “pro”?
Apple needs to decide what it wants to do with iPadOS for professional users. If it can identify some areas where there are big wins for pros and execute those changes, that would be wonderful. But it needs to pick up the pace.
The iPad hardware has shown that a light-and-thin touch tablet that can also be popped into a keyboard case to become a laptop is a powerful combination. That’s why the iPad fits really well into some people’s lives, including mine. So is the iPad the future of convertible devices in Apple’s ecosystem? Is it some future evolution the Mac? Is it some combination thereof?
I’ve spent a lot of space recently suggesting that Apple might want to back off on intense iPadOS development, ship a macOS virtual machine for the iPad Pro, and call it a day. Let me be clear: I would prefer to see iPadOS grow and develop into its own unique but functional platform that can fulfill the needs of disparate pro user bases. I have suggested macOS virtualization more out of a sense of despair, borne out of the fact that the iPad’s hardware is certainly capable of performing the task and that its software is eternally too late and a dollar too short.
Back where we startedThe original iPad Pro was great. The 2018 iPad Pro was great. The new iPad Pro is great. It’s got a fast processor, a gorgeous OLED display, and a collection of accessories that are (mostly) improved from the previous generation.
The iPad Pro fits in some places better than any other device. It’s supremely portable and flexible. The Apple Pencil makes it a game changer for artists and people who mark up PDFs all day. The Magic Keyboard can transform it into a MacBook Air-class laptop with the snap of a magnet—and will relinquish it back to its natural state with one simple gesture.
The design and power make me love the iPad Pro more than perhaps any other Apple product I own. This one’s even better. This is all good stuff. Unfortunately, I have to end this review the same way I’ve ended almost every iPad Pro review I’ve written: I wish iPadOS loved the iPad Pro as much as I do. We continue to live in a world where Apple’s most flexible, powerful, groundbreaking piece of hardware is let down by an inflexible, weak, and slow-to-be-upgraded operating system. “Unfortunately, the hardware has outpaced the maturity of the operating system and app ecosystem” is a thing I wrote nearly nine years ago, and while everything has evolved since then, it’s still true.
If the iPad Pro works for you, you won’t be disappointed by this one. I just wish more people could fit in that category.
The September 2023 MGM hack quickly became one of the most notorious ransomware attacks in recent memory. Journalists and cybersecurity experts rushed to report on the broken slot machines, angry hotel guests, and the fateful phishing call to MGM’s help desk that started it all.
And, like a slick magic trick, the public’s attention was drawn in the wrong direction. Now, months later, we’re still missing something critical about the MGM hack. That’s because, for many of the most important questions about the breach, the popular answers are either incomplete or inaccurate. Those include: who hacked MGM, what tactics they used to breach the system, and how security teams can protect themselves against similar attacks.
Why is that a problem? Because it lets us write off the MGM hack as a one-off story, instead of an example of an emerging style of attack that we’ll certainly be seeing more of. And that leaves companies and security teams unprepared.
Who hacked MGM? Plenty of news stories have confidently blamed the MGM attack on either the Scattered Spider or ALPHV hacking group, but the truth is still murky, and likely involves a dangerous team up between different groups, each bringing their own expertise to the table.
Their attacks first use fluent English social engineering skills to get onto networks, where they then deploy sophisticated ransomware that quickly establishes persistence across multiple systems.
What tactics did they use? The dominant narrative has been that “a single phone call hacked MGM.” A phone vishing attack to MGM’s IT help desk is what started the hack, but there’s much more to it than that. The real issue is that this help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols, and probably wasn’t doing anything “wrong” when they gave the bad actors access to a super administrator account.
How can security teams protect themselves? Cybersecurity experts have centered most of their advice on user ID verification. But while it’s true that MGM’s help desk needed better ways of verifying employee identity, there’s another factor that should have stopped the hackers in their tracks.
That’s where you need to focus your attention. In fact, if you just focus your vision , you’ll find you’re already staring at the security story the pros have been missing.
It’s the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what we learned when we researched the MGM hack–like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story–check out the Kolide Blog.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block video ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Well, that was fast.
The M3 chip, introduced last October, is already yesterday’s news. We’re living in an M4 world, courtesy of the surprising announcement that the new iPad Pro is powered by Apple’s next generation of chips.
Even if you don’t care about iPads, this announcement will affect the trajectory of the Mac and iPhone in quite a few ways.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
How we recommend iPads to people, whether Apple should stop holding events, what one task our perfect chatbot would do, and how we feel about the Apple Pencil.
Go to the podcast page.
Ever since Steve Jobs’s famous two-by-two grid of Apple devices, Apple aficionados have tried to cram the company’s product lines into neat little boxes.1
In recent years, the iPad line has seemed exceptionally complex and difficult to delineate. Should you buy an iPad Air or an iPad Pro? What about the multiple low-end iPads? How does the mini fit into the equation?
With this week’s refreshes to the iPad Air and the iPad Pro, it seems as though some clarity might be returning to the tablet lineup…but it may have also introduced some new uncomfortable questions.
At what price iPad?From a price perspective, Apple’s recent changes come in two extremes: the top and bottom of the lineup. The demise of the ninth-generation iPad and the price cut on the tenth-generation has clearly staked out the low end; on the high end, the iPad Pro has become even more expensive.
Here’s a chart of the available storage configurations. (I’m not including options like nano-texture screens and cellular connectivity.)
Purely looking at price, I’d argue the iPad lineup actually makes much more sense now. The base-level “for most people” iPad is available in small and large capacities with a $150 markup for four times the storage. (Should it probably have 128GB on the low-end? Sure, but when it comes to margins, Apple’s gonna Apple.) Likewise, if a small screen is what you value above all else, the iPad mini remains a product in the lineup.2
Where Apple has de-muddied the lineup, though, is in the mid-range. Previously, once you went higher than the paltry base of 64GB storage on the iPad Air, you quickly got into entry-level iPad Pro territory, then forcing you to make a more complex decision between more capacity and more capability at around the same price point. Rather than the simplicity of a decision based around more storage for more money, customers instead had to weight the ability to store more photos vs. Face ID which…how do you even?
In the new lineup, that’s not really a problem. The base-level iPad Airs now boast an acceptable 128GB of storage and are still priced well below an iPad Pro. You’ve go to go up to the top-tier iPad Airs before you really start competing with base level iPad Pros—which is as it should be.
From a feature standpoint, Apple’s made that delineation clear too. With powerful (and, thus, pricey) features like OLED displays, M4 chips, Face ID, and Thunderbolt, it’s clear that the iPad Pro really is being targeted at those who want the most power that an iPad can deliver.
Back in 2022, when trying to decide between the iPad Air and Pro I ultimately bought an 11-inch iPad Pro with an M1 chip and 128GB of storage for $799; a 256GB iPad Air would have cost only $50 less, and I got a lot for that extra $50. But today, the $999 starting point for the iPad Pro would definitely make me think twice, and I believe I’d probably end up with a cheaper (if less capable) iPad Air.
And you know what? That’s fine. I generally opt for the MacBook Air over the MacBook Pro too, and the iPad Air and Pro lines are now positioned more closely to the differences between the Mac laptop lines.
Though, speaking of which, let’s change gears here.
Putting on (Pro) AirsThe most expensive iPad Pros have always trodden on the toes of low-end Macs, but with these recent revision, that’s even more the case. As Jason wrote the other day, the iPad is no longer the future of computing; instead, it’s more of an alternative to the Mac, for those who want a touch interface with the flexibility to add a keyboard and trackpad.
Still, purely from a price perspective, things do get more confusing now. Consider the comparison between the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air. (All quoted prices are for the base level 13-inch (8-core CPU/8-core GPU) and 15-inch MacBook Air (8-core CPU/10-core GPU) models with 8GB of RAM.)
Of course, some of the iPad Pro models have different amounts of cores and RAM, making this all a bit fraught. Not to mention that if you want a true comparison, you are probably adding at least a $299 Magic Keyboard into the mix.
Look, I get that it’s apples and oranges. People who prefer the iPad are going to get an iPad, and people who prefer the Mac are going to get the Mac. Some people might get both!
But zooming out, there are certain broader assumptions that become clear: the iPad Pro commands a price that is comparable to a Mac laptop, meaning that Apple kind of slots them into the same market.
Which is fine, as far as the hardware goes; the problem remains the software. Is a 13-inch iPad Pro with specs that are equivalent to—and in some cases, better—than a comparably-priced MacBook Air as capable as that MacBook Air? There are trade-offs, which would be perfectly reasonable…if the tradeoffs were really just about whether you want a detachable tablet or the ability to use an Apple Pencil.
But so many of the tradeoffs are about what has been hampered by Apple’s decision to have iPadOS spend years trying to reinvent the wheel. In the iPad’s earliest days, Apple was determined to obfuscate all those computer annoyances like file management and multitasking, only to eventually have to backtrack because it turned out people needed those abilities, annoying as they were.
So an iPad is comparable to a Mac laptop…except where it isn’t.
It’s raining shoesAll of this leaves me with a feeling I know well: of waiting for a shoe to drop. We’re about a month away from WWDC, when Apple will reveal the latest updates to its software platforms, including iPadOS.
Will the company unveil something major that makes us all sit up and think “Aha! This is the missing piece of the iPad puzzle!”? I’d like to say yes, but I worry I’d be Charlie Brown lining up to kick a football, only to end up once again with a head injury explaining why I don’t remember this next year.
Because even if the iPad does get something to deliver on that promise, it’s not as if the Mac is standing still. And I’m forced to ask myself: were Apple’s laptops to some day get touchscreens and Apple Pencil support and perhaps even a detachable screen…would there still be a need for an iPad Pro?
- I contend that the a defining characteristic of humanity is a futile striving to bring order to chaos. ↩
- Should the mini maybe just be a smaller version of the tenth-generation iPad? Maybe. But there I go trying to put things into boxes again! ↩
Apple declared Tuesday as the biggest date in iPad history since the launch of the product in 2010. I’m not sure I’d go that far. It was a major event, to be sure, but so was the original iPad Pro and Apple Pencil launch in 2015 and the 2018 launch of the redesigned iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil 2.
But yes, today brought a brand-new iPad Pro and a new iPad Air that continues to be recycled out of the features of previous models, but at a more accessible price. The lack of any updates to the low-end iPad (other than a price drop) and the iPad mini (which desperately needs one) diminish my enthusiasm for Tuesday as the all-time iPad update.
It was a good day, though. Especially for those of us who use and love their iPads. But despite all of it, I’m also left with some of the same feelings of unease that I had back in 2018.
The iPad Air is the new iPad ProiPad Air, in two sizes at last.Don’t get too hung up on the iPad Air’s name. It makes sense in that it forms half of a pair with a more powerful, higher-priced device in the same product line, like MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The difference is that the iPad Air is thicker and heavier than the iPad Pro. What’s lighter than air? On the iPad, Pro. Pro is lighter than air.
But that’s not the point of the iPad Air. It’s meant to bring iPad Pro features down to a cheaper price so more iPad users can benefit from features that used to be cutting-edge. Apple cuts the price and saves by reusing tech from other iPads.
This time around, that’s been taken to an extreme: the 11- and new 13-inch iPad Air are identical in size to the old (2018-2022) iPad Pro models. Apple’s literally re-using those old models, with only some minor feature variations. There’s no Mini-LED HDR display on the 13-inch model as there was on the M1 and M2 versions, nor is there a Face ID sensor; if you want a keyboard, the 2020-era Magic Keyboard will suffice. You can use either the USB-C Apple Pencil or the new Apple Pencil Pro, so that’s a win, and the FaceTime camera has been moved to the horizontal axis.
There are a few other minor cuts here and there, but fundamentally, the iPad Air is even closer now to the old iPad Pro and offers a larger model for the first time. Just as with the MacBook Air, which finally stretched to offer a 15-inch model, now there’s a more affordable 13-inch iPad. It’s a good thing, even if it’s not the most exciting or cutting-edge hardware. (Given the past of iOS software innovations, that might be just fine.)
Even better, Apple has finally decided to embrace simplicity and is calling the larger iPad Air a 13-inch model. Yes, the screen is technically 12.9 inches when measured diagonally, but all of Apple’s laptops are rounded to the nearest inch for simplicity’s sake, and now the iPad has been given the same treatment. 11 and 13, that’s the spirit.
One disappointing note: Apple continues its trend of removing color from its products as they escalate in price. The iPad Air’s colors were subtle before, but they’re vanishingly distinguishable now. On Tuesday, I sat not two feet away from two iPad Airs in blue and purple, and, reader, I could not tell that they were not silver. And while you may be thinking, well, poor Jason’s colorblind, and that’s why he’s saying such hurtful things, I’ll remind you that blue and purple are colors I can see.
For the life of me, I don’t know why Apple hates fun colors. The regular iPad has them.
The M what now?
It was quite a shock when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported last week that the new iPad Pro might ship not with an M3 processor, but with the debut of the M4 processor. The report seemed outlandish, but the more I thought about it, the more it made some sort of crazy sense. And it turns out, Gurman was dead on.
Why the M4 now? It mostly has to do with Apple shifting chip production at TSMC (the company that fabs Apple’s chips) from the first-generation 3nm process to a new, more efficient second-generation 3nm process. There’s a whole backstory about TSMC’s change in 3nm processes that’s not worth getting into here, but suffice it to say that the first-generation process is largely a dead end, and the company is moving to a new set of 3nm processes.
So while Apple was proud of buying out TSMC’s first batch of 3nm processors to build the M3 and A17 Pro chips, it’s time to close the book on those chips—and by the end of next year, that generation will probably be entirely discontinued.
While it’s easy to think of processors as monolithic, every new M-series processor is really a collection of different parts, and they advance at different rates. With the M4, Apple’s moving to a new process a little earlier than one might expect—I doubt the company wants to release a new M-series generation more often than once a year—and the chip itself seems somewhat evolved over the M3.
The M4’s CPU cores are slightly improved over M3, featuring next-generation Machine Learning accelerators that help speed more basic AI tasks that don’t require farming things out to the Neural Engine or the GPUs. Apple has also changed the balance of the CPU cores in the M4, taking the total number to 10 (from eight) by adding two additional efficiency cores. This should boost overall CPU efficiency, though the four performance cores will largely gate peak performance. (And on the lower-end iPad Pro models, Apple’s using binned M4 chips with only three functional performance cores.)
The features Apple touts as being major GPU improvements are actually ones introduced in the M3, which never came to the iPad Pro—so it seems like there are no major changes on the GPU front in the M4 after the major upgrade during the last generation. However, the M4’s display engine has gotten a major upgrade, which was required for the complex Tandem OLED display of the M4 iPad Pro to work properly. (It’s a shining example of how Apple benefits from controlling its own chip design so it can build functionality that enables specific product features.) It remains to be seen if there are any other display-engine enhancements that might affect Macs running on the M4.
Finally, the M4 has powerful AI processing units… just like Apple chips have had for years. It was hard not to listen to Apple on Tuesday and get the sense that the company feels it’s being unfairly marked as “behind” on AI, given that it’s been building its Neural Engine cores into chips since 2017.
The Pro hardwareYou can have it in any color you want, so long as it’s silver or Space Black.Adding the M4 is impressive, as is the rest of the iPad Pro hardware package. I want to spend more time with the Ultra Retina XDR displays to really experience how bright and colorful they are in various conditions and with different sample media, but my brief exposure to them was definitely eye-opening. Apple has done a lot of engineering work to build a unique dual-layer OLED system that can produce eye-watering brightness.
Just as impressive is the resulting physical size of both iPad Pro models: They got smaller. In the case of the 13-inch model, a lot smaller—it’s not only the thinnest iPad (or Apple product?!) ever, but perhaps even better, it dropped nearly a quarter of a pound in weight. The new model is only 85 percent of the weight of its predecessor! And the 11-inch model weighs just slightly less than a pound. It’s a huge engineering victory.
I also have to applaud the relocation of the FaceTime camera and Face ID sensor to the horizontal side of the device, as I almost never use the iPad Pro in any orientation but horizontal. The Apple logo on the back still needs to be rotated to match, but I’ll take the win. And thumbs up to Apple for finding a way to make the relocation happen while also retaining the ability to magnetically dock and charge the Apple Pencil at the same location.
Unfortunately, the new iPad Pro suffers from the same tragic lack of color as other Apple products. You can get them in any color you want, as long as they’re silver or the new Space Black, which appears to be a bit darker than the old Space Gray.
The software letdownHere’s something I wrote in my review of the 2018 iPad Pro:
Saying that the processor in the new iPad Pro can handle anything thrown at it is praise, sure, but it’s also a little bit of an indictment. As users, we need more things to throw at it.
I got those vibes again on Tuesday. Apple has evolved the iPad a lot since 2018, but the product still exposes a remarkable imbalance between the incredibly confident and skillful march forward by the company’s hardware design and processor architecture groups and the erratic advancement and limited functionality of iPadOS.
I will give Apple credit: It worked hard on Tuesday to show off all the use cases that might lead someone to buy an iPad Pro for between $999 (11-inch, base config, no accessories) and $3077 (13-inch, max config, all accessories). There were lots of great Apple Pencil-based demos featuring creative professional apps, of course. I was impressed with the substantive updates planned for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.
There was also a dude on a BART train editing a spreadsheet in Numbers. Which, ooookay….
I like seeing Apple sweat a little in making a case for a product. It’s really doing its best, and if I were someone who primarily performed creative tasks with an Apple Pencil, I’d be all in. As someone who uses a keyboard (and a USB microphone, I suppose) to make a living, I’m looking at $2177 for a mid-range 13-inch model with cellular, an Apple Pencil Pro, and a Magic Keyboard. That’s substantially more than I’d pay for a new MacBook Air, and while I know that I can’t use the MacBook Air as a thin and light touch tablet, I also can’t use my iPad Pro as a travel podcasting unit.
I’m not saying that iPadOS and the iPad platform are bad. They’re not. I write regularly on my iPad Pro and read on it every morning and evening. I wouldn’t travel without it.
What I’m saying is, when it comes to iPad Pro hardware, it feels almost like Apple can do no wrong. On the software side, iPadOS is still rife with limitations that probably don’t matter much if you’re just using it to watch TV in bed or triage a few emails—but matter a lot if you’re trying to go beyond a limited set of features and some specific apps.
I will live in hope that the next version of iPadOS will address some more of these issues. (I have expressed this sentiment every single time a new iPad Pro has been released. It hasn’t helped.)
The accessory situationLook at that function row.Accessories make the iPad. No, really: The iPad’s ability to use things like the Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard are what make its Apple’s most ergonomically versatile computing device. It’s the reason I love the iPad.
So let’s cheer the new accessory additions. While I’m not a heavy Apple Pencil user—I only really use it for editing podcasts and the occasional marking up of a PDF—I have huge admiration for the Apple Pencil 2 as the apotheosis of Apple Products. It is a high-tech object that feels and looks like an inert solid block. It’s the most non-technical tech product ever, and yet when you bring it close to an iPad, magic happens.
The new Apple Pencil Pro is a sensible revision of the Pencil 2. (Apple’s moving to a model where iPads will support two Apple Pencils, one on the low end and one on the high end.) If you want to save some money, you can use last year’s USB-C Apple Pencil on these new iPads, but you’ll lose magnetic charging—which is delightful—and some snazzy new features, like a squeeze gesture that brings up a contextual menu, haptic feedback that reacts to the squeeze gesture and other events, and the ability to rotate the pencil to change how brushes function or apply other changes to content.
The new Magic Keyboard is also an improvement. It retains the clever cantilever design but takes advantage of the lighter iPad Pro weight to slide it further back, adding room for a larger trackpad (with haptic click!) and a full row of function keys. Oh, to finally adjust my iPad’s volume and brightness without taking my hands off the keyboard.
The anticipation resumesI look forward to the new iPads shipping next week. While I continue to view Apple’s iPadOS software strategy with consternation, I am still a heavy iPad user and want the product to keep getting better. On the hardware side, it has certainly taken a big leap forward.
As for the rest, well, you know. Hope springs eternal. There’s always the next WWDC.
Both Jason (New York) and Myke (London) have had their hands on the new iPads and are here to report back with all the details. We discuss M4 surprises, iPad Air choices, iPad Pro use cases, and save a little time to Lawyer Up.
Go to the podcast page.
Wes Davis, writing at The Verge:
The newly announced iPad Pro hides a sneaky upgrade option that Apple didn’t mention during its event today. When you cough up the $600 it costs to jump from the 256GB base model iPad Pro to the 1TB version, Apple doesn’t just double the RAM along with that — it also puts a faster chip inside, going from a nine-core M4 chip to a 10-core version.
One core is probably not going to make a lot of difference in most performance cases, but it does reinforce the fact that these chips are Apple’s newest and thus, presumably, more expensive to make. So it isn’t surprising that they’re using the 9-core version in the lower tiers of iPad Pros, along with providing double the RAM. (The M2s in the iPad Air, if you’re curious, all have the same specs: 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 8GB of RAM.)
I do kind of miss the days when I didn’t have to worry about processor cores and RAM in my iPad: sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple on Tuesday made some big moves to its iPad lineup, introducing new models of the iPad Air and iPad Pro, as well as a new Magic Keyboard and the Apple Pencil Pro. But Apple’s video was fairly short, clocking in just over half an hour, so as usual, there are some details that it didn’t have space to share. Good news, though: I’ve collected a few of the biggest ones for you!
The ninth-generation iPad is (mostly) deadPour one out for the home button: with the tenth-generation iPad’s price drop to $349, it now solidly holds down the low end of the company’s tablet lineup. The ninth-generation model has accordingly shuffled off this mortal coil, though you can, as of this writing, grab an eighth-generation model from Apple’s refurbished store. It’s also still available for education customers, which have whole fleets of older iPads. (And would we be surprised if it found its way to Walmart or Costco at some point soon?)
This standardizes Apple’s iPad design across its lineup, with edge-to-edge screens, USB-C ports, and flat edges, no matter which model you buy—except the mini is now the only model with the front-facing camera in portrait orientation instead of landscape, which is slowly killing me.
Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro updates come to the Mac as wellIf you’re a Mac user casting an envious glance at those newly updated Pro apps for the iPad, don’t worry: the Mac versions of the software will be getting many of the same benefits.
Logic Pro for Mac 11 will be available, like Logic Pro for iPad 2, on Monday, May 13, and include the Session Players, Stem Splitter, and ChromaGlow features. It’ll be a free update for existing Logic Pro users or cost $199.99 for new customers.
The Final Cut Pro story is a little more complex. Final Cut Pro for Mac 10.8 will appear as a free update for existing users or $299.99 for new customers. It brings new AI-powered features like Enhance Light and Color and Smooth Slo-Mo, custom names for color corrections and video effects, and the ability to search the timeline index and text-based timeline. However, it doesn’t seem as though it gets several of the other features of Final Cut Pro for iPad 2, like the integration with Final Cut Camera or Live Multicam.
Nanotexture will cost youUnsurprisingly, for those who’ve opted for the glare-reducing nano-texture option on Apple’s standalone displays, the iPad Pro version will cost you. For one, it’s only available on 1TB and 2TB models, meaning a starting price of at least $1599 for the 11-inch model and $1899 for the 13-inch model, but on top of that it’s a $100 premium.
This new nanotexture formulation was built with the iPad in mind, meaning that it’s meant to survive contact with our greasy paws (as well as the Apple Pencil). As its positioning on only high-end iPads implies, it’s really meant for professionals working in environments with heavy glare. The nanotexture cuts glare, but as you’d expect, it also lessens the dramatic blacks of the OLED display.
Smart Folio gets redesignedIf you don’t want to splash out for the pricey new Magic Keyboard, there are also redesigned versions of the Smart Folio for your iPad Air and iPad Pro, which Apple says now “supports multiple viewing angles for greater flexibility.” (Though I’m not sure exactly what that means: it looks pretty much like the previous versions.)
The Air model will come in four colors—charcoal gray, light violet, denim, and sage—while the Pro version is available black, white, and denim1. 11-inch versions cost $79; the 13-inch model will run you $99.
- I guess 2024 is the year of denim on the iPad? ↩
iPad Pro and keyboard, circa its October 2018 announcement.It’s hard to believe that it was more than five and a half years ago that I flew home from a New York Apple event, my mind spinning with the announcement of a new iPad Pro at a unique Apple event in Brooklyn.
Now all signs point to a new era in the iPad Pro beginning on Tuesday. It’s made me reflective about what’s happened to the iPad since the fall of 2018.
In hindsight, that event was a bit of a foreshock for the arrival of Apple Silicon. During the event, Apple introduced a new iPad Pro processor—clearly a forerunner of the M series that would power Macs in a couple of years—and boasted about how much more powerful it was than almost every PC laptop being sold. It was the first big brag about Apple’s chip-design prowess that went beyond the iPhone, which had been already running circles around Android phones powered by Qualcomm chips.
But that boast also drew the iPad into direct comparisons with PC laptops, and while its sheer hardware power might have defeated most of those laptops, power isn’t everything. It’s what you do with the power. And in many ways, that’s been the story of the iPad Pro since then: This is a device with computer power, but running a phone-adapted operating system that’s not nearly as capable or flexible as macOS. And thanks to the Apple silicon transition, today’s core iPad Pro hardware is almost indistinguishable from the chips that power a MacBook Air.
If this narrative sounds familiar, it’s because despite it coming up in 2018, it’s never really gone away since then. Apple has evolved iPadOS quite a bit since then, adding Stage Manager and a revamped Files app and even introducing versions of its pro apps, Final Cut and Logic.
But over this same span, it’s become clear to me that Apple no longer views the iPad as the future of personal computing. This is to the Mac’s credit: Now that it’s on Apple silicon itself, the Mac’s battery life can rival the iPad, and it can pick up all the new features and apps that come to the iPhone and iPad thanks to a much more aligned base operating system and platform-smoothing features like Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.
So where does that leave the iPad? More specifically, where does it leave the iPad Pro? What’s the role of a professional iPad, when the Mac is now much more capable of doing professional jobs with similar power and at a similar price?
It comes down to physical attributes. The iPad is something a Mac can basically never be, at its core: a touch-driven tablet that’s thin and light, with literally nothing else attached. From that base, the iPad can be whatever a user wants it to be—just a tablet, or a tablet with a pencil, or a tablet with a laptop-style keyboard and trackpad. It can even be docked to an external display and drive multiple windows.
The iPad’s adaptability takes me back, once again, to 2018. That was the event that introduced the Apple Pencil 2, and in some ways generations of iPad hardware are defined more by their accessories than any other characteristic. The Apple Pencil 2 was a solid update on the original, with a magnetic charging system that’s simple and elegant—a far cry from the approach of the original Pencil, with its Lightning port hiding under a little plastic cap.
(However, one feature of the Pencil 2 was a bit of a flop—I never could get the hang of its subtle, accelerometer-based double tap. It seemed to never trigger when I wanted it to, but would accidentally trigger all the time. I’m hopeful that Tuesday will bring another, improved take on letting Pencil users get some more control while still holding the implement in their hand.)
Still, it’s funny to think that perhaps the most defining accessory of this iPad Pro generation didn’t ship until more than a year later: the Magic Keyboard. That keyboard—now with a trackpad, and proper pointer support on iPadOS for the first time!—made the iPad into a tablet that could truly convert into a laptop. Apple’s first true convertible computer didn’t run macOS, but iPadOS.
But again… that was the problem. I’ve been an iPad Pro user since the beginning, and have spent plenty of time trying to coax the platform into fulfilling all the needs as a creative professional. I’ve been successful far more often than not, but that made the failures all the more frustrating. My standard travel backpack is a microcosm of this storyline: After years of trying to make it work with just the iPad Pro, the advent of Apple silicon has made me go back to traveling with a MacBook Air. It’s small enough, powerful enough, and can do literally everything I need—something the iPad Pro just can’t.
So what’s the way forward for the iPad Pro? I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out what I’d do, if I were one of the people inside Apple with the future of the iPad in my hands. There are no easy answers. For the iPad Pro to be a viable product, it needs to justify its higher price—at this point, the cheaper iPad Air can do everything that 2018 iPad Pro could do. So why buy an iPad Pro at all?
Accessories have to be part of the story—this is the iPad we’re talking about, after all. Reports abound that in addition to that upgraded Apple Pencil, there will be a new Magic Keyboard, one that’s more laptop-like. That’s a good start, because it leans into the idea that the iPad is Apple’s convertible device, a tablet that can be a laptop when you need it to be. If that keyboard is sheathed in aluminum and connects to the iPad Pro less awkwardly, it just reinforces that the iPad Pro can be a laptop when you want it to be.
(As an aside, I’m so tired of the people who come out of the woodwork to ask why people who use the iPad as a laptop don’t just buy a Mac. Let me answer the question one more time: I can’t rip the screen off a Mac and use it as a touch tablet. But I can make an iPad into a laptop when I need it to be. Not everyone needs or wants a convertible computer, but it has advantages that the Mac is incapable of matching.)
It’s funny how the Mac keeps coming back into this, isn’t it? There’s a good reason. The Mac is Apple’s do-it-all computing platform, and thanks to the boost from Apple silicon, it’s really doing better than ever. That mid-2010s malaise when it felt like Apple had no clear idea about the Mac’s future, which coincided with the possibility that the iPad would ultimately replace it, is gone.
Instead, the Mac is a key that can unlock the limitations of Apple’s platforms. One of the best features of the Vision Pro is its ability to connect to a Mac and display the Mac’s interface in a large virtual space. The Vision Pro becomes a stronger product because macOS exists, and integrates with visionOS.
This brings me to the issue I’ve been championing for a while now, which I think is the ultimate solution to the problem of the iPad Pro: the Mac. The iPad Pro is already capable of transforming from a tablet into a laptop, when needed. It’s got the same power as a MacBook Air. Apple’s built virtualization and a hypervisor framework into its products.
iPad Pro buyers already value the product for its flexibility. Imagine how much more flexible it would be if it could run macOS, virtualized, when connected to an external keyboard and trackpad. Apple’s first convertible device would be able to becomes a Mac when it needed to—and exit that mode when it doesn’t. Travelers could invest in the iPad Pro and all its accessories—at a price comparable to a MacBook Air, by the way—and know that they’re getting the best of Apple’s tablet experience and its traditional computer experience.
If Apple were to accept that at the top of the iPad product line, the iPad literally transforms into a Mac, that choice would also take a lot of the pressure off of iPadOS. Does Files in iPadOS really need to keep slowly trudging toward life as an ersatz Finder? And more to the point, does anyone who has used Files over the past five and half years really believe it’ll ever get there? And should it even try, or is that stuffing way too much functionality into a much more basic, iPad-like file manager?
The iPad no longer feels like the future of computing, and that’s fine. The Mac is here to stay, something that didn’t seem like a sure thing five and a half years ago. It feels like it’s time for Apple to accept this state of affairs. macOS isn’t just one of Apple’s platforms—it’s a feature, a secret weapon that it can use to make all its other platforms more powerful when they need to be.
I don’t have any idea if Apple really has any intention of letting macOS run on other devices, whether it’s an iPad or a Vision Pro or even an iPhone plugged into an external display. But it seems to me that if there’s any Apple product that is flexible enough to make it work, it’s the iPad Pro.
I still love my iPad Pro. I look forward to Tuesday’s announcements, whatever surprises they might bring.
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 300,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
Here are a few assorted thoughts about Apple’s second-quarter 2024 financial results based on the analyst call with executives that followed the release. For a “boring” quarter where Apple revenue was flat and profits surpassed $20 billion, there are still a few tidbits.
Actually It’s Apple Intelligence Ad InfinitumAI! It’s a thing. Have you heard of it? While Apple has been investing in machine-learning tech, on both the hardware and software side, for many years now, it got caught flatfooted in the burgeoning Large Language Model space and has been trying to play catch-up while re-emphasizing its skills in the broader AI area. In 2024, Apple has cranked the AI hype machine to a higher level, with executives repeatedly hinting at AI announcements to come and press releases making sure to touting AI features wherever even marginally appropriate.
This leads Cook to say this at the very top of his prepared remarks on the analyst call: “We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI. We are making significant investments, and we’re looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon.”
It’s interesting that Cook calls out generative AI, which is basically the sort of stuff that Apple hasn’t spent the last few years rolling out inside its various products. He acknowledges that they’ve been investing in this technology and once again touts that Apple will share things soon. That could be Tuesday, at its video event, but it’s more likely to be at WWDC in June.
“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create,” Cook continued.
Here you can see the shape of Apple’s argument about its relevance in AI. It’s going to compete with its hardware prowess, most notably Apple silicon and the Neural Engine that it’s been iterating for years now. Obviously, software integration is Apple’s bread and butter, but there’s the promise of Services integration, which is an interesting thread. What AI-powered services does Apple have up its sleeve? Or is that just code for farming some AI features out to the cloud? Finally, the focus on privacy seems to clearly indicate that Apple is trying to build a lot of AI features to run on its devices rather than in the cloud—a concept that dovetails nicely with needing powerful hardware to run those features.
As Cook said later, “We believe that we have advantages that set us apart” in generative AI, “and we think that we’re well-positioned.” The proof is in the pudding, of course. We’ll see what Apple has up its sleeve and where it has advantages or disadvantages when compared to its competition.
There was one claim that made me laugh out loud during the call, though. Apple CFO Luca Maestri said, as a part of his prepared remarks, that “customers are loving the incredible AI performance of the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models.” Are they, really? I knew some apps have AI features, but the idea that M3 MacBook Air users are just buzzing over how incredible the AI performance they’re getting is… just seems silly. This is the place where Apple’s product marketing hype machine collides with its investor community hype machine and generates something… not optimal.
One more AI item: I think investors and analysts are a little concerned about this whole AI boom because it can be very expensive. It’s expensive to train models and expensive to build out cloud infrastructure to run those models. Apple using the power of its on-device processors to run models takes care of some of that, but there are still concerns.
This is why Mike Ng of Goldman Sachs asked Maestri if Apple would be expending a larger amount of capital in the coming years due to the AI boom. Maestri’s answer was instructive: “We have a bit of a hybrid model… we have our own data center capacity, and then we use capacity from third parties. It’s a model that has worked well for us historically, and we plan to continue along the same lines going forward.” A lot of iCloud is hosted by Apple today, but it has used Amazon, Microsoft, and Google cloud services too. Maestri says that this will continue, which just makes sense. Apple will build and own what it feels to build and own, and the rest it’ll rent.
The rise of the restJ.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee asked Cook about Apple’s role in India, where it’s growing sales while also adding manufacturing capacity. Tim was happy to provide more color: “In terms of the operational side or supply chain side, we are producing there,” he said. “From a pragmatic point of view, you need to produce there to be competitive, and so, yes, the two things are linked from that point of view, but we have both operational things going on, and we have go-to-market and initiatives going on. We just opened a couple of stores last year…. We’re continuing to expand our channels and also working on the developer ecosystem as well, and we’ve been very pleased that there’s a rapidly growing base of developers there, and so we’re working all of the entire ecosystem from developer to the market to operations, the whole thing, and I could not be more excited and enthusiastic about it.”
It’s a soup-to-nuts answer that isn’t particularly surprising, but it’s nice to see it all laid out all at once. Yes, Apple makes stuff in India. Yes, part of that is that for it to sell products in India, it needs to make them there. But there are other consumer initiatives there, as well as a growing developer base. As Cook put it, “we’re working all of the entire ecosystem”—in other words, manufacturing, consumer sales, and app developers.
More broadly, analyst Richard Kramer of Arete Research asked a really interesting question about when the rest of the developing world will become as important as China or even eclipse it. “You regularly call out all the rapid growth in many other emerging markets,” he said. “So is Apple approaching a point where all those other emerging markets in aggregate might cross over to become larger than your current 70 billion Greater China segments?”
Maestri was delighted with the question, which he said Apple had been looking at internally as well. “Obviously, China is by far the largest emerging market that we have,” he said. “But when we start looking at places like India, like Saudi [Arabia]… Turkey, of course Brazil and Mexico, and Indonesia, the numbers are getting large and we’re very happy because these are markets where our market share is low, the populations are large and growing, and our products are really making a lot of progress in those markets. The level of excitement for the brand is very high.”
Sometimes, it seems like Apple has almost saturated demand for its products, which leads to slower growth (for everything except the Services category, apparently). So, where would growth ever come from? This answer focuses on it: There’s a big portion of the world where Apple’s market share is quite low, but populations are growing and income levels are rising. Apple’s growth story for the next couple of decades may have more to do with India, Brazil, and Indonesia than with Europe or the United States.
Don’t believe the hype (unless it’s from us)Finally, I particularly enjoyed the exchange between Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers and Cook in which Rakers asked Cook to explain Apple’s results compared to the data reported by independent research groups that suggested iPhone sales were falling apart in China. Apple’s actual numbers weren’t that bad, and in fact, Apple trumpeted how well the iPhone was going in urban China.
“I can’t address the data points,” Cook said. “I can only address what our results are, and you know, we did accelerate last quarter. And iPhone grew in mainland China, so that’s what the results were. I can’t bridge to numbers we didn’t come up with.”
That’s about as savage a shade-throwing as you’ll get on an Apple analyst call. But to summarize, Rakers asked Cook to respond to third-party estimates on Apple’s sales, and Cook essentially pointed at his legally mandated financial statements and declared them the real numbers.
Defensive? Frustrated? You be the judge. But I’ve frequently seen those “independent estimate” numbers end up being widely off the mark, and I’m sure that people at Apple with inside access to all the data frequently roll their eyes at reports from the outside that get it wrong. I’d like to say he was teaching everyone a lesson about not accepting those numbers as gospel, but I don’t expect that anyone will learn it.
We revisit the philosophy of binge drops versus weekly releases—because it’s complicated. [Downstream+ members also get to hear us discuss the future of Paramount, complicated NBA rights negotiations, and more RSN drama.]
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Conversation Tree Press for sponsoring Six Colors this week. This is a very different kind of Six Colors sponsor, but they’re doing something special. They celebrate the craftsmanship of beautifully designed, letterpress-printed, and finely bound books. Each of their editions includes newly commissioned artwork. These books are perfect for those who appreciate quality and design.
The Conversation Tree Press collection ranges from classics like Peter Pan and Treasure Island to modern stories such as Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon and Joe Hill’s Faun. Upcoming titles include a collection of weird fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Press proprietor Tony-–a former digital project manager—designs the bindings, typesets each book, and personally packs and ships each order. Enjoy free shipping to the US or Canada with promo code 6COLORS on any book currently in the store or when pre-ordering The House on the Borderlands next week.
Discover more at conversationtreepress.com.
Hey, it’s that time Apple made an ad directly targeted at me.
I just used Precision Finding last week while traveling around the D.C. area; it was a handy way for my wife and to find each other in the Smithsonian museums when one of us would go off with the kid for a bit.
Worth noting: every single number you see in the background of this ad is a Star Wars reference: 2187 (Princess Leia’s cell) is seen twice, once on the apartment building and once as the bus lines at the bus stop1; 1138 (Death Star cellblock/Lucas’s favorite number) is seen as a pair of apartment building numbers; 3263827 (the Death Star trash compactor number) is seen as a phone number on an ad; and the bus is number 3720 (the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field).
Kudos to whatever team put this one together.
- Above which the text reads “The First Transport is Away.” 👏 ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
On Thursday Apple announced its quarterly financial results, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri to spend some quality time with their favorite financial analysts on a scheduled phone call. Here’s our complete transcript:
Tim Cook’s opening statementToday, Apple is reporting revenue of $90.8 billion and an EPS record of $1.53 for the March quarter. We set revenue records in more than a dozen countries and regions. These include, among others, March quarter records in Latin America and the Middle East, as well as Canada, India, Spain, and Turkey. We also achieved an all-time revenue record in Indonesia, one of the many markets where we continue to see so much potential. In Services, we set an all-time revenue record of 14% over the past year.
Keep in mind, as we described on the last call, in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish iPhone channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the December quarter COVID-related supply disruptions on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max. We estimate this one-time impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter revenue last year. If we removed this from last year’s results, our March quarter total company revenue this year would have grown. Despite this impact, we were still able to deliver the records I described.
Of course, this past quarter we were thrilled to launch Apple Vision Pro, and it has been so wonderful to hear from people who now get to experience the magic of spatial computing. They describe the impossible becoming possible right before their eyes, and they share their amazement and their emotions about what they can do now, whether it’s reliving their most treasured memories or having a movie theater experience right in their living room.
It’s also great to see the enthusiasm from the enterprise market. For example, more than half of the Fortune 100 companies have already bought Apple Vision Pro units and are exploring innovative ways to use it to do things that weren’t possible before, and this is just the beginning.
Looking ahead, we’re getting ready for an exciting product announcement next week that we think our customers will love, and next month, we have our Worldwide Developers Conference, which has generated enormous enthusiasm from our developers. We can’t wait to reveal what we have in store.
We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI. We are making significant investments, and we’re looking forward to sharing some very exciting things with our customers soon. We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy, which underpins everything we create. As we push innovation forward, we continue to manage thoughtfully and deliberately through an uneven macroeconomic environment and remain focused on putting our users at the center of everything we do.
Now, let’s turn to our results for the March quarter across each product category, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue for the March quarter was $46 billion, down 10% year-over-year. We faced a difficult compare over the previous year due to the $5 billion impact that I mentioned earlier. However, we still saw growth on iPhone in some markets, including mainland China, and according to Kantar, during the quarter, the two best-selling smartphones in urban China were the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
I was in China recently, where I had the chance to meet with developers and creators who are doing remarkable things with iPhone, and just a couple of weeks ago, I visited Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore where it was incredible to see all the ways customers and communities are using our products and services to do amazing things. Everywhere I travel, people have such a great affinity for Apple and it’s one of the many reasons I’m so optimistic about the future.
Turning to Mac, March quarter revenue was $7.5 billion, up 4% from a year ago. We had an amazing launch in early March with the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air. The world’s most popular laptop is the best consumer laptop for AI, with breakthrough performance of the M3 chip and its even more powerful neural engine. Whether it’s an entrepreneur starting a new business or a college student finishing their degree, users depend on the power and portability of MacBook Air to take them places they couldn’t have gone without it.
In iPad, revenue for the March quarter was $5.6 billion, 17% lower year-over-year due to a difficult compare with the momentum following the launch of M2 iPad Pro and the 10th generation iPad last fiscal year. iPad continues to stand apart for its versatility, power, and performance. For video editors, music makers, and creatives of all kinds, iPad is empowering users to do more than they ever could with a tablet.
Across Wearables, Home, and Accessories, March quarter revenue was $7.9 billion, down 10% from a year ago due to a difficult launch compare on Watch and AirPods. Apple Watch is helping runners go the extra mile on their wellness journeys, keeping hikers on course with the latest navigation capabilities in watchOS 10, and enabling users of all fitness levels to live a healthier day. Across our watch line-up, we’re harnessing AI and machine learning to power life-saving features like irregular rhythm notifications and fall detection. I often hear about how much these features mean to users and their loved ones and I’m thankful that so many people are able to get help in their time of greatest need.
As I shared earlier, we set an all-time revenue record in Services, with $23.9 billion, up 14% year-over-year. We also achieved all-time revenue records across several categories in geographic segments. Audiences are tuning in on screens large, small, and spatial, and are enjoying Apple TV+ originals like “Palm Royale” and “Sugar,” and we have some incredible theatrical releases coming this year, including “Wolves,” which reunites George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Apple TV+ productions continue to be celebrated as major awards contenders. Since launch, Apple TV+ productions have earned more than 2,100 award nominations and 480 wins. Meanwhile, we’re enhancing the live sports experience with a new iPhone app, Apple Sports. This free app allows fans to follow their favorite teams and leagues with real-time scores, stats, and more. Apple Sports is the perfect companion for MLS Season Pass subscribers.
Turning to retail, our stores continue to be vital spaces for connection and innovation. I was delighted to be in Shanghai for the opening of our latest flagship store. The energy and enthusiasm from our customers was truly something to behold, and across the United States, our incredible retail teams have been sharing Vision Pro demos with customers, delighting them with a profound and emotional experience of using it for the very first time.
Everywhere we operate and everything we do, we’re guided by our mission to enrich users’ lives and leave the world better than we found it. Whether we’re making Apple Podcasts more accessible with a new transcripts feature, or helping to safeguard iMessage users’ privacy with new protections that can defend against advances in quantum computing.
Our environmental work is another great example of how innovation and our values come together. As we work toward our goal of being carbon neutral across all of our products by 2030, we are proud of how we’ve been able to innovate and do more for our customers while taking less from the planet. Since 2015, Apple has cut our overall emissions by more than half, while revenue grew nearly 65% during that same time period, and we’re now using more recycled materials in our products than ever before. Earlier this spring, we launched our first-ever product to use 50% recycled materials with a new M3-powered MacBook Air.
We’re also investing in new solar and wind power in the U.S. and Europe, both to power our growing operations and our users’ devices. And we’re working with partners in India and the U.S. to replenish 100% of the water we use in places that need it most, with the goal of delivering billions of gallons of water benefits over the next two decades. Through our Restore Fund, Apple has committed $200 million to nature-based carbon removal projects, and last month, we welcomed two supplier partners as new investors who will together invest up to an additional $80 million in the fund.
Whether we’re enriching lives of users across the globe, or doing our part to be a force for good in the world, we do everything with a deep sense of purpose at Apple, and I’m proud of the impact we’ve already made at the halfway point in a year of unprecedented innovation. I couldn’t be more excited for the future we have ahead of us, driven by the imagination and innovation of our teams and the enduring importance of our products and services in people’s lives. With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s opening statementThank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone.
Revenue for the March quarter was $90.8 billion, down 4% from last year. Foreign exchange had a negative year-over-year impact of 140 basis points on our results. Products revenue was $66.9 billion, down 10% year-over-year due to the challenging compare on iPhone that Tim described earlier, which was partially offset by strength from Mac. And thanks to our unparalleled customer satisfaction and loyalty, and a high number of customers who are new to our products, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and all geographic segments.
Services revenue set an all-time record of 23.9 billion, up 14% year-over-year, with record performance in both developed and emerging markets. Company gross margin was 46.6%, up 70 basis points sequentially, driven by cost savings and favorable mix to Services, partially offset by leverage. Products gross margin was 36.6%, down 280 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by seasonal loss of leverage and mix, partially offset by favorable costs. Services gross margin was 74.6%, up 180 basis points from last quarter, due to a more favorable mix. Operating expenses of $14.4 billion were at the midpoint of the guidance range we provided, and up 5% year-over-year. Net income was $23.6 billion, diluted EPS was $1.53 and a March quarter record, and operating cash flow was strong at $22.7 billion.
Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was $46 billion, down 10% year-over-year, due to the almost $5 billion impact from a year ago that Tim described earlier. Adjusting for this one-time impact, iPhone revenue would be roughly flat to last year. Our iPhone active install base grew to a new all-time high in total and in every geographic segment, and during the March quarter, we saw many iPhone models as the top-selling smartphones around the world. In fact, according to a survey from Kantar, an iPhone was the top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan. And the iPhone 15 family continues to be very popular with customers. 451 research recently measured customer satisfaction at 99% in the U.S.
Mac revenue was $7.5 billion, up 4% year-over-year, driven by the strength of our new MacBook Air powered by the M3 chip. Customers are loving the incredible AI performance of the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, and our Mac install base reached an all-time high with half of our MacBook Air buyers during the quarter being new to Mac. Also, customer satisfaction for Mac was recently reported at 96% in the U.S.
iPad generated $5.6 billion in revenue, down 17% year-over-year. iPad continued to face a challenging compare against the launch of the M2 iPad Pro and iPad 10th generation from last year. At the same time, the iPad install base has continued to grow and is at an all-time high, as over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product. In addition, the latest reports from 451 Research indicate a customer satisfaction of 96% for iPad in the U.S.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $7.9 billion, down 10% year-over-year, due to a difficult launch compare. Last year, we had the continued benefit from the launches of the AirPods Pro 2nd generation, the Watch SE, and the first Watch Ultra. Apple Watch continues to attract new customers, with almost two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product, sending the Apple Watch install base to a new all-time high. And customer satisfaction was recently measured at 95% in the U.S.
In services, as I mentioned, total revenue reached an all-time record of $23.9 billion, growing 14% year over year, with our installed base of active devices continue to grow at a nice pace. This provides a strong foundation for the future growth of the services business as we continue to see increased customer engagement with our ecosystem. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double digits year over year, and paid subscriptions showed strong double-digit growth. We have well over 1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. We continue to improve the breadth and quality of our current services, from creating new games on Arcade and great new shows on TV+, to launching additional countries and partners for Apple Pay.
Turning to Enterprise, our customers continue to invest in Apple products to drive productivity and innovation. We see more and more enterprise customers embracing the Mac. In healthcare, Epic Systems, the world’s largest electronic medical record provider, recently launched its native app for the Mac, making it easier for healthcare organizations like Emory Health to transition thousands of PCs to the Mac for clinical use. And since the launch of Vision Pro last quarter, many leading enterprise customers have been investing in this amazing new product to bring spatial computing apps and experiences to life. We are seeing so many compelling use cases, from aircraft engine maintenance training at KLM Airlines, to real-time team collaboration for racing at Porsche, to immersive kitchen design at Lowe’s. We couldn’t be more excited about the spatial computing opportunity in Enterprise.
Taking a quick step back, When we look at our performance during the first half of our fiscal year, total company revenue was roughly flat to the prior year in spite of having one less week of sales during the period and some foreign exchange headwinds. We were particularly pleased with our strong momentum in emerging markets, as we set first-half revenue records in several countries and regions including Latin America, the Middle East, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Turkey. These results, coupled with double-digit growth in services and strong levels of gross margin, drove a first-half diluted EPS record of $3.71, up 9% from last year.
Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $162 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $3.2 billion in maturing debt, and commercial paper was unchanged sequentially, leaving us with total debt of $105 billion. As a result, net cash was $58 billion at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we returned over $27 billion to shareholders, including $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents and $23.5 billion through open market repurchases of 130 million Apple shares. Given the continued confidence we have in our business now and into the future, our board has authorized today an additional $110 billion for share repurchases, as we maintain our goal of getting to net cash neutral over time. We are also raising our dividend by 4% to 25 cents per share of common stock, and we continue to plan for annual increases in the dividend going forward, as we have done for the last 12 years. This cash dividend will be payable on May 16, 2024, to shareholders of record as of May 13, 2024.
As we move ahead into the June quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suassini referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter.
We expect our June quarter total company revenue to grow low single digits year-over-year in spite of a foreign exchange headwind of about 2.5 percentage points. We expect our Services business to grow double digits at a rate similar to the growth we reported for the first half of the fiscal year. And we expect iPad revenue to grow double digits. We expect gross margin to be between 45.5% and 46.5%. We expect OPEX to be between $14.3 billion and $14.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $50 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Analyst Q&AMike Ng, Goldman Sachs: First, I’ll ask about the June quarter guidance, the revenue outlook for low single digits growth. I was wondering if you could run through some of the product assumptions. You know, iPhone, like what kind of gives you confidence around that? And then on the services momentum, what was better than expected in the quarter?
Maestri: Hey, Mike. It’s Luca. On the outlook, what we said is we expect to grow low single digits in total for the company, we expect Services to grow double digits at a rate that’s similar to what we’ve done in the first half of our fiscal year, and we also mentioned that iPad should grow double digits. This is the color that we’re providing for the June quarter. In Services, we’ve seen very strong performance across the board. We’ve mentioned, you know, we’ve had records in several categories, in several geographic segments. It’s very broad-based. You know, our subscription business is going well. Transacting accounts and paid accounts are growing, paid accounts are growing double digits, and also we’ve seen really strong performance both in developed and emerging markets. So, very pleased with the way the services business is going.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you, and I wanted to ask about, you know, as Apple leans more into AI and generative AI, should we expect any changes to the historical CapEx cadence that we’ve seen in the last few years of about 10 to 11 billion dollars per year, or any changes to how we may have historically thought about the split between tooling, data center, and facilities?
Maestri: Yeah, we are all obviously very excited about the opportunity with GenAI. We obviously are pushing very hard on innovation on every front, and we’ve been doing that for many many years. Just during the last five years we spent more than a hundred billion dollars in research and development. As you know, on the CapEx front, we have a bit of a hybrid model where we make some of the investments ourselves, in other cases we share them with our suppliers and partners on the manufacturing side, we purchase some of the tools and manufacturing equipment. In some other cases, our suppliers make the investment. And we do something similar on the data center side, we have our own data center capacity and then we use capacity from third parties. It’s a model that has worked well for us historically, and we plan to continue along the same lines going forward.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, can you talk about the implications to Apple from the changes driven by EU DMA? You’ve had to open up third-party app stores, clearly this poses some security risks on the one hand, which can dilute the experience, but also lower payments from developers to Apple. What are you seeing developers choose in these early days, and consumers choose in terms of these third-party app stores?
Cook: It’s really too early to answer the question. We just implemented in March, as you probably know, in the European Union, the alternate app stores and alternate billing, et cetera. So we’re, you know, we’re focused on complying while mitigating the impacts to user privacy and security that you mentioned, and so that’s our focus.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Okay. Thank you, Tim. And Luca, I was wondering if you could comment a bit on the product gross margins. The sequential step down, you noted mix and leverage. Any more color on the mix, if you could share if customers are at all starting to mix down across product lines, or is this more a mix across product lines? Just trying to get some color on customer behavior because of the broader inflationary pressures.
Maestri: On a sequential basis, yes, we were down. It’s primarily the fact that we had a slightly different mix of products than the previous one. Obviously, leverage plays a big role as we move from the holiday quarter into a more typical quarter. So, I would say, primarily leverage and a different mix of products. We haven’t seen anything different in terms within the product categories, we haven’t seen anything particular. >> Thank you so much.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Tim, you’ve obviously mentioned your excitement around generative AI multiple times. I’m just curious how Apple is thinking about the different ways in which you can monetize this technology, because historically software upgrades haven’t been a big factor in driving product cycles? And so, could AI be potentially different? How could that impact replacement cycles? Is there any Services angle you’d be thinking? Any early color that you can share on that.
Cook: I don’t wanna get in front of our announcements, obviously. I would just say that we see generative AI as a very key opportunity across our products and we believe that we have advantages that set us apart there, and we’ll be talking more about it as we go through the the weeks ahead.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: And then Luca maybe to just follow up on Wamsi’s question, there’s a broad concern about the headwind that rising commodity costs have on your product gross margins. Wondering if you could just clarify for us, if we take a step back and look at all the components and commodities that go into your products kind of collectively, are you seeing these costs rising, are they falling? What tools do you have to try to help mitigate some rising costs, if at all?
Maestri: Yes, I mean, during the last quarter, commodity costs and, in general, component costs have behaved favorably to us. On the memory front, prices are starting to go up. They’ve gone up slightly during the the March quarter, but in general I think it’s been a period, not only this quarter, but the last several quarters where commodities have behaved well for us. Commodities go in cycles and so there’s obviously always that possibility. Keep in mind that we are starting from a very high level of gross margins, we reported 46.6% which is something that we haven’t seen in our company in decades. And so we’re starting from a good point. As you know, we try to buy ahead when the cycles are favorable to us. So we will try to mitigate if there are headwinds, but in general we feel, particularly for this cycle, we are in good shape.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: Hey Tim, I was wondering if I could ask the China question again. Is there any more color from your visit there that gives you confidence that you’ve reached a bottom there and that it’s turning? I know you’ve continued to be confident there in the long term. Just wondering if there was any color as to when you think that the tide turns there.
Cook: Ben, if you look at our results in Q2 for Greater China, we were down eight. That’s an acceleration from the previous quarter, in Q1, and the primary driver of the acceleration was iPhone. And if you then look at iPhone within mainland China, we grew on a reported basis. That’s before any kind of normalization for the supply disruption that we mentioned earlier. And if you look at the top selling smartphones, the top two in urban China are iPhones. And while I was there, it was a great visit, and we opened a new store in Shanghai, and the reception was very warm and highly energetic. And so I left there having a fantastic trip and enjoyed being there, and so I maintain a great view of China in the long term. I don’t know how each and every quarter goes and each and every week. But over the long haul, I have a very positive viewpoint.
Ben Reitzes, Melius: There’s a fear out there that, you know, you may lose some traffic acquisition, you know, revenue, and I was wondering if you thought AI from a big picture—on a long-term basis—if AI is an opportunity for you to, you know, continue to monetize your mobile real estate. Just how maybe investors can think about that from a big picture, just given that’s been one of the concerns that’s potentially been an overhang, of course, due to a lot of the news and the media around some of the legal cases, and I was wondering if there’s just a big picture color you could give that makes us kind of think about it better and your ability to sort of continue to monetize that real estate.
Tim: I think AI, generative AI and AI, both are big opportunities for us across our products, and we’ll talk more about it in the coming weeks, but I think there are numerous ways there that are great for us, and we think that we’re well-positioned.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Sorry to beat the AI horse, but Tim, I know you don’t want to reveal a lot, but I’m just kind of curious, because last quarter you spoke about how you’re getting traction in enterprise. Is the AI strategy going to be both consumer and enterprise or is it going to be one after the other? Any color would be helpful.
Cook: Our focus on enterprise has been in, through the quarter and in the quarters that preceded it, on selling iPhones and iPads and Macs and we recently added Vision Pro to that, and we’re thrilled with what we see there in terms of interest from big companies buying some to explore ways they can use it, and so I see enormous opportunity in the enterprise. I wouldn’t want to cabin that to AI only. I think there’s a great opportunity for us around the world in enterprise.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Got it, very helpful, and then for Luca, you know, I’m kind of curious on given the macro environment on the hardware side, are you seeing a bias towards like standard iPhone versus the pro model? The reason I’m asking the question is that there’s a weaker consumer spending environment, yet your services business is still growing and has amazing gross margins, so I’m just trying to like square the circle over there.
Maestri: I’m not sure I fully understand the question, but in general what we are seeing on the product side, we continue to to see a lot of interest at the top of the range of our products, and I think it’s a combination of consumers wanting to purchase the best product that we offer in the different categories and our ability to make those purchases more affordable over time. We’ve introduced several financing solutions from installment plans to trading programs that reduce the affordability threshold and therefore customers tend to want to buy at the top of the range. That is very valuable for us in developed markets, but particularly in emerging markets where the affordability issues are more pronounced. But in general over the last several years—and that is also reflected in our gross margins—we’ve seen this trend which we think is pretty sustainable.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: First off on capital allocation, you folks have about $58 billion of net cash right now, as you think about eventually getting to this net cash neutral target, do you think at some point Apple would be open to taking on leverage on the balance sheet and continuing the buyback program? Or is it more like, once you get to this neutral position, it’s going to be about returning free cash flow back to shareholders? I’m just wondering, how do you think about leverage on your balance sheet over time and what sort of leverage do you think you’d be comfortable taking on?
Maestri: Amit, it’s Luca. I would say one step at a time. We have put out this target of getting to net cash neutral several years ago. And we’re working very hard to get there. Our free cash flow generation has been very strong over the years, particularly the last few years, and so, as you’ve seen this year, we’ve increased the amount that we’re allocating to the buyback. For the last couple of years, we were doing $90 billion. Now we’re doing $110 billion. So… let’s get there first. It’s going to take a while still, and then when we are there, we’re going to reassess and see what is the optimal capital structure for the company at that point in time. Obviously, there’s going to be a number of considerations that we will need to look at when we get there.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Fair enough. I figure it’s worth trying anyway. If I go back to this China discussion a bit, and Tim I think your comments around growth and iPhones in mainland China is really notable. Could you step back? I mean, these numbers are still declining, at least in Greater China on a year over year basis in aggregate. Maybe just talk about, what are you seeing from a macro basis in China and then at least the year-over-year decline that we’re seeing, do you think it’s more macro driven or more competitive driven or whatever, that would be helpful.
Cook: Yeah, I can only tell you what we’re seeing, and so I don’t want to present myself as an economist. So I’ll steer clear of that. What we saw was an acceleration from Q1, and it was driven by iPhone. And iPhone in mainland China, before we adjust for this $5 billion impact that we talked about earlier, did grow. That means the other products didn’t fare as well, and so we clearly have work there to do. I think it has been and is, through last quarter, the most competitive market in the world. And so I wouldn’t say anything other than that. I’ve said that before, and I believe that it was last quarter as well. But if you step back from the 90-day cycle, what I see is a lot of people moving into the middle class. We try to serve customers very well there and have a lot of happy customers, and you can kind of see that in the latest store opening over there, and so I continue to feel very optimistic.
David Vogt, UBS: I’m going to roll the two together so you guys have them both. So, you know, Luca, obviously I’m trying to parse through the outlook for the June quarter, and just based on the quick math it looks like, all things being equal given what you said, the iPhone business is going to be down mid single digits again in the June quarter. And if that’s the case, and maybe this is for Tim, how are you thinking about the competitive landscape in the context of what you just said, maybe outside of China? And what changes sort of the consumer demand or receptivity to new devices, because we’ve been in this malaise for a while? Is it really this AI initiative that a lot of companies are pursuing? And do you think that changes the demand drivers going forward, or is it just really more of a timing issue in terms of the replacement cycle is a little bit long in the tooth, and we see a bit of an upgrade cycle at some point, maybe later this year into next year, thanks.
Cook: I do see a key opportunity, as I’d mentioned before, with generative AI, with, all of our devices, or the vast majority of our devices, and so I think that if you look out, that’s not within the next quarter or so, and we don’t guide at the product level, but I’m extremely optimistic. That’s kind of how I view it. I’ll let Luca comment on the outlook portion of it. I think if you step back on iPhone though, and you make this adjustment from the previous year, our Q2 results would be flattish on iPhone. And so that’s how we performed in Q2.
Maestri: Yeah, David, you know, on the outlook, I’ll only repeat what we said before, and this is the color that we’re providing for the quarter. We do expect to grow in total, low single digits. We do expect Services to grow double digits and we expect iPad to grow double digits. For the rest, I’ll let you make assumptions and then we will report three months from now.
Samik Chatterjee, JPMorgan: Your services growth accelerated from 11% growth to 14%. If you can sort of dig into the drivers of where or which parts of services did you really see that acceleration and why it isn’t a bit more sustainable as we think about the next quarter, because I believe you’re guiding more to sort of averaging out the first half of the year for the next quarter. So just curious, what were the drivers and why not have it a bit more sustainably sort of improve as we go through the remainder of the year?
Maestri: So a number of things on Services. First of all, the overall performance was very strong. As I said earlier, all-time records in both developed and emerging markets, so we see our services do well across the world. Records in many of our services categories. There are some categories that are… growing very fast, also because they are relatively smaller in the scheme of our services business, like cloud, video, payment services, those all set all-time revenue records. So we feel very good about the progress that we’re making in services. As we go forward, I’ll just point out that if you look at our growth rates a year ago, they improved during the course of the fiscal year last year so the comps for the Services business become a bit more challenging as we go through the year. But in general, as I mentioned, we still expect to grow double digits in the June quarter at a rate that is very similar to what we’ve done in the first half.
Samik Chatterjee, JPMorgan: If I can ask you more specifically about the India market, obviously you continue to make new records in terms of revenue in that market. How much of the momentum you’re seeing would you associate with your retail strategy in that market, retail expansion relative to maybe some of the supply change or the manufacturing changes or strategies you’ve undergone or taken in that market itself. Any thoughts around that would be helpful.
Cook: Sure. We did grow strong double-digit, and so we were very, very pleased with that. It was a new March quarter revenue record for us. As you know, as I’ve said before, I see it as an incredibly exciting market and it’s a major focus for us. In terms of the operational side or supply chain side, we are producing there. From a pragmatic point of view, you need to produce there to be competitive, and so, yes, the two things are linked from that point of view, but we have both operational things going on and we have go to market and initiatives going on. We just opened a couple of stores last year, as you know, and we see enormous opportunity there. We’re continuing to expand our channels and also working on the developer ecosystem as well, and we’ve been very pleased that there’s a rapidly growing base of developers there, and so we’re working all of the entire ecosystem from developer to the market to operations, the whole thing, and I could not be more excited and enthusiastic about it.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: I guess I’m going to go back to the China question. I guess at a high level, the simple question is, when we look at the data points that have been repeatedly reported throughout the course of this quarter, I’m curious, Tim, what are we missing? Where do you think people are missing Apple’s iPhone traction within the China market, just at a high level, you know, given the data points that were reported throughout this course of the last quarter?
Cook: I can’t address the data points. I can only address what our results are, and you know, we did accelerate last quarter. And iPhone grew in mainland China, so that’s what the results were. I can’t bridge to numbers we didn’t come up with.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: I know you guys haven’t talked about this, quantified it in quite some time, but I’m curious to how we would characterize the channel inventory dynamics for iPhone?
Cook: Sure. For the March quarter, we decreased channel inventory during the quarter. We usually decrease channel inventory during the Q2 time frame. So that’s not unusual. And we’re very comfortable with the overall channel inventory.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: I’m not going to ask about China…
Cook: [Laughs]
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: …but you regularly call out all the rapid growth in many other emerging markets. So is Apple approaching a point where all those other emerging markets in aggregate might cross over to become larger than your current 70 billion Greater China segments? And maybe investors could look at that for driving growth for the wider business?
Maestri: I think, Richard, you’re asking a really interesting question. We were looking at something similar recently. Obviously, China is by far the largest emerging market that we have. But when we start looking at places like India, like Saudi, like Mexico, Turkey, of course Brazil and Mexico, and Indonesia, the numbers are getting large and we’re very happy because these are markets where our market share is low, the populations are large and growing, and our products are really making a lot of progress in those markets. The level of excitement for the brand is very high. Tim was in Southeast Asia recently, and the level of excitement is incredibly high. So it is very good for us, and certainly the numbers are getting larger all the time and so the gap as you compare it to the numbers in China is reducing and hopefully that trajectory continues for a long time.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: You’re coming up on four years from what was an incredibly popular iPhone 12 cycle, and given you’re struggling to reach your net neutral cash position and your margins are sort of near highs, do you see ways to deploy capital more to spur replacement demand in your installed base, either with greater device financing, more investment in marketing, more promotions? I mean, do you feel like you need to produce those sort of margins, or is it more important to spur growth with replacement?
Cook: I think innovation spurs the upgrade cycle, as one thing. Of course there’s economic factors as well that play in there, and what kind of offerings there are from our carrier partners and so forth, and so there’s a number of variables in there. But we work all of those. And, you know, we price our products for the value that we’re delivering, and so that’s how we look at it.
Maestri: And if I can add to Tim’s comments, Richard, one of the things that when you look over the long arc of time that maybe is not fully understood is that we’ve gone through a long period of very strong dollar, and what that means given that our company sells more than 60% of our revenues outside the United States, the demand for our products in those markets is stronger than the results that we report, just because of the translation of those local currencies into dollars, right? And so that is something to keep in mind as you look at our results, right? And so we are making all the investments that are needed, and Tim has talked about innovation. Obviously, we made a lot of progress with financing solutions, with trade-in programs, and so on, and we will continue to make all those investments.
Atif Malik, Citi: Tim, for enterprise specifically, what are some of the top two or three use cases on Vision Pro you’re hearing most excitement?
Cook: You know, the great thing is I’m hearing about so many of them. I wouldn’t say that one has emerged as the top right now. The most impressive thing is that similar to the way people use a Mac, you use it for everything. People are using it for many different things in enterprise, and that varies from field service, to training, to health care related things like preparing a doctor for pre-op surgery or advanced imaging, control centers, and so it’s an enormous number of different verticals, and our focus is on growing that ecosystem and getting more apps and more and more enterprises engaged, and the event that we had recently, I can’t overstate the enthusiasm in the room. It was extraordinary, and so we’re off to a good start, I think, with enterprise.
Atif Malik, Citi: Luca, I believe you mentioned that for the March quarter, the commodity pricing environment was favorable. Can you talk about what you’re assuming for commodity pricing on memory and [inaudible] for the June quarter and maybe for the full year?
Maestri: Yes, we provide guidance just for the current quarter, so I’ll tell you about the guidance. We’re guiding to, again, to a very high level of gross margins, 45.5% to 46.5%. Within that guidance, we expect memory to be a slight headwind, not a very large one, but a slight headwind, and the same applies for foreign exchange. Foreign exchange will have a negative impact sequentially of about 30 basis points.
Apple announced its financial results for its second fiscal quarter of 2024 on Thursday. The company booked $90.8 billion in revenue (down 4% versus the year-ago quarter) with $23.6 billion in profit. Mac revenue was up 4%, presumably buoyed by the release of the M3 MacBook Air. iPad revenue crashed down to $5.6 billion, a 17% drop from the year-ago quarter and the weakest iPad quarter in four years. iPhone revenue was $46 billion, down 10% versus the year-ago quarter.
Services revenue was the big highlight for Apple this quarter, with a new record $23.9 billion in revenue, up 14% year over year. The Wearables, Home, and Accessories category managed only $7.9 billion in revenue, down 10% versus the year-ago quarter.
We’ve also generated our usual transcript of the executive call with analysts, and then we broke down the numbers on YouTube:
Let’s get to the charts.
Apple continues to revise its approach to complying with Europe’s Digital Markets Act, today announcing a pair of exceptions to its Core Technology Fee. The first pertains to apps that are totally free:
First, no CTF is required if a developer has no revenue whatsoever. This includes creating a free app without monetization that is not related to revenue of any kind (physical, digital, advertising, or otherwise). This condition is intended to give students, hobbyists, and other non-commercial developers an opportunity to create a popular app without paying the CTF.
This would seem to be the exception hinted at by Apple’s Kyle Andeer during the company’s DMA workshop in March. The rule itself seems pretty reasonable: if you don’t intend to make any money off an app, you pay nothing, even if it goes amazingly viral.
The second rule is a little more complex and is aimed at small developers:
Second, small developers (less than €10 million in global annual business revenue*) that adopt the alternative business terms receive a 3-year free on-ramp to the CTF to help them create innovative apps and rapidly grow their business. Within this 3-year period, if a small developer that hasn’t previously exceeded one million first annual installs crosses the threshold for the first time, they won’t pay the CTF, even if they continue to exceed one million first annual installs during that time. If a small developer grows to earn global revenue between €10 million and €50 million within the 3-year on-ramp period, they’ll start to pay the CTF after one million first annual installs up to a cap of €1 million per year.
So, basically, if you’re making a small amount of money, you can avoid paying the CTF for three years, giving you a chance to get to the point where you can afford to pay Apple’s fee. (Once again, reinforcing that the target of this rule seems to be large companies paying nothing: Meta, Spotify, etc.)
If that rule seems to raise a lot of questions, you’re not alone: Apple’s updated its Core Technology Fee documentation to address the specifics of the rule.
In addition to these two adjustments, Apple also confirmed that iPadOS will be updated “later this fall” to comply with the European Commission’s recent ruling that it constitutes a gatekeeper platform.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
At Conversation Tree Press, we celebrate the craftsmanship of beautifully designed, letterpress-printed, and finely bound books. Each of our editions include newly commissioned artwork from some of today’s leading illustrators and are perfect for those who appreciate quality and design.
Our collection ranges from classics like Peter Pan and Treasure Island to modern stories such as Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon and Joe Hill’s Faun. Upcoming titles include a collection of weird fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Tony, a former digital project manager and the Press’s proprietor, designs the bindings, typesets each book, and personally packs and ships each order from Kitchener, Ontario. Enjoy free shipping to the US or Canada with promo code 6COLORS on any book currently in the store or when pre-ordering The House on the Borderland next week.
Discover more at conversationtreepress.com
How we’d like to see Apple implement GenAI, our home network troubleshooting process, the iPad model we currently use and what features would prompt an upgrade, and our views on the centralization of account logins, like those from Apple and Google.
Go to the podcast page.
Dan’s back to discuss our iPad event predictions, the very latest on Lex’s games and Moltz’s one weird trick for evading the iCloud logout problem.
Go to the podcast page.
The iPad, remember that? It’s been a minute since Apple unveiled new models of its tablets—about 807,690 minutes, to be precise—but all indications point to brand new models being rolled out as part of an Apple keynote next week, on May 7.
A lot has happened in the intervening time: Apple has released a brand new version of iPadOS, the Apple Vision Pro was announced and shipped, and the M2 processors have given way to the M3—with the promise of more soon. Throughout all of that, the iPad Pro and tenth-generation iPad have remained static and unchanging—and the iPad Air and iPad mini lines date back even further, to March 2022 and September 2021 respectively.
So what do we expect from some brand new iPads? Can Apple move the needle significantly, or is the iPad hardware still so far out ahead of its software that we’ll end up with a lot more horsepower but without too much to use it on.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
We’re trying to puzzle through some strange rumors about next week’s iPad launch event. Also, the EU brings the iPad into the DMA party, Apple locks the Apple IDs of many people (including Myke!), and we shout out the OG Knowledge Navigator.
Go to the podcast page.
Lode Runner running in Virtual II on the Mac, where all emulation is allowed.And just like that, Apple embraced retro game emulators in the App Store. Feeling pressure from regulators and from regulator-enabled alternative app marketplaces like AltStore, Apple decided to drop a decade-plus ban on game emulators on iOS and made them available worldwide.
Despite the fact that I’ve been told repeatedly that nobody cares about game emulators, somehow Riley Testut’s Delta is now topping the App Store charts. Sure, some of that is probably a natural tendency by some of us veteran App Store users to download forbidden fruit before Apple has a re-think and decides to ban it again. But there’s also a genuine interest in reconnecting with older games, something that’s been there all along on other platforms—but has always been blocked from iOS by Apple’s arbitrary policies.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a specific reason why Apple banned emulators on the App Store, but my guess is that it’s one of numerous rules Apple made in the early days based on the fear that platform security could be breached by any app that allowed outside code to be downloaded and run. It took quite a while for Apple to allow apps that interpreted languages like Python to be functional on the App Store, for example.
As is so often the case with Apple’s App Store policies, however, the general fear of legitimate security holes gets commingled with a broader desire to control a platform and choose who competes on it. See, for example, its insistence that Microsoft’s game-streaming service submit each individual game for Apple approval—a patently unworkable request that Microsoft turned down. (This is another rule that the newly regulation-fearing Apple policy crew has revoked recently, though it may be too little, too late, for Microsoft.)
So where do we go from here? While Apple’s acceptance of emulators in the App Store is groundbreaking, and should delight many fans of retro gaming consoles, it’s an extremely limited change. Nobody really knows how Apple defines any of the words in that phrase. How old is retro? Is an old computer on which you can play games a console?
I grew up playing games on early computers, including the Apple IIe. Does the ability to open a spreadsheet in AppleWorks disqualify an Apple II emulator that would otherwise let me play Lode Runner and Choplifter? And if so, why?
Another limitation of Apple’s policy is that for some emulators to work properly, they need to prepare software for execution using what’s called a just-in-time compiler. This is how, for example, you’d be able to play a PowerPC-processor-based game on an Apple silicon processor. But while Apple now allows game emulators, it doesn’t allow JIT technologies, ostensibly for security reasons.
This effectively bans a whole generation of game emulators. Apple should allow retro emulators of all kinds in the app store, and allow game emulators to use JITs to boost performance. Otherwise, its limited expansion of the rules feels mostly for show and not indicative of a real change in approach to App Store rules.
But I want more—and this is a case where Apple’s own intellectual property comes into play. I mentioned the Apple II earlier, but I also played a lot of games on the classic Macintosh. I realize there are potential legal and licensing issues here, but wouldn’t it be great if Apple officially blessed emulators that emulated old Apple devices, like both the Apple II series and classic Macs?
Even better: What if Apple officially released all the ROMs and system images required to run classic Mac OS on iOS? Right now, all old emulators of Apple hardware operate on a sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach where you’re supposed to dump your legitimate Apple ROM images to a file, when in fact most people just download them from the wilds of the Internet. I realize how old stuff may be encumbered legally in a lot of ways, but maybe one of the world’s most valuable companies could task a small group to clear their old intellectual property for those who might delight in playing old games again?
My next suggestion goes to the heart of the incompatibilities that happen as platforms evolved. As Apple has progressed iOS, numerous games and other apps have broken and are no longer usable on modern iPhone and iPad hardware. Those files still exist in the App Store, accessible by old devices, but not modern ones.
Today’s iOS hardware is impressively powerful. So… what if Apple put some effort into virtualizing old versions of iOS itself? It would unlock all sorts of classic apps still available in the App Store, and allow developers of those apps a pathway to keep them alive without expensive and impractical updates.
Finally, here’s my wildest (yet, I assure you, entirely practical) suggestion for Apple: Just embrace virtualization in all forms. Apple’s chips are built with powerful virtualization features in them anyway. Maybe it’s time to let iPhone and iPad users run Windows, Linux, and yes, even modern macOS in virtual machines. The iPhone and especially the iPad have the power to do it.
What are we waiting for? Let’s emulate all the things. The more Apple can do to make this a reality, the better.
Jess Weatherbed at The Verge:
Following an almost eight-month investigation into whether Apple’s iPadOS holds enough market power to warrant stricter regulation, the European Commission has now designated the iPad operating system as a Gatekeeper service under its flagship Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules.
“The Commission concluded that iPadOS constitutes an important gateway for business users to reach end users, and that Apple enjoys an entrenched and durable position with respect to iPadOS,” reads a statement published by the Commission on Monday. “Apple now has six months to ensure full compliance with the DMA obligations as applied to iPadOS.”
Apple only split iPadOS off from iOS in 2019 and the two continue to largely share their underlying, despite their differences. While I’m sure that Apple’s not thrilled about having to implement all the DMA requirements for yet another OS, I’d assume that it will basically follow the template for the iPhone. In some ways this is good, because it will provide some degree of parity between iOS and iPadOS for users in the EU, instead of having apps that will run on users’ smartphones but not their tablets.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
I have an admission: Though I frequently review new Apple products, I don’t always buy them. Like many of you, I can’t afford to update every bit of Apple hardware every time the company does a revision—so I have to carefully measure when the old stuff has now become too old and needs to be replaced with the shiny and new.
Of course, Apple would love us to buy new stuff all the time. But the company has to earn its sales the hard way. I might buy a new iPhone because of an upgraded camera or a new MacBook Air because of a new design and a faster processor. I might bypass a new Apple Watch because the new features just don’t matter to me.
As the heat from the iPhone’s huge acceleration of growth begins to cool down and iPad and Mac sales drop from their pandemic-driven heights, Apple is looking for reasons to sell new hardware. And now, it may have found a big one in a somewhat unexpected place: AI.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Meta adds AI to its glasses, our thoughts on chronological vs. algorithmic timelines, how we find software tools, and the U.S.’s TikTok ban.
Go to the podcast page.
Stephen Hackett has quite a story about what Logitech is doing to its Mac mouse software:
I cannot tell how little I want THE SOFTWARE FOR MY MOUSE to include features tied to ChatGPT … let alone a mouse with a built-in button to start a prompt.
I’ve never liked most vendor-supplied input device software for the Mac and try not to use it, but this is beyond the beyond.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
What an amazing story by Josh Dzieza at The Verge about the people who repair undersea fiberoptic cables to keep data flowing around the world:
The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.
Infrastructure isn’t exciting, but it’s vitally important.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I just got word this morning that Charles Edge, who helped jumpstart the Apple in the Enterprise Report Card and who actively participated in this year’s edition that I posted just last week, has passed away.
His MacAdmins co-host Tom Bridge has a remembrance, as does Adam Engst of TidBITS:
The history of computing was especially near and dear to Charles’s heart. He had been working on a book about it for seven years, a project that had ballooned into four volumes and more than 2000 pages. His last Facebook post from a week ago was about how he had just signed the contracts. I hope the publisher he was working with remains interested in the manuscript since I’m sure Charles would want the editor to finish so it can see the light of day. I certainly want a copy to remember Charles by.
I fervently hope that book makes it into the world. My condolences to everyone who knew and loved Charles.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The world’s foremost e-reader podcast returns, but we also take time to talk about the appeal of retro game emulators, iPad and iPhone rumors, and the possible end of Apple’s leather replacement material.
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker. With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
I’ve used Zoom audio recorders for many years, including the Podtrac P4 I wrote about here a couple of years ago. I carry a Zoom H4n Pro in my backpack for radio field work. And a Zoom H6 has been my go-to in-person podcasting rig, since you can connect up to six mics, and make multitrack recordings with ease. But the display on my H6 crapped out, and the rubberized case began to suffer from what the Internet tells me is called “rubber reversion.” That means the case got all sticky. In the meantime, Zoom has released a set of new handheld recorders; the Essential series, with a couple of features I’ve been craving. So right before a big reporting trip, I replaced my H6 with the H6essential.
No-clip audioSupport for 32-bit floating point audio is the marquee feature of the H6e (and its siblings, the H4e and H1e). Instead of riding input levels to be sure your recordings don’t clip, 32-bit float allows you to record at any level and then raise or lower the audio’s gain when you work with it in a 32-bit compatible DAW. In a 16-bit or 24-bit file, doing so would introduce noise when boosting a too-low signal or still sound distorted if your recording was too hot to begin with. Zoom sells other 32-bit float-compatible recorders, but not handheld ones, until now.
The feature came in handy for me when I waded into a crowd of solar eclipse fans with my shotgun mic and Zoom H6e, looking for good soundbites for a story. I didn’t fiddle with levels – I just rolled tape the whole time I talked to people without having to fiddle with the H6E, and then I leveled the best bits later in Adobe Audition. Worked perfectly.
Similar body typeLike the original H6, the H6e is a rectangle. It’s 10.6 x 4.2 x 1.9 inches and weighs 1.07 pounds. It feels lighter than the old H6. Its case contains more plastic than the original, but it feels sturdy and not cheap. The recorder ships with an x-y capsule mic and also comes with a nifty little cap you can put over the capsule port to protect it when no capsule is installed. You can’t use old Zoom H6-compatible capsules with the new recorders (I have three). The company promises new capsules, including a two-port XLR option, in the coming months. Like the recorder itself, the mic capsule included in the box is mostly plastic, and both smaller and lighter than the one from that older version.
Like the H6, the H6e is battery-hungry, requiring four AAs. It provides phantom power if you need it for unpowered mics, and you can use the USB-C port not only to connect to a computer or an iPhone, but as a power source. Just plug in a battery pack.
Input and outputLike other Zoom recorders, the H4e and H6e have a tactile button for each input and a status light to tell you when the input is armed for recording. The display icons mirror that information, and if you’re recording, you’ll see levels for each active input.
Because setting levels isn’t important, I didn’t really think about it when I first plugged a mic into the H6e. I was puzzled when I got no audio. But even though you don’t need to ride levels to avoid clipping, you do need to use the software-based mixer to raise the volume of the input you’re using. The original H6 model has hardware knobs for each input, which is a bit more intuitive, especially since the documentation doesn’t make it clear that you need to raise the input volume to record.
Zoom has fully migrated to USB-C, which you can use to connect the recorder to a computer or an iOS device, either as an audio interface or to transfer files. I’ve used it as an interface a couple of times with different mics connected. In both cases, I needed to coordinate with the producer of the show I was guesting on to see if my levels were OK on their end, despite a mixer display on my recorder and the ability to monitor with headphones. I was surprised, however, that the level we agreed on for my output was about a third of the maximum the recorder offered. Audio I record might not clip, but I need to be in sync with what someone else needs when I’m logging in remotely.
Zoom has also switched from full-sized SD cards to microSD cards for storage. I had to make a quick Best Buy run since all of my older recorders use the larger cards, and I don’t have game systems or other gadgets that take microSD. The device supports SDHC and SDXC cards, giving you up to a terabyte of available storage per card. You might not need quite that much out in the field, but 32-bit files are larger than the 16- or 24-bit variety.
AccessibilityZoom has offered a few different display types on its recorders, and while I can use most of them after a fashion with my low vision, some displays, like the Podtrac P4, are difficult for me to read, even with brightness and contrast settings adjusted. The Essential series changes all that, and Zoom is even marketing the products’ accessibility. All three recorders in the series include a voice-based menu system. In fact, you’ll encounter it when you first turn on the unit, so a visually impaired user can set the device up unassisted without resorting to special keystrokes or reading the user guide. You can turn speech off if you don’t want to use it. If you use the accessible menu system, you can even choose one of three volume levels for the interface speech.
Additionally, the Essential recorders’ displays use a high-contrast, dark background, with white text and graphics. It’s much easier to read than past Zoom screens, especially in bright light. Finally, the 32-bit float support offers an accessibility boost for anyone who can’t eyeball levels as recording takes place. Just be sure you’ve initially set each input channel to a level that’s high enough to capture your audio.
Affordable PowerhouseZoom’s Essential recorders range in price from $99 for the H1e (no XLR ports, but a great little capsule mic) to $199 for the H4e (two XLRs, ideal for a reporter in the field) to $299 for the H6e, which has already done triple duty for me as a field recorder, podcast roundtable unit, and audio interface to my MacBook Pro.
Just as majestic as Apple’s Aerial screensaver, no?Increasingly, every pixel in front of our eyes is fought over by a pool of large technology companies that are trying to squeeze fractions of cents out of ads and promotions.
There’s a lack of care and thoughtfulness about all of these moves. Instead, there’s just an assumption that as long as they can pry someone’s eyes open, “Clockwork Orange”-style, then they’ve helped activate those reluctant viewers with brands.
Last week, YouTube rolled out a new version of its app for Apple TV. It overrides the screensaver by starting a slideshow just before the Apple TV’s screensaver is supposed to come on. If you’re watching a video, it’ll be an endless loop zooming into the video’s thumbnail and fading to black. If you were just paused somewhere in the app’s interface, it’ll be stills taken from a random assortment of YouTube videos on nature, or stills from drone footage.
The YouTube logo is burned in to the upper left as a static image in white, and a graphic for the directional pad with the “up” arrow highlighted in white appears in the bottom right corner. You can hit the up button to resume that paused video (instead of just pushing play???) or, if it’s one of the heavily compressed video stills, it’ll take you to that video of drone footage and start playing it.
Fortunately, when I complained about this on Mastodon, Rob Bhalla got in touch and told me that he fixed it by changing the Apple TV screensaver timing to start at two minutes, instead of the default five. Sure enough, that makes the screensaver start before the slideshow can, because YouTube has no idea what your Apple TV’s screensaver settings are. They just guessed that most people will leave them at the default, and hard coded that timing in for their slideshow.
YouTube’s not doing this out of concern over screen-burn-in. (Those static white graphics prove that.) And they don’t have a better screensaver. YouTube’s screensaver has no settings, because this isn’t for you to control. YouTube is undoubtedly staking out real estate so they can inject advertising and promotion into it at a later date. (No, YouTube hasn’t said that the screensaver is a future home of ads, but there’s absolutely no other reason to add this feature.)
Even if you have the ad-free YouTube Premium, like I do, you’ll see the screen stealer. It seems like it was something that’s been tested for a while, with some users reporting that they saw it months ago, not just in the most recent app release. But now everyone I’ve talked to on the current version is being subjected to it.
The pause that advertisesRoku was in the news just the other week when Janko Rottgers came across a patent that they filed to inject ads from the display device (meaning a TV with Roku software) over paused video streams from input sources, like an Apple TV.
Roku already boasts about selling ad placement in their cityscape screensaver, and offered a branded takeover of the screensaver for “Barbie” last summer.
Imagine a future where Roku injects ads over the YouTube app injecting ads. Will there be a cat-and-mouse game over who gets to sell access to the screen you paused when you went to the bathroom?
Meanwhile, those whiz kids in Redmond are testing out using the Windows Start menu to promote apps. From Tom Warren at The Verge:
Microsoft started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment in beta versions of Windows 11. Microsoft has been experimenting with ads inside Windows for more than 10 years. There are already promotional spots on the Windows 10 lock screen and in the Start menu, so it’s not exactly surprising to see them appear in Windows 11, too.
Classy, classy stuff.
It’s hardly necessary to recount, but Amazon does some pretty sketchy stuff in its quest for money. Jason Snell and I have both removed the Amazon Echo Show from our lives because the things are haunted by noisy, intrusive offers that outweigh their utility.
Amazon also executed the most brazen maneuver out of all the others when they flipped the switch this year on every Prime subscriber getting ads in Prime Video unless those users paid more. A brilliant move when they have a captive audience.
Petites pommes de terreAll those companies look terrible. Not like those saints over at Apple. They certainly haven’t junked up the experience of using their devices in the pursuit of small potatoes.
Using Apple devices without Apple services is subpar, and Apple will take every opportunity to make you aware of that, on every Apple Device that you own. From their perspective this promotion is first party, and it has something that’s like truth to it. Close enough.
Let’s circle back to the Apple TV. The tvOS updates have gradually started to beef up emphasis on the TV app as place to go for your TV-watching needs. However, that’s only true if you really want to watch the Apple TV+ shows that Apple is currently promoting.
If you launch the app after an OS update, and you’re not a current subscriber, you get whisked to the Apple TV+ tab where you will get autoplaying video, and spiel about all the great Apple TV+ content you’re missing out on. This happens every time there’s a point update.
Theoretically my home. In practice, Apple’s.If you go to the Home section of the TV app, you’ll get the same carousel sales pitch for Apple TV+ shows that you’d get if you were in the Apple TV+ section. It’s not left to stand on its own. Apple doesn’t trust you to pay enough attention to them.
TV+ isn’t playing hard to get, or trying to lure me back with mystery. It all just turns into interface noise, frustrating what I want to do. This screen real estate belongs to Apple, not to me.
Just like all these other companies shoving promotions in, Apple doesn’t think it’s a villain. It thinks it’s increasing awareness and fostering discovery! (Never mind that if you are an Apple TV+ subscriber, you’ll see shows in the carousel that you’ve already watched.)
Well, now I want to subscribe.After all, Apple TV+ shows and movies are critically acclaimed, darlings, especially Argylle. If what you want to watch doesn’t fit into that category, that’s your problem, not Apple’s.
Apple is on the verge of launching their ad-supported Apple TV+ tier. I doubt that they’ll be as bold as Amazon when they do, but they’re not going to be quiet about how much they’d like you to subscribe to the ad-supported tier.
Left to right: A puzzling News+ ad, classy targeted ads in News, and an awfully big ad in the App Store.Apple Music? Well, there’s not a lot to differentiate it from other music streaming services, but if you don’t sign up, good luck with the app. There don’t seem to be ad-supported plans, but promoting Music itself is the killer ad, really.
The News app that exists to promote Apple News+? That’s a harder sell, because there’s absolutely nothing critically acclaimed about News+. It might have something that’s critically acclaimed buried in the interface somewhere, but they can hardly take credit for that. They can take credit for spamming everyone about the crossword.
The only thing the News team is interested in is whether or not you’ll fork over more money. They even supplement it with really bad ads in the interface that parade around as news, like ads from The Penny Saver.
There are bad ads in the Stocks app, and Apple’s at least tested ads in Maps, but Mark Gurman’s rumor about that was from 2022, so I’m not clear if we’ll see it, or someone has been able to hold the line on keeping that out.
Speaking of bad ads, let’s not forget that the App Store needs to skim more money from developers and confound users by inserting ads into that interface as well.
Until third-party app marketplaces are really real, everyone will have to go to search for a specific app and then scroll past the bombastic ad masquerading as the first search result to get to the app they actually want. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone, including the most valuable company in the world.
These are the tactics of companies that sell hardware at a reduced cost, like TV manufacturers, where the hardware is a commodity. Unless Apple starts arguing that they make commodity hardware that needs to be subsidized, I think they should reconsider.
Will it ever be enough?When I complained about YouTube’s screensaver on social media, I was told to leave a one-star review on the App Store. Like that’s the leverage we have over YouTube. When I wrote about Amazon sticking ads into Prime Video, several people told me that they’d swear off Amazon. (At press time, Amazon is still doing quite well.) It’s worse than vowing you’ll never fly an airline again.
There is little in the way of taste or thoughtfulness to these things that are embedded in Apple’s shipping software. The push for pennies is inculcated into Apple’s business and culture nearly as much as the promoted apps in Microsoft’s Start Menu, Amazon’s junked-up Echo Shows, Roku’s city-for-sale, and YouTube’s screen stealer.
It’s not that advertising is evil, but taking a spot that didn’t have an ad and “innovating” by wedging an ad in there is.
I suspect that the people responsible for plastering Apple TV+ in the interface think they’re better than the people at YouTube injecting a screensaver slideshow. I’m positive everyone thinks they’re better than Amazon.
There must be people at these companies that look at this level of self-serving hackery and realize that they’ve gone too far. But for that to happen, there need to be executives who can see the value in not viewing every inch of interface as an opportunity for more revenue generation.
I’m not optimistic.
Is this phase of the streaming wars reaching an endgame? We discuss the fates of Peacock and Paramount+, and consider Max after a year under its new name. Also, we share more listener streaming suggestions!
Go to the podcast page.
Less than two weeks after Apple changed its rules on emulators, Riley Testut’s Delta game emulator climbed to the number one spot in the U.S. App Store within twelve hours of its launch. If Testut’s names sounds familiar it’s because he’s also the purveyor of the recently launched Alt Store PAL, the first third-party app marketplace in the European Union, enabled by the Digital Markets Act.
On Mastodon, MacStories’s John Voorhees described Delta’s success as “what pent up demand looks like.”
I’d go further and say it’s not pent-up but penned up. This wasn’t merely a case of waiting for a company to release a product it hadn’t gotten to yet—like when Apple released the iPhone 6 amid desire for a larger phone—but of a product that was actively withheld as a matter of policy. Nothing technical prevented Delta from running on iOS three weeks ago, or even three years ago. (To that point: Delta was already available for those iOS users who wanted to engage in the necessary circumventions.) Apple had merely decided, as a matter of policy, not to allow emulators on the App Store for its own reasons.1
The reversal was less capricious: with the launch of third-party marketplaces in the EU, of which the previously mentioned Alt Store PAL (with Delta as its marquee offering) is at the forefront, Apple is attempting to neutralize one of the biggest advantages of those competitors. Emulators like Delta are often used as an example of something that Apple wouldn’t allow in its own stores that third-party marketplaces could offer instead. There’s probably no other category of apps that replaces it in that regard.2 With emulators now available on the App Store worldwide, it will be interesting to see if there’s anything else that draws users towards third-party stores in Europe.
One view of this is that Apple allowing for emulators on its platform is competitive. And that’s true…but it’s equally true that it was dragged kicking and screaming into this competition by outside forces.
Think different, compete betterLast week, I wrote that the change of Apple’s policy was that regulation—or the threat of regulation—works. My pal John Gruber suggested that should be revised to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. That seems to me to go without saying: not all regulation is good or implemented well any more than all business decisions are. But let me take my own shot at revising my thesis: regulation—or, more broadly, the existence of regulatory bodies—is necessary.
There are those who think that all problems in business should be solved by the market, as though envisioning a mano-a-mano, no-holds-barred, winner-take-all cage match between corporations.
But this specific case of emulators would seem to point out the shortcomings of that view. Clearly, there was plenty of demand for emulation apps—take Delta’s success as evidence—but Apple steadfastly refused to meet that demand by allowing for supply. It didn’t do so until essentially forced into it by regulatory changes in the European Union.3 Without that change, the chances that Apple would have eventually made the decision on its own is vanishingly small.4
One of John’s recurring points is that Apple is consistent: “Apple’s own needs first, users second, developers third.” An astute observation, if not particularly surprising for any profit-seeking corporation, but this situation also makes clear that no amount of combined demand from users or developers will outweigh Apple’s own needs. What makes the emulator situation particularly strange is that offering them on the App Store doesn’t actually seem to hurt Apple at all—and probably even helps it, given the evident popularity of the category. This is the rare situation that’s good for everybody.5
This is why the existence of regulatory bodies and use of regulation, even if it isn’t always universally good or correct, is a necessity to get the best out of competition—to keep the system honest, the playing field level. Checks and balances are just as important for business as for a system of government, and the bigger and more powerful companies get, the even more important it is.
Recent comparisons of Apple to Boeing may not be entirely apt, but here’s one place where I think there is some similarity: Boeing operates in an industry where it is (in the U.S. at least) the market share leader, and together with its largest rival, Airbus, dominates the field as an effective duopoly. As of 2018, the two manufacturers accounted for about two-thirds of all commercial airlines in use in the U.S.; those numbers go even higher if you’re talking about just larger airplanes like jumbo jets—or perhaps we could call them “performance aircraft.” I don’t think anybody would argue that Boeing’s in need of less regulation.
Or, if I can be permitted another analogy, much as we get mad at the umpires for bad calls, they’re on the field to keep the teams honest and to provide impartial accountability. John and I would probably both find a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees without any umpires to be entertaining, but I’m not sure either of us believe it would show off the real spirit of competition.6
The success of Delta illustrates that perhaps it’s time for both Apple and the App Store to evolve. Despite our fond memories of the team that once hoisted a pirate flag over its campus, a trillion-dollar corporation is not a bunch of maverick upstarts. The idea of Tim Cook putting up the Jolly Roger on the roof of Apple Park7 is not only risible in the extreme, but displays a lack of self-awareness for the current state of affairs. Let’s not root for Apple to win—let’s root for Apple to do better.
- Perhaps for avoiding the appearance of impropriety? But emulators have been widely available on the Mac for years. In fact one of the landmark cases about emulation, Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., was about a game emulator that ran on the Mac. ↩
- The biggest other draw (probably larger than all of emulators as a category) is probably a single app, Epic’s Fortnite. ↩
- I’ll give the company the barest amount of credit for making that change worldwide; it certainly could have restricted emulators to use in the European market, but I think that would have made US customers even angrier—and rightfully so. ↩
- I’m tempted to say it would never have allowed them, but only a Sith deals in absolutes. ↩
- Well, maybe not Nintendo? ↩
- As always, an exception to the rule: For decades I played ultimate frisbee, which thanks to its hippie roots, is famously self-refereed. Official play often uses “Observers” though, who don’t have ref powers but can be appealed to as impartial. However, the professional North American leagues do have refs. ↩
- Where would Lisa Jackson even stand?! ↩
In 2021, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.
This is our fourth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 128 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by me, Jason Snell.
Overall scoresAs it did last year, Apple’s strongest scores came in hardware—Apple silicon Macs are a big winner—and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy.
In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of deployment (which had taken a big hit last year) and macOS identity management. The only categories to show score drops, albeit small ones, were the top scorers—hardware reliability and security/privacy—which both dropped 0.1.
We also asked a few questions outside the traditional set. For the third straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. And for the second straight year, the sense that OS adoptions were happening quicker than usual was up — from 37% in 2022 to 51% in 2023 to 56% this year.
We asked about Vision Pro adoption, understanding that a large portion of our panel is from outside the U.S. and therefore unable to deploy Vision Pro right now. Still, it was interesting to see that 10% of respondents said they were deploying Vision Pro today.
We also wanted to see how organizations were embracing next-generation technologies designed to eliminate passwords, such as Passkeys. A full third of our panel said they’re already deploying those technologies.
Finally, we asked about the current state of in-office, hybrid, and remote work in our panel’s organizations. Nearly half reported a mostly-hybrid organization and an impressive 81% reported some degree of hybrid work. Two smaller groups, both around 10%, reported either being all-in on office work or in organizations that are entirely remote.
Here’s what Tom Bridge of the Mac Admins Podcast had to say about this year’s results:
“It’s interesting to see the slight declines in security and hardware innovation. I wouldn’t have expected either. Neither is a substantial loss, but I suspect security may come down to the increased number of software updates to cover security issues.
“Deployment getting a boost is a pleasant surprise, likely owing to structural changes in the automated device enrollment framework released in Sonoma. I have the same reaction to the improvements in the identity management scores. With January’s updates to Apple Business Manager, any IDP with OpenID Connect, Shared signals framework and SCIM can power managed Apple IDs.”
Read on for category-by-category scores and comments from participants.
Enterprise programsGrade: B (average score: 3.6, last year: 3.5)
Teg Bains wrote: “ABM sign up is still painful and slow.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “Behind the scenes, Apple has made some notable enhancements, such as improvements to the Apple Software Lookup Service.”
Joel Housman wrote: “We haven’t made any changes in this area with any of the tools we use. Our MDM provider for Apple is JumpCloud and they’ve made a lot of improvements over the past year, but its hard to tell whether those improvements have came about because of anything Apple changed with their MDM APIs or whether JumpCloud is just improving upon what already exists.”
Adam Anklewicz wrote: “The enterprise programs are pretty good for what they are, but they’re pretty stagnant. While the Federated Apple IDs is a welcome and long overdue change, these programs have barely budged since first introduction. VPP continues to only work sporadically without any changes in years.”
Jeff Finlay wrote: “Listed programs are working well at my higher ed enterprise.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Another year of incremental improvements. There’s still room to improve integration with Apple Business Manager, Applecare, Store for Business etc by making them all work together (and/or providing API’s so we can collect and collate this information ourselves).”
Dennis Logue wrote: “The efforts to improve software updates are appreciated but still not complete.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “It would be nice if Apple gave clearer timelines about API deprecations and documented when certain things will stop working. In one of the betas, any app that wasn’t using the newer ScreenCaptureKit API call (rather than a deprecated method) would display an error message repeatedly to the end user. If that change had made it to production, it would mean that every CEO who tried to share their screen via Zoom would have to deal with multiple popups, containing a confusing error that meant nothing to them. I cannot stress enough how poor of a user experience this is. Because Zoom had not updated to an API change that Apple vaguely said was being deprecated at some point, countless Mac Admins would deal with tickets and angry phone calls because Apple (presumably) wanted to put pressure on developers to update their API calls. The proper way to do this would be to document these changes through a roadmap distributed to developers, not to put Mac Admins in the unfortunate position of nagging developers and reassuring end users that this error (completely out of their control) would eventually be going away.”
Nate Felton wrote: “I believe some of the largest improvements in this category are around service availability and access controls for Managed Apple IDs (MAIDs). The introduction of iCloud Keychain and Passkeys for MAIDs is a huge step in the right direction. One current oversight of adding additional services to MAIDs is the lack of ability to increase the iCloud storage for a MAID, resulting in the free 5GB tier quickly being used up. With Apple Business/School Manager (AxM) finally allowing for federated authentication with a custom identity provider (meaning other than Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra ID), using MAIDs within the enterprise becomes a possibility for organizations that use other cloud identity providers (e.g. Okta or JumpCloud). Apple Business/School Manager (AxM) is still missing some much needed APIs to allow for external integrations, primarily around device management such as assigning (or unassigning) a device to a specific MDM server. The ability to define custom roles with granular access to AxM features would be a huge improvement as well. As others have mentioned in the past, in some cases, AxM has become the de facto device management portal for Apple, but some device information is still locked behind other services. Features that are available today via GSX, such as diagnostic tools and warranty information, should also be available as a part of AxM, and in turn, available via APIs to MDM vendors to access.”
Tony Williams wrote: “There could be improvements but it is pretty good.”
John Cleary wrote: “ABM/ASM are largely stagnant, yet many deficiencies remain. The UI is slow and clunky, creating classes in ASM is still a painful process of uploading CSVs with no ability to download the current account set as pre-populated CSVs meaning if you don’t keep a copy of the last set of CSVs you uploaded you may accidentally disable or remove accounts, and there’s still no way to buy storage for managed Apple IDs which means in they essentially can’t be really used if you need more than 5GB (ABM) or 200GB (ASM). And let’s be honest, neither of those limits are sufficient, but to not be able to expand them in inexcusable.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Apple has invested heavily in Apple Business/School Manager in the last year, as well as in Managed Apple IDs, in new and important ways that empower enterprises to make better use of these core technologies. It is exciting to see Apple adapt these areas of their products for the needs of businesses of all sizes. There are still challenges here, and progress is often slow, sometimes even imperceptibly so, to get needed improvements and needed goals. Apple is a slow-moving ship in the channel, carrying a lot of programs, and it’s got a quality pilot, but sometimes the course is just a little off. Apple’s secrecy is part of its DNA, but the absence of better partners who are read into the plan means it takes longer for MDMs to adopt and adapt to the roadmap in Cupertino.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “It is getting better slowly but more work is required. Apple still really doesn’t get enterprises needs.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “I would like API integration to read assets from ABM into ServiceNow, or another CMDB.”
Trevor Sysock wrote: “The additional services and controls added to MAIDs are very welcome.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “Solid services with increased feedback from Apple’s engineering teams.”
John C. Welch wrote: “One of the few bright spots in terms of documentation from Apple.”
Michael Reinhart wrote: “Some of this is still not available in Canada.”
June Billings wrote: “Apple is focused on consumers and makes little or no effort to cater to Enterprises. e.g. no grace time for accepting updated T&Cs, no allowance for time for corporate legal teams to review.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “We are a small company so we use only some of the programs. ABM works well for us. So does Apps & Books. I buy all software via ABM if possible. Combined with a MDM it makes it easy to distribute software. On the minus side, apps do not always install or upgrade as quickly as we would like. We started use of Managed Apple IDs in 2023. For now we don’t have much use for it but I plan on using it to help with remote support. The biggest negative for us is the Developer program, but we aren’t developers. We have some digital versions magazines and we are moving away from distributing them via apps to a simple web based approach.”
Jeff Richardson wrote: “Apple should have made MDM ready on the Apple Vision Pro even before Day 1 so that the big vendors like Microsoft could have MDM solutions in place when the product first shipped. Apple’s recent update finally enabled MDM, but who knows how long it will next take Microsoft and others (other than JAMF) to enable support.”
Nic Scott wrote: “I appreciate the improvements in ABM, MAIDs, and DDM in the last year but MAIDs are still not enough for our org to use them and DDM and MDM management has not been as reliable as I was hoping. Looking forward to macOS 15 to see more improvements.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Apple Business Manager and Managed Apple IDs got big improvements this year. One of my feature requests was addressed: Custom IdP support in ABM.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “There have been no major improvements in the last year, but there have not been any major faults either. Apple are generally running things at even pace now.”
Chris Schildhorn wrote: “What is offered is mostly well documented, and supported.”
Adam Rice wrote: “Steady strong improvements in what can be done with Managed Apple IDs. DDM looks to be the light at the end of the long dark Software Update tunnel.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Apple’s failure to extend program availability beyond the US, particularly in regions like EMEIA, persists. For example, Apple Business Essentials is still not accessible in many areas. This lack of global inclusivity underscores the need for improvement.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “Why am I not using FaceTime instead of Teams?”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “The experience we can create with ABM, ADE and MDM so that a user can open the shrink-wrapped box of a new computer and get started without IT intervention is wonderful and so nurturing of the user experience. DDM is progressing sensibly and looks like it will be a great thing once complete. Can’t wait to see what WWDC2024 brings.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “Some solid improvements in last year’s releases. The recent addition of Apple Vision Pro is a good first step, but should have been there from day one. Overall, MDM is still lacking features and cross platform support.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Apple is making some progress here. An example would be finally allowing administrators to force a software update on iPadOS. That being said, the way it is implemented is still a bit convoluted and contingent on several steps and factors. And the Defer Software Update is still managed by number of days, and not actual OS version numbers. This requires admins to constantly change the number when updates are released for two different major OS versions within days of each other.”
Luke Charters wrote: “We finally have support for iCloud keychain and Continuity features for Managed Apple IDs! This, together with the improvements to permissions and controls for Managed Apple IDs, has made me very happy.”
Karsten Fischer wrote: “Seems fine so far.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple Business Essentials is still only available in the US. The options for Apple Care and managed iCloud Storage are only available through Business Essentials. Apple admins still cannot volume purchase or manage App Store subscriptions or in-app purchases. I am all for being cautious, but this is too slow. Big improvements to Managed IDs last year, though there are still challenges to deployment.”
Allister Banks wrote: “There’s still no customer-facing API to AxM which would remove IT asset management toil and administrative overhead. There’s a general continued crackdown on having an enterprise developer account for those wanting to use an open source MDM. Signing certificates and entitlements for System Extension entitlements are slow (on the order of months in some cases) to the point that it’s hard to focus on advanced applications. Sufficient uptime and relative maintenance of docs doesn’t really earn high marks?”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “AxM still does not have an API to help multi-server environments like you might find in a house-of-brands. Instead, staff have to manually assign and unassign every single serial number by hand, a task we do about 40 times a day, every day. MAIDs have slowly gotten better but still have substantial limitations—for example, you can’t use passkeys with your “work or school” Apple ID slot—and rolling out MAIDs to an enterprise where people have personal accounts at their work domain is complicated. Apple’s sales engineering teams have very little guidance on exactly how to turn on MAIDs for an organization, and the best source of information has come from conference talks from the community. MDM has had some improvements, but Apple needs to do a better job of getting MDM vendors to adopt new features. For example, Apple added a mechanism to have clients upgrade to a specific version by a certain date, but this new feature is only available through the DDM APIs, and VMware (Workspace One) has not built out this feature, and might never at this point. Jamf provides it only if you’re using their more expensive “Jamf Cloud” version, but if you have regulatory reasons – which would be workplaces where you’d really really want to bump updates – and are running Jamf Pro on site, you are out of luck. Similarly, Jamf Pro still doesn’t support device attestation for certificates on macOS, neither in on-prem nor with Jamf Cloud, as they have yet to implement ACME certificate payloads. Apple should have some kind of way of showing compliance with their features so that we can hold vendors accountable through a certification program. Of course, that would be best served by some way to actually let us move between MDMs, which is not possible without a great deal of on-the-ground engineering and helpdesk time. If Apple made it easier to change MDMs without boiling the ocean, that would enable a lot more competition and hopefully push vendors to work faster.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Federating a domain with MAIDs remains problematic and difficult. While I appreciate Apple’s focus on privacy, and Apple does supply a number of affected users in your domain during the federation process, it refuses to supply a list of which users would be affected. Organizations are given little to no ability to customize the emails that are sent to affected users with branding, tagging, or information security/anti-phishing considerations. As Apple continues to increase the number of things that require a MAID for access, it continues to move away from Enterprise compatibility and more conventional integrations.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “Apple has made some progress in the last year, such as adding other identity providers to Apple Business Manager, and several welcome improvements to the MDM APIs. However, to me, it is still somewhat baffling how Apple seems somewhat oblivious to how most enterprise platforms operate and are missing several fairly key features that would benefit businesses and enterprises significantly.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “Additions of Federation options and updated Apps & Books show real growth.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “Significant work done this year for MDM APIs and some updates for Managed Apple IDs. I wish there had been meaningful updates for Apple Business Essentials. I would like to enroll, but even my Apple Store Reps have been confused about ABE’s feature set and if it could replace our current MDM.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “Nobody understands Managed Apple IDs. As a school, students want to use their personal Apple IDs for iMessage (we allow this). This locks us out of using features with Apple Classroom Manager. Allowing Forced Updates in macOS 14 has been helpful. The fact that we can’t force enable screen sharing on school-owned devices is still concerning to us. Devices that don’t get rebooted for long periods of time still often fail MDM check-ins and don’t get updated policies. Apple has actively blocked workarounds to this like Addigy’s MDM Kickstart tool in 14.4, yet there is no solution in sight for an actual fix to this MDM problem.”
Charles Edge wrote: “The past year has probably not seen as many high-value net-new options as it’s seen cleaning up existing options that many consider table stakes. So updates haven’t garnered a lot of attention, and that’s a good thing!”
Enterprise Service and SupportGrade: B (average score: 3.7, last year: 3.7)
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “Significantly better than years before, but it’s still the iron curtain of silence.”
Joel Housman wrote: “I would say they’ve improved in this area. In the past year, I’ve been contacted several times about online or in-person webinar/training available to me. I’ve had more contact with our Apple rep, who meets with me quarterly.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Good things here: Apple recently published a list of specs and downloads for its devices, and they have had good deployment and security documentation for several years. Calling into support is generally a good experience. But I tried purchasing a replacement power supply for an M1 iMac. I couldn’t just buy it like a replacement power supply for a MacBook. Very convoluted process of going through support, filling out fairly labor-intensive paperwork, multiple line items, a limit to how many could be purchased per support case. (I think the limit was like four, and each supply counted as two items.) And expensive!”
Fraser Hess wrote: “It’s time for a more mature and cooperative engagement with enterprise partners. Apple needs to publish roadmaps, score their vulnerabilities with CVSS, and provide more controls and documentation for new features. This year, we raced to understand how to manage the new video reactions, desktop, and screen saver features. Too often, the Mac admin lives at the intersection of spelunking and whack-a-mole.”
Allister Banks wrote: “Same as every year, Apple has great people and good updates being pushed out in totally hidden-in-plain-sight docs and a bitbucket where feedback goes.”
Charles Edge wrote: “We’ve seen iterative improvements in documentation and more content that’s more widely accessible. I’ve been most impressed with the ability to now interface with much of this content programmatically, through APIs and GitHub.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “We don’t pay for any enterprise support contracts from Apple besides the AppleCare+ we purchase for all our laptops. I really like the support they provide via the Apple Enterprise Support phone line: (866) 752-7753. It’s very easy for me to quickly set up mail-in repairs by calling that number. It’s a much quicker and more streamlined process than calling the main support line as a consumer.”
Tony Williams wrote: “I’ve always found that I get a swift response and help to fix my problem.”
Trevor Sysock wrote: “I don’t have access to Enterprise Support. However, I have found numerous inaccuracies and conflicting documentation regarding MDM profile keys. Some were fixed upon filing feedback, and some have gone unanswered. I also do not like the new beta paradigm of requiring users to log in before being enrolled in a beta channel. It was unreliable in early Sonoma builds.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Apple’s Documentation for Enterprise remains strong, and lately they are oftentimes delivering in excess of expectations. Timely and versioned documentation available through AppleSeed and public sources remains excellent. The only challenge here is how quickly those docs get revised.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “Documentation for Mac Admins has really stepped up in the past few years, most notably the Apple Platform Deployment guide, which is regularly updated. Filing Feedback still feels like screaming into the void sometimes, but I have had some more obscure issues addressed via feedback in the past year, so I know they are at least reading them.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Feedback Assistant is still a black hole, or at the very least seems that way from this side of the equation. Using ‘sideloading’ methods of gaining attention to an issue is still the best way to get it looked at. In other words, it’s not how you say it, it’s who you say it to (and also how you say it since you can’t just dump facts into a Feedback, you need to invent a user story on how XYZ change affects you and your business, etc).”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “The AppleSeed for IT Program and the associated community on the Mac Admins Slack appears to be working very well. As a community, we are all seeing the importance of filing feedback as early as we can. With guidance from within Apple, I feel the community is filing better feedback that appears to bring the changes we want and/or need. The Enterprise Team here in Australia has provided fantastic support to help the community with presentations at local meetups.”
John Cleary wrote: “This works pretty well, but the process for joining is still stuck in the early 2000s UI.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “Utilizing Apple Professional Services and the Apple Consultants Networks has given customers confidence that certified Apple support is available to the enterprise.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “As the only MDM admin for my organization, unfortunately I do not spend much time utilizing AppleSeed for IT. I do welcome the reach out from Apple in the private channel in MacAdmins Slack and do realize that this is one conduit to the community they use.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “If you have access to the right resources such as AppleCare Enterprise, they are top notch. They are extremely helpful and will help track down answers that they don’t immediately know. There is a little bit of a gap in the SMB space around support, but they seem to be at least thinking about that with some of the programs they have been working on.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “Great work from the team in the UK with both the Appleseed and financial services meetings.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “In typical Apple fashion, they changed how developers and admins download and install system betas right before WWDC last year. Mac admins had to scramble to adapt their workflows and deployments. Other than that, not much has changed. The deployment user guides remain of high quality, even though the Security Guide has not been updated in nearly two years. What is encouraging is that Apple has management options for most new features (e.g. alternative App marketplaces) or will implement them fairly quickly on feedback. Though I would still prefer more clarity and directness, Apple is getting better at communicating their goals and direction to the developers and administrators.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “I said before and I will say again: Appleseed is an amazing resource. Feedback Assistant, on the other hand, feels like shouting into the void. I have noticed that feedback updates have gotten better in the last year, but there is still room for improvement.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “The documentation is pretty good. Beyond that, there’s room for improvement, especially on the feedback side.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Submitting an issue through Feedback Assistant is still akin to yelling into a bottomless well. We do get engagement through Enterprise Support tickets, but any ticket we’ve submitted over the past year through Enterprises Support has been resolved by either being told to wait till the next OS update or having Support create product feedback on our behalf; it’s not necessarily technical support but more Feedback Assistant concierge service. I wish Apple would reconsider how users participate in the macOS and iPadOS betas. In an ideal world, we would be able to control access to the betas through configuration profiles and not have to rely on users signing in with AppleIDs. Apple has said for years that MDM and configuration profiles are the way of the future, so having to fall back to signing into System Settings seems like Apple is undercutting their own message. “.”
Nic Scott wrote: “I think they do a terrific job with the Appleseed program, some of the rebranding, interacting with admins in Slack, and always encouraging feedback. Feedback Assistant as a product has been a little wonky several times or crashed in betas to where you can’t submit feedback. Not a huge fan about the switch away from seedutil to enroll in the betas, but I’m used to it now.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “Topics discussed in the community are reflected, and cases shared with Apple in the Enterprise Portal are also addressed in a detailed manner. For example, issuesFileVault activation during macOS enrollment.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “A lot more work is required. Enterprise OS support is expensive and frustrating, as you log bugs and feature requests, but they don’t go anywhere. Apple should have extra engineers working on fixing bugs and implementing feature requests for their enterprise customers. Documentation is getting better, but release notes are still as vague as ever. If Apple releases a new feature or a major improvement in an OS update, even if it’s a minor OS update, they should have some sort of tutorial on the new/updated enterprise features and what their implications are. Feedback Assistant is still a black hole. With the odd exception when Apple has really screwed something up that impacts everyone, filing feedback seems a pointless exercise.”
Michael Reinhart wrote: “Quality of support feels poorer in the last year or so.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “No complaints here. Every time I’ve reached out to Enterprise, I’ve been given access to very knowledgeable people. After I forwarded a Windows-focused coworker one of the response emails from Apple, he commented, “Wow, I wish all the vendors I work with would answer with this amount of detail and information.”
Nate Felton wrote: “Feedback Assistant continues to be a black hole. Well-written feedback can often take hours to complete, only for there to be zero response for months or years. It has left me discouraged to ever write feedback. Having said that, Apple’s continued focus and commitment to programs such as Appleseed for IT and the Enterprise Workflows team has had some great successes over the past year in discovering issues during Beta cycles and resolving them before final release to Public. Apple publicly publishing changes to device management schemas has been a big win. Rather than needing to discover what has changed, being able to see diffs helps to focus on the things that have been added or changed. The Apple Platform Deployment guide, the Apple Platform Security guide, and the ‘What’s New for Enterprise in macOS (Name)’ all continue to be invaluable sources of information that help with keeping up on changes to the platforms.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “The AppleSeed Beta program is running smoothly, but it must be said that it owes a large chunk of its success to the MacAdmins Slack, who work tirelessly to test issues, discuss findings with their peers, and submit feedback to Apple. Response times to feedback submitted via AppleSeed for IT have improved in the last year. Having said that, it still seems like the feedback triage team is not adequately tying similar reports together. It becomes clear from Slack that many of us are having issues, and we share feedback numbers, but the ‘similar reports’ count never rises.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “In Australia, it is hard to work on the basics of the hardware side. Really don’t like the third party (eg Kolide).”
Teg Bains wrote: “There are no security details or real changes detailed in OS updates.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “My experience with Apple’s enterprise services, support, beta programs, documentation, and Feedback Assistant remains excellent this year. I’ve had great experiences, bringing Apple closer to a perfect score. Their commitment to feedback is evident, reinforcing their dedication to improvement.”
Luke Charters wrote: “As someone who has to find and read a lot of enterprise documentation, the platform guides and Appleseed for IT is insanely great compared to other vendors. It still feels like you need to roll a natural 20 to get a response in Feedback Assistant.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “It takes Apple too long to identify product issues, and then doesn’t remove those reports as tickets that count against or max threshold.”
Hardware Reliability and InnovationGrade: A (average score: 4.3, last year: 4.4)
Luke Charters wrote: “In a year where Apple has introduced a new product line and way of computing, the most exciting feature announcement for me has been support for two external displays on MacBook Air. Pro/Max MacBook Pros are far too cost-prohibitive to purchase for all staff in K-12 environments just to get this feature. This removes one of the last roadblocks to going 100% Mac in our organization. I would have preferred two (or three) external screens with the lid open, but I’ll take what I can get at this point. Touch ID keyboards are about to get a big sales boost. I also need to call out 8GB of unified memory being the base spec on any Mac at this point, every year it continues, the more ridiculous it gets.”
Stephen Short wrote: “Macs are generally more reliable than PCs, and the gap has only grown wider since Apple Silicon debuted a few years ago. No notes; hardware reliability is excellent.”
Jeff Richardson wrote: “The iPhone and iPad are remarkably durable, and the iPhone is cutting-edge.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “Overall, I think hardware is in a really great place for the most part. The iPad line is a bit dated and really confusing at the moment, but Apple Silicon continues to shine on the Mac, and the iPhone 15 Pro with titanium has been a much bigger upgrade than I anticipated. I truly love this iPhone more than any other I’ve ever owned.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “The Vision Pro is truly amazing, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds in that space.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Apple Silicon continues to exceed our wildest expectations for performance. It will not be a sad day when Apple drops support for Intel Macs. We’re a laptop-heavy fleet and have been actively pushing users to refresh their 2018-2020 Intel models.”
Peter Thorn wrote: “Our latest purchases are MacBook Air M2s, which are perfect and stable, but from 2023.”
John Cleary wrote: “Vast improvement since the Apple Silicon transition. Entry-level laptops are actually good enough to buy for the win!”
Tony Williams wrote: “It’s almost perfect. It could be faster.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “Reliability, not innovation, but we expect to use Vision Pro in the Teams-like space internationally.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “We continue to see very good hardware reliability from our Apple products, particularly when compared to other companies products.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Apple devices last a long time, and generally do not fail in normal use. M1 iMacs are so thin and light, however, that they more easily tip over, causing more replacement screens than ever in my 26 years of purchasing devices for Apple Enterprise.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “My rating is solely based on the Mac and the Apple silicon transition. But my company has mostly been running on M1 MacBook Airs for the past 3 years with no hardware issues to speak of besides a few random Bluetooth bugs. And that’s probably software.”
Allister Banks wrote: “Apple’s entire innovation budget went into the goggles, it seems—no new iPads, Apple Watch feels very stagnant, Macs are allowed to coast after the good updates at a good clip, but there aren’t compelling enough reasons to upgrade.”
Gerald Horn wrote: “There seem to be too many new products with software/hardware issues from the beginning.”
Nate Felton wrote: “I believe we are in another golden age of Apple hardware with the Apple Silicon transition at the core of the success. The continued limitations on the number of supported external monitors on the base chips is a drag. This is slowly becoming less of a factor as the price of a single ultra-wide monitor gets closer to the price of dual monitors of the same screen real estate. With the reduced number of ports on the cheaper MacBook product lines, it would also be great to see Apple support Multi-Stream Transport (MST) to enable daisy-chaining multiple monitors together, while only requiring a single cable coming from the MacBook.”
Teg Bains wrote: “Most Apple hardware is nongradeable or repairable by 3rd party when compared to Dell or HP.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “Apple Silicon continues to improve significantly year over year. Apple Silicon devices feel more robust and appear to be more reliable.”
Nic Scott wrote: “I still feel Apple is best in class for hardware.”
Fabrice Neuman wrote: “I would be hard-pressed to find a fault here. Devices I deploy in the small businesses I work with last for years. One annoyance? The most used letters on Apple-branded keyboards tend to disappear, which is disappointing considering the price tag.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “A++. Ever since Apple Siicon’s debut, the hardware has been exceptional. (Okay, perhaps that first generation of 13″ Pros with touchbar was some growing pains). In particular, the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pros are among the best Apple laptops ever created — in all the 30 years I’ve been using Apple hardware. Battery life is beyond impressive. The build quality is very good. My end-users are ecstatic. I hope to remove the last of the Intel Macs from my fleet by the end of 2024.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “Solid devices that have very few issues.”
Jeff Finlay wrote: “I’ve heard few complaints about hardware from our support and repair team. The new processors are solid and fast. Compatibility is no longer a concern.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “We have not made many new hardware purchases in the last year, but the hardware we have continues to be reliable.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Nothing to add. Hardware has been overwhelmingly rock solid.”
Chris Carr wrote: “For sure Apple’s top attribute.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Apple’s latest round of MacBooks continue to be excellent and reintroducing multiple monitor support to the Air is welcome, even with caveats. But while the base has improved markedly since 2020, Apple has ceded ground at the high end and doesn’t have any offerings for high-performance computing, nor do they support the biggest GPUs. The lack of any new iPads this year means the “education model” is still the 9th generation from September 2021. Hopefully this will be addressed very soon.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “The base M3’s ability to drive two external screens when the lid is closed is a huge improvement. We appreciate that since Apple provides the OS and the hardware, we spend zero minutes worrying about device driver compatibility, which takes thousands of hours of engineering time on the PC side.”
John C. Welch wrote: “It’s hard to say. Compared to themselves, they’re doing a decent job. Compared to everyone else, they’re doing amazingly well. The biggest problem in my world are vendors like PTC and Dassault essentially ignoring macOS.”
Charles Edge wrote: “The Vision Pro release was seamless. We shipped our first app into TestFlight within days of getting our test unit. Our first Vision Pro had a problem, and we had multiple people from support calling to dig into what happened, asking questions about everything from the straps being used to the apps on the device. I’ve not heard of any other issues, and I was even the first person the Genius Bar had come in with a failure. I got mine back within a couple of days and was running new code. Problems can happen, but what you do when they happen says a lot, and it couldn’t have been a better experience.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Was disappointed with the new Mac Pro. It seems like a stupidly overpriced and underpowered piece of junk—twice the cost of the Mac Studio with the same processor, and all you get are some underpowered PCI slots that you can’t put GPUs in. It was good to see the M3 Air can now support two external displays when the lid is shut, but they should give you the option of being able to turn off the internal screen and keep the lid open so you can use the keyboard and trackpad. Also annoyed there’s still no M3 Mac mini or M3 Mac Studio.”
Joel Housman wrote: “I can only speak for MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, and iPad mini, because that’s all we use at our org. We deployed ~40 M1 devices and ~40 M2 devices and three M3 devices so far. Over time, we’ve had hardware issues of some sort or other out of 4 or 5 M1 devices, and but only 1 M2 device. So far the M3s, albeit a small sample size, have been flawless. No issues out of our MBP, iMac, or iPads. One of the major things they’ve added with the M3 MacBook Airs is the ability to run a 2nd external monitor in clamshell mode. This is huge for us as I’ve spent the last two years removing monitors from desks in our DC office and swapping out those 2nd monitors for a laptop stand. Now I can slowly transition all our desks back to 2 monitor setups over time.”
Adam Rice wrote: “I have not had any major hardware issues that weren’t due to accidents in a long, long time. I am very pleased with the real-world performance and battery gains with the M chips; it’s great!”
Daniel Zamorano wrote: “Silicon Macs are offering the reliability we needed once again. Good aging computers.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “Hardware reliability is pretty great. Nothing like the awful days from 2015 – 2020 when they were shipping laptops with the butterfly keyboard.”
Bryan Heinz wrote: “The iPad’s stagnation is glaring. The rest of the lineup looks great.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “iPhones and MacBooks remain the best they have been. Mac mini with the Pro M-series chips is a great addition to the product line (but why no iMac with Pro M-series chips?). The introduction of the 15” MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro 14″ with the ‘plain’ M3 chip seems confusing as those two devices have very overlapping feature sets and prices. The Mac Pro seems a bit redundant now, except for that market that needs expansion slots that aren’t GPUs, which can’t be that big. The entire iPad line is, as of this writing, still the same as last year. It is still good, still confusing, and still hampered by an OS that does not live up to the hardware. I don’t expect the new hardware that is probably coming soon to change this. The displays are getting a bit long in the tooth, and I would love to see a 24″ display (an iMac without the iMac). Vision Pro and visionOS are definitely interesting and innovative, but they will not play a big role in Enterprise until their use cases are figured out.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “The biggest problem I’ve seen is dying batteries on old MacBooks. Over the past 25 years, we’ve had many 5+ year old Macs in operation. At times, I wish they didn’t last this long; we should be refreshing more often for software reasons. We are now mostly M1 or newer Macs; there are no hardware problems with those. We have a few iPads—a couple have battery issues and don’t run current software, but there is nothing I can blame on Apple. We don’t supply iPhones or Watches to staff. I can just say I’ve been happy with mine, I tend to keep them for at least 4 years.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “Being in Higher Ed, we will still have Intel Macs for a while longer (no matter how aggressively Apple tries to push these computers out of support), but the Apple Silicon Macs we do have are rock solid and excellent performers. The iPad line could use some love, however.”
Adam Anklewicz wrote: “Apple’s hardware keeps on getting better and better. The M3 is a fantastic upgrade to Mac products, and it’s nice to officially be post-Intel hardware. The reliability makes managing a large fleet of Macs easy. We’ve had very few hardware issues with our Macs.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Apple’s Apple Silicon machines continue to amaze with their reliability and speed. The new M3 series is a testament to their ongoing innovation. Additionally, the introduction of the Apple Vision Pro showcases their commitment to groundbreaking technology. While not available in EMEIA yet, my firsthand experience with it leaves me eagerly anticipating future iterations. The progress is truly remarkable and revolutionary. And remember, this is the worst version. Amazing what the next version will bring. It’s mind-blowing!!”
Barry Caplan wrote: “MacBooks Pro and displays are unparalleled in their reliability and robustness.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “Pretty solid improvements and innovations, especially the M3 line. AVP has massive potential, but needs a lot of work still. It also needs to ship outside the US soon—before competitors grab the market.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “The lack of iPad and Apple TV hardware updates in 2023 was disappointing.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “I continue to be very impressed with the quality of hardware coming out from Apple. The MacBook portfolio is rich in options. I’m very interested in how the future shakes for the Vision Pro. I believe it will be a niche product like the Mac Pro tower was when it first launched and will find its way into the universe. Version 2 or 3 of the Vision will be more mainstream. I think that we are all waiting for new iPads now. Both iPhone and Apple Watch are in a good space. Watch needs more software updates. When the watch is able to read blood sugar levels in real time, this will be a device for all of us. It will change the world, even in more ways than the iPhone did.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Apple is doing some impressive work on the hardware front. The new M3 line of processors and Macs are absolutely amazing, and very very reasonably priced. Vision Pro is the future in a very expensive package. The hardware reliability and innovation is Apple’s bread and butter, and they continue to deliver.”
Software Reliability and InnovationGrade: B- (average score: 3.4, last year: 3.3)
Luke Charters wrote: “Another year with AirPlay issues in tvOS at release. We had to wait until 17.2 for them to be resolved. It’s not ideal when we only use them for one thing, and it’s the one thing that’s broken.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “macOS 14 is better than 13. In particular, Software Update seems to work more reliably.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “I’m pleased to see progress in addressing my previous feedback. Last year, I highlighted the importance of innovation in bringing account-driven user enrollment to macOS, particularly in the context of BYOD workflows. This year, I’m delighted to note that Apple has taken this point seriously, extending account-driven user and device enrollment to iOS/iPadOS, macOS, and even VisionOS. This development signifies a step forward in enhancing productivity and personal workflows. Moreover, the stability of the beta versions has noticeably improved. Unlike last year, where I hesitated to run beta versions on my production machine until later iterations, this year’s betas have been remarkably stable.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “There’s been nothing truly earth-shattering in macOS or iOS in years. Window management on both macOS and iPadOS is a mess, and Stage Manager needs to be rethought on macOS. Overall reliability seems to be getting better. Siri is still a deaf and clueless pile of junk.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “In macOS 13.3-13.5, Apple fixed a number of networking bugs. After updating, we basically stopped receiving tickets for connectivity issues from our Mac users. Additionally, macOS Sonoma has had fewer reported bugs at our organization than previous releases.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “iOS has been rock solid for us. iPadOS is reliable but it feels really limited to me. I love the iPad hardware, but I still feel like any time I try to do real work I struggle to be productive on the iPad and either go back to iPhone or Mac, which is really disappointing given how capable the hardware is. macOS feels like it has improved in reliability, but there are still some rough parts that I really wish they would spend more resources resolving. For instance, being able to dictate software updates to macOS has been extremely rocky in the last few years. It has vastly improved of late, but it still is not quite where it should be.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “I saw way too many bugs (iCloud, passwords, print) in public releases. On top of this, Apple continues to suffer with Software Update mechanisms. Every year, I’m hopeful it will be fixed, and for the past five years, we have not been there.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Software is hard. I think, at times, we are sitting in a mansion and complaining about how the food is served. That said, I do have issues with some of the design decisions being made and the lack of communication when it comes to removing features mid-OS cycle. And no, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say, “But we said it was deprecated X months/years ago, so you knew it was going away.” All I want is a damned date when the thing you said might be removed is being removed, and not mid-OS cycle, either. I don’t have an issue with removing outdated frameworks or whatever; I have an issue when I only get two or three weeks warning that it’s really going away this time. Planning is easy when you have a date to plan around. That said, I’m resigned to the fact that there is zero consideration for the poor admin whose work schedule is now disrupted when it comes to these matters.”
Brent David wrote: “Software updates are still a pain, and it seems even with the beta cycles, big issues are still cropping up with OS versions. Most recently, with 14.4, the USB hubs, Java, and other tools were not working as intended.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Overall, macOS Sonoma has been fine. We had over 98% install base across the fleet by the end of January 2024, and no major issues with compatibility with our existing tools or services. The place where we have encountered problems is with the macOS Sonoma betas. Apple has an unfortunate tendency to introduce changes in the middle of a beta cycle (for example, a system-level change is introduced in beta 4 versus appearing in beta 1) for the dot updates. This can be a problem because either third-party vendors might not test with each and every beta release in a dot update’s beta cycle or vendors don’t have time to respond to a change released late in the beta cycle before the OS update is publicly released. As an organization, we try to test each and every beta update against our major applications and services, but getting caught off-guard by a late-cycle change can be disruptive. Yes, macOS update betas are for testing new features, but it would be great if Apple was more forthcoming about those changes and didn’t backload them into the testing cycle.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “There are some glitches here and there, but overall, it’s solid and secure. Maybe it feels a bit boring at times, but I don’t know whether that’s just me or a maturing market.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “iPadOS has stagnated, and there have been significant bugs in several releases this year that caused significant disruption for our users.”
Chris Carr wrote: ” It may be far from perfect, but macOS is still leaps and bounds ahead of any other desktop OS.”
Chris Schildhorn wrote: “iOS 17 and macOS 14 were quiet unstable releases in comparison to the last years. There were a lot of small or bigger issues everywhere and a lot of support cases at ACE.”
Daniel Zamorano wrote: “Ventura to Sonoma: as simple as it gets to update and to run existing software without issues.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “This year, I had no fear of deploying updates, including Sonoma, on release day. Kudos.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “Changes to the login and lock screens as well as System Settings have caused loss of functionality. It’s as if when Apple rewrites certain things, they look at certain functionality and say, “nobody uses that,” and don’t implement it in the rewrite. Feedback submissions can work to address these, but my experience is that any functionality requests have to wait until the next major version of the OS if you make them in January or later. Yes, the window to address problems in the current OS is during the initial beta period and for about 3 months thereafter, even though it is the current OS for about 12 months. That’s not acceptable. While Sonoma solves some problems from Ventura, it definitely added bugs in others. Apple is not holding its proverbial head high regarding macOS 14.4, for example. I want to be running the latest, most secure operating system at all times, but Apple can really make it hard sometimes.”
Teg Bains wrote: “macOS Updates are not reliable. And you still can not uninstall an upgrade like Windows can.”
June Billings wrote: “macOS updates have been very buggy, e.g. Java issue on Sonoma 14.4, Bricking issue on Ventura 13.6.”
Karsten Fischer wrote: “I think some introspection might be a good thing before plowing forward regardless of the consequences.”
Barry Caplan wrote: “Timely updates and fixes. New features are welcomed to improve productivity.”
Bryan Heinz wrote: “I enjoy the novelty of Apple’s constant updates. However, through the enterprise lens, they’ve once again released breaking changes during the spring macOS update. Trying to keep up with yearly breaking upgrades is hard enough for my small-ish organization. Twice a year really takes away from other important work that we’re trying to get done.”
Michael Reinhart wrote: “Falling short in so many areas, particularly in a more connected world. And the hobby HomeKit software could really use some improvement. When will we see things like compounding conditions for Automations, and more?”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “Even if the key issues are addressed quickly, it would be great if they are solved in the beta phase and not stuck in a dot release. Not every org can update the whole fleet ahead to gain from a fix in the onboarding process. And not every MDM yet supports modern software enforcement (including enrollment).”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “Software is great overall, but I would like a more reliable cadence for business purposes (i.e., Patch Tuesday).”
Jolle Carlestam wrote: “Not bug-free but nice novelties.”
John Cleary wrote: “Less rough edges than previous years, thankfully!.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “The 2023 iOS and macOS releases have been far more stable than previous years. Overall, it has been a great year software-wise.”
Joel Housman wrote: “There are occasional hiccups with point releases on versions, but we’ve suffered no huge issues from any new software updates. I do wish they would bring back some of the old UI in macOS for notifications from the regressions we suffered 2 or 3 years ago when they limited our action choices on a pending notification.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Rocky year on the update front. There have been escape defects in many of Apple’s software releases this year, resulting in 4 more releases of macOS 14 Sonoma to date than were needed for Ventura last year. An increased release cadence can be a blessing, but not when it comes with updates that are broken. Innovation in macOS and iOS remains only incremental at this point, without a lot of sea changes. There have been some bright spots — high-throughput screen sharing, for example — but very limited improvements in the management pane and no strong use cases for upgrades have made it less attractive to upgrade for reasons that aren’t security. Security is a feature, sure, but not the kind that moves users.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “iPad platform is still held back by the OS and the weird choices of functionality lacking from Pro apps. macOS Sonoma was a relatively good update until the 14.4 update.”
Tony Williams wrote: “We always seem to have a software problem of some sort.”
Peter Thorn wrote: “Software update via DDM looks promising. Our MDM (Filewave) hasn’t implemented it yet, but we look forward to it.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “We still have a dismal user experience for notifications. I still have users who click ‘block’ on every notification request dialog without knowing the implications. The new DDM Scheduled Software updates are easy to ignore or quickly dismiss—at least they get quite persistent as the deadline approaches. Dialogs are still constrained to mobile-sized dimensions, especially bad when important information is truncated for no reason. My users are feeling some update fatigue but appreciate the need to install updates in a timely manner. The vast improvement in the speed of installation is appreciated but, ideally, should be reduced to just the time it takes to reboot. Windows Server is getting reboot-free updates – maybe Apple could bring that to their devices. “.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “macOS updates continue to introduce new bugs. Apple continues to make major OS changes at “point releases” instead of major versions, which result in breaking functionality during routine software updates. Apple needs to have a clear published roadmap for the OS and focus on QA for a while instead of features. It would also be good if they completely separated feature updates from security updates.”
Nic Scott wrote: “There is a growing murmur in the admin community that we are the new Windows admins. Software updates have been unreliable; betas have had multiple releases to fix bugs; and there are multiple public updates on unexpected dates, catching admins off guard—only to have a 0.0.1 release a week later to fix an issue. Update fatigue in orgs is real, and the latest 14.4 issues with USB, printers, and Java is very frustrating when those issues were not seen in betas.”
Nate Felton wrote: “Apple continues to rewrite existing macOS features while adding new ‘features’ without regard for allowing granular (or any) management, especially from an Enterprise point of view. A good example of this is the use of gestures for the Reactions feature when in a video call. Apple released this feature enabled by default, with no management framework to control the feature. This resulted in some embarrassing balloons and fireworks during sensitive meetings. Existing Enterprise management features, such as managing settings with a profile, are presented as hostile or scary, using UI elements such as trianglebadge.exclamationmark. Apple continues to overburden users with notifications and dialogs, resulting in alert fatigue and causing important notifications to go ignored or unnoticed amongst the noise.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Apple still seems focused on innovating features in the consumer space at the expense of overall reliability and dependability for enterprise customers. MacOS Ventura had above-average reliability, especially later in the release cycle (13.4 and later). The boot loop in 13.6.2, where ProMotion displays set to <120 Hz would cause the Mac to fail to boot, was a most unfortunate hiccup in an otherwise pleasant release. The elephant in the room has to be Rapid Security Responses. Apple had made a big fuss about them at WWDC, but the AppleSeed testers did not have a lot of time to test and validate the RSRs prior to release. They also required a reboot anyway—something Apple administrators were hoping to avoid and assumed that Apple would strive to achieve. The RSRs were a net negative for the platform; let’s just hope Apple has abandoned the grand experiment. macOS 14 Sonoma is innovating with some cool new features, like reactions that appear superimposed on your webcam’s feed when you use certain hand gestures, often with hilariously inappropriate consequences. Sonoma has been plagued with a number of strange bugs in different point releases, starting with the random time de-synchronization issue in early 14.x releases, and leading up to the most recent unpleasantness in 14.4 with USB hubs and Java that have been reported around the world in the trade presses. There is also a nascent issue of excessive requests to access Desktop and/or Documents when iCloud is signed in, and OneDrive’s “Known Folder Move” is also enabled. None of the above issues appeared during the 14.4 beta cycle, which leaves us to wonder if Apple’s Security team imposed code changes at the last minute to patch the 60+ CVEs disclosed in this cycle. I don’t know who could find fault Apple for trying to make the operating system more secure. If there’s anything to fault them for, it’s the apparent lack of quality control and failure to ask useful questions about the end-user experience. This was especially apparent in a more recent issue around Screen Capture that was so heinous that if the MacAdmins community had not acted swiftly and decisively to bury Apple with an avalanche of feedback, the issue would have caused widespread pandemonium on release and might have caused significant damage to Apple’s public perception. Lastly, Apple made a sudden change in the 14.4 RC to disallow certain ‘critical’ system services from being restarted with the command ‘launchctl kickstart.’ As a result of the unannounced changes in macOS 14.4, Addigy has had to retire their “Watchdog” product and made the entire thing open source. Using launchctl kickstart is a common and safe method to safely restart individual services. These are now restricted by System Integrity Protection. Instead, Apple’s official advice is to restart the computer in the event of this type of malfunction—even one that an end user would not necessarily notice.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “macOS is much more stable than it was five years ago or longer. My issues are more with 3rd party applications/services. I wish Apple would improve on Safari and Passkeys when you store Passkeys in something other than Apple Keychain. Apple’s insistence on file sharing services using ~/Library/CloudStorage has resulted in major problems with paths to these files being different for every user.”
Fabrice Neuman wrote: “The main software problems I have are basically related to other vendors, Microsoft mainly. Office, Teams and OneDrive are not reliable, but is it Apple’s fault? I actually would like to know.”
Allister Banks wrote: “iPad and iOS feel stalled, innovation-wise. macOS for my environment has a corner-case bug on Apple Silicon causing complete data loss, so I’m not given the impression of reliability there, either.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Not a whole lot happening on the innovation side of things. More than reasonably reliable. A few gotchas—macOS 14.4 in particular was not the best in reliability.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “We mostly haven’t had any major software bugs, but we do see software finickiness in dealing with Bluetooth, Bluetooth headsets, peripherals, and some third-party software issues on Sonoma. I would prefer a full first-party MDM implementation, but that’s more related to the other questions.”
Gerald Horn wrote: “The newer security technologies are becoming a detriment to supporting the Mac product. For a smaller business without using Apple Business Manager, it is getting harder to process Active Directory support.”
Security and PrivacyGrade: A- (average score: 4.1, last year: 4.2)
Paul Chernoff wrote: “I’m happy with Apple’s work, but too many pop-ups encourage people to just click OK.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “I think Apple cares about this a lot and puts a lot of effort into this. My only complaint is that I think, in some cases, they have started pushing things a little bit too far with how many prompts there are. Most customers we work with do not understand what most of them mean, so they just click through them, which is a bad user experience and negates the point Apple is trying to make. I think they need to focus on the experience for users more in the coming years and reduce the number of clicks and taps needed. As an Apple focused MSP and Apple Consultant, it would also be fantastic if there were more ways to support our customers, such as more easily being able to screen share. I understand the thinking behind the screen sharing restrictions, but there should be a way to more easily allow access on company owned Apple Business Manager enrolled devices. Customers are always confused by the Privacy Profile method, and either allow too many things that they don’t need or accidentally block us from being able to support them. I think there has to be a way to allow this workflow more seamlessly while preserving privacy and security.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “While Security features like FileVault have improved for Enterprise, Apple needs to allow Enterprise/Education administrators to force settings such as Screen Recording for approved apps without user intervention. Users/Students need to be informed that they have no expectation of privacy on machines that they do not own, and we should not have to deal with the constant cat-and-mouse game of students unchecking screen sharing for monitoring apps generating tech support headaches.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “Apple is best in class in security and privacy. Although it’s kind of annoying having to manually allow apps access to the camera, microphone, screen recording, etc. in System Settings.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “I spend less time and have fewer worries about security on my Apple devices than on any other platform I manage. The security policies that I put in place on Apple devices are also easier to manage on Apple devices than on other platforms.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “This is where Apple is clearly going. As an organization admin, I would like more visibility into MAID. For example, I would like to extract a file from a user’s drive, similar to using Vault in a Google environment. It’s these enterprise-level access procedures that are missing in the Apple ecosystem.”
Allister Banks wrote: “Still waiting on rapid response updates to do more than save release engineers at Apple time, it was such a large deal that’s turned into an almost unnoticeable acceleration of patching. ChromeOS will always be where the bar is set, and the unpredictable and lengthy updates Apple still needs at a minimum to patch such a large swath of the system keeps holding them back. (Yes, I say it every year 😅).”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Security is the talk of the town; wherever you look, it’s about security and compliance. And yes, Apple makes their devices secure without compromising the user experience. That’s great, but it’s not only the device that needs to be secured; there are a lot of things that are a threat to the end user. And that’s the downside of becoming bigger; it makes you a target at the same time! Because of this, you see many vendors reacting to it. Do I like it? Not sure, but as an Apple Admin, we need to think about this more and more, and luckily, the available products are more compatible than they used to be.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Apple remains steadfastly committed to a user’s privacy. In the Fortune 500 company I work for, this is important. I can confidently say to InfoSec and Cybersecurity that the data on our Mac endpoints is protected, several times over. Apple’s security documentation is very well written, and I’ve shared it many times with managers and leaders in my company. Microsoft continues to play catch-up.”
Jeff Richardson wrote: “Frequent operating system updates have kept Apple’s products safe. The only big security issue I can think of in recent memory was the one exposed by Joanna Stern, but that one involved social engineering to get your password. And now, Apple has even limited what bad actors can do even if they do have your password.”
Bryan Heinz wrote: “While Apple’s stance on security and privacy is great for home use, for Macs owned by a company, not being able to fully manage screen recording permissions is a consistent pain point for remote help and conference software.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “The release frequency of Sonoma is on average 18 days after the last release, with an average of 27 CVEs fixed each release. The many external researchers, as well as the teams within Apple, do a great job of discovering and fixing vulnerabilities. We all know that no software is completely secure. So overall, I appreciate what Apple is doing in terms of security and privacy.”
June Billings wrote: “Why no facial recognition. Many enterprise employees work docked, but you leave no option to keep the built-in mic working when the lid is closed.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “I will repeat my reply from last year: Apple remains strong in this area. However, their focus on end-user privacy is often at odds with enterprise management requirements. Many features, like the new Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, are unavailable for managed Apple IDs. I don’t think user privacy and manageability have to be opposed. Apple could (and should) work harder to make all features available in managed environments. Several standard security options on macOS are still not able to be managed with profiles.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “When a vulnerability is announced for a cross-platform service or tool that is also built into the OS, such as SSH, it would be appreciated if Apple more readily shared information about how the vulnerability does or does not impact macOS and, if it does, when an expected resolution will be available. Even something as simple as, “This issue will be addressed in macOS 14.7″ would be appreciated. Make it easier for IT to respond to the Security team’s queries.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Apple’s commitment to Privacy and Security are a hallmark of their focus. No other vendor is as committed to both causes. But the tradeoffs that come with this mean manageability is often limited in return. Not the worst thing, sure, but not the best either.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “What happened to rapid security responses?.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “In general, very good, but we get a lot of noise from vulnerability scanners complaining about versions of libraries and tools that are in the read-only OS version, such as Apache (httpd) being out of date. My team spends a lot of time discussing the limitations with Windows-first security teams here. “.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote, “Apple’s investment in the security of its platforms shows a deep understanding and commitment to security. I especially love all the papers and documents they release.”
Teg Bains wrote: “The walled garden approach gives a false sense of security considering the amount of exploits.”
Nic Scott wrote: “Apple is great at individual users security but not great at giving enterprises security options. I totally understand the number of prompts, user-approved dialogs, and notification banners for consumers. But for machines in ABM with MDM management, we still can’t suppress some dialogs, pre-approve mic and camera for new hires so that Zoom and Slack open smoothly, or take screenshots with an enterprise DLP tool without our end users’ approval, or force installing a zero trust extension into Safari to enforce enterprise policies. Relying on users to opt-in to allowing permissions only to have them disable or remove them after IT is troubleshooting. There needs to be more management control for enterprises; these are not consumer machines, and we are regulated because we’re in the financial industry.”
Luke Charters wrote: “When it comes to privacy, Apple is in a league of its own compared to the competition. The only security feature I really want at this point is native FIDO key support at the login window.”
Chris Carr wrote: “Apple’s second best attribute.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “Some progress with Managed Apple IDs and Passkeys. I would really love to see a proper business suite using managed Apple IDs for inter-office communication, screen share access, shared password management, etc.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “The new DDM software update features boost the score here. But overall, Apple still struggles with the notion of the device owner and the device user being two different entities. Often, their privacy features want to protect the user from the owner. As mentioned above, Apple needs to score its vulnerabilities according to industry standards. It’s exhausting for both users and admins to assume that all releases mitigate at least one critical vulnerability.”
Nate Felton wrote: “Apple leads in this category. Apple’s platform security is among the top reasons we chose to deploy Apple devices to 95% of our company. There was a slight misstep (in my opinion) with Rapid Security Responses (RSRs), though there has not been another RSR since July 2023, so perhaps Apple agrees and has decided to silently discontinue them.”
Fabrice Neuman wrote: “It’s probably very good, and everybody seems to agree. But I’m annoyed by the deal with Google, for example, which makes me reconsider the whole story: I mean, Google is not known for respecting privacy, and still, Apple is OK to use their search engine, I suppose for the big amount of money. So, can we trust all the other things they say about privacy? It’s a big stain.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “Other than coddling Google Chrome, five stars.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “I think Apple’s mishandling of the App Store has led to unnecessary government interventions that are going to undermine all the fantastic work they have done with Privacy and Security. We still see inconsistency in privacy controls and dialog fatigue. MDM managed devices should be able to override some user preferences. “.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Apple needs to allow Screen Recording approval to be enabled via config profile on a fully supervised device. Managing a large number of shared Macs in teaching labs, there’s a real need to be able to remotely screen share to these devices when they are not in use to perform maintenance and fix issues. Having to physically go around each device after we’ve installed our enterprise screen sharing/remote assistance software is very time-consuming for our IT support staff. Apple also needs to implement additional config profile payloads so we can easily enforce all the rules in the commonly used security baselines such as CIS & NIST. And Apple needs to remove the old insecure version of Apache Web Server from macOS. There’s probably other old binaries they need to update or remove as well.”
Charles Edge wrote: “Improvements to iCloud Keychain, Passkeys, and Platform SSO continue to roll in. As do expanded API options for credential providers and endpoint security. The one place I’d like to see more is with the Screen Time APIs, but balancing telemetry and privacy is a challenge.”
John C. Welch wrote: “It’s not even close. Windows is a nightmare, and Linux management is 20 years behind.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Apple set the benchmark for security and privacy and consistently exceeds it.”
DeploymentGrade: B (average score: 3.6, last year: 3.1)
Jason Broccardo wrote: “After several years of being problematic and painful, Software Update in macOS Sonoma has largely returned to a “just works” state. We are still using Nudge to encourage users to upgrade over the new built-in notification methods, as we feel like the deferral options are more user-friendly.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Apple made big strides in this area, such as enforced software update and FileVault during enrollment. Declarative Device Management for software update has been a success at our organization. Unfortunately, most of the new features require MDM vendors to implement them.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “Deployment improves for me every year. This is partly due to Apple improving the MDM infrastructure for makers of MDMs. I do not miss the days of using file images to set up Macs, I found keeping the images up to date too much work. These days, I boot up a new Mac, and it gets on the MDM, installs the basic software, and does some configurations. I then assign the Macs to groups, which results in more automation. As a small shop that often sets up just a Mac at a time, I don’t do as much automation as possible. What is missing is one-time settings. For example, in the old days, I could provide an initial setting to a user’s Dock, and then I or the person could customize it. Now, the Dock settings are persistent, so I don’t use them. What I haven’t experienced yet is the ability to set the order of software installs and make the installation more reliable.”
Daniel Zamorano wrote: “Rapid security response still needs to improve, especially when a restart is required. Automated device enrollment has been stellar in the last year. macOS still needs a more controlled way (in terms of choosing how and when) to deploy updates to managed computers via MDM platforms. 3rd party tools like Nudge are still needed in this scenario.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “Apple has made major improvements to Automated Device Enrollment (ADE) and OS update enforcement in the past year. I no longer have to worry about devices I deploy not enrolling in Kandji via ADE. Additionally, Kandji has adopted Apple’s new mechanism for enforcing OS updates, and it works great. In the past, I would have to nag about a third of my users to manually update to the latest OS after an enforcement deadline had passed. Now, I can enforce an update via Kandji and will always have 100% compliance within 1 – 2 business days after the enforcement deadline. It’s a game changer.”
Trevor Sysock wrote: “DDM is a very welcome addition, and I like the direction of requiring a minimum OS for MDM Enrollment and FileVault at enrollment.”
Charles Edge wrote: “No one seems to really complain about software update anymore!”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “It’s great to see progress in addressing past feedback. Last year, I highlighted the need for the ability to update to a specific macOS version before continuing with enrollment. This year, I’m pleased to see improvements in this area, showing that Apple is responsive to user concerns. I’m especially impressed by the extension of account-driven user and device enrollment to iOS/iPadOS, macOS, and even VisionOS. This expansion is a significant step forward in improving productivity and personal workflows. However, there are still areas that need attention. Despite progress, the availability of Apple programs is still limited, only covering around 70 countries. This could pose challenges for global companies in their enrollment strategies and operations. Overall, while Apple has made positive strides in enterprise deployments, there’s still room for improvement, particularly in making programs available to a broader global audience.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “Software update management is still a problem in the enterprise market.”
Nic Scott wrote: “The team has done a huge amount with software updates—thank you! I haven’t used kickstart in almost a year. I won’t fault Apple for MDM providers’ lack of investment in app deployment. Jamf is probably the best, and app installers are still a mess for us, and deploying Mac App Store apps is just black magic. So we package and deploy our own apps. I’d love to stop doing this, but it takes vendors multiple years after Apple publishes the APIs. What’s the disconnect? Is Apple not partnering with vendors for adaptation? DDM is promising, but it has not been the hype that was promised. We have multiple issues where machines ignore DDM updates. There’s no way to actually manage them with MDM providers. You can push the command, but then there’s no way to check progress, cancel a command, issue a new command, etc.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “Silly me, I still wish we had an official API for ABM. The latest addition to DDM and having various options to enforce software updates now has vastly improved. It feels great to have this ‘live’ in our own MDM solution. We use this with an extra spin – so it’s more or less set and doesn’t need to be adjusted over and over again.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Despite the numerous bugs in Sonoma, the actual managed and unmanaged software updates have gotten easier and are more reliable.”
Teg Bains wrote: “We still can not deploy any 3rd party OS to extend the lifespan of hardware. Nor downgrade iOS.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “I do not feel that Apple’s automated device enrollment is reliable enough to depend on, at least on macOS. We still manually run through the enrollment on machines before issuing them to end users. There are too many things that cannot be set during enrollment, such as the default browser. Our remote support software TeamViewer, and Classroom Management software via Mosyle, both need screen recording permission set manually. Also, the MDM does not check to make sure the profiles it sends during enrollment are actually received and installed, so if there is any kind of hiccup in the process, entire apps or profiles can get missed and must be manually resent via the MDM.”
John Cleary wrote: “I’m dinging Apple here for software updates still being harder than they need to be for devices. e.g. an MDM managed, supervised device that you can’t schedule an update for as an admin is a bit shit (user needs to approve).”
Tony Williams wrote: “There’s always room for improvement, but overall it does just seem to work. They are always improving things.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “There have been some improvements in this in the last year, but it is still a little flaky in some scenarios. This has become far more reliable than it used to be, however.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “Automated Device Enrollment seems to be progressing well, though managing OS updates through MDM is still a bit of a hassle.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “If I compare where my deployments were five years ago with where they are now, there is a lot to love. When I get a new Mac for my computer labs, it’s simple enough to restore macOS to the current IPSW for our labs, enroll it via MDM, and let the automation setup in my MDM do the rest. That is both simpler and quicker than it used to be. Software Update is still not where it needs to be, but it’s good to see Apple apply effort here; timed software updates via DDM will be a killer functionality for our computer labs, when we can actually implement it.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “Solid service with no issues on Apple’s part.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “Automated Device Enrollment is perfect and works great with my MDM. Software updates and OS upgrades, however, are notorious for failures. I leverage third-party tools (for which I’m very thankful) to accomplish something that should be baked in. Software Updates are where Apple continues to be very weak.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Software Update is got a lot better in macOS 14. At this point, it’s more the implementation bugs the MDM vendors have than macOS that’s causing issues. Apple still needs to implement bootstrap tokens for iOS so we can force OS updates on devices with a passcode set. And Apple needs to add a way to wipe and automatically re-enroll a Mac over WiFi like they can do now over Ethernet. An MDM command to make a device reboot into DFU mode would be very helpful as well. And there’s still no way to deploy downloadable content for VPP apps or manage subscriptions.”
Stephen Short wrote: “User self-service for redeploying Macs is a bit smoother with Erase Assistant, but automatically updating to the latest macOS would be a welcome feature addition. Software update in general seems to be in a perpetual state of ‘two steps forward, one step back.’ Mac admins were excited last WWDC when support for enforcing a minimum macOS in Setup Assistant was announced, but we’re on 14.4.1 and it’s still not available as a feature for most MDMs. It’s unclear if this is more of an Apple issue, or with each MDM vendor.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “The addition of Declarative Device Management for Software updates finally allows a proven repeatable solution for mass updates for security compliance.”
Michael Reinhart wrote: “Gets a little better each year.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “As an organization, we support far more iPads than Macs, and the deployment workflows for iOS and iPadOS work very well for us.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “DDM driven Software updates seem to be working well from the OS Side. Delivering the DDM request and updating is still problematic, but that is the MDM.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Apple’s new declarative device management has the potential to be a real game changer, and it can’t get here soon enough! Managing software updates on both macOS and iPadOS continues to be much harder than it needs to be, and Apple continues to work on it, but it shouldn’t take this long to have models that do what administrators want to do easily and reliably. Apple’s focus on security and privacy can get in the way of managing enterprise devices and applications (think about installing an app like Zoom, and what kinds of privileges Zoom asks for); the tools used to manage how administrators can deploy software need improvement.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “I wish we weren’t stuck waiting for vendor support on a lot of the new cool things in enterprise deployment, like true declarative device management and platform SSO.”
Allister Banks wrote: “You’d think competition from Business Essentials would bear fruit upstream and the improvements trickling down would teach MDM folks they can’t continue to offer piss-poor deployment, yet Jamf continues to only support one zip app deployment – for their VNC-ish remote support tool they snuck onto their customers managed computers (with no opt-out, quality vendors open sockets and phone home without telling you). SimpleMDM and Zentral (and JumpCloud and Fleet and TwoCanoes as the upstarts with aspects of the total package orgs need) are the only ones doing right by themselves and the MacAdmins community. Apple always thought ‘tier zero’ meant end user self-support was the answer, and shocker, you get what you give when you don’t value end users’ time or the day-one experience.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Overall very solid. There are some great features now for MDM enrollment, keeping things enrolled, getting them back. Declarative MDM is the bee’s knees. Rolling out and enforcing macOS updates is still confusing, though it’s getting better. Big ❤️ to those working on those features—you put up with a lot of crap from us admins.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Enforced Automated Device Enrollment has been a very welcome feature. Return to Service shaved an enormous amount of time off our iPad redeployments in preparation for the new school year. Enforcing a minimum version of macOS during Setup Assistant would save us a lot of time and deployment headaches if our MDM provider would only implement it.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “I love Automated Device Enrollment, but would like more logging capability to identify issues.”
Nate Felton wrote: “There have been some major improvements in this category that might seem like small things but really help with ensuring the security of our fleet at the time of onboarding. macOS Sonoma introduced a new feature allowing MDMs to enforce a minimum macOS version when enrolling devices using Automated Device Enrollment, ensuring the device is upgraded to our preferred version of macOS prior to enrollment. macOS Sonoma 14.4 also added the ability to enforce FileVault for standard users during Setup Assistant, ensuring FileVault is enabled earlier in the onboarding process and not delayed longer than it should be. While still not perfect, enforcing software updates with a DDM declaration is a huge improvement in the right direction for keeping our fleet updated.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “Declarative software updates are beautiful.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “The improvement for managed software updates seems solid, as do some other welcome additions to the deployment workflow (required software updates and FileVault in Setup Assistant). Apple is chipping away slowly but surely, and there are some pain points here.”
June Billings wrote: “Patching is awful for Enterprise. We have had to leverage Nudge with our MDM solution to try and address the gaps. Microsoft does this so much better. Allows users to schedule a time for the update/reboot.”
Adam Anklewicz wrote: “Some very welcome upgrades to the deployment process. Being able to force a minimum OS version would be amazing, if our MDM would roll out that feature. OS updates have been the bane of the Mac Admin, and that’s getting better. DDM is allowing us to force updates a bit better, but it’s still not fully there with features we would like and are still using Nudge to accomplish this.”
Bryan Heinz wrote: “A huge hole with Apple’s device enrollment is how hard it is to move MDMs. It is a monumental lift for any IT department to migrate MDMs, which creates artificial lock-in.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “macOS 14.4 was a little rough around the edges, but that’s mostly not Apple’s fault. For some reason, several third-party vendors did not do much testing against 14.4 and we saw some incompatibilities arise. These have since been fixed, but it meant there was a period of time when I had to put a deferral in place, which has become increasingly less necessary. Declarative Device Management continues to mature. I’m looking forward to controlling more pieces of my domain with DDM.”
macOS Identity ManagementGrade: B (average score: 3.6, last year: 3.3)
June Billings wrote: “Would like to have the option to federate without iCloud.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “We really don’t see how this has trickled down to us in Education. We federate with both Google Workspace and Microsoft Azure but rely on our MDM’s ‘Mosyle Auth’ feature to inject itself into the login window process to allow cloud login access. I have not seen any way to do this with the built-in OS tools. Managed Apple IDs are also pretty much useless to us, as we allow students to use their personal Apple ID on the Mac so they can sync to iCloud or use iMessage.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “PSSO Framework looks promising, and I’d like to get it working. However, to my knowledge, only Okta has it working, and Microsoft is still in beta until Q3 24.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “I’m glad this exists and Apple is thinking about this, but as of right now, the process is incredibly cumbersome, and even when it’s implemented, in my opinion, it does not really embrace what SSO is meant to do and solve. I was incredibly excited when this started getting announced but the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I hope Apple works on this further and is able to get 3rd party solutions on board with this.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “My team hopes to be able to at least trial Platform SSO in our organization this year. Due to other projects and waiting for full support from Okta, our IdP, this is still something in our backlog. Platform SSO with Okta looks promising.”
Joel Housman wrote: “Again, I think the benefits we take advantage of are coming to us mainly through what JumpCloud provides to us: connecting our Google Workspace environment with the user accounts of our staff on their macOS machines via the MDM. It has worked well in the past and continues to do so.”
Allister Banks wrote: “There are respectable implementations, but most of the huge vendors are just an iota better than turning a local password interception into a cloud bypass. Apple has been making strides in providing a basic password manager, but creating an account and auth’ing has remained almost unchanged since the dawn of NeXT.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “Excellent. Leads the industry.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Platform SSO getting user creation is a big improvement. And Apple still needs to get more IdPs inside the tent.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “I am still unable to federate Apple IDs with Okta – it is finally in beta, though.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “I don’t know enough about this tbh.”
John Cleary wrote: “Until Login Window natively supports cloud IdP solutions (Entra, Google, Okta, etc.) and we don’t need to stuff around maintaining password sync, which is incredibly user-hostile (e.g., with Jamf Connect or Xcreds), this will get my lowest rating.”
Daniel Zamorano wrote: “We use Microsoft SSO and have had no issues in the past year.”
Stephen Short wrote: “There are marginal improvements in how Desktop SSO can assist with password syncing or account creation using IdP credentials, but actual MDM vendor support for these features is lacking. Apple really needs to take ownership of this space and provide robust ‘it just works’ first-party support for cloud directory authentication and integration. Stop farming out this feature to MDM vendors!.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “I see good things on most fronts: eSSO is working well. MAIDs are getting some needed features, though more work is required. Federation with other identity providers appears covered now. I’ve changed my opinion on the identity used for login. I now think Platform SSO is a dead end, unless it becomes available at the FileVault prompt. It looks like “everyone” is ok with a device PIN for iOS/iPadOS, and those devices contain access to almost all corporate data available on macOS. I’m running with the idea that the local device password should be treated like an iOS PIN and should NOT be your Enterprise SSO credentials. It is simpler, more robust and easier for both users and admins.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Apple still doesn’t get what enterprise needs for Identity Management. We need to be able to log in to the Mac with our Enterprise Cloud Identity Provider using MFA and create a local user account whose credentials are kept in sync with the Cloud IdP. This requires being able to join an Enterprise WiFi network at the login window of the Mac so it can contact the Cloud IdP. The configuration of the connection to the Cloud IdP on the Mac also needs to be fully automated via the MDM (config profiles and app installation) so you don’t have to log in to the Mac as a local user first and manually set things up.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple is not trying to be a party in the Enterprise Identity Management space and is finally providing some hooks and APIs for third parties to provide this service at various levels in macOS and services. However, as welcome as those improvements are, there still seems to be a lot of work necessary to improve these integrations.”
Teg Bains wrote: “Glad the AzureAD connections work.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “It’s not just Apple that is lagging a little behind in fulfilling the wishes of the community/customers, the major IdP and SW providers on the market are also moving rather slowly, so we’re not quite there yet.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Last year, I emphasized the importance of Apple working closely with Identity Providers to ensure a seamless integration process and optimal end-user experience for their Single Sign-On (SSO) platform. While Apple’s Platform Single Sign-On (PSSO) was a significant step forward, its success still depends heavily on Identity Providers’ implementation. Apple continues to lay the foundations for a robust identity solution. Supporting Open ID Connect (OIDC) within the Apple Business and school manager programs demonstrates their commitment to advancing SSO capabilities. However, patience is key as we await further improvements. Collaboration and feedback from IT teams remain crucial for Apple and IdPs, to refine their SSO platform into something truly exceptional. Although we’re not there yet, the future looks promising.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “I appreciate taking their time to get PSSO right.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “We’re not using most of these features. But we do leverage Okta’s Device Trust integration with Kandji, and it works great. This integration allows Macs we manage to sign in to resources we secure via Okta (Google Workspace, Jira, Slack, Zoom, etc…). Unmanaged Macs and PCs are not allowed to sign in to Okta. We do allow unmanaged iOS and Android devices to access our resources, as long as they meet our minimum security standards: OS up to date, biometrics and passcode enabled, not jailbroken or rooted.”
Trevor Sysock wrote: “OpenIDP for federation is great. I wish Platform SSO was actually available and working.”
Jeff Finlay wrote: “I look forward to support for Platform SSO in our Microsoft environment, but that lack of support is not Apple’s fault.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “Finally being able to get rid of all bound Macs in the building and moving to Kandji passport with Okta to facilitate access to Active Directory has been a game changer.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “The fact that Apple has even built an Extensible Enterprise Single Sign-on framework and SSO hooks is something! We can federate Apple School/Business Manager against both Microsoft and Google, and there are integration tools for other options. That being said, we use Mosyle Auth against Google to log into our Macs, and it does not respect the ‘remember this device’ checkbox. Is this Apple’s, Mosyle’s, or Google’s fault?”
Adrian Stancescu wrote, “There has been a huge improvement, especially with regard to the ESSO and Microsoft’s Intune/EntraID, which has made the deployment of new Macs a breeze.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Platform SSO is promising, but the roll out seems to have been very slow.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Slow progress is better than no progress. Federated Managed Apple IDs arrived in the year following announcement, with few supported vendors and MDMs. Platform SSO, and the SSO Extension models have proven difficult to adopt technologies due to their slow progress and limited applicability. There’s much potential here, but Apple needs to continue to invest and partner to make it more productive.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Still a way to go. The ‘paradise island’ of IDP is authentication at the FileVault login screen with biometrics. Also less reliance on ‘it’s up to the vendors to build the thing’—spin up a reference design and tie it in with a managed Apple ID.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Finally we have support for Managed Apple ID federation with custom IdPs! Apple has been doing well with rolling out these identity features. IdPs have been lagging behind with supporting them.”
Nate Felton wrote: “Platform Single Sign-on (PSSO) is probably the largest feature that I’m eagerly awaiting to become fully baked and supported by MDM and IdP vendors. The dream is to enable a first-party macOS integration with cloud IdPs at the login window, much like Macs joined to an Active Directory domain used to work, with no need for third-party authentication tools (e.g. Jamf Connect or Kandji Passport). The addition of Managed Device Attestation and the creation of hardware-bound private keys for certificates issued using the ACME protocol continue to show how Apple is releasing features that may not be heavily adopted at first, but will eventually be core to the security of the platform.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Smaller businesses with MDM would benefit from a smoother onboarding experience if Apple continued to innovate on the Platform SSO extension and refine the “whole login window” experience with SSO integrations. The best login window replacement is still Jamf Connect.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “Platform SSO is still not there, and we continue to rely on login window shims like XCreds to do what Apple should be able to do out of the box.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “I have yet to test eSSO and pSSO (other than Microsoft’s solution). I think I’m waiting for it to mature more. In the meantime, Jamf Connect still works. So does Apple’s own KerbSSO extension. The pipe dream, of course, is a first-party IdP connector that can natively communicate with Entra ID during Setup Assistant and then at the FileVault login window.”
MDM protocol and infrastructureGrade: B (average score: 3.7, last year: 3.6)
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “This year, I’ve witnessed gradual progress in integrating declarative device management functionalities into our toolkit. Notably, many MDM vendors have implemented the software update command, signaling advancements in this area. However, tools like Nudge and Superman are still prevalent, possibly due to concerns about the stability of DDM functionality. Undoubtedly, embracing declarative device management represents a significant shift in IT workflows. Trust in this new approach is crucial as it revolutionizes how IT manages devices. Establishing the reliability and stability of DDM functionalities is vital for successful implementation and seamless transitions. While DDM offers promising benefits, such as streamlined processes and enhanced efficiency, building confidence in its reliability is key. IT professionals must collaborate closely with vendors, monitor performance, and address concerns promptly to ensure stability and reliability in DDM workflows. Despite the challenges, my optimism about the future of device management on Apple devices remains steadfast. Though the journey may be long, I believe in the potential for improvement and encourage perseverance. Together, we can navigate this evolving landscape and fully leverage the benefits of declarative device management.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “I am looking forward to being able to use DDM and for it to gain even more functionality. Traditional MDM commands, including app updates via Apps and Books, are still not reliable enough. Much like Apple Feedback, MDM commands get sent out into the world, and you just have to hope that they succeed. When it does work, it is marvelous. When it doesn’t, it is very difficult to troubleshoot.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “As far as I can tell with our Kandji / Okta setup, it all just works, and that’s what we’re looking for.”
Mike Stirrup wrote: “DDM is great for enforcing OS updates. However some of the features in the MDM protocol (minimum OS for enrollment – Jamf) have still to be implemented by vendors.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Software Updates via DDM was a good start but we need to be able to do all the common admin tasks via DDM. I want all app installs to be pushed back to the MDM as soon as they occur so the device inventory on the MDM is up to date. I’d like to be able to see the progress of OS and app installs/updates reported back as well.”
Allister Banks wrote: “We appreciated the feeling of greater remote access to Apple engineers via Slack during WWDC last year, and there were some great ideas on display—you can now regex a password policy—but since Lion you can’t configure anything else as a range nor as a single-use default the end user can override. MDM has always been about shoehorning a locked-down config into an opened-up world. Engineers get the go-ahead to ship an Appley version of features and often ship the first two betas with either no MDM support whatsoever or no way to successfully test new controls. It’s still very obvious they take the hint of good ideas and go in their own direction until it’s very late to get them to change course.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Most MDM issues experienced over the last year have been on the MDM provider side rather than Apple themselves. Reliability of declarative software updates hasn’t been great so far.”
Adam Codega wrote: “Declarative Device Management has been a great step forward by Apple.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Improvements have improved MDM. 🎉 Would like to see their business essentials MDM opened to non-US based organizations (free for < 10 devices even 🙂 ) and have their implementation be updated with the latest in MDM shenanigans so we can play with them in detail rather than wait for $vendor MDM to implement them.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “Very solid basis, but lacks some features compared to other platforms.”
Karsten Fischer wrote: “I’d love to see vendors adopt DDM more aggressively and openly, but that’s hardly Apple’s fault. Apple could probably push it by deprecating the MDM command superseded by the DDM counterparts, but boy, that would raise hell.”
Chris Carr wrote: “It seems to work better this year, and more improvements are coming in the future.”
Nate Felton wrote: “Apple has released some amazing features and capabilities with Declarative Device Management (DDM). I’m hopeful that MDM vendors will be able to utilize these new features and capabilities sooner than later. It’s clear that this is the direction that Apple will be going with management in the future, and a faster rate of adoption by MDM vendors is going to be required. I often realize that MDM vendors learn of these new features at the same time the public does during WWDC sessions, so perhaps Apple could work on improving its relationship with MDM vendors to ensure that they have more advanced knowledge of upcoming changes to MDM/DDM to ensure that they have more time to work on them to release them to the public alongside the release of a new version of macOS. It would be great to see Apple enable a workflow that allows for better transitions between MDM products. As the MDM landscape continues to change, with old incumbents wavering (such as Workspace ONE UEM [AirWatch] with Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware) and increased feature parity between market leaders, the complexity of transitioning from one MDM to another is often a large enough deterrent to allow for proper competition.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple was very vocal about DDM being the way forward for MDM developers at WWDC last year. Some features and workflows are already improving because with DDM, but overall, Mac admins still have to wait for the MDM devs to fully enable the advances and features in their products and workflows.”
Adam Anklewicz wrote: “For the most part, the MDM protocol works very well. Where it struggles is with a few machines within a fleet that cannot renew the MDM certificate and thus lose management capabilities.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “I want an easier way to migrate between MDMs.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “If Apple is going to introduce additional PPPC controls into the OS, then administrators need the ability to manage those PPPC controls via configuration profiles. Having to explain to users that it’s OK to click on that dialog does not scale, nor is it a good security practice. Company staff should be allowed some measure of privacy on their endpoints, but at the end of the day, it is a company-owned and managed device, so fleet administrators should have control over how and when PC dialogs and mechanisms are presented or activated. Users should be able to control their cameras and microphones, but they likely don’t care that one app needs access to another app’s sandboxed data and are just frustrated they have to interact with a system dialog; let IT admins fully manage PPPC for their fleet unless there is an explicit user impacting control in scope. As it currently exists, MDM encourages vendor lock-in. There is not an admin or user-friendly way to move between MDMs. Users do not care about how their Mac or iPad is being managed, but if a company wants to switch MDM management tools or have to migrate systems between MDMs (e.g. Macs from an acquired company moving into the new parent company’s existing management system), users have to be forced to go through a migration process. Not being able to easily/silently move systems from one MDM to another impacts administrators and users in ways that seem contrary to Apple’s user-centered methods. MDM migrations or moves should be something that can be handled entirely on the backend without having to get the user involved or forcing IT to interact with each device in some fashion.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “Overall, DDM is great and we are lucky to be able to use it extensively in our MDM. But there is still a lot of legacy MDM going on, so we are hoping for a big leap forward in the next major operating system released in the fall.”
Charles Edge wrote: “The MDM protocol and especially Declarative Device Management have continued to improve slowly but surely. I expect to see more and more added to DDM in the next year, but what has been added so far is working better than I had expected.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “This is a topic dear to me, but since we are still on Ventura for reasons (a third-party publishing system is to blame), I haven’t been able to try out the goodies Apple has released with Sonoma.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Apple adding MDM control for Vision Pro less than 30 days after launch was a genuine surprise to the community, but they’re too quick to celebrate. This is a small win; they have a long way to go to providing the kind of controls that admins still crave. And if they’re reading this and asking, ‘What does he want?’ then they’re not reading their feedback or talking to their customers.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “DDM continues to mature. I’m looking forward to great things.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Declarative Device Management is a marvel of technology, but it’s also not as mature as it needs to be to drive adoption. The broad framework has few valuable use cases today to make it a compelling upgrade over MDM, given the requirements to adopt. I look forward to a broader application of the technology with more benefits to help spur adoption and drive forward the state of the art.”
Jeff Richardson wrote: “Same comment as above: Apple should have made MDM ready on the Apple Vision Pro even before Day 1 so that the big vendors like Microsoft could have MDM solutions in place when the product first shipped. Apple’s recent update finally enabled MDM, but who knows how long it will next take Microsoft and others (other than JAMF) to enable support.”
Tony Williams wrote: “They are doing good work.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote, “The only miss has been the removal of launchctl kickstart, which broke many Enterprise Mac deployments once macOS 14.4 was released.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Things are improving. The number of Profiles and options in Profiles is increasing. Declarative Device Management promises great improvements in day-to-day management tasks; I wish it would be fully implemented faster!”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “The best use I have seen for DDM is for macOS 14’s forced software upgrades. That said, we still see machines that aren’t getting the latest update profile forced to it. This seems to be in line with students and staff not rebooting their machines for long periods and the background MDM processes getting stuck. Apple needs to figure out how to make their MDM commands reliable for machines that students and staff don’t reboot often.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “This is in pretty good shape. I have no specific complaints other than the difficulty of troubleshooting this in the rare cases something does go wrong. Some improvements could be made, but this is in great shape.”
June Billings wrote: “On MDM-managed Enterprise devices, we should be able to deliver profiles completely silently without users having to Accept the profile.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “I await when my MDM is better with DDM. I am very frustrated that the top-of-the-line MDM solution is lacking.”
The Future of Apple in the EnterpriseGrade: B+ (average score: 3.9, last year: 3.9)
June Billings wrote: “Apple’s track record indicates it does not care to cater to Enterprise customers. It’s Apple’s way or the Highway.”
Adam Rice wrote: “They’ve hired a great internal team who’s empowered to connect with the Mac admin community. IT concerns are heard and addressed in beta cycles. It’s great!.”
Teg Bains wrote, ” Hardware becomes obsolete is too soon. Vendor OS lock-in is a problem as well.”
Joel Housman wrote: “I think they’re pushing their Business Essentials service a lot, which just does not fulfill our needs. And that’s fine – it’s not for everyone.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “Apple is doing better, but still has a very ‘individualistic’ approach to device use.”
Luke Charters wrote: “The future for Apple in the Enterprise feels brighter than ever. I’m looking forward to the What’s new in managing Apple devices session at WWDC than I am for the keynote.”
Daniel Zamorano wrote: “Considering how most people work nowadays (web-based and remote), I am sure Apple’s security and privacy development is a big plus for companies. Long battery life and cooler, quieter computers are also a big plus here.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “There is no tech space I would rather be in than the Apple space. The hiring of Mac Admins to key positions inside Apple helps get our message across. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges, but I like the general direction.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “I do see solid future and growth for Apple.”
Nate Felton wrote: “I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of Apple in the Enterprise. They have shown some great strides and improvements over the past year, but there have still been a few missteps.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “I’m still concerned about the impact of CloudOS, where all your data and app live in the cloud, on Apple. The Browser as the endpoint OS is a thing. Apple needs to be making sure that developing native apps is worth the effort. Their behavior around the App Store seems to provide good reasons not to develop natively.”
Brent David wrote: ” It seems that Apple is finally listening to Enterprise admins, and we are finally going in the right direction.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “The future looks bright. After a rough couple of years from 2018 – 2022(ish), Apple has made significant improvements to its MDM protocol and related features to support a stable deployment of Apple devices in businesses. This demonstrates Apple’s commitment to serving business needs and iterating on the capabilities it provides to businesses over time.”
Tony Williams wrote: “It is always getting better. You would be hard-pressed to find an enterprise without some sort of Mac fleet.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “There is a solid foundation of protocols and APIs for Enterprise support in all of Apple’s platforms, including watchOS and visionOS, and as long they keep chipping away at the pain points, and users keep choosing Apple devices over the competition when given a choice, Apple in the Enterprise will be fine.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “The crystal ball is still quite hazy here. I’m hoping to see a well-defined roadmap at WWDC in June, but I am not holding my breath. In Enterprise, we plan 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year (some places do even longer) roadmaps. I can look one year ahead at Apple in the Enterprise. Three is much harder. Five is virtually impossible. The landscape shifts and changes too rapidly (not Apple’s fault). However, a roadmap that showed direction, velocity, and potential could be useful.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “Apple will continue to thrive in Enterprise because of the products and the open nature of web / SaaS-based apps that enterprises rely so heavily on, but honestly, it feels like Apple devotes extremely limited resources to Enterprise. I would love to see them take this space more seriously, particularly as Windows continues to get more and more bloated and ad-ridden. I think Apple could make significant headway in Enterprise if they took it more seriously.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Apple is not doomed yet.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “I’ve seen a lot of progress in the past five years, so I am hopeful. It’s just that Apple takes its eyes off the ball.”
Karsten Fischer wrote: “Some things I’d like Apple to provide: cloud storage for Enterprise, regardless of platform (I mean, getting rid of Dropbox would be a personal win for me). Also, get more into the IdP market as well.”
John C. Welch wrote: “They need to partner with major software VARs, especially in manufacturing. Apple would be ideal for that world, but they need key application suites like Solidworks and Creo. Getting more Autodesk products would help.”
Allister Banks wrote: “I’m cautiously optimistic about DDM, but otherwise, the upheaval of tech jobs that overwhelmingly offer Macs/iOS may wax and wane while the new heroin crypto, the AI/Musk-style mismanagement siren call that continues to lure the C-level.”
Henry Stamerjohann wrote: “Apple has a lot of great people on board who are listening, so I’m confident we’ll see improvements on both ends: the product side, and the growing adoption of the platform including the Mac in enterprise and business.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote: “Their efforts are showing. Most big enterprises these days offer their employees Apple devices as options. Not just because employees love them, but also because they work well in an enterprise environment and even make financial sense in the long run.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “Nowhere near enough people on the Enterprise Workflows team who work in a marginalized sub-unit in San Diego.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Apple computers remain solidly in demand for a wide range of industries. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems to be staking its future not on its Windows operating system but rather on Copilot: they tried to court OpenAI’s Sam Altman but got Mustafa Suleyman from DeepMind. Apple knows that Siri and ML are just one part of their whole vision, and they cannot put their eggs in one basket. But the money they wasted chasing Project Titan ($10B) could have been used to hire more engineers focused on the Enterprise, education, and government.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “There are people at Apple that live this stuff, drive the conversation, and strive to make Apple platforms work as best as they can in Enterprise. I love those people. There are also people whose thoughts stop at “consumer” and those people seem to make a lot of decisions around direction. I’d like to know how to communicate with those people. Overall, I feel Apple still has the best desktop and mobile platforms. They dominate the mobile space. They have the most advanced desktop OS. Are they working on the future of the desktop in Enterprise? Yes. Could they do more? Yes. Do they need to? Market cap would suggest they don’t, but I’d love it if they would.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Apple’s Enterprise Workflow team continues to be a great boon for enterprise, but that team needs more discretion for sharing relevant information.”
John Cleary wrote: “Apple Silicon has rejuvenated Apple in the Enterprise. If they could just get MS to start building native apps again (e.g., Teams), they’d do even better! 😂.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “I still do not feel that Apple values Enterprise or Education. When we are responsible for the well-being of students, especially in a boarding school environment, we need to be able to monitor the devices, especially during study hall periods when they are learning to be independent. I do not feel that macOS Automated Device Enrollment is reliable or flexible enough for our needs. Managed Apple IDs are a mess – nobody understands them, and they do not play nicely with situations where we want to allow users to also use their personal Apple IDs. Apple continues to have problems with Macs with long uptimes failing to check in with MDMs, so time-sensitive or security-sensitive profiles cannot be reliably pushed to Macs.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “Very confident. I’m mostly interested in at what point they expand their in-house MDM tools and how well it’s adopted over third parties.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Apple continues to enhance its enterprise offerings each year, spanning hardware, software, and services. However, it remains crucial for Apple to actively listen to the needs of larger organizations and further refine its device management capabilities to align with their requirements. While there’s still progress to be made, Apple is steadily advancing in this domain. Notably, Apple’s expansion within the enterprise market is noteworthy. The concept of ‘Employee choice,’ once a mere buzzword, has now become a reality for many organizations. The increasing adoption of such programs signifies a significant victory for Apple as it strengthens its presence in the enterprise sector. The growing readiness of companies to embrace these initiatives underscores the evolving application landscapes, further solidifying Apple’s foothold in the enterprise market.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “There’s never been a better time to be a Mac Admin. The ecosystem is substantially mature, there are a number of different price points and functionality spectra for tools. It has never been easier to go deep with Apple’s technology in a corporate world, and thanks to key stakeholders at all levels, it’s never been a better investment for business.”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Apple is more popular than ever in Enterprise. ChromeOS is king in education, however.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote, “Apple is in a very good position, and I forsee increasing adoption in the Enterprise in the coming years.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “We will continue to be Apple-based, against headwinds.”
Fabrice Neuman wrote: “It seems that Apple’s inability to play well in a mixed environment makes it difficult. As soon as a new team member comes in with a PC, things start to hit the fan.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “I’m hoping Apple’s starting to get what Enterprise needs and it’s just taking them a long time to implement it. They clearly need to expand their engineering team to implement stuff faster. They have 1000 engineers working on the iPhone camera—they should have 500 working on Enterprise Device Management.”
OS AdoptionGerald Horn wrote: “We cannot purchase new computers at the rate at which macOS versions are released.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “As stated above, this year I had no fear of deploying updates, including Sonoma, on release day.”
Allister Banks wrote: “Our CISO just realized that even more than the writing being on the wall and in the docs, the raw numbers of Critical and High CVE’s plummets once on the latest OS.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “We adopted Sonoma faster than we adopted Ventura. I think this trend will continue. Perhaps we may never get to ‘Day One Readiness’ but we get closer and closer every year and this is because Apple keeps making OS upgrades a smoother process. I was surprised at how little broke in my environment between Ventura and Sonoma.”
June Billings wrote: “Excellent, as we deployed Nudge.”
Adam Anklewicz wrote: “Getting our fleet up to macOS 14 was easier than it’s ever been.”
Nic Scott wrote: “We’re aggressive with updates and have been using Nudge. We have tried to switch to DDM updates, but it’s not ready. The notifications are not customizable by orgs, words are cut off in the banners, half the time they don’t show to the end users, and deadlines are not actually enforced. Not to mention, not all of our machines support DDM across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “For our computer labs, we have had to hold off deploying Ventura because the change in Lock Screen behavior means that a new user to that computer cannot log in (via a directory service, like Active Directory) if another user is already logged in and the Lock Screen is active. We always have to hold off adopting the new major version of macOS for at least a few months because Apple releases them in the middle of an academic Term, but this is the first time we’ve had a showstopping regression hold us back further.”
Chris Carr wrote: “No one seems in a hurry.”
Adam Codega wrote: “Updates on Apple Silicon Macs are largely faster and more reliable, making updating easier.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “The need to be on the latest OS to have the most secure device is real. That drives us to begin testing the next OS as early as we can, so that we are ready as soon as possible after release. It is a massive ongoing effort, but needs to be done.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “We have been pretty aggressive at forcing updates whenever possible. The mechanism is more functional now, so maybe it is a bit faster than previous years because the reliability has improved, but I would say about the same as we were pretty aggressive previously as well.”
Adam Rice wrote: “As an MSP, I moved clients to Sonoma way sooner than I rolled out earlier versions of macOS – November/December vs February/March.”
Daniel Ricci wrote: “We pushed macOS 14 out to the 90-day limit. Ideally we would like to be able to hold off major updates to the summer months. When we were finally ready for updates, we still had a lot of students on macOS 13 as it had no way to force updates. Hopefully, once we get more on macOS 14, we will be able to use the DDM to keep the machines current.”
Tony Williams wrote: “We had a blocker with 14 and Xcode that took a while to be resolved.”
Trevor Sysock wrote: “We have fully embraced the ‘no delays, no blocks’ in all possible cases.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “100% of our Macs are already on macOS Sonoma 14.4, the latest OS. However, it’s starting to make me a little nervous seeing numerous reports of major bugs in this release.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “With both macOS Ventura and macOS Sonoma, we’ve had pretty much 100% adoption by February of the following year.”
Nate Felton wrote: “We continue to support new major versions of macOS with release day support and will push the latest minor version within 14 days of release. Continuously running the latest beta version throughout the year has helped with this rate of adoption.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “Our issue with macOS has been a third-party publishing platform, but that should be fixed within the next month. As soon as that is done, I expect us to adopt Sonoma quickly.”
Fabrice Neuman wrote: “Quicker than usual to adopt the iCloud Password sharing feature, which is awesome and a good alternative to 1Password or BitWarden. And, hopefully, a good way to introduce Passkeys at some point….”
Cameron Kay wrote: “I think the month earlier release of macOS 14 is a factor in the much higher percentage of the fleet now running the new OS compared to this time last year. We do still have an annoyingly large number of Macs that are broken somehow and just won’t upgrade from old versions of macOS, and we’ve tried both MDM commands and downloading full installers via softwareupdate and using startosinstall. To get these Macs upgraded, IT support is going to have to physically get ahold of those Macs and erase & reinstall them. This is a very costly process and very disruptive to users. Hopefully this will be less of an issue once all the fleet is running macOS 14 for the upgrade to macOS 15.”
Daniel Zamorano wrote: “In our case, the problem relied on MacOS, but, after Big Sur, every new OS has managed to get rolled out in less than six months to around 90% of our fleet.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “We are deploying macOS Sonoma quicker than macOS Ventura, which was quicker than macOS Monterey. Next year should be faster again when we can use Declarative Software Update for a major upgrade.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote, “We’re pushing people quite heavily towards the latest versions. It makes sense from a security standpoint and also limits support.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “It’s good to see more organizations upgrading to the latest macOS, iOS, and iPadOS versions for better device security with the latest patches. Just like last year, this trend continues, with organizations quickly adopting new versions and patches. It’s becoming hard to slow down this trend, as staying updated is crucial for device security. As organizations focus on security and keep their systems up-to-date, they play a big role in making devices safer. Moreover, it’s not just the operating systems; software vendors are also stepping up their game. They’re ensuring their apps are compatible with the latest versions as soon as possible. This means there’s no need to hold off on updating just because a core application isn’t compatible. Now, they’re adopting at the same pace, ensuring smoother transitions to new OS versions.”
Adam Lacy wrote: “I’ve been able to manage updates a lot more efficiently with our current MDM than in years past.”
Bryan Heinz wrote, “Apple doesn’t really give us a choice anymore. At best, we get 90 days to adopt the latest and greatest before our users can upgrade anyway, regardless of potential OS-level bugs, whether the software that we need to support works on the OS, or anything else that might be going on.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “We were able to release macOS Sonoma within 60 days of release after help from our internal beta testers. Last year, we waited well over 90 days.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “Due to many bugs in public release I have delayed new OS adoption cadance.”
Joel Housman wrote: “Our stance is for staff to install the updates immediately. Because of the nature of our work, some of our staff are potential targets. We want those security updates immediately.”
Vision ProLuke Charters wrote: “I could see us purchasing one or two for students to experience and play with, but I can’t see widespread adoption happening in the K-12 space any time soon.”
Chris Carr wrote: “We have one, and it is fascinating but has very small utility as of yet.”
Charles Edge wrote: “We’ve extended all of our apps to Vision Pro. We recompiled the credential provider from our iPadOS version for Vision Pro, and it mostly worked. However, we filed some requests, and others must have done the same, because just last week, there were updates to add native passkey support for Optic ID. It took less than half an hour to get it all working. I loved that!”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “The fact that Vision Pro needs to be specially fitted and outfitted with custom inserts really limits its use as an enterprise device.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “The tie to an Apple ID makes it difficult to use in a shared enterprise environment.”
Ted Goranson wrote: “Spatial reasoning will be breakout.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “We support lots of Apple customers as an MSP, and we’ll need to eventually help support customers with Vision Pro. I’m personally very excited about the possibilities of the platform, but it is very early on. We have not seen any business interest yet from our customers but I expect that to change in the future.”
Joel Housman wrote, “The product is just not ready for mainstream adoption in a workplace yet. I won’t rehash what many have already said on hundreds of other podcasts, but the AVP is like the Apple Watch Series 0 (though decidedly a lot better performing). I don’t think it will “catch on” until Series 3 or 4. And even then, I’m not convinced yet that it’s anything more than an entertainment consumption device. And yes, I own one.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “While we have no plans, it’s awesome that Apple has implemented MDM management of Vision Pro so early in its life. I take this as an indication that Apple sees Vision Pro as a business tool.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “Unless someone has a compelling reason to publish our magazine on The Apple Vision Pro with a custom app, I don’t see us adopting it for the next few years, if ever. That reflects our business, not anything bad about the technology.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “Waiting on our MDM vendor to implement what’s there. As of today, I don’t see a lot of ways to tailor the Vision Pro for enterprise use (e.g., single-user design).”
Joel Anderson wrote: “Expensive. Not easily shareable. Fragile. Prescriptions.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “We’d love to deploy these, but they aren’t available in my country yet. We’ve imported a few, so we’re playing around with the tech but are limited in any real-world testing due to app store account requirements. We will want to make them available to those who want them as soon as we are able to, presuming management capability is up to it.”
John C. Welch wrote: “For manufacturing, the VP is an amazing device.”
Jeff Richardson wrote: “These are still very early days for the Apple Vision Pro, but it is great that Apple is selling a product so that we can start to envision future uses by lawyers and other professionals.”
Teg Bains wrote: “Overpriced iOS device. Cannot run apps not allowed by Apple. We should pay to beg Apple to let us use the device. Nope.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Our Emerging Tech people are giddy about the possibilities, having been forced to design their AR/VR/MR stuff around Meta’s offering. While still in the early stages, I am expecting to see amazing applications of Vision Pro’s technology in the next 12 months. Gen 2 and 3 of this thing are going to be very interesting. I’m bullish on the future of mixed reality and augmented reality and the new paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Until an exec asks for one, it will likely never enter our organization. Even then, an Apple Vision Pro would likely have a limited use case as it cannot be fully managed like an iPad or Mac yet.”
Passkeys/passwordlessJoel Anderson wrote: “I can’t wait for passwords to go away! But this is not quite mainstream enough for us right now.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “I love the idea of removing as many passwords as possible. Apple’s Passkey implementation is great. But there are still too many rough edges in other services yet – hopefully, this year, that will change.”
Joel Housman wrote: “We’ve been issuing Yubikeys to staff since 2018. We’re starting to adopt passkeys, too.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “The main issue is the lack of Passkey export. There is no standardized mechanism in place that currently allows this, and it is, therefore, a showstopper.”
Adam Anklewicz wrote: “We support passkeys through our password manager, though we’re looking to further roll out to our Identity Management solution.”
Jeff Richardson wrote: “Moving beyond passwords is a great way to improve security, and the iPhone has a vital role to play in this process.”
Adam Rice wrote: “In my very limited testing, I can’t get this to work as advertised using 1Password as my primary password manager and Safari as my browser on any platform.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Personally, I’ve been using passkeys through services like iCloud and 1Password, and I’m impressed with their seamless implementation across compatible sites. I’m excited about the prospect of passkeys being integrated into Identity and Access Management (IAM) platforms. This would enable organizations to provide and manage passkey authentication options to end users, enhancing security and user experience simultaneously. I would love to see what Apple is going to do in this area.”
Allister Banks wrote: “As part of a ‘zero-trust architecture’ initiative, our org now requires ‘phishing-resistant multi-factor auth’. While that still involves a password at deploy time, a hardware token and passkey credential takes the friction out of subsequent and frequent session extensions.”
Charles Edge wrote: “We use them wherever possible. We’re also looking for ways to force their use with third-party software.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “I can’t see how we can go passwordless and still use FileVault. I wish Apple had a way to FileVault unlock your Mac from your Apple Watch or iPhone. We haven’t looked at updating any of our enterprise systems to support Passkeys. I think that would need to be something that our Cloud IdP would need to implement first.”
Robby Barnes wrote: “Passkeys are nearly magic when they work, and we do deploy and use them internally. The support from sites is pretty limited, and it’s a bit frustrating how siloed iCloud Keychain is and how buggy some other 3rd party solutions can be in this space, but this will continue to improve. I hope the rate of adoption continues to rapidly improve, and that 3rd party clients are able to improve reliability with Passkeys across browsers.”
James Brown wrote: “Very eager for this. Hoping for cross-platform interoperability.”
Nic Scott wrote: ” The fact they are tied to hardware or iCloud is not great. I would love to see Apple lead a vendor-neutral, hardware-agnostic approach.”
Jim Zajkowski wrote: “Not my part of the organization. Lack of experience with Passkeys among Windows and Android users limits excitement for using them.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “I’m playing with it right now. I was ready to go ahead with staff, but 1Password and Safari are not playing smoothly together, and Apple needs to fix it. I am far from convinced that Passkeys will improve security in the short term as long as (1) passwords can still be used to log into the account and (2) someone can easily reset the password. If someone can access your email it is game over. Almost every service bends over backward to help people with log-in problems, but devious people can use these same mechanisms to break into accounts. So I end up turning off password recovery for users where possible and have to make them go through IT to reset passwords. I don’t see Passkeys closing this back door.”
Jonathan Forsander wrote: “We use Okta FastPass for passwordless authentication to most internal resources. It works great.”
Peter Thorn wrote: “We are slowly implementing.”
Fabrice Neuman wrote: “Companies are made with real people who are slowly getting into password manager thanks to iCloud password management and sharing. The passkey notion is totally unknown and not understood.”
John Cleary wrote: “We already use passwordless where we can (e.g. SSH key pairs). Passkeys adoption is hamstrung by the lack of a real password management interface on Mac / iPad. If Apple actually built one (e.g. 1Password-like interface for iCloud Keychain), it’d go a long way to helping. Maybe this year? 🤔.”
Jason Broccardo wrote, “We’re not opposed to passkeys as an organization, but we need to see cross-platform support and have a mechanism to use them that is not reliant on iCloud Keychain.”
Office work styleAdam Anklewicz wrote: “We are remote-first, and current plans are to stay that way.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “In my opinion, a mix of working from home and going to the office is necessary. Collaboration in the office is different from remote sessions, especially for group discussions. At home, you miss out on casual conversations and learning opportunities that happen spontaneously. For junior roles, learning alongside seniors in person is crucial for growth. Working remotely can be isolating, even for introverts. It’s important to have face-to-face interactions to exchange ideas and gain different perspectives. In the end, we work with people! And yes, we are working on computers; however, we are working on improving end-user experiences (or our own experiences/automations)!”
Jolle Carlestam wrote: “We are very open to remote, calling it the new normal.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “With most employees working remotely, drop-shipping computers to users is a priority at our organization.”
Patrice Brend’amour wrote, “The board is pushing for hybrid and RTO. I expect a bunch of people to leave soon.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “During COVID, we proved that we are remote capable. My leaders do not believe in remote or hybrid work. So often, during my drive to work, stuck in traffic, I question this in my head as my home office setup mirrors my work setup.”
Karsten Fischer wrote: “Really? While I — sometimes — enjoy being in the office, I don’t see any benefit. Even if commuting time would be considered work time, I would rather stay at my place and do my job instead of negotiating train schedules and them being obsolete while getting pissed off. Luckily, I’m paid for delivering results, not appearance.”
Pete Curtner wrote: “Commutes are a waste of time, effort, and energy. RTO is counter-productive and archaic.”
Paul Chernoff wrote: “We went completely remote in March 2020. We had the basics in place, though we had to replace the VPN three months later after moving into a new office, but it wasn’t that difficult. We are now two days a week in the office, but some staff still work from home 98% of the time. I see benefits to seeing my co-workers face-to-face, as they are more likely to ask me questions if they see me. Our CEO is pushing for more face-to-face but accepted back in 2020 that we would never be a 100% in-office company. Our union is resisting any more required time in the office.”
Joel Housman wrote: “We’ve been 100% remote since March 13, 2020. We do have some staff that come into the office to collect the mail, etc. We do have plans to start using the office more in the coming months, on a person-by-person basis, as their job requirements warrant their doing so. Though, pre-COVID, we had 60+ people in our office, and during the past four years, as natural attrition has occurred and we’ve rehired for those roles, many of those positions aren’t local anymore. We only have ~35 “local” people anymore. Everyone is spread out around the country.”
Tanya Pfeffer wrote: “We were remote pre-pandemic. We have offices, but employees are not required (overall) to come in. Obviously, some teams need to be in the office.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “Hybrid requirements are honestly quite small at one day per week.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “100% remote, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I live in a beautiful small town near my family, and remote work makes that possible. A return-to-office mandate would mean that I would have to quit my job.”
Tony Williams wrote: “It is a little too cut and dried; the enterprise needs to be more open to variation from the one hybrid model.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “In our org, people can be 100% remote or 100% in the office or anywhere in between. I’m three days in, two days remote because I like to do that. Plenty of people I know are 100% remote and work better that way. I’m very happy that it’s an option.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “The company has always been remote friendly, but staff, especially in IT, have been encouraged to be in an office if we have an office in their home city.”
Chris Carr wrote: “We had already chosen to be an in-office company before COVID, but we have embraced a hybrid workweek (3 in-office, 2 at-home), and folks can take remote work ‘leaves’ of up to 30-45 days.”
Early web nostalgia and memorable online experiences, the most disappointing tech product we’ve owned or reviewed, our persistence in troubleshooting tech, and the oldest piece of technology we still use.
Go to the podcast page.
Last week, my family and I—like so many others in the U.S.—hopped in a car to try and catch sight of a total eclipse. And, like so many other parents, I planned to distract my kid for some part of this lengthy adventure with an iPad.
As my kid is still under two, there hasn’t been a lot of time spent with screens, aside from occasionally “playing” a game on our phones or watching some videos of trains. This marked the first time I planned to actually hand over a whole device—albeit still with the idea of just watching some downloaded videos—and I found as I set up the iPad what likely a legion of parents before me has also discovered: setting up an Apple device for a kid is kind of annoying.
I’ve been covering Apple for almost twenty years, so you’d be forgiven for thinking this wouldn’t shock me, but the simple truth is that, not unlike the Matrix, this is something you have to experience for yourself. Ultimately, the conclusion I reached was that Apple should really improve this experience for all of us time- and attention-strapped parents in a variety of ways.
Everything is permissibleLet’s start by saying that Apple does have an extensive set of parental controls baked in to its operating systems, all now collected under the aegis of Screen Time. Ostensibly this set of features not only allow parents to monitor how much time their kids spend using devices, but also control the limits of which apps can be used, which settings can be changed, and so on.
All to the good, but as I—again, a veteran technology journalist of almost two decades—embarked upon setting this all up, one thing quickly became clear: it is a pain. By default, everything is on and allowed, even when the iCloud account you login to is a child’s account (more on which in a bit).
One thing that would be helpful here is some kind of kids profile, where permissions are locked down by default, allowing parents to selectively enable features they want kids to have access to. This also makes sense from the perspective of enabling more features as kids get older. It’d also be handy if it was an ad hoc mode you could go into, rather than having to spend the time setting up all the various permissions, the same way that Netflix has a kids profile that you can log into with just kids content. Reduce the friction by removing all the fiddling.
That’s not to say such a feature would be enough, but it would be a good jumping-off point.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Skepticism about the future of the Vision Pro and brutal reviews of the Humane Ai Pin make us discuss misguided expectations and the power of the smartphone duopoly. We also attempt to decode reports of new M4 Mac chips.
Go to the podcast page.
Humane Ai Pin. (Photo: Humane)I’m not bullish on the Humane Ai Pin, the clip-on device whose first reviews arrived with knives out this week. The thing feels like a commodity product from 2026 that escaped back a couple of years—a basic hardware conduit for cloud AI models that will soon be available ubiquitously. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Apple Watch had most of its functionality later this year.
What excites me about the Ai Pin is what it represents for the future of computing, namely, eliminating a whole lot of drudgery from our lives. Computers have already reduced dramatic amounts of drudgery—they’re really good at it; it’s basically their best thing—but in eliminating all that analog drudgery, they’ve managed to create a small but still significant amount of digital drudgery. AI constructs have the potential to reduce that, performing tasks for us in seconds based on a single command that we’d otherwise spend a minute on by swiping and tapping.
But the more I think about the Ai Pin, the more sad it makes me… and not for the reason you might think. (If we were to play a word-association game and you prompted me with AI, my response would be “overhyped, but still world-changing.”) No, I’m sad about the Ai Pin because it—and a similar AI hardware product, the Rabbit R1—shows just how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies, most notably the Android-iPhone duopoly.
I’m looking forward to Apple’s new AI efforts, which it’s likely unveiling this summer at its developer conference and rolling out to everyone in the fall. I really do expect that at some point soon my cellular Apple Watch will have capabilities in line with those of the Humane Ai Pin. So will my iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and maybe even Apple TV? It’s gonna be everywhere.
The problem is that I’m dismissing the Ai Pin and looking forward to the Apple Watch specifically because of the control Apple has over its platforms. Yes, the company’s entire business model is based on tightly integrating its hardware and software, and it allows devices like the Apple Watch to exist. But that focus on tight integration comes at a cost (to everyone but Apple, anyway): Nobody else can have the access Apple has.
Humane’s Ai Pin has its own cellular account and uses its own cloud services. My Apple Watch shares a cellular account with my iPhone and syncs data with my iPhone apps, with watch apps that are based on Apple’s platform, and with the same cloud services that my other iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps use. It’s a huge advantage for the Apple Watch.
It seems like we’re at the point where even the most groundbreaking hardware device simply can’t succeed in a world where it’s unable to deeply integrate with either the iPhone or Android. (And really, in the U.S. especially, it would need to integrate with both.) This is why the Ai Pin and the Rabbit and similar products are not going to succeed. Instead, Apple and Google will integrate everything that the Ai Pin does into iOS and Android, and those will be the best-in-class implementations, and that’ll be it for Humane and anyone else who wants to create an AI-powered hardware dingus.
This is not a lament for Humane or its business model. It’s a lament for all of us. So many innovative products will never get funded or never launch a product because if they can’t connect deeply with the smartphone, they’re at an impossible disadvantage. And if one such product somehow did make a mark, what are the chances that it would survive rather than just being acquired by Apple, or Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, or Facebook? What are the chances that those companies would just build a me-too product that was vastly more functional because they were able to tightly tie it into the ecosystems they control?
I’m not making a legal argument here. (Which is good, because I am not a lawyer.) I’m just observing that the smartphone has become so central to life that if your product can’t offer deep connections to the smartphone, you’re stuck. And yes, Humane could do a better job integrating with phones than it has done—its entire conception as a replacement that frees users from the most successful tech product ever seems misguided—but I’d expect that any integration they built would be largely unsatisfying. They don’t own the phones, so they can’t play that game.
That’s what troubles me about where we are right now. I love my iPhone—I really do. And I appreciate the hardware Apple makes that is tightly integrated with its other products, which is why I own a vast amount of Apple hardware. But it sure does feel like it’s increasingly unlikely that any sort of revolutionary hardware is going to come from anyone not named Apple or one of the big Android hardware partners, if not Google itself.
If the world’s tech giants have gotten so big and so powerful that nobody else can even afford the table stakes, we all lose. And the existence of that dumb Humane Ai Pin is just a reminder of that.
Dr. Drang has come for the Apple Sports app:
Scores are only part of what a good sports app is about. Sports apps are used not only when you can’t watch a game and want to be kept plugged in, they’re also used—even more often used, I think—to give you background information on the game you’re currently watching. Announcements during a broadcast are ephemeral, but a sports app can tell you how many fouls Nikola Jokić has at any time. And this is where Sports falls down.
His critique of the poor presentation of basketball box scores is pointed and accurate. It definitely feels like an app that was launched with “I just want to get the damn score of the game” as the guiding premise now needs to expand to provide better presentations for literally every other portion of the app.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide wants your business to be secure. Think of it like airport security: there are two lines, one to verify your identity and another to scan your carry-ons. In enterprise security, the first line is user authentication. The second line is scanning the devices themselves.
That second line doesn’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average solution is like eyeing a bag and listening to hear if there’s a ticking sound. And that’s assuming there’s a second line at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.
Unmanaged devices can be infected with malware, full of personally identifiable information, or even belong to a bad actor using phished employee credentials. Companies need device trust solutions that block devices from authenticating if they don’t meet minimum security requirements. That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates.
Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. Kolide can help close the gaps.
Howard Oakley of Eclectic Light Company has a deep dive on how your Mac knows what app to open when you double click a file:
In the days of Classic Mac OS, that was accomplished using the infamous Desktop Database, which recognised files and apps by means of their Creator and Type, two codes consisting of four characters each. A great deal has changed since, for the better. This process now relies on a chain of information to work out which app to launch to open any file. Although that chain can go wrong, in general it’s far more reliable now and seldom needs any user intervention or maintenance.
As much as I initially missed the old Type/Creator system, and as much as a dislike relying on file extensions (and keep them hidden by default on my Mac!), I do love being able to arbitrarily command that all files of a given type open in my preferred app, all right from Finder’s Get Info window.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has another one of his excellent chip scoops, this time about the future of the Mac:
The company, which released its first Macs with M3 chips five months ago, is already nearing production of the next generation — the M4 processor — according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it.
Apple’s moving through Mac chip generations fast—the M3 was introduced six months ago, but Gurman suggests that it will only be about a year before the cycle begins again.
Gurman’s report suggests that the biggest picture is what you might expect: There will be an M4 chip (code-named Donan) in the MacBook Air, low-end MacBook Pro, and low-end Mac mini; and an M4 code-named Brava in the high-end MacBook Pros and high-end Mac mini.
More intriguing is the destination of the Mac Studio: Gurman suggests that Apple is testing versions with both a “still-unreleased” M3 chip and a variation of the M4 Brava processor. This one’s tough to parse—it’s unclear if the M4 Brava chip is actually referring to both the Pro and Max class chips, or if there’s something changing in the product line. Gurman also doesn’t say if the Mac Studio might get an M3 Max and Ultra update this year followed by an M4 update next year, even though the idea of Apple offering a new model in both M3 and M4 variants seems pretty out of pattern.
On the topic of the Mac Pro, Gurman says it’s “set to get the new Hidra chip,” a “top-end” version of the M4, next year. Is that the Ultra, or is something different? Reply hazy, ask again later.
And for RAM fiends out there, Gurman also reports that Apple is considering a new memory ceiling of 512GB, up from the current high-end maximum of 192GB.
Generally Gurman’s reports are accurate, but of course he’s operating with limited information—hence the lack of clarity on some fronts. Regardless of the details, though, it seems that we might be seeing another generation of Macs starting this fall.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing. While some have decried these actions as interference in the internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that I think those opinions often overlook.
Regulation works.
Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of Apple changing its policies due to regulations—or, in some cases, the mere threat of regulation:
- In January, Apple announced that it would now allow developers of game streaming apps to submit a single app containing the entire game catalog. That had previously been a sticking point for Microsoft bringing Xbox Game Pass to the platform in 2020—and, as we later found out, was one of the areas of concern in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice just a couple months later.
- Late last week, Apple changed another of its longstanding App Store rules by allowing “retro game console emulator apps”. Interestingly, one of the only other announced third-party marketplaces coming to the EU is AltStore, the marquee title in which will be Delta, a Nintendo emulator developed by AltStore proprietor Riley Testut.
- Just today, Apple announced that it would it relax rules around used parts for repairing iPhones. Apple’s Self Service Repair program, which was put into place to comply with Right to Repair legislation passed in some states, launched in 2021. But critics pointed out that Apple’s initial foray still required a restrictive “parts pairing” process that made third-party repairs more limited and more expensive, and Oregon recently made a law that bans the approach. Today’s change effectively undoes that process, though it does still include provisions to prevent stolen parts from being used.
None of this even takes into account the massive changes made to iOS as the result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which may already be resulting in consumer changes.
Apple is unquestionably a behemoth in the technology industry, one of a handful that dominate our lives. And while there are places that those companies butt up against each other and compete, it’s also apparent that corporations of this size are not subject to the same degrees of competition that much smaller players might be. Their core businesses are relatively stable, even if they skirmish around the edges: Apple and Amazon can, for example, squabble over the (relatively small) market of smart home speakers, but Apple’s no more likely to come up with a killer retail site that unseats Amazon than Amazon is to make a world-class smartphone.1
More to the point, these handful of tech companies are so large that the chances of being upset, or even threatened, by small upstarts is vanishingly small. (And in the rare cases where it might happen, it’s a simple matter for the large companies to simply acquire the smaller ones.)
That means the only entities powerful enough to impose any sort of pushback against the companies are government bodies.2 Apple details this in its annual 10-K filing, which lays out risk factors to the company’s business. One entire heading in that section is “Legal and Regulatory Compliance Risks”, which includes the follow sub-heading:
The Company is subject to complex and changing laws and regulations worldwide, which exposes the Company to potential liabilities, increased costs and other adverse effects on the Company’s business.
The simple fact is that, without some sort of threat, Apple was never going to change any of its business practices, because there was absolutely no reason to do so. Apple would happily have never offered a self-service repair program or allowed emulators or changed its policies about game streaming—we know because there were literally years of people asking for these changes without the company lifting a finger—until governments got involved.
It’s not just Apple, either. Broadband companies weren’t about to start giving customers clearer and more accessible information about their plans without regulatory intervention from the FCC.
The absence of meaningful challenges breeds complacency. And complacency leads to the temptation to collect increasing revenue without corresponding innovation because, well, it sure is a lot easier, isn’t?
Much as some might pooh-pooh government intervention in the market, these regulatory and legal threats are ultimately efficacious because Apple ended up changing its behavior. In some cases, it may take months or years for the impacts on the consumer to be felt—and, in some cases, as detractors point out, it may not happen at all if users decide they don’t want these capabilities or alternatives. And you know what? That’s totally fine—because then it’s users choosing to stick with the status quo, as opposed to having no other option than the one that they’re given.
- 🔥 ↩
- There are still other external risk factors that affect everybody, of course, like foreign exchange rates and, say, pandemics. ↩
When I was a kid, the first personal computer I ever saw showed up in an elementary school classroom one day and changed my life. But in the early days of the computer, they were expensive and impractical—yet somehow also on the cutting edge and pointing toward the future. Computers were more than a decade away from becoming ubiquitous.
Things were different in the 1970s, I guess. (But yes, they were as colorful as you imagine—but much smellier.) Today, we are so tech-savvy as a society that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the ground floor of a barely feasible product category. And yet, that’s just where we are with the Vision Pro and similar products.
I’m not declaring that the Vision Pro has a special destiny because there’s no way to know that. But I do feel comfortable suggesting that those who are declaring it a dead end and a failed product might want to consider how foolish it would have been to say the same thing about a Commodore PET or TRS-80 in 1977.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Color e-readers, apps and devices we use while traveling, tech products we have but no longer want, and the tech products we’d immediately replace.
Go to the podcast page.
Ashley Belanger, writing at Ars Technica:
Reuters collected data from six companies, confirming that, when presented with a choice screen, many EU users will swap out default browsers like Chrome or Safari for more privacy-focused options. And because iPhones have a larger market share than Google-branded phones in the EU, Apple is emerging as the biggest loser, Reuters reported, noting that under the DMA, “the growth for smaller browsers is currently coming at the cost of Safari.”
In some ways, this isn’t surprising: I’m guessing a lot of consumers in the EU weren’t even aware that they could change the default browser on iOS.1 But it’s also early days and it’s possible that some of this is experimentation for people to see what else is on there—it’s not entirely clear to me from the story (or the Reuters story where the numbers originate) over what time period they’ve logged this. People may try out another browser and then change back—especially if we’re talking about browsers with, say, free trials to a paid subscription.
If this is real, lasting change however, then it would seem like the DMA is accomplishing at least part of its goals.
You may also remember, however, that the European Commission is currently looking into Apple’s compliance on browser choice. The Ars story goes into more detail here about some of the elements that spawned that:
[Open Web Advocacy] accused Apple of “maliciously” intending “to undermine user choice” with “an astonishingly brazen dark pattern” where “Apple engineers added code to the Safari’s settings page to hide the option to change the default browser if Safari was the default but then to prominently show it if another browser was the default.”
You can test this on an iPhone by scrolling to Safari under Settings. If Safari is not the default browser, there will be an option for “Default Browser App” where you can easily set Safari as the default. But if Safari is set as the default, this option disappears. For every other browser installed, the option remains to switch the default, whether that browser is set as the default or not.
This made me curious, so naturally I checked it out and, yes, this is true. However, that seems to be because the option for setting any browser as default is within the settings for that particular app. So, for example, if you download Chrome, you need to go to Settings > Chrome to change the default. That said, the Chrome settings always show an option to change the default, even if Chrome is already the default.
The right answer is to probably have a Browsing section (or even a Default Apps section) of Settings that’s an agnostic place to set the default. Because otherwise, you might not even know that you can change the default browser…which is exactly what the Open Web Advocacy group is alleging here. That certainly feels like Apple making a design choice that just so happens to favor its own app—which is exactly what the DMA is taking aim at.
- Case in point: how many consumers outside the EU don’t know that Apple lets you change the default browser too? ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Our weeklong baseball nightmare…. continues? As I recounted on opening day, the MLB app for iPad—which works on the Mac and is great to have!—had stopped working on the Mac. Turns out it was a little more complex than that: it worked until you logged in, at which point it stopped working.
In any event, MLB updated the app and I was happy to report that it worked on my Mac again… for a single launch. Unfortunately, the next time I launched the app, it crashed.
The only solution for Mac users for now seems to be: when you want to launch MLB, go to Finder and choose Go to Folder from the Go menu. Then type ~/Library/Containers and press Return. Within the Containers folder you’ll find an MLB folder, which you must delete! Then launch MLB, click through the setup screens, and whatever you do, don’t quit the app or you’ll start this process all over again.
C’mon, MLB tech folks. Sort this out.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Casey Liss joins Myke to discuss Apple’s new Spatial Personas for visionOS, and their thoughts on an immersive experience from… Gucci? Also, emulators are coming to the App Store, and Myke wants to check Casey’s vibe.
Go to the podcast page.
You know the drill: when you go through airport security there are two lines. In one, a TSA agent makes sure you’re the person in your passport photo. In the other, a machine scans your carry-on for explosives, weapons, or a normal-sized bottle of shampoo.
Enterprise security is much the same, but instead of passengers and luggage, we’re talking about end users and their devices. In the first line, user authentication verifies a user’s identity, and it’s gotten pretty sophisticated in the past few years, with SSO and MFA becoming more common.
But user devices don’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average device trust solution only looks at a handful of endpoint security factors, like OS updates and firewall. If this really were the TSA, that wouldn’t even be an x-ray machine, more like holding a bag to your ear and listening for a ticking sound.
And that’s assuming an organization looks at end user devices at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.
Unmanaged devices (those outside a company’s MDM) can be infected with malware, full of PII, or worse–they can belong to a bad actor using phished employee credentials.
And hey, there are valid reasons for a device not to be enrolled in MDM. Contractor devices, Linux machines, and employee phones all need to be able to access company resources. But there’s plenty of room for middle ground between “fully locked down and managed” and an open-door device policy.
Specifically, companies need device trust solutions that block devices from authenticating if they don’t meet minimum security requirements.
Even with phishing-resistant MFA, it’s frighteningly easy for bad actors to impersonate end users–in the case of the MGM hack, all it took was a call to the help desk. What could have prevented that attack (and so many others) was an unspoofable form of authentication for the device itself.
That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates. Kolide’s agent looks at hundreds of device properties (remember, our competitors only look at a handful). What’s more, our user-first, privacy-respecting approach means you can put it on machines outside MDM: contractor devices, mobile phones, and even Linux machines.
Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. But Kolide can help close the gaps. (And we won’t even make you take off your shoes.)
To learn more, please watch our on-demand demo.
My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Listen Later is such a clever idea. If you’re like me, you collect longer articles throughout the week that you just don’t have time to dive into at the moment. Sometimes I get back to these articles, but other times they get lost in the shuffle.
But you know what I never lose track of? My podcast queue. This is where Listen Later comes in: It turns articles into episodes of a podcast, so your reading list can be automatically transformed into a podcast in your queue. It all works via email, so you just share any article you want via your browser’s share sheet to your Listen Later email address. (This means you can also forward any email to Listen Later, even ones with attachments, and Listen Later will translate the whole thing into spoken audio.)
Listen Later uses some really high quality AI voices to read your audio. They’re really excellent narrators, and you can choose from numerous voice options. You can also have Listen Later auto-translate articles in other languages into your chosen language.
Head over to ListenLater.net and start your free trial today.
Is it time for a Disney pep talk? We discuss what’s working and not working, and how Disney’s ready for streaming success if it’s willing to change. Plus, streaming advice! [For Downstream+ subscribers only: Disney/Apple bundling and Baseball streaming.]
Go to the podcast page.
Voice Dream Reader, the highly regarded Mac and iOS text-to-speech reading app, is the latest beloved app to adopting a subscription model, angering its loyal user base in the process. (In this case, the community of users skews heavily toward folks who are blind, visually impaired, or have print disabilities like dyslexia.)
The move comes from the app’s new owner, Applause Group, which bought the app in 2023 from original developer Winston Chen. Part of the backlash results from the planned $79 per year price tag (discounted to $59 until at least May 1, when the subscription becomes mandatory), but a bigger issue for longtime users is that Applause Group will effectively disable the older version of the app.
Jonathan Mosen, a well-known voice in the blindness community, says Applause Group has engaged in “trust-building” with the user community of late. However, he writes:
Users who are unwilling or unable to pay a subscription will lose the ability to add new content to their Voice Dream Reader library, thus rendering the app useless once they have read all the current material they have uploaded to the app. To put it clearly, Applause Group wants existing customers to pay a second time to retain functionality they already paid for.
Mosen also accuses Applause Group of violating App Store guidelines that require clarity when a developer changes the business model, since uploading new material to the app’s library was a feature users already had already purchased.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Year after year, one Apple OS ends up getting short shrift when the company announces its annual updates. While iOS, macOS, and iPadOS all show off their shiny new features, their overlooked sibling is left sitting sadly on the bench, waiting for its chance to shine—a chance that never seems to come.
I speak, of course, of tvOS.
And yet, tvOS is far from an also-ran when it comes to my household. A few years back I switched to consuming pretty much all my content through the Apple TV, and it’s put me in a contradictory situation where it comes to the set-top box: appreciative of how quietly and competently it does its job, and all too aware of where it could be so much better.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Our physical versus digital media preferences, the one tech product we have in (too much) abundance, whether we keep our phones in a case, and our journaling habits and methods.
Go to the podcast page.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/spatial-friends.mp4Now that’s more like it.
Spatial appears above the red Leave button.On Tuesday, Apple flipped the switch on a new version of Persona, its 3D representations of visionOS users. Anyone with visionOS 1.1 or later now has the option to enable the spatial option when they make a FaceTime call with another visionOS user. (To enable a spatial Persona during a call, tap on the Persona tile and select the spatial icon right above the red Leave button.)
When you enable the Spatial Persona, everything changes. The box disappears, and instead, that person is just… inhabiting your space with you. Except as a ghost? The Persona itself is still hazy (there’s no back side) and mostly head, shoulders, and floating hands. And yet, somehow, by placing it into 3-D space, it seems more real.
I was able to invite my friend Stephen Hackett’s Persona over to my house for a play date and we were able to chat face to face in a way that just seemed more natural than talking to a persona in a box. It felt more like it was him.
Stephen Hackett haunts my iMac G4 and my Kallax.And then I enabled SharePlay, and things got even wilder. I opened a Freeform board and shared it using Shareplay, and visionOS updated our locations so that we were both looking at the board together, side by side. The system kept our relative positions to each other and to the content consistent, so we were seeing the same stuff in the same places. (When I moved the Freeform window, the system also moved Stephen’s Persona. And when he moved the window, the window and his persona shifted in my space.)
After we had done enough damage in Freeform, we moved on to Game Room, where he beat me at Battleship. I kept peeking around the corner to see him playing at his side of the board. He sank my battleship!
Then we moved on to the TV app, where I used SharePlay to watch part of an episode of For All Mankind. When I used the app put myself in a virtual environment, Stephen also entered the environment. He could see when I moved us from the Moon to Apple’s (oddly chair-free) movie theater setting, and even as I adjusted our location in the theater. He was also able to drop out of the virtual environment and return to it on his own. But from my perspective, he was sitting next to me and chatting as the video played.
Personas and SharePlay have been available on visionOS from day one, but combining them in this way just feels different. And apparently the feature supports up to five participants simultaneously! I can’t wait to try that out.
Last week I provided a lot of tough love to Major League Baseball’s apps on Apple’s platforms. The MLB visionOS app is really buggy and lacks some key features. Meanwhile, an update to the MLB iPad App broke it on the Mac for most users. (Apparently it works until you’re logged in, at which point it starts crashing?)
There’s no news on either front—hopefully updates are coming, and it’s a long season—but I did want to share a bit more positivity about MLB’s tech abilities on another platform: Apple TV. This year’s MLB tvOS app adds support for Multiview, allowing you to place up to four games on screen at one time. And it’s an extremely good implementation.
To enable Multiview, bring up the player controls in any given game. You’ll see options to enter Gameday (which is excellent if you’re a pitch-by-pitch baseball nerd) or picture-in-picture, but there’s a new option to enable Multiview. When you select this, the video slides back and brings up an interface that lets you add more live games via cards at the bottom of the screen:
MLB’s interface here is top notch. When I was telling my wife about this feature, she complained that our Fubo TV Multiview feature is too complicated. And she’s right—it requires a bunch of remote-control gestures that are a bit opaque. MLB, in contrast, displays very clear instructions about which buttons do what:
The instructive text is clear and bold, and it changes based on context. My only complaint about the new interface is the lack of layout options. You can only display one game in large format; the others go in a strip on the right side of the screen, whether there’s one, two, or three. The Multiview feature in the Fubo and TV apps allow you to place two games side by side at the same size, and four games tiled perfectly to fill up the entire screen. (That’s my preferred layout.)
There are some other quirks: When you zoom into a single game and then zoom back out later, the other games sometimes don’t start playing, or play from the point where you left rather than just showing what’s happening live.
But quirks aside, I’m really impressed. In fact, this implementation is so good that I found myself assuming it would have limitations that it doesn’t actually have. Since Gameday appears in the same playback controls as Multiview, I assumed they were mutually exclusive, but they’re not: If you zoom into a single game, you can enter Gameday mode. When you click the back button, Gameday disappears. Click the back button another time, and the video zooms back into the Multiview window. It’s all smooth—this shows off the power that Apple packs inside modern Apple TV hardware, which is far beyond what’s available in other streaming boxes.
So, gold stars to the developers of the MLB app for Apple TV. The addition of Multiview is a winner, even though it’s got some quirks that need to be ironed out, and I’d really like some alternative layout options.
If you want to see it in action, here’s a video demo.
We often cite anonymous reports about Apple’s future, but where do those reports come from? We discuss of the value and ethics of Apple rumor coverage. Also, we’ve seen the latest Vision Pro immersive video and have strong opinions.
Go to the podcast page.
Welcome to a world where your reading list becomes your listening playlist. We are thrilled to introduce you to ListenLater.net—an innovative service that turns articles into podcasts, making your favorite reads accessible in your favorite podcast app.
Have you ever stumbled upon an article that piqued your interest but didn’t have the time to delve into it? Whether you’re commuting, exercising, or relaxing, ListenLater.net simplifies the process. Just email the article’s URL, and presto! Listen Later takes over, converting it into an engaging podcast episode. The narration is so lifelike, you’ll find yourself immersed in the listening experience.
But the innovation doesn’t end with articles. Listen Later enhances your entire email experience. Forward any email, and Listen Later will transform its content and attachments into a podcast episode just for you—whether it’s work reports, newsletters, or those lengthy reads you’ve postponed.
Worried about language barriers? Listen Later has you covered! ListenLater.net offers multilingual translation and narration services. Simply select your preferred language, and immerse yourself in a vast array of content, all available to your ears.
Join us in embracing convenience and versatility. Listen Later brings your articles, emails, and documents to life in audio format. Head over to ListenLater.net and start your free trial today. Let’s redefine the way we consume information, one podcast at a time.
Matt Birchler’s got an excellent and quick primer on what it means to turn on federation on your Threads profile:
I know I’m drilling this in a lot, but you literally do not need to have a Mastodon account. By not turning on federation from Threads, all you’re doing is making it so people who did figure out how to sign up for Mastodon and like it to not be able to follow you. You can choose to do that, but you never have to touch Mastodon if you don’t want to.
I’ve been using both Mastodon and Threads (and BlueSky) for a while now. Mastodon continues to my biggest platform in large part because a lot of the tech crowd has moved there, but I’ve seen upticks on Threads (for the general public) and BlueSky (a lot of writers and creative folks). While I miss the simplicity of the one-stop shop that was Twitter, I’m glad to see so many options thriving. But federation remains my big hope for how we might see cohesion in the next decade.
While Threads’s federation integration is still kind of bare bones, it does at least prove that Meta’s actually attempting to deliver on that promise. The biggest outstanding question for me is how ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT protocol, which is also a form of federation, might end up interoperating.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Play… ball?A few years back I reported with delight that you could now use the MLB iPad app on Apple Silicon macs. While MLB’s TV streaming service works on the web, it was nice to have everything in a separate app.
Welp.
It’s the opening week of the baseball season, which has often meant an opportunity for me to praise MLB’s apps, which were among the very best in the earlier days of iOS. Unfortunately, the MLB Vision Pro app is a mess. And now it is my sad duty to also report that, just in time for Opening Day, the MLB iPad app now crashes on launch on macOS.
I hate being hard on MLB, given its rich history of supporting Apple’s platforms. But here’s the truth: Major League Baseball got $3.8 billion by selling its tech arm to Disney.
I have no inside information about what happened as a result of that transaction, but MLB’s apps have gone from being stalwarts to being big messes. I guess they took the $3.8 billion and ran?
I haven’t even mentioned (until now!) the disastrous 2017 demo where MLB announced (and kinda, sorta demoes) an AR-based iPad ballpark app with functionality that basically never shipped. (At least I got to meet one of my favorite sportswriters, Grant Brisbee, and watch a Giants game from a luxury box.)
There’s a lot of great work going on at MLB. Statcast is amazing; the data feeding the wonky 3-D field in the Vision Pro app is spectacular; its Baseball Savant pages are just staggeringly good.
I just wish the apps would get their groove back.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
On Thursday Apple debuted its first immersive video since the Vision Pro launched, a five-minute-long compilation of highlights from the MLS Cup playoffs late last year.
Without even seeing the video, I had many questions. Why did it take more than three months to produce a highlight package? And why, when it finally arrived, was it only five minutes long? And what do those two facts suggest about how difficult it is for Apple to produce immersive video content on an ongoing basis?
Now, having seen the video, I have a few more observations. The first is that I don’t think the new video is very good. Oh, sure, the individual shots can be impressive. Being that close to professional athletes doing their thing is stunning, and being in a giant stadium thrumming with fan energy is pretty awesome.
The problem is that, based on how Apple and MLS built the video, it’s not actually immersive.
As you might expect from the runtime, the video is a highlight package, with lots of quick cuts. Video’s all about quick cuts. I’m a child of the ’80s; music videos ingrained the value of the quick cut at a formative age.
But immersive video doesn’t work with quick cuts, I don’t think. Several times during the MLS highlights video, my head was turned in one direction, taking advantage of the 180-degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left or right… only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective. Now I was staring at nothing. It would take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings and re-orient—often times a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing.
Most of Apple’s initial immersive videos, launched with the Vision Pro, linger with long shots. Cuts happen, but only occasionally. The pace is such that when a cut occurs, there’s time to re-orient. You need time to immerse. Quick cuts in a regular video help speed up the action; in immersive video, they’re like hitting a speed bump.
I get that immersive videos are basically a new medium and it’ll take a lot of experimentation to find the best way to present them. I’m sure that behind the scenes, Apple and its media partners are working on it. I’m glad the MLS highlight video exists, because it taught me some important lessons about this new medium. Unfortunately, they’re largely of the “what not to do” variety.
I still firmly believe that immersive video is going to be amazing for sports, live theater, concerts, and other live events. But those are events that take time, spooling out over several hours. A tightly edited highlight reel, it turns out, might be the worst possible showcase for immersive video.
Regardless of how I feel about this particular video, I hope Apple has much, much more planned. Perhaps the single clear consumer use case for the Vision Pro is video viewing, and immersive video is a unique part of that. It was one of the aspects of the Vision Pro that I was most excited about, and as a result it’s been one of the biggest disappointments.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide helps its customers keep their devices in compliance, which keeps their company data safe.
Kolide has seen a rise in cyber liability insurance issues recently. Companies are investing more in security insurance and less in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Kolide has seen its cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years. It turns out that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software. Read Kolide’s full blog post to learn more about their findings.
You can’t close the main window, and that’s not the worst of it.As is typical for one of Apple’s best sports partners, Major League Baseball had a demo app for visionOS ready to go for the debut of the new platform. It used the device’s augmented reality functionality to display a live 3-D Gameday animation simultaneously with video playback from a demonstration game—one of the games from the 2023 World Series.
While the app was otherwise fairly basic, it was just enough of a taste to suggest that MLB would be using its amazing in-game data to create something new and groundbreaking for the Vision Pro.
That might still happen, but just before Opening Day the app was updated to support real, live baseball games, and all the exciting stuff is gone. Today I took it for a spin and was deeply disappointed—it’s essentially just a front end for watching games via MLB TV, and a buggy one at that.
The Brewers hit a sac fly on my garage floor.I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.
When the Vision Pro MLB app works, Gameday mode is pretty cool. I don’t love the strike zone view, but the all field view really has potential. All the baserunners disappeared but it was otherwise synced with action and I could see data about batted balls, positioning of fielders. It was a little toy field on my floor. There’s potential here — just needs lots of kinks worked out.
Outside of gameday, the app will only play back a single video at a time, even if multiple games are going on at once—despite the fact that watching multiple video streams at once is basically what VR was made for.
It gets worse. The main window is just not right. You can make it very small by pushing it very far away, which shouldn’t happen. Its control bar and close box are way below the bottom of the content of the main window. Controlling the window was also difficult—I had to bring it very close to my eyes before I could properly control it via eye tracking.
When you play a game video, the app spawns a second window, which some video player apps do. But if you close the main window, the entire app closes—and so the video window goes away. That’s not supposed to happen. And it means that in order to watch a game, you’ve got to keep that unncecessary main window around at all times.
Clearly this app shipped half-finished because MLB otherwise wasn’t going to have something ready for Opening Day. At least it does stream the games! But that’s pretty much it. There’s plenty of time left in the season, but right now MLB’s app is the tech equivalent of going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts.
Lots of Disney this time! We talk Disney’s big succession question, Taylor Swift’s Disney+ numbers, and Disney’s deal in India. Also, a quick Sports Corner on NFL streaming rights, Spulu, and ESPN as a streaming aggregator.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple announced Thursday that the first Apple Immersive Video documentary for Vision Pro, featuring highlights from last year’s MLS playoffs, will debut March 28 at 6 p.m. Pacific.
The video format has previously only been seen in a handful shorts in the TV app on the Vision Pro. This new film will be similarly short, running about five minutes long, and will be free to all Vision Pro users.
I’m excited to see the finished product—all of Apple’s immersive videos have been pretty amazing—but I have to point out that this five-minute highlight packages is being released 110 days after last year’s MLS Cup Final. That’s not great turnaround time. If immersive video for sports is going to be a thing, turnaround is going to need to be a lot faster.
Our use of tethering for Internet, Mac buying advice, our notification styles, and the TikTok ban.
Go to the podcast page.
Titans are clashing. Big tech companies, including Apple, are facing legal challenges from government entities like the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. Battle lines are being drawn. Compromises are being floated. Hours are being billed by pricey law firms.
But what does it all mean for the regular people who live in regions governed by these entities and use products made by those tech giants? Is this something that will change how we use our personal technology, or will it end up meaning a whole lot of nothing? What about the smaller developers who create innovative apps but can’t afford to employ giant law firms or take out million-euro lines of credit at their local bank?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
It’s that time of year, when young developers’ fancies turn to thoughts of platform updates. Probably because Apple has announced the dates for its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, which will take place between June 10 and 14.
As with last year, the event will happen both online and in person with a special “all-day event” taking place at Apple Park on Monday, June 10. Those in attendance will be able to watch the keynote—presumably led by CEO Tim Cook—at Apple Park, as well as meet with Apple team members, and join in for some “special activities.” Those interested in participating in person can apply for one of the limited slots available.
Apple’s also once again offering a separate track for students via the Swift Student Challenge; those who have applied will be notified on March 28, and will then be able to apply to join the festivities at Apple Park.
Rumor has it that this year’s platform updates will be amongst the biggest in some time, including a big push in generative AI. But Apple will also be holding the event against the backdrop of challenges from its recent legal troubles in both the European Union and the US.
My younger child’s MacBook Pro was unsalvageably full. Only a complete wipe would suffice—and then Time Machine failed us.
I love my children, but they do sometimes forget what I do for a living: answer questions and write books about the most troubling problems people have with their Macs, iPhones, and iPads. But when something goes truly wrong, they suddenly remember, “Hey, Dad might know how to fix it!”
So it happened that my younger asked for my help when their M2 MacBook Pro’s storage filled up while they were downloading a (legitimate, purchased) game using Steam. No problem! I could just empty the trash. Nope, they tried that. Well, what about finding some caches and…nope. I could just go into the Terminal and…ok, that didn’t work either.
Turned out, my kid had managed a neat trick, though they were not alone: they had filled macOS’s startup volume storage so full that the operating system was incapable of deleting files in any fashion. Instead of halting the massive Steam download when the drive became disastrously full, macOS continued to write files until there was just 41K free on the drive.
I don’t know quite what happened. They didn’t realize their terabyte SSD was quite so filled, as they keep most of their useful files in the cloud. It was likely…er, perfectly legitimate video files. Yeah, I’m sure there was no problem with the copyright there. But they weren’t concerned about retaining them. They just wanted their computer to work again!
I have a theory about what happened. Due to our gigabit Internet connection and the size of the Steam file, macOS outstripped its ability to throttle filling storage because it was also making a local Time Machine snapshot. The Steam file appeared monolithic to me—one giant file—but clearly not to Time Machine. macOS keeps these snapshots to provide local backups for the last 24 hours even while it’s copying files to an external or networked Time Machine destination. I don’t think macOS tracks these snapshots well, and I suspect a collision of live files on disk with the specially created snapshots.
I went through a succession of file deletion attempts, relying on my own knowledge and searching for similar situations in online forums:
- Empty Trash: Emptying the Trash via the Finder a big “no” (File > Empty Trash). “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full.” Yes, macOS, I’m already aware of this.
- Terminal: While Terminal would launch, using the standard Unix
rmcommand resulted in a similar error: “No space left on device.” Allrmalternatives, like using thefindcommand to search for very large unneeded files and adding the-execoption to run thermcommand, failed too. Terminal was a bust. - Disk Utility: Disk Utility shows Time Machine snapshots on APFS startup volumes, and you can typically select and delete these snapshots, which occupy only the amount of storage space required to contain the differences from the previous snapshot. That failed with a “no space left” error as well.
It was time to restart to see if it would clear caches. Unfortunately, restarting left the Mac unable to start up at all. No matter what I tried, it would reach about halfway through the progress bar before failing.
I shifted to recoveryOS, Apple’s somewhat new name for the special disk partition in macOS that lets you run operations on the main startup volume while it’s not mounted, including Disk Utility repairs and reinstallation. From there, I hit the wall as well, as Terminal commands continued to fail with the same error.
I restarted again to access the Apple silicon Share Disk option to mount my kid’s drive on one of my Macs, hoping that over Samba (the disk-sharing protocol), I’d be able to force a deletion. No dice.
At this point, I shifted to stronger medicine. I had a series of Time Machine backups of their drive, including one from the previous evening, and they weren’t terribly concerned about losing data, as they have most things they care about in some kind of cloud storage. Here’s where things went pear-shaped in an entirely different direction.
First, I erased the drive and used macOS Recovery to reinstall Ventura, the native system with which the MacBook Pro had shipped. I then used Migration Assistant at macOS startup to access the networked Time Machine backup. In choosing what files to restore, I unchecked a number to ensure there would be plenty of storage. My kid had a lot of things they could delete, too, they said, and I could give them the Time Machine backup as a mountable drive if they needed access to files that weren’t restored later.
Halfway through, Ventura stalled and wouldn’t resume. I decided to upgrade to Sonoma, the version of macOS that was running at the time the Mac filled its drive. That worked fine—but the upgrade took the Mac to version 14.4, and my kid had had 14.3.1 installed. When I attempted to restore directly at startup, I was told the version different wouldn’t allow it. Now what?
I completed a basic Sonoma user account setup and then ran Migration Assistant. It found the networked Mac on which I manage Time Machine backups and recognized it. However, it refused to mount my child’s backup volume. No matter what I did, “Mount failed” appeared. Digging around in forums, I found that Sonoma has broken the SMB/Samba-based networking mount procedure for Time Machine restores, and no one had found a solution. This appears to still be the case in 14.4.
Retrieving a backup image for restoration.Because my younger only needed their apps and certain files, we both gave up at that point. I copied their Time Machine backup onto an external 1 TB SSD through this straightforward method:
- On my Mac, which handles networked backups, I double-clicked the disk image for their computer and then entered their Time Machine volume password. (I always set a networked password for Time Machine volumes.)
- I found the disk icon with the latest timestamp and copied this to an empty 1 TB drive.
- Ejecting it from my Mac, I connected it to their stub account on their MacBook Pro and copied over the necessary files, including the contents of most of their home directory folders, excluding some large downloads and unneeded (ahem) video files.
I gave them the drive so that they could restore anything else they needed if it were missing, and we’ll probably keep it on hand for a while to make sure nothing is missing.
This put them back in business, but I missed two tricks that I could have tried to make things easier:
- I could have unmounted the Time Machine backup drive from my computer I use for other computers on the network. (I have a separate drive I use for local Time Machine backups from that computer’s startup volume.) Then I could have connected that directly to my kid’s computer and it likely would have become available as a Migration Assistant starting point.
- Failing that, I could have copied the virtual disk from the Time Machine disk image I mounted on my Mac of their backup so that the external 1 TB drive I was transferring “looked” like a Mac source volume. I’m not sure if this would have worked, but I didn’t try it. Then, I could have potentially restored directly from it using Migration Assistant.
I’m sorry I didn’t try the above, but I had already invested a cumulative couple of hours of my time and over a day of effort while my kid was unconcerned about a perfect directory-to-directory recovery.
I hate to think what people without decades of Mac experience do when confronted with systemic, cascading failures like this when I felt helpless despite what I thought I knew and all the answers I searched for and found on forums.
The U.S. Department of Justice joins the European Commission in contributing to Apple’s legal troubles; and in a surprise, pre-emptive move, we attempt to predict the future of the iPad via a draft!
Go to the podcast page.
When MGM Resorts suffered a $100 million hack in September, CEO Bill Hornbuckle wasn’t too worried about the lost revenue, because cyber insurance would cover the tab. “I can only imagine what next year’s bill will be,” he joked.
Weeks later, on a call with analysts, Hornbuckle complained about the “staggering” rise of insurance costs in the past few years.
This story neatly illustrates the crisis in cyber liability coverage. For years, companies have invested more in security insurance than in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Some large enterprises are responding to the increased costs by creating their own “captive carriers,” insurance providers that exist only to serve them. But that’s clearly not an option for small businesses, which are more likely to go without insurance altogether.
According to Andrew Bucci, VP of Sales at Amplified Insurance Partners, “It’s going to come to a point where some people may have to self-insure, which means that they don’t take a cyber policy out and they just cross their fingers they don’t have some sort of breach.” That’s a huge gamble for SMBs, since they could be driven to bankruptcy by a single security incident.
At Kolide, we’ve seen our cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years, and we got curious about:
- What’s driving the increases?
- Who really needs cybersecurity insurance?
- How can the average company reduce their premiums?
What we found was that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software.
Read the full blog to learn more about our findings.
Europe’s Digital Markets Act continues to be the gift that keeps on giving—a gift Apple probably wishes it could return. The European Commission today announced that it was opening a slew of investigations into big tech companies over their non-compliance with the DMA, including Alphabet, Meta, and Apple.
Apple, in particular, has found itself in the crosshairs for three different areas. First, that the company may have put too many restrictions on developers who want to steer customers outside of the App Store. (Apple recently relaxed those rules, including ditching mandatory design templates.)
Secondly, in the area of user choice, the EC is concerned Apple has not done enough to allow users to choose what software is installed on their phone. That includes the ability to uninstall built-in apps, change default app settings, and provide screens allowing users to choose between alternatives. The EC’s announcement particularly calls out the browser choice screen, though it doesn’t specifically details its concerns beyond saying it “may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services within the Apple ecosystem.” The screen currently shows up when users first launch Safari on iOS and provides a list of the eleven most popular browsers in the region, in random order. However, Apple does impose some restrictions on what it takes to be included in that list, including a requirement that the app has been downloaded 5000 times in the EU over the past calendar year.
Finally, and perhaps most contentiously, the EC says that it is investigating the fee structure of Apple’s new business model in the EU, saying that it “may be defeating the purpose of its obligations under Article 6(4) of the DMA.” That decision was hinted at this past week by Margrethe Vestager, the executive vice president in charge of competition policy, when she said in an interview with Reuters “if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating.” This also comes on the heels of an EU-Apple workshop about the DMA last week, during which developer and AltStore proprietor Riley Testut asked Apple representatives how they would protect creators of free apps if those apps went viral, putting them on the hook for Apple’s new Core Technology Fee. Apple’s Kyle Andeer said the company was likewise concerned and that it was “something we’re working on,” though no further information has been provided.
These investigations aren’t going to be speedy: the EC says they will be concluded within 12 months, at which point the body will tell the companies what changes if any need to be made. The companies may also be subject to fines of up to 10 percent of annual global revenue, or 20 percent in cases of “repeated infringement.”
Apple, for its part, said in a statement provided to several outlets, including The Verge: “We’re confident our plan complies with the DMA, and we’ll continue to constructively engage with the European Commission as they conduct their investigations.”
Dan’s takeThe DMA and the EC are clearly proving to be a thorn in Apple’s side. Despite the company trying to get ahead of these kinds of issues, apparently its attempts to do the minimum needed to comply weren’t quite enough. The specific issues over anti-steering policies and user choice are certainly annoyances, but seem like issues that can be tweaked by Apple without serious impacts to the company.
But the big risk here is the investigation into the fee structure. Big companies like Meta and Spotify seem unlikely to ever have used Apple’s new business terms as proposed: they would go from paying Apple nothing under the current App Store terms to paying Apple quite a bit—a scenario that Apple wins either way. While those companies might want more control over the distribution and monetization of their apps, they’re not going to do so at the literal expense of millions of euros. Likewise, while small developers might find the new terms comparatively more attractive, especially for types of apps that will never get approved by Apple, the risk of “hitting it big” and triggering the CTF could likewise be too high. And though Apple opened up the avenue for web distribution, the strictures it put on place as to who is allowed to use the feature—such as a calendar year threshold of one million downloads—certainly limits a lot of small developers. While that last isn’t specifically mentioned by the EC, I have a hard time imagining it’s not part of the overall investigation into the fee structure.
The real challenge for Apple will be in trying to figure out what changes it can make in the near term to both avoid the heavy end of the EC’s hammer and dodge further pitfalls along the way. Gee, sure is tough when your business is entirely subject to the whims of a seemingly capricious organization who won’t tell you exactly what rules you need to follow, isn’t it?
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin has an excellent (if technical) rundown of a recently unearthed security vulnerability in Apple’s M-series processors. Basically there’s a system that tries to predict what memory addresses are going to be used in order to speed up processing, but Apple’s version can accidentally leak data:
The attack, which the researchers have named GoFetch, uses an application that doesn’t require root access, only the same user privileges needed by most third-party applications installed on a macOS system. M-series chips are divided into what are known as clusters. The M1, for example, has two clusters: one containing four efficiency cores and the other four performance cores. As long as the GoFetch app and the targeted cryptography app are running on the same performance cluster—even when on separate cores within that cluster—GoFetch can mine enough secrets to leak a secret key.
This particularly affects M1 and M2 series chips, with the M3 providing an option to disable the predictive system—albeit likely with a performance hit during cryptographic operations. Because the system is implemented in hardware, it can’t be patched by Apple—rather, apps that are performing cryptography would have to add additional layers of security in order to protect against it.
While the researchers only demonstrated the flaw on four different encryption algorithms, that’s enough to suggest that other cryptography is likely affected as well.
Ultimately, it may be up to Apple to mitigate this functionality for its M1 and M2 chips in software, though the company has not yet publicly commented on the flaw.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The U.S. Department of Justice, 15 states, and the District of Columbia sued Apple on Thursday. While I am not a lawyer, I’ve written extensively about Apple for 30 years and just read all 88 pages of the full complaint. Here are some initial reactions:
Defining a “monopoly.” Before we get to some of the details of Apple’s specific anti-competitive behavior, it’s worth noting that this suit is charging Apple with violations of the Sherman antitrust act, which is meant to specifically regulate monopolies. Things that are legal for regular companies to do become illegal when monopolies do them.
Part of this document, then, has to establish that Apple holds monopoly power over a specific market. Given that Apple’s share of the U.S. smartphone market is about 60 percent, how can it be called a monopoly? The DoJ attempts to square this circle in a few different ways:
- It uses revenue instead of unit sales, pointing out that Apple and Samsung combined hold 90 percent of the U.S. smartphone market by revenue.
- It creates a new sub-market, the “Performance Smartphone,” which pushes Apple up to about 70 percent of the market in terms of unit sales.
- It accuses Apple of attempting to create a monopoly through its various business tactics, which is also illegal.
Questions I would ask about this approach: Can you add in Samsung, find a number starting in ninety, and declare something a monopoly? Is revenue share how monopolies are defined? Can you draw borders on a product category in a beneficial way in order to declare it a new market?
Apple’s position in the U.S. market is certainly strong, but regardless of how you view its behavior, it will be interesting to see if the DoJ can make a convincing case that Apple is actually a monopoly, given the presence of Samsung and Google in the market.
Suppressing cross-platform technologies is key. One of the DoJ’s primary arguments is that Apple has reduced competition by making it hard for developers to deploy cross-platform software—in other words, software that works the same on both iOS and Android. This, in turn, makes it harder for iPhone users to switch to Android, which reduces competition.
Among the examples it cites:
- “Super apps,” which provide multiple kinds of functionality and mini-apps within a single app container, written in HTML and JavaScript. WeChat is never named, but its ubiquity in China is alluded to, and the argument is that it’s a reason that Chinese users can switch phone platforms more easily.
- Cloud streaming games, which make the power of smartphone hardware less relevant, thereby freeing consumers to buy cheaper, low-powered phones and still play games.
- Messaging apps not being able to have access to incoming SMS messages. (Yep, I was surprised too.) The argument is that because incoming text messages come to the Messages app, Apple is feeding users into its own chat app ecosystem and putting other messaging apps at a disadvantage.
- Smartwatches, specifically access to the iPhone for non-Apple smartwatches. The DoJ says that by not allowing third-party watches access to messages and the ability to maintain consistent connections to the iPhone, Apple is suppressing competition in the smartwatch market and making it harder to switch. In theory, if you could buy a competitor to the Apple Watch and use it on the iPhone, you could then later switch to Android without a penalty.
- Digital wallets. By controlling the iPhone’s digital wallet tech, the suit alleges, Apple has increased “friction” in moving to a different smartphone platform, and denied users access to alternative wallets provided by their banks.
Apple’s total control is an issue. It’ll be familiar to anyone who has been following Apple’s adventures in Europe with the Digital Markets act, but another argument here is that Apple exerts its power over its platform to limit developers and users. This comes in numerous forms, including capricious and self-serving App Store policies and the failure to offer third-party access to APIs that Apple itself uses in its apps.
Apple’s only concerned about user security when it’s convenient. The document alleges that Apple talks a good game when it comes to privacy and security, but that it favors them when it’s convenient and not when it’s not. It calls Apple’s privacy and security justifications an “elastic shield that can stretch or contract” to serve Apple’s interests. The examples in the document include continuing to rely on the insecure SMS protocol for cross-platform texts and letting Google be the default search engine when more private options are available.
Lock-in will be on trial. Many of the DoJ arguments come down to this: Every feature that Apple builds that makes it harder to switch to an Android phone is fundamentally anticompetitive. It’s clear that the DoJ envisions a competitive smartphone market—or, if that doesn’t work, performance smartphone market—as one in which there’s as little friction as possible when jumping between platforms.
This would mean Apple offering third-party app access to features it currently keeps for itself. (One could argue that Apple’s behavior has already begun to change due to pressure, as it launched its new Journal app alongside an API that gives other apps access to the same data as its own app.) It also suggests that policies against game streaming and web apps would also come under scrutiny.
The DoJ congratulates itself. For me, the most unexpected part of the document was the DoJ’s explanation that Apple’s success as a company largely stems from… the DoJ itself. It points out that Apple’s resurgence early in this century was due to the release of the iPod, which only became a hit when it arrived on Windows. The DoJ argues that the iPod’s presence on Windows was only due to Microsoft being under a consent decree from the DoJ for monopolistic behavior.
I don’t know enough about the specifics of the Microsoft consent decree to weigh in on the idea that an unconstrained Microsoft would have made it impossible for Apple to make the iPod compatible with Windows. It’s a pretty big hypothetical, and I’m skeptical, but I’m impressed that the DoJ would try to place its current case within the larger DoJ Connected Universe.
A few howlers. Some arguments in the document seem silly. A section describes how Apple will use its sinister market powers to dominate the automotive industry by… inflicting CarPlay 2.0 on users? Not only is Apple struggling to get CarPlay into cars by major American manufacturers, but I’m not sure how better integrating our phones (which we love) into our car infotainment systems (which we frequently do not love) is some sort of tragic outcome. (Update: Nilay Patel of the Verge suggests the implication is that Apple won’t let carmakers support CarPlay in the future unless they let Apple take over the entire auto interface. That would certainly be a power move, but the DOJ will need to prove that for it to become more than another scary story told around a campfire.)
And then there’s the danger of Apple, tech giant, affecting “the flow of speech.” How, you might ask? The answer is Apple TV+, where Apple has committed the grave sin of “control[ling] content.” Be right back, gotta find some pearls to clutch.
United States v. The People of the United States. What strikes me most about this document is that people… like using the iPhone? This suit (joined by 16 other attorneys general, mostly of blue states) has a political element to it, in the sense of trying to send a message that your government is looking out for your rights and protecting you from big, bad tech companies.
What happens when that collides with a product that has extremely high customer satisfaction ratings? Those of us in the know are well aware of all the ways that Apple plays hardball, and understand that the company is so powerful that really the only way it will be convinced to change its ways is under threat of government intervention. But will American iPhone users feel like the government is on their side, in taking on an American tech giant that makes a product they actually enjoy using?
I doubt most regular people will get into the weeds with this stuff, but some of the depictions in the lawsuit really are topsy-turvy. Imagine trying to sell regular people on the idea that they’d be better off with a bunch of different banking apps implementing NFC payments in random ways, rather than using the Wallet system Apple built. No doubts the banks disliked it, and they certainly despise that Apple skims some money off of every transaction, but there’s no denying that Apple’s approach actually did favor the user… and that Apple used its power (or “monopoly power,” if you’re the DoJ) to force the banks to play ball.
This one issue seems like a microcosm of the entire case: Apple undoubtedly has huge market power, owing to its success in the market. Apple uses that power to make decisions that frequently benefit its users and enrich itself. (Sometimes it’s one or the other, but usually it’s some degree of both.) Is it illegal for Apple to use its power to improve the user experience? What about when it cuts itself in for some sweet Services revenue along the way? How do we tell the difference between real user benefit and phony benefit that’s really designed to allow Apple to exert its power and increase its profits?
It’s complicated. There’s some danger that Apple will no longer be able to make judgments that favor users, and that will degrade the user experience. But this is the same company that acts as if buying things on the Internet with a credit card is the height of dangerous behavior, when in fact it’s commonplace and safe. By mixing exertions of its control and power with notions of user benefit, it risks losing all of it.
What’s next? Again, not a lawyer. What I’ve learned in observing three decades of government interaction with tech is that the most likely outcome is one that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I could create a list of Apple behaviors that I consider to be anticompetitive and unfriendly to consumers, but many of them are barely touched on in this document.
So my prediction is that this will be a long, drawn-out process that will end up with Apple changing some of its policies. Some of those changes will be substantial and will alter how the company operates; others will be pointless and cause no appreciable effect; and still others will degrade the experience of iPhone users without increasing competition. Meanwhile, other Apple policies that stifle competition, degrade the user experience, and cost users money will just go on as usual, unchanged and unchallenged.
When I wrote about Apple’s new Sports app, I heard from several people who pointed out that maybe Eddy Cue had done his job a little too well. Apple’s SVP of Services told me that he was prioritizing speed, right down to measuring the lag between the scoreboard at the Warriors game he was attending and the current score in the Sports app.
The problem with that lag is that while radio and TV broadcasts are often a fraction of a second behind live action, streaming radio and TV broadcasts tend to be far, far behind the action. So far behind that Apple Sports was indicating made baskets in NBA games while the team was still coming up the floor with the ball. (I experienced this myself when a friend texted me to give condolences about the Super Bowl about 30 seconds before Kansas City scored in overtime to win it.)
Streaming lag is real. So real, in fact, that I just discovered a new setting in the Major League Baseball app that I had never seen before. Under Notifications, there’s a setting for Delayed Gameday Notifications. “Turning this on will delay live Gameday notifications by 30 Sec.,” reads the legend under the setting.
This is hilarious, and absolutely necessary. Many times, I’ve had game audio playing for an MLB game, only to notice that the Gameday play-by-play was way ahead of the action. It’s… not great!
In the long run, it would be nice if MLB could use some more advanced technologies to ensure that its data feeds and media feeds were running at the same pace—maybe take a page from what Apple’s doing with podcast transcripts? But offering to delay the data by 30 seconds so that the media stream can catch up is a great first step.
How we search online, our tips for minimizing vehicle data tracking, the GenAI features we’d like to see added to Apple’s platforms, and what features we’d want to see in a future iPad.
Go to the podcast page.
Jason recently reviewed the new M3 MacBook Air, and a key feature of the new models is Wi-Fi 6E support. Wi-Fi 6E is a big deal because it adds the 6GHz spectrum to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands we’re all used to.
The M3 Air also adds support for Wi-Fi 6E, while the older M2 models only support Wi-Fi 6. The difference is real. On my home Internet connection, I was able to get 931 Mbps down and 813 MBps up via Wi-Fi, which is more or less the same speed as my wired connection to my router. In the same spot, my M2 Air could only manage 618 up and 700 down. I wouldn’t buy a new laptop just to have faster Wi-Fi—and keep in mind that you need to upgrade your router and possibly your home internet to take advantage of these speeds—but that’s the fastest Wi-Fi connection I’ve ever experienced.
Jason didn’t get that speed boost from an Apple-made wireless router, because Apple got out of making those long ago. He didn’t get that speed from a wireless router currently for sale at the Apple Store because the only two options are the Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System, and AmpliFi Alien Router (with optional mesh extenders). Linksys does make a version of their Velop mesh network with 6E, but it’s not for sale through Apple.
Jason used an Eero 6E router, and wasted half a day trying to change his network topology to allow for it so he could see that speed difference.1
It seems like a great time for Apple to sell a friendly 6E router.
Apple was the catalyst for consumer wireless internet with AirPort, but after a decade-plus of glory, they wound down AirPort and it quietly disappeared. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. The last new AirPort product was released in 2013. The AirPort team dispersed to other teams in Apple, like the group working on the 4th generation Apple TV in 2016. In 2018, the death was official. Having left an indelible mark on the wireless router industry in the form of plastic roundrect routers and bespoke “friendly” utility software, Apple left the field.
The thinking at the time was that Apple wasn’t really competitive in the market, just like they weren’t competitive in external displays, so why bother expending resources on such a thing? Other companies had the market covered, and most home Internet routers came with Wi-Fi, so why bother?2 Let Apple reserve its magic dust for something other than commodity hardware with thin margins.
I never agreed with that line of thinking, because networking underpins everything that Apple does care about. Every Mac, iPad, Apple TV, HomePod, Vision Pro, and most importantly every iPhone. The iPhone is a cellular device, but when you’re at home, you’re on your Wi-Fi network. If your iPhone and your wireless router aren’t playing well together than you are an unhappy person.
The performance, reliability, and ease of use of your home network really matters a lot to you, and everyone you share your home with, along with all of their devices. Just start counting everything in your home that’s on your Wi-Fi network right now.
When my AirPort Extreme died in 2019, I needed to replace it, and I didn’t need a mesh network, so I went with a terrible Wirecutter pick, the Netgear Nighthawk R7000, which would just periodically stop being on the internet until I hard-rebooted it. The Nighthawk’s design wasn’t from the Apple-aping school of rounded corners—it was presumably made by and for men who were Very Serious About The Internet, which is why it looked like something you might find in the Batcave.
When I moved to a home that needed a mesh solution, I was again disappointed in a product: the Eero, which occasionally has undiagnosable flaky moments, and always bumps one of my smart plugs off the network when it restarts after a software update.
We all love AirPort securityLet’s not forget about how your router figures into your security and privacy, which are both things Apple cares about. To get around sketchy networking, Apple has added iCloud Private Relay to operate on any network inside and outside your home. However, sometimes iCloud Private Relay doesn’t get along with a network, or a service. You have no recourse but to toggle it off, and see if the site works. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a blessed Apple router in your home that iCloud Private Relay would always play nice with?
Apple also obfuscates your devices on a network, which is a great feature on untrusted networks. However, when I am at home, it sometimes decides to play Cold War spy games with my Eero router. Occasionally a handful of devices will simply be “Unnamed Device” and I have no idea what each one is. What if an Apple-blessed router could be consistently entrusted with my device names?
While I don’t have any little tweens getting into trouble online, I know that parental controls are a big deal for some people, and they have to set those parental controls on Apple IDs and on routers, and etc. What if that was unified?
Home is where the hub isPutting aside the absolute mess of the software side of Home, let’s discuss the networking side of Home. Apple leans heavily on Apple TVs and HomePods to provide the networking backbone for all the connected smart home devices you have.
I’m not sure that’s a useful strategy because when there are issues with your home network, the device designated as your Home Hub loses the game of musical chairs, and a device you do not want to be Home Hub is selected. You want a device that has robust connectivity, which is usually the most modern Apple TV you have (except the $129 one they’re selling without a Thread radio, and without Ethernet).
The device that has the most robust connectivity in my home is my Eero wired to my fiber connection, and its affiliated Eeros. Eero’s Thread network is not compatible with Apple’s approach to Thread, which is just great. Some day Matter might deliver on its promise, but I’m not holding my breath.
What if Apple shipped mesh network devices? Devices that could be the backbone for a Home initiative that Apple allegedly cares about?
Bring back spinning disks!I’m just kidding about enthusiasm for spinning disks, but one of the strengths of Apple’s AirPort line was that you could shove Time Machine backups somewhere that wasn’t wired to your Mac. Time Capsule was a slow hard drive crammed into the white plastic of your internet router. There was also an option to hook up an external drive to your AirPort Extreme over the USB cable. It was a good idea, because it took something hanging off of your Mac and moved it somewhere else where it could be quiet. Also not everyone wants to build and maintain a NAS.
Yes, backing up a Mac via Wi-Fi back then was slower than doing it over a wire, but wireless networking was also slower back then. I would be interested to see what Apple could do with a 6E router. Surely it’ll never be blistering speeds, but it could be a quiet, competent solution.
And just think of how much they could charge for that embedded solid-state storage! They’re leaving money on the table! Bleed us dry, Tim! Sell a line of them: AirPort Express mesh nodes, AirPort Extreme with ports, AirPort Ultra with Time Capsule (just skip the titanium finish).
Step 4: ProfitI know that it’s still easy to argue that Apple doesn’t need to make wireless routers. They won’t make enough money to make it worth the effort. Whatever “enough money” means is so flexible when you think about all the various things Apple does make. Those networking boffins are better allocated to other products, rather than making commodity hardware.
The return of Apple to the monitor market illustrates how effective Apple’s integration can be when it comes to supposedly superfluous product categories, especially when those products complement or support the products Apple already makes lots of money on… like the Macs it sells that use those displays. It’s called synergy, people.
Designing networking solutions in every device to work around the one component Apple doesn’t want to make is a lot of effort. The R&D can’t cost more than a self-driving, bread-loaf saloon, and the benefits of an Apple wireless router will lift all of Apple’s products. It’s time to head back to the AirPort3.
- [Thanks for generating more content out of this expensive and time consuming purchase, Joe.—Jason] ↩
- [I edited this piece minutes after installing an Eero router at my mom’s house, because her ISP-supplied router provides slow, unreliable Wi-Fi.—Jason] ↩
- Oh, the irony of someone near LAX saying that… ↩
After years of the market complaining that Apple is “behind” on artificial intelligence, the company is poised to make a big push in the technology with its platform updates this year. In a rare move, that’s been confirmed by no less than CEO Tim Cook himself, who said in the company’s most recent financial results call that the company would “share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.”
Of course, the company’s not really a stranger to this space: Apple has spent plenty of time deploying machine learning technology in a variety of areas for years, from photography to autocorrect. But the industry’s focus of late is on generative AI, the technology that underlies the products that have captured the zeitgeist, from chatbots like ChatGPT to image creation tools like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.
The big question that hovers over all of this is how Apple will bring those technologies into its existing operating systems, what choices it will make in rolling them out. The company tends to be on the judicious side when it comes to deploying new features, but there are still plenty of places on its platforms where generative AI—contentious as it may be—might find a foothold with users.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Since 2021, Six Colors has been compiling an annual report card focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise, and we ask them every year.
If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s a click away. Results will be posted in April.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith watched all of today’s workshop between Apple and the EU on the Digital Markets Act and posted some highlights on Mastodon.
Of particular interest was an exchange between Apple’s representatives and Riley Testut, the developer of AltStore, an existing third-party places to get apps for jailbroken iPhones. Testut has already announced that AltStore will be available as a third-party app marketplace in Europe under the DMA. I’ll embed the post with the video below because it’s worth watching, but 9to5Mac has transcribed it as well.
During the workshop, Testut used his time to ask about the Core Technology Fee. Under Apple’s new business terms in Europe (required for apps looking to be distributed via non-Apple app marketplaces or the web), there’s a €0.50 fee per app install over the first million. Testut rightly points out that a free app, such as the one he made in high school, that becomes popular could easily accrue enough costs to ruin a young developer’s life.
Apple VP of Legal Kyle Andeer responded sympathetically, saying that the company is continuing to try and find a good solution, and to “stay tuned.”
Obviously, we’ve already seen plenty of alterations in Apple’s original DMA plans, including the late addition of Web Distribution, but this certainly seems to suggest that further changes are coming.
The CTF has been a point of contention amongst developers; it certainly provides a potential disincentive for those looking to distribute apps outside the App Store—especially in cases where those apps derive revenue from other places, such as subscriptions not available via in-app purchase or advertising. (And yes, to be clear, that is exactly why Apple is putting that fee in place.)1
But free apps in particular seem to be the biggest sticking point. When the App Store debuted with the commission model, it was a relatively simple matter to say that if an app made no revenue, then Apple charged the developer nothing. But not all free apps are created equal, as the boom for in-app ads and subscription services have shown. That’s a bed of Apple’s own making, but it shouldn’t be surprising the company is trying to course correct to close those loopholes—that same impetus has been at the heart of a lot of its questionable App Store policy decisions over the past decade-plus.
Still, apps that are completely free—including open-source apps—certainly don’t seem like they should be subject to the Core Technology Fee. The question, from Apple’s perspective, is how to police that? What about, say, an app that’s distributed for free outside the App Store but has a big Patreon community that brings in a lot of money?
That in turn leads to the root of the question: does Apple deserve to get a cut of apps not distributed from its marketplace? There’s no arguing that the company has benefited from the huge ecosystem of software available for its devices, especially the iPhone. And as the CTF is currently structured, it could very well lead to a chilling effect amongst young developers who can’t risk the downsides—a category of people who Apple has made a big deal of specifically championing
I’m skeptical the entire CTF will end up discarded, but I do suspect that there will be additional carve-outs to come, especially for free/open-source apps (or perhaps Apple will greatly increase the amount of installs before the CTF is triggered, thus even more specifically targeting its biggest rivals). It’s been almost a week since the last changes, so keep your eyes peeled to see if a new batch is incoming.
- As a poison pill, it seems particularly aimed at other big tech companies who might be tempted to go a third-party route to have more control over their own apps, but pay nothing under the current terms. Hi Spotify and Meta! ↩
Quite a scoop from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry.
The two companies are in active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google’s set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Apple also recently held discussions with OpenAI and has considered using its model, according to the people.
As I said on Upgrade this week, these are the early days of large language models and there are a lot of competitors in the market. While Apple may continue to build its own LLM—it may one day become a major competitive advantage for Apple to control this technology, as it is for so many others—right now it’s probably far more reasonable for Apple to partner with one of the existing companies in the field. (As Ben Thompson noted on Monday, Apple probably couldn’t get the Nvidia GPUs it would need, regardless.)
On top of all that, a big LLM alone will not help the iPhone. Apple’s secret sauce will come from integrating A.I. assistant features with its voice assistant, with its own apps, and with third-party apps on its platform (presumably via methods like App Intents, used by Shortcuts). If Apple can build a new version of Siri that is smart enough to use disparate sources to serve the user, and one of those sources is a Google Gemini LLM, that’s all good.
Put another way, I’d much rather have Apple technology mediating my relationship with various APIs and A.I. models. If Apple can build a great intermediary, it won’t matter so much to users about what technologies are powering that experience.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Is Apple working with Google on its A.I. strategy? We break down what that might mean for the future of Apple’s platforms—and why it might make a lot of sense. And in Europe, Apple continues to alter its App Store rules.
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker. With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
None of us are as good at clocking deepfakes as we think we are. Even your mom, or your boss, or anyone in your IT department might not be able to tell the difference. We all think we’re clever enough to spot a fake, but in real life, people only catch voice clones about 50% of the time.
That makes us all extremely vulnerable to attacks. They might be seeking an immediate payout or working a more sophisticated social engineering attack. A friend of a friend was almost convinced her son had been arrested and was in jail before they realized that it didn’t add up.
But the good news is that we can be trained to look past our vulnerabilities and recognize a suspicious phone call, even if the voice sounds just like someone we trust. Kolide has a blog post all about it. It’s a frank and thorough exploration of what we should be worried about when it comes to audio deepfakes.
Hugo Barra, former head of Oculus at Meta, has a lengthy review of his Vision Pro experience that’s well worth reading. Don’t let the somewhat inflammatory first headline (of four?!) put you off:
But in the case of VR at Oculus, we also never really felt like the world had a Northstar that could truly capture human hearts and minds, and without that it would be impossible to transition VR from being a niche gamer tech to the incredible spatial computing paradigm that we always thought it potentially represented…
The Vision Pro launch has more or less done exactly what I had always hoped for, which is to build a huge wave of awareness and curiosity that elevates the spatial computing ecosystem and could ultimately lead to mass-market consumer demand and a lot more developer interest that VR has ever had. Now it’s up to the industry to create enough user value and demonstrate whether this is in fact the future of computing.
Barra makes some smart observations about the hardware—most first-generation hardware is over-engineered because it’s being built before the final needs of the product are clear—and when he’s impressed by what Apple has done, he is very impressed.
Barra also makes a point similar to the one I’ve been making for a while now: For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s protests and insistence that his own product, the Quest 3, is “better” than the Vision Pro—I mean, it’s his product, of course he’s going to say that—the truth is that the Vision Pro is great for Meta:
Wile working at Meta/Oculus I used to semi-seriously joke that the best thing that could ever happen to us was having Apple enter the VR industry…. I knew Apple would do the best job of any company making people really want VR through its unparalleled brand, design and marketing…. For Meta, the Vision Pro launch is the best marketing tool for Quest VR that the company could have dreamed of but could have never achieved on its own.
The Vision Pro validates Meta’s interest, makes more people aware of the category, helps establish the strengths and weaknesses in the format, and helps give Meta a competitor to focus on. Similarly, Meta’s existence in the category will hopefully prevent Apple from getting complacent.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Sticky scrolling through a Python project in Nova, complete with a terminal tab and an SFTP sidebar.I’ve been writing scripts in Python for a few years now, and it’s taken over a lot of my remote automation. I’ve got a calendar in my kitchen driven by a bunch of Python scripts, and numerous automations running on a remote linux server for Six Colors and The Incomparable.
Up to now, I’ve been doing all of my Python work in BBEdit, an app I use as my default tool for so much of the work on my Mac. But to be accurate, I have to say that I do all my work in BBEdit and Terminal, because these are scripts running on remote devices that I need to be able to control.
The other day it hit me: While I think of Panic’s $99 Nova as a web development tool (I used it when I moved Six Colors into WordPress, which required rebuilding the site’s entire theme using PHP), it’s also a code tool, with SFTP and a terminal built in. An hour later I had created Nova projects for all my remote Python tools and was happily able to access remote directories and the command line from a single tabbed window. Nova also has some pretty great code editing features of its own that go a little bit beyond BBEdit, including sticky scroll, which helps me know what function(s) I’m inside of while editing.
I know a lot of people swear by Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Code, but every time I look at it I realize that it is made for people who are not me. Nova’s outside my comfort zone, but it’s closer—and seems to want to work the way I work.
This will show you how much of a sicko I am. A recent Nova update added support for debugging features, which I’ve only ever used in Script Debugger, the definitive AppleScript development tool. That’s right, programmer nerds, my only debugging experience ever is with AppleScript.
Anyway, I can’t entirely understand how to set up debugging (and remote debugging?!) in Nova, but I’m going to give it a go because it would be nice to stop debugging by printing various things to the log and waiting for things to break.
I’m sure I’m still only using a fraction of the tools available to me in Nova, but for my projects writing scripts on remote Linux servers, it’s found a place in my tool chest.
The Europe-mandated tech changes we’d like to see in the US, circular vs. square smart watches, how often we completely reset our devices, and the extent of our home automation pursuits.
Go to the podcast page.
If Apple had its way, it would never open the App Store to competition, never offer sideloading of apps, never allow app developers to link to outside websites, and probably never reduce its cut of all App Store purchases from the original 30 percent tariff. For the last 15 years, Apple has had its way.
That’s all changed, now, by the force of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), along with the results of a few legal matters in Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands. This is a new era, where Apple can’t just have its way—instead, it has to abide by regulations specifically targeted at its own preferred business practices.
The company’s reaction to this era has been occasionally combative and passive aggressive. Some have called it “malicious compliance,” a label that I don’t think quite encompasses Apple’s approach. As events this week have shown us, Apple’s approach to responding to regulation is is incremental and iterative—kind of like its approach to designing and updating products.
The question is, what’s going to be the cost of Apple taking this approach?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
It’s been a seismic few weeks for Apple in the European Union, and the company’s approach to distributing iOS apps continues to evolve. On Tuesday, Apple announced a few further changes to its rules, all of which stand to make significant changes to the marketplace for iOS apps. Let’s break them down.
One-stop developer shopWhen Apple initially announced third-party app marketplaces on iOS in Europe, one restriction it put in place was that a company could not create a store that featured only its own apps. If Meta or Epic wanted to build a third-party app store, it would have to offer software from any developer that essentially met its criteria.
But that restriction has now been abolished. Which means that if a company wants to gather all its apps in a third-party store, thus reducing its dependance on Apple and avoiding the company’s 30-percent cut, that’s now a possibility. (Granted any extremely popular apps, such as Meta’s, would likely trigger Apple’s new Core Technology Fee.) I’m sure that Meta, Google, and some other large tech companies are doing the math right now to figure out if this new rule works in their favor or not.
An external link’s awakeningOne element of Apple’s business practices that has gotten a lot of attention worldwide is its restrictions on apps linking out to the developer’s site in order to offer discounts or promotions. (The company’s harshest restrictions on those external links have gotten them in legal hot water in the U.S. and elsewhere, leading to some relaxing of terms.)
Previously, apps in the EU would have had to adhere to Apple-provided templates in order to provide links out. These templates carefully controlled the way such links would look and where they would appear.
But Apple has now demoted those templates from requirements to optional guidelines, allowing developers to fully choose for themselves where and how they link to their own sites. There’s obviously benefits to that for developers who don’t want to be told where and when to put their links, though it remains to be seen how users will feel if apps start to abuse this ability by getting in people’s faces.
A tangled webThe biggest change that Apple enacted is the addition of Web Distribution, coming later this spring. For the first time, this lets developers distribute apps outside a store for the first time, directly via the web.
If you’re saying “whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that sounds like sideloading“, well, you’re not wrong, but before you get too carried away, I’ll point out that developers need to jump through a number of hoops before Apple will allowed them access to this feature.
Those include being in the Apple Developer Program in the EU, having had two years of tenure within the program, and having an app with “more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” Additional strictures include only offering apps from your developer account, corresponding with Apple about safety and security issues, publishing your data collection policies, and other legal and governmental compliance.
So not just anybody is going to be able to slap together a website and put their iOS apps up for download. Apple’s trying to do something similar to what it’s done with third-party app marketplaces, providing some degree of assurance that users aren’t going to be hit by bad actors and that entities providing web distribution will be able to handle customer service, user privacy, and so on. Apps distributed via the web will still require notarization by Apple and can only be installed from a limited number of domains provided by the developer.
These rules also mean that many small and independent developers likely won’t be able to opt in to web distribution—that one million threshold is still pretty high. Do those shops deserve to be restricted from developing their apps on the web? It’ll be interesting to see if those rules stick.
Times they are changingWeb distribution does seem to open up another avenue for developers of a certain level, but it’s still certainly different from the wide-open nature of the Mac, where apps have been distributed on the web forever, with very little (if any) oversight by Apple.
In terms of why those disparities between macOS and iOS app distribution exist, Apple points to its recently issued security whitepaper. One of the company’s big arguments is that our phones are much more personal devices, carrying everything from our bank info to our health data, and protecting them is even more important than on the Mac. And the company sees the decided lack of widespread malware incidents on iOS under the App Store-only distribution as evidence of its success.
That said, while the Mac has been subject to more malware than iOS in recent years, it still remains a pretty secure platform overall.
Of course, we’ve already seen numerous changes to Apple’s DMA rules in just the last couple weeks, and there’s no telling what further alterations might happen as the rubber meets the road. It’s difficult to put legislation this large into effect without adapting it as you go.
Apple, for its part, says that it’s taking into account feedback from developers and other stakeholders. That presumably includes the European Commission, which certainly has a vested interest in the process.
We discuss Apple’s latest embarrassing and unnecessary policy stumble in Europe, and then explain how Jason’s full review of the M3 MacBook Air managed to kill his home network.
Go to the podcast page.
Now, don’t get offended, but–you aren’t as good at clocking deepfakes as you think you are.
And it’s not just you–nobody’s that good at it. Not your mom, or your boss, or anyone in your IT department.
To make matters worse, you probably think you can spot a fake. After all, you see weird AI-generated videos of celebrities on social media and they give you that uncanny valley tingle. But it’s a different ballgame when all you’ve got to go on is a voice.
In real life, people only catch voice clones about 50% of the time. You might as well flip a coin.
And that makes us extremely vulnerable to attacks.
In the “classic” voice clone scam, the caller is after an immediate payout (“Hi it’s me, your boss. Wire a bunch of company money to this account ASAP”). Then there are the more complex social engineering attacks, where a phone call is just the entryway to break into a company’s systems and steal data or plant malware (that’s what happened in the MGM attack, albeit without the use of AI).
As more and more hackers use voice cloning in social engineering attacks, deepfakes are becoming such a hot-button issue that it’s hard to tell the fear-mongering (for instance, it definitely takes more than three seconds of audio to clone a voice) from the actual risk.
To disentangle the true risks from the exaggerations, we need to answer some basic questions:
- How hard is it to deepfake someone’s voice?
- How do hackers use voice clones to attack companies?
- And how do we guard ourselves against this… attack of the clones?
Like a lot of modern technologies, deepfake attacks actually exploit some deep-seated fears. Fears like, “your boss is mad at you.” These anxieties have been used by social engineers since the dawn of the scam, and voice clones add a shiny new boost to their tactics.
But the good news is that we can be trained to look past those fears and recognize a suspicious phone call–even if the voice sounds just like someone we trust.
If you want to learn more about our findings, read our piece on the Kolide blog. It’s a frank and thorough exploration of what we should be worried about when it comes to audio deepfakes.
My workspace is what is apparently called an “unconditioned space,” in that it’s a lighly insulated garage with no access to my home’s central heating system. In the winter that’s an issue, so I’ve resorted to using an oil-filled electric space heater to make the space habitable.
The radiator faces its partner, the infrared blaster (the circle hanging in front of the shelf post).Those Delonghi heaters are pretty great at quiet, sustained heat, but the first one I bought used an old-style analog timer to turn itself on and off, which meant that it ticked constantly, and that made me very unhappy. I bought another one that offered a digital timer, but it couldn’t tell the difference between the weekend and weekdays, meaning I frequently heated the garage on a day I wasn’t working, or—even worse—opened the door to discover I hadn’t turned the timer back and the place was unacceptably cold.
After a few years of wrestling with these issues, I finally decided to see if I could solve the issue without buying more heaters. Using a smart outlet didn’t work—when turned on after an extended power outage, my heater is nonfunctional.
Instead, I bought a $26 Wi-Fi infrared blaster, taught it how to speak the language of my heater’s included (and fairly useless!) infrared remote, and now I was in business. (Of course, I had to do some work to get the heater and the IR remote to see one another, but after a few trial-and-error attempts, I got that part locked down.)
Unfortunately, my IR blaster doesn’t support HomeKit—but, you guessed it, there’s a Homebridge plug-in for that. Once I had my heater in the Home app, I could use Automations to turn the heater on automatically very early in the morning (it takes hours for the heater to work its magic) and then turn itself off in the afternoon.
This worked pretty well, but on a warmer morning, the heater would heat things up a bit too fast, and while the Delonghi heater does have its own thermostat, it’s never struck me as being particularly reliable. But I do have a $35 Wi-Fi thermometer in my office, and it works with HomeKit! So I created an additional automation that automatically turns off the Delonghi heater whenever the garage gets above 70 degrees.
I’ve been reluctant to write about this set-up because, frankly, a lot of smart home set-ups don’t stand the test of time. But this is the second cold season that I’ve automated the heating through HomeKit, and it’s worked solidly every time. When I go on vacation, I turn off the one early-morning automation, and the heater never goes on. I just have to remember to turn it back on when I get home.
Maybe someday I’ll find a Wi-Fi-controllable space heater that I like. Until then, this one does the job just fine.
This week has been a heck of a roller coaster for Epic. After the game-maker’s Sweden branch reportedly had its developer account restored so that the company could launch its alternative app marketplace in Europe, the company was subsequently banned again by Apple. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney posted the exchange with Apple’s Phil Schiller, as well as the ensuing message from Apple’s lawyers saying that Epic would not be allowed to have a developer account in the EU.
But now Epic’s been returned to the App Store again, due in some part to an intervention from the European Commission, with Sweeney saying “a swift inquiry” led to Apple agreeing to reinstate Epic’s account.
The DMA went through its first major challenge with Apple banning Epic Games Sweden from competing with the App Store, and the DMA just had its first major victory. Following a swift inquiry by the European Commission, Apple notified the Commission and Epic that it would relent…
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) March 8, 2024
Apple, for its part, issued a terse statement, saying only, “Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”1
This whole series of shenanigans has been an own goal by Apple, which seems to have largely taken issue with Sweeney’s criticisms of how Cupertino changed its rules to accommodate Europe’s Digital Markets Act. It doesn’t really end up looking great for Apple, which now seems both petty and ineffective. Just another reminder that optics are important.
- Sure seems like we could have skipped this entire middle act, right? ↩
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
It’s easy to setup and easy to keep up to date. And Magic Lasso’s pro features enable you to block YouTube ads, craft your own custom rules and see ad blocking energy, carbon and data savings for any site.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
It’s not pretty—but it never was. The point is, it runs!Last month, Dan wrote about getting PC games up on Mac using Apple’s game porting toolkit and the Wine API translation tool, all via an easy to use free app called Whisky.
This inspired me to give Whisky a try with my own white whale, a game that I’ve played in emulation for more than a decade—Diamond Mind, a venerable baseball simulation with legendary statistical accuracy. A colleague1 and I have drafted teams and played entire fictional league seasons in Diamond Mind. But keeping those emulators running over the years has sometimes been more work than it was worth to keep playing.
I gave Whisky a shot, and created a bottle with minimal settings—I only need Windows XP compatibility!—and installed Diamond Mind right off an installer EXE on my Mac hard drive. After some churning and learning and re-loading… up came Diamond Mind. No Windows emulator needed. Right on my Mac.
Sure, there are rough edges—you’ve still got to manage files in the Windows way, and I’m skeptical that network play will work—but… this thing runs. I was keeping an old Surface Go around just to play Diamond Mind! Goodbye to all that. Thanks, Dan, and thanks, Whisky.
- Yes, it’s Philip Michaels. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The first major visionOS update was released Thursday, with a bunch of security fixes as well as some more substantive interface updates:
- Personas are improved, and there’s a new accessibility mode you can use to capture a Persona hands-free. My Persona certainly looks better when running 1.1. (You’ll need to capture a new Persona.)
- Organizations that use Mobile Device Management (MDM) to configure, deploy, and manage Apple devices can support Vision Pro.
- You can delete Apple’s apps from the Home view.
- iMessage Contact Key Verification, a feature recently introduced to Apple’s other platforms but not supported in visionOS 1.0, is now supported.
- There are a grab bag of other items, including general improvements to the virtual keyboard, Mac Virtual Display, closed captions, and support for captive Wi-Fi networks.
Updating visionOS is weird. You use the Software Update section of the Settings app, of course, but when it’s ready to install you’re instructed to take the device off so it can reboot and install it. It’s very weird to just walk away and come back later, but I also don’t really want to sit in the dark waiting for visionOS to do its thing, so this is how it will be, I guess.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Here’s a ruling that isn’t music to Apple’s ears: the European Commission this week levied a fine of $2 billion against the company for violating antitrust regulations in the EU, specifically in terms of the distribution of music streaming apps.
Apple, unsurprisingly, was not happy, issuing a scathing rebuke of the kind rarely seen since the days of former CEO Steve Jobs. That missive insists that the EU found “no evidence of consumer harm” and “no evidence of anti-competitive behavior,” arguing that the digital music market in Europe is stronger than its ever been, in large part thanks to the App Store.
Arguments about this will be continuing ad infinitum, not least of all because the company is appealing the decision. But it’s worth taking a look at Apple’s response from a couple different viewpoints.
Just businessUltimately, there may be only one real perspective that matters: this is business. Apple does not want to pay $2 billion in fines. Spotify doesn’t want to pay Apple’s 30-percent App Store fee (or, really, any commission at all).
The thing about pure business is that it’s simple. Your worth is judged purely on, well, your worth. More money coming in is better; more money going out is bad. Everybody wants a bigger piece of the pie, and they’re going to do whatever they have to ensure it.
But there’s a scale-tipper there: how companies accomplish getting that bigger slice does matter. And while it might not connect as clearly to the profit and loss statements in black and white, you can see its effect no more clearly than in the fact that Apple published a 1500-word essay on its website about why the EU’s contentions are so wrong. Because the question its existence prompts is: who exactly is the intended audience?
Optic blastSo let’s talk about the other part of the equation: public image. Optics, in the colloquial—how a company is perceived. Were Ambrose Bierce still around today, he might define optics as “the art of making people feel good about giving you money.”
Apple is often very good at optics, especially on a product front. But the company’s had its challenges in recent years, especially when it comes to the App Store. A large part of that is because the App Store makes so much money: Apple has found a business with amazing margins that continues to generate money hand over fist without much in the way of additional costs. So, no surprise, it wants to protect that business as much as possible (see “business,” above).
That’s where optics comes into play. Apple’s not publishing a 1500-word piece about why it disagrees with the EC’s ruling in order to convince the EC to change its mind. Presumably it made all of these arguments in its discussions with the regulator, and if it did not, then its army of lawyers is not doing its job.
No, this piece is for the public and the press (who will relay said arguments to the broad swath of the public that hasn’t consumed them firsthand). It’s there to point out all the great things that Apple does and cast it as the one being targeted unfairly by Europe. Apple’s just here making the world a better place! Fundamentally, Apple wants you to be party to its point of view here: that it’s the one being taken advantage of.
But that argument falls a bit flat when you boil the argument down to its essence.
Let’s work backwards here. Apple made $33.9 billion in net income last quarter. I’m going to repeat that because it’s worth letting it sink in: $33.9 billion in pure profit. In its 2023 fiscal year, the company made $97 billion in profit. That’s more than $3000 of profit every single second.1
And, to drive that home, again, I’m talking about profit. Not simply all the revenue the company generated; this is income after costs and expenses.
So it’s fair to say that, as a company, Apple’s doing pretty well. And I’m not here to begrudge it that accomplishment: it’s mostly accomplished that by making great products that people want to buy. But that $2 billion fine amounts to about a week worth of its 2023 profits—not insubstantial, but ultimately by no means make or break for the company.
Look, we live in a capitalistic society. Apple wants to make more money. Spotify wants to make more money. But, as a rule, be suspicious of any for-profit corporation that wants you to believe it’s on the side of what’s good or right, except insofar as what’s good and right aligns with maximizing shareholder value.
Companies want you to give them your money. That’s fine. But that doesn’t mean they deserve your love. If a company is asking you to be on their side, it’s probably worth asking why.
Let’s get competitiveI find it ironic that this story is, at root, about digital music. Apple was, after all, the company that turned digital music from a curiosity into a fact of daily life when it launched the iPod and, a couple years later, the iTunes Music Store. But it missed out on the chance to be as dominant a player on streaming—albeit not quite as badly as Microsoft missed the boat on mobile—and it often seems resentful of that fact.
The thing is, the company’s launch of the iTunes Music Store was an example of one of the best philosophical points about entering the market (or perhaps any technology market), as Steve Jobs himself pointed out:
“Who iTunes really competes with is piracy,” [Jobs] said. “Piracy is a really big market, and this is our competitor. To compete with piracy, you have to understand it and offer a better product.”
Piracy isn’t the opposition here, but I think the big idea holds true to when it comes to the App Store. With the iTunes Store, Apple believed that its solution was so good—literally so good—that it could convince customers to pay for something that they would otherwise pay nothing for.2 And it was largely right!
The App Store has proved successful at revolutionizing software sales, especially on mobile, and Apple has every right to be confident in its product. But if it really were confident in its product—that the App Store truly provides a better experience for developers selling apps and consumers being able to find and purchase software than anywhere else—then you could argue it doesn’t need the restrictions that it’s put in place to prevent customers from going elsewhere.
Apple’s policies on preventing or heavily restricting companies from linking to their sites sure feels a lot less like competition and a lot more like protectionism.3 More than a few courts in different countries around the world have come to a similar conclusion—including the U.S., where it was the sole contention that Apple lost in its fight against Epic.
And nowhere are these anti-steering clauses more questionable than when they intersect with things like digital books and, yes, streaming music—markets in which Apple itself is a competitor. To drag optics into this once again, it certainly doesn’t look good when your competitors in a space are subjected to restrictions because they’re doing business on one of your platforms—restrictions your own competing offering doesn’t have.
Moreover, users—the people whose money all these huge companies are fighting for a bigger chunk of—are the ones who get caught in the middle. We’d all prefer it if we could buy ebooks in the Kindle app, or easily sign up for Spotify or Netflix without having to jump into a web browser. Because we want what Apple was promising to deliver: an easy and seamless experience.
The cure is better than the diseaseThe EC’s ruling comes not only with a monetary fine, but an edict for Apple:
The Commission has also ordered Apple to remove the anti-steering provisions and to refrain from repeating the infringement or from adopting practices with an equivalent object or effect in the future.
While the full effect of this won’t be felt until all appeals are dealt with, it does raise the question of what such changes will look like—especially on the eve of huge changes Apple is already implementing to comply with another far-reaching piece of European legislation, the Digital Markets Act.
Based on the fact that courts have largely come down hard on Apple’s restrictions on external linking and the EU’s generally tight regulatory market, it seems unlikely that the EC’s ruling will be overturned. And so, like it or not, further change is coming to the App Store.
Is this a threat for Apple? For its constantly increasing Services revenue (and profit), certainly. But it’s also an opportunity for the company to make a big change, one that could benefit it from an optics perspective. And if you have to make a change, why not capitalize on it?
By welcoming competition with open arms, and leveling the App Store playing field, Apple has the chance to ameliorate one of the biggest sources of dissatisfaction for its customers and critics.
Nor would this be the first time the company reversed itself either. For example, Apple’s gone from fighting against right-to-repair laws to being a vocal supporter. It’s not to say this isn’t at least partially driven by sheer pragmatism: the company saw which way the wind was blowing, and when the conversation’s about you it’s better to be part of the conversation.
It’s been emotionalThe App Store has always been a frustration for many consumers of Apple’s products, the place where the naked realities of business shine through the company’s anodized, chamfered veneer. Where people have raised eyebrows at practices that may not have been illegal, but often felt distasteful.
If it were another other company, people might not care so much. It’s just business, right? And from the outside, it often seems as if Apple doesn’t understand why people are so upset: surely any other corporation would do the same.
Frankly, though, this is a bed that Apple’s made for itself. For years, the company has extolled that it thinks different. That it cares not just about its bottom line, or even about making great products that users love, but about issues that affect us all, from the environment to social justice. And it’s been very effective at that argument, in part because people want to believe the best of a company that makes things they like.4
In other words, good optics have paid off handsomely for Apple. But live by the optics, die by the optics. If you ask people to buy into the idea that you’re working toward the good, be prepared for the moment when they pull off the mask and are shocked to discover that you were a for-profit company all along.
- They could pay a month of my mortgage, daycare costs, and utilities in literally two seconds, with a decent amount left over. ↩
- Yes, there’s the myth of the lost sale and the idea that not everybody will pirate something just because they can get it for free, but I’m talking more about what Apple promulgated as its belief here. ↩
- My funny bone is also tickled by the fact that if you want to link outside your app you need to request an “entitlement.” That’s standard terminology, but it’s also deeply funny to me, because it points to how Apple views any piece of software that wants to access a feature Apple is trying to discourage you from accessing. And yet, somehow, the irony is lost on Apple… ↩
- Cognitive dissonance reduction is a hell of a drug. ↩
If you haven’t already seen it, well, this is a sentence that happens early in Federico Viticci’s opus about exploring differently shaped macOS and iOS devices:
Alright, so obviously the first step of the process is to physically remove the screen from a MacBook, right?
🤔
Some people will call this a silly stunt, but the truth is that for years Federico has been exploring (and pushing) the edges of Apple’s platforms so the rest of us don’t have to. He’s an ergonomic astronaut, floating away into strange places where no one (outside of rooms in Cupertino with blackened windows) has gone before.
In this case, my biggest takeaway is that Apple needs to get weird and explore different ways to mix its hardware and software. The MacBook Air is a solved problem—but there may be some as-yet-unsolved use cases out there.
The other thing that struck me about Federico’s story is that he’s made a pretty great Vision Pro accessory. I’d love a keyboard and trackpad in a single slab to use with the Vision Pro… and what a great bonus if it had a Mac inside it, too!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
A midnight M3 MacBook Air driving two Studio Displays in lid-closed mode.Apple’s definitive laptop of the last decade, the MacBook Air, finally got an exterior redesign in 2022 with the release of the M2 MacBook Air. This new model traded in the classic wedge shape and rounded edges for flat sides with curved corners, restored the MagSafe connector, and dramatically reduced the size of the display bezel.
It’s a great revision, and I’m happy to report that the M3 MacBook Air, due to be released Friday, is identical to the M2 model in terms of external design. Without reading the model number printed on the bottom, I’m not sure you could tell them apart.
This is not to say that there aren’t new features, of course. The M3 chip introduced with the M3 iMac and MacBook Pro in November offers improved performance, and there are a few other wrinkles that provide a little texture to this update.
But the bottom line is that Apple did a spectacularly good job redesigning the MacBook Air in 2022, and now here’s a revision that brings Apple’s most popular Mac up to date with the latest generation of Apple silicon. If you already have an M2 Air, you probably don’t need this update (with one notable exception I’ll get to later). But if you’ve been holding onto an Intel MacBook Air and waiting for the right time to jump… the M3 Air will provide a soft and pleasant landing.
Back to basicsThe 15-inch (starlight, top) and 13-inch (midnight) Air.I’m not kidding: I can’t tell the M2 and M3 MacBook Air models apart. They’re essentially identical. There are 13-inch and 15-inch models, just as there were (eventually) with the previous generation. The 15-inch Air has slightly better speakers, but the only palpable difference is that it’s got a bigger screen than the 13-inch model. Because the 15-inch M2 model trailed the 13-inch version by a year, this marks the first time that both sizes have launched simultaneously. If you’ve always wanted a larger laptop screen but haven’t wanted to spend the money on a MacBook Pro, the 15-inch Air is a great choice.
The single change to the exterior of the M3 Air to previous versions is a new fingerprint-resistant anodization seal on the dark “midnight” models, which do show fingerprints more than the others. This is apparently the same approach that Apple took with the Space Black M3 MacBook Pro.
My reaction is pretty much the same as the one I had to the MacBook Pro: Apple hasn’t “cured” fingerprints. It is absolutely possible to put fingerprints all over the midnight MacBook Air. I managed to cover it in streaks in a couple of minutes. It might be a little more resistant than the old model, and it might be easier to wipe the surface clean, but after a day’s use, the M2 and M3 midnight Airs in my house looked more or less the same.
It’s worth noting that the MacBook Air’s 1080p FaceTime camera is passable but not amazing—I wish Apple would tuck a nicer camera up there. These new models also have a “notch” in the display that contains the camera, so you’ll lose a little bit of menu bar space, but I’ve never found it to be a big issue. I forget the notch is there, honestly.
And proving that some changes are invisible to the eye, Apple claims that this is the first Apple product to be made with more than 50 percent recycled content, including all of the aluminum, the rare-earth elements in magnets, and the copper on the logic board. (I can’t tell the difference between recycled atoms and original ones, and neither can you.)
Dual-screen detailsTwo Thunderbolt ports, two displays.A feature of Apple’s Intel-based MacBook Air models was the ability to drive multiple external monitors at once, providing a relatively affordable way to get a multi-screen workspace. When the MacBook Air moved to Apple Silicon, it lost that capability. In fact, the base M1 and M2 chips are only able to support two displays—and in a laptop, one of those is built in, so that meant support for only one external display.
This set up the frustrating situation where MacBook Air users with multiple-monitor setups were going to need to spend $2000 on a MacBook Pro if they wanted to upgrade to Apple Silicon and keep their setups. The most frustrating thing was that the Mac Mini supported two displays—but of course, it didn’t have that built-in laptop screen.
But the M3 has changed things! I was able to use the M3 MacBook Air with two Apple Studio Displays—as long as I kept the lid of the laptop closed and used an external keyboard and trackpad to control everything. I plugged the two displays into the two Thunderbolt ports on the MacBook Air, and when I closed the lid, the second of the two monitors turned on.
There’s a scaling disparity between two external Studio Displays.There are a few quirks. The Air can support one 6K display, but the second display can only be 5K resolution. In my setup with two Studio Displays, I could only set the secondary display to use the option that scales everything down a little bit (to the equivalent of 2880 x 1620 resolution); the “main display” (in other words, the one that takes over for the internal one) couldn’t be greater than 2560 x 1440.
In any event, this is a big expansion of the functionality of the MacBook Air for a certain class of users. Apple silicon laptops make great desktop computers when tethered to an external display, and now users don’t have to buy a MacBook Pro to get that functionality. (The base M3 MacBook Pro, which strangely shipped without support for a second external display, will receive a software update later this year to bring it to parity with the M3 MacBook Air.)
The M3 Air also adds support for Wi-Fi 6E, while the older M2 models only support Wi-Fi 6. The difference is real. On my home Internet connection, I was able to get 931 Mbps down and 813 MBps up via Wi-Fi, which is more or less the same speed as my wired connection to my router. In the same spot, my M2 Air could only manage 618 up and 700 down. I wouldn’t buy a new laptop just to have faster Wi-Fi—and keep in mind that you need to upgrade your router and possibly your home internet to take advantage of these speeds—but that’s the fastest Wi-Fi connection I’ve ever experienced.
They keep getting fasterThe big speed boost in Apple silicon came during the transition to Intel. Since then, things have kept incrementally improving. The M3 Max is actually a pretty decent bit faster than the M2 Max, but the low-end M3 chip used in the MacBook Air is only a little bit faster than the M2 in the 2022 model. The M3 was about 19 percent faster than the M2 in multi-core CPU tasks but a more impressive 39 percent faster than the M1. In graphics tests, it was only about four percent faster than an M2 Air with the same number of GPU cores.
In a noticeable shifting of gears from previous product launches, Apple has devoted a large amount of time to promoting the M3 Air as the best consumer computer for artificial intelligence tasks, citing the integrated Neural Engine in the M3 chip. Of course, Apple silicon Macs have had the Neural Engine since the M1, and while some AI applications use the Neural Engine, others use the GPU cores—and still others run in the cloud, entirely separate from the computer.
So, is the M3 Air an AI powerhouse? I’m sure it’s fine, and it did manage to transcribe a podcast using OpenAI Whisper in less than 80 percent of the time it took an M2 model—but that was pretty much down to the extra GPU cores, I think. And, of course, an M3 Max MacBook Pro with 40 GPU cores polished off that same transcript in 40 percent less time than the M3 Air.
So yes, the M3 Air is faster than the M2 model and quite a bit faster than the M1 model. But in the Apple silicon era, the MacBook Air has enough horsepower for most general use cases. If you’re really pushing things with something like an AI transcript or a video encode, the MacBook Pro line offers a whole lot of performance upside, which is why I included a 16-CPU, 40-GPU M3 Max MacBook Pro in my speed charts as a comparison.
To be sure, there are other reasons to buy a MacBook Pro instead of a MacBook Air, most notably the beautiful display and the extra ports. The Pro also has a cooling fan, which the Air doesn’t. This makes the Air really nice and quiet, but in extremely taxing situations, the Air will have to restrain itself in order to prevent overheating, while the Pro can just crank up the fans and keep on churning.
Who should upgrade?If you’ve got an M2 MacBook Air, you can stay put—unless you’re desperate to plug in a second display, that is. M1 Air users might be tempted to upgrade, and there are a lot of reasons to do so—not just that the M3 is faster, but that the entire MacBook Air redesign that came with the M2 is pretty great. (The 13-inch M2 model is still on Apple’s price list, a bargain at $999.)
If you’re still using an Intel MacBook Air, well… if you’re doing that because you have a two-monitor setup, you’ve probably already placed your order. I no longer have a late-model Intel MacBook Air to use as a comparison to these Apple silicon models, but suffice it to say that an Apple silicon Mac is a huge upgrade over the old Intel models.
The truth is, unless you’ve been waiting to plug in a second monitor to a MacBook Air, this upgrade isn’t going to blow anyone away—and that’s okay. The chips keep getting faster, 2022’s MacBook Air design refresh remains great, and the 15-inch model offers a large screen for people who don’t need MacBook Pro prices or features. The MacBook Air is Apple’s most popular Mac, and now it’s even better.
Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett of Bloomberg have a detailed story about the rise and fall of Apple’s car project. This was my favorite small bit:
The new design also incorporated a more traditional automotive interface: a steering wheel and pedals. “They finally smartened up,” says an Apple executive. “I was like, ‘Guys, you could have done this 10 years ago!’”
Sounds like a lot of people inside Apple knew this project was a disaster, and that Tim Cook failed to provide a vision and decisive leadership. Though I do appreciate the internal argument about why to start the project in the first place: “Would you rather compete against Samsung or General Motors?”
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The importance of encryption in messaging services, the topics we’d want to see in a prediction market, how many monitors we use, and our preferred podcast app(s).
Go to the podcast page.
Adieu, Project Titan, we never knew ya.
But while Apple’s ambitious car project may have been left in the dust, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a valuable experience—nor that it doesn’t continue to pay some dividends for the company. After a decade of work, billions in investment, and the work of hundreds of engineers, you’d better believe that Apple cutting its losses doesn’t mean that everything Titan-related is packed up into a white cardboard box and thrown into Apple Park’s attic.
We already known that many of the people who worked on Project Titan will be reassigned elsewhere. But it’s more than just the personnel who worked on the Apple Car—it’s the technology developed for Apple’s automotive project that will surely work its way into other places across the company’s product lines. After all, one of Apple’s great strengths as a company that controls both its hardware and software is the ability for features and capabilities to be shared across its various devices where appropriate.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Someone new is in charge of Netflix’s film output, which lets us ponder the company’s past and future film strategy. [Downstream+ members get: Max’s new Harry Potter approach, and lessons we could learn from The CW’s mid-budget approach to superhero TV.]
Go to the podcast page.
One of my surprisingly favorite features of the Vision Pro is the dynamic display of photographic panoramas. Immersive environments are great, and I love that I can capture stereo video now, but I’ve got an immense library of panoramas that date back to the 1990s.
Yep, that’s right: before the iPhone made it easy to capture panoramas, you used to have to take them the hard way—namely by rotating in a circle and capturing photos every so often. What’s worse, I used to do this with film. I know! I know! But in the late 1990s my parents sold the house I grew up in, and I wanted to capture that place one last time. It was the heyday of QuickTime VR and so I took several rolls of film on my last visit and captured it all.
Developer David Smith gets it. He has detailed how, even now, it’s often superior to capture a bunch of stills and stitch them together rather than use the iPhone’s convenient panorama feature:
Unfortunately right now these panoramas are limited to roughly the width of a standard 12MP capture…
Looking at these iPhone panoramas on a Vision Pro is lovely, they have barely enough resolution to give a good sense of being back at the place where the image was captured. However, after the initial WOW! factor has worn off I started to really notice the fuzziness of the presentation. Presenting an image which is around 3900px tall at a conceptual height of about six feet tall just isn’t enough resolution to really feel immersive.
His solution is mine, too: Take a bunch of photos vertically as you swivel around, then use Photoshop to merge them into a panorama. (The command is File: Automate: Photomerge.) His resulting panoramas were 304 megapixels in size!
If you’re in a spectacular location, it’s totally worth the trouble.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
(Left to right): A transcript playing back, selecting a paragraph in the transcript view, and sharing a quote from a podcast.As was foretold back in January, with the release of iOS 17.4 Apple’s Podcasts app now supports podcast transcripts. This is a pretty big breakthrough in terms of access to podcast content and accessibility of podcast to audiences who might not be able to listen.
The way Apple has implemented transcription is very clever. It’s all happening up in the cloud—the moment it detects that a new episode has arrived, Apple kicks that episode into its transcription queue and quickly generates a full transcript. (This is why, if you start listening the moment an episode drops, you won’t be offered a transcript—but very soon thereafter, it should appear.) Apple supports transcripts in English, Spanish, French, and German, which should cover 80 percent of overall listening in Apple Podcasts.
Apple’s not just running that podcast through a standard transcription engine like the one I use to generate transcripts on my Mac, but one that’s been built to detect some detailed information about how the podcast is structured.
That’s important, because many modern podcasts use something called Dynamic Ad Insertion to insert different ads depending on where you are, who you are, and when you downloaded the episode. A traditional transcript file won’t keep sync with a podcast if the time codes of the ads keep changing. Apple’s engine should be able to detect the beginning and end of those ads and adjust its transcript accodingly, inserting a filler animation (three slowly filling dots that will be familiar to users of lyrics in Apple Music) until the podcast content resumes, at which point the transcript should pick up right where it should.
Apple’s processing also detects content down to the word, so that (again, Apple Music style) it can highlight every word in the transcript as it’s spoken. It detects speaker changes and breaks paragraphs to improve readability, though it can’t identify the speakers. Episodes with chapter markers should see those reflected in the transcripts as subheads.
You can also select a paragraph from a transcript and share it (including a link back to the podcast), or even view the entire podcast transcript on its own without playing audio.
Podcasters who would prefer to use their own transcripts—I could see it happening in podcasts where there are some highly specific spellings and terms that they want to get exactly right—can do so by using the <podcast:transcript> field in their podcast RSS to point at a subtitles file in SRT or VTT format. Apple’s backend systems will pick that file up, run it through their own special processes, and supply it in the same interface.
The only thing that’s really missing is support for private podcast feeds, which is where most members-only versions of podcasts live these days. (Full disclosure: I produce several podcasts with members-only versions, and subscribe to several more!) I realize that there are some complicated technical isuses with members-only podcasts—technically each one is unique for each member, which is a real complicating factor—but between the file download URL and the URL of the transcript file, it should be doable for Apple to group all the members-only podcast episodes together. If it wants to transcribe those episodes itself, it’s more than welcome—but I’m also happy to provide my own transcript. I just don’t want my members missing out on this really great new feature.
It’s time to say goodbye to the M1 MacBook Air (hello, new M3 models!) and our Upshift segment (RIP Apple Car project), but our in-depth coverage of Apple being regulated and fined by the European Commission rolls on!
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want an to try an ad blocker that’s easy to setup, easy to keep up to date and with pro features available when you need them?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
With Magic Lasso’s pro features, you can:
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Craft your own Custom Rules to block media, cookies, and JavaScript
- Use Tap to Block to effortlessly block any element on a page with a simple tap
- See the difference ad blocking makes by visualising ad blocking speed, energy efficiency and data savings for any site
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 300,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
If you’ve been keeping your powder dry for Apple’s most popular laptop models to get its latest processors, well, time to light that candle. The company announced on Monday that it has updated its MacBook Air line with M3 processors, bringing not only faster performance but also a much desired new capability: support for two external displays.
The new 13-inch model comes in three basic configurations: all three feature an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. While the $1099 base configuration includes an 8-core GPU and 256GB of storage, the $1299 and $1499 versions include a 10-core graphics processor and a 512GB SSD—you can get up to 2TB of storage on any model. Just to mix it up a bit, the two lower configurations start with 8GB of memory, compared to the highest model’s 16GB—all are configurable with up to 24GB of memory at max.
Meanwhile, the 15-inch model also comes in three configurations, though all use the same 8-core GPU/10-core GPU configuration. As with the 13-inch version, the lower two models both includes 8GB of memory with the highest offering 16GB and the higher two configurations have 512GB SSDs with the lowest having only a 256GB.
There should be very little surprise about these options, given that they mimic the same versions of the M3 chip found in the latest version of Apple’s iMac, including the 16 core Neural Engine, hardware ray tracing, and 100GB/s memory bandwidth.
Where they do differ is one place that many vocal users have been upset: the new M3 models not only support an external display at up to 6K resolution but now also support a second external display at up to 5K resolution…if you close the MacBook Air lid. While that may not appease all critics of the display limitations, it’s likely to make many users happy.
The only other change is the addition of Wi-Fi 6E (aka 802.11ax), which offers better performance. Otherwise, specs—including size, weight, and available colors—are unchanged across the line.
There’s one last footnote, though: in true Apple fashion, the 13-inch M2 Air has been kept around to hit that sub-$1000 price point. For $999 you can get a 8-core CPU/8-core GPU model with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage; there’s also an $1199 configuration with the 8-core CPU/10-core GPU model with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. That means there’s effectively a configuration at every $100 interval, so you can buy as much MacBook as you need. The M1 Air, meanwhile, has shuffled off this mortal coil, bidding adieu to its Intel-era design.
All models are available for order today and will ship this Friday. The company also announced a new assortment of Silicone iPhone cases and a refresh of Apple Watch bands as it generally does in the spring.
There was a moment when it seemed like an Apple Car made sense. Ten years ago, when the Apple Watch wasn’t anything more than a rumor (and I still worked at a magazine), it seemed like the entire automotive industry was on the edge of an enormous change, and the traditional players just weren’t ready.
In 2014, Tesla was sort of the only one out there trying to bring that future into existence, and back then, Tesla only really sold one consumer car—the expensive Model S. If the future of cars was that they were going to be computers on wheels, wasn’t there a chance to catch the auto-industry giants sleeping and elbow them out of their own industry?
That’s not how it worked for a multitude of reasons. But as Apple begins the process of tearing down all the pieces of its fruitless quest to build its own vehicle, it’s worth remembering that at one point, it almost made sense.
In defense of the gambleIt’s 2014, and you’re Apple. You’ve got all the free cash and ambition in the world, and you know that as the iPhone matures, it’ll cease to be a major generator of the growth that Wall Street demands. (To be clear, there was a lot of growth still to come for the iPhone: Apple wouldn’t even introduce the first “big” iPhone, the iPhone 6 Plus, until the fall.) You’ve got the Apple Watch on the horizon, and a grand plan to dramatically boost Services revenue, but you know that investors want growth to be infinite and eternal.
You’ve got the Innovator’s Dilemma buzzing in your mind, as well as Steve Jobs’s maxim that it’s always best if you’re your own replacement. You and your fellow tech giants have enormous amounts of money and a commitment to not become so complacent that some new tech company comes along and turns you into a historical footnote.
So what do you do? You place your bets. You put money down in the hope that you will stave off irrelevance and maybe even discover the Next Big Thing. In 2014, it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that in 2030, most new cars would be computers on wheels, using new electric technologies that were foreign to the big automakers. What was more likely, that Ford and GM would learn the vital synthesis of hardware and software, or that Apple could turn the talents of its hardware design team to an auto chassis?
(Just an aside: Could Apple have just… bought Tesla? Or Rivian? Or Lucid? Perhaps the timing never quite worked, but it also feels like there’s some strong “not invented here” syndrome at play here. Apple didn’t want to buy the revolutionary electric car and popularize it; it wanted to invent it.)
The dangerous distractionApple may have had a decent reason to make a speculative dive into the car business, but it seems like the effort lacked leadership and direction. If someone with authority had put a stake in the ground and said the company should ship its own Tesla-style car by, say, 2019, that might have been something. Given the eccentricity and distraction of Tesla’s leadership, Apple might have ended up even beating Tesla at its own game in a few years.
But it sure seems, based on various reports over the years, like Apple’s strategy kept swerving into other lanes. Any observer of Tesla has noticed that Elon Musk has spent the last decade hyping the just-around-the-corner promise of true self-driving cars. Alphabet and other companies have invested in the dream, too, and as an outside observer, it sure seems like what we’ve learned is that the technology just isn’t there yet—and might never be. Human streets are messy.
But as much as a hype man for self-driving as Musk has been, and as questionable as his taste in hardware driving interfaces has been, Tesla has continually designed its cars with, you know… steering wheels. What if we just can’t crack the entirely autonomous vehicle? Steering wheels. They’re a great fallback.
The moment that I realized Apple’s car effort was completely off track was when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple’s car design did not hedge: “Apple’s ideal car would have no steering wheel and pedals, and its interior would be designed around hands-off driving,” Gurman reported.
Was Apple convinced that it could beat everyone to the self-driving holy grail? Had it decided that if it couldn’t build a roving autonomous salon on wheels, it didn’t want to make anything at all? Was the project hijacked by a bunch of idealistic designers fed by unearned confidence that Apple could achieve anything it set its technological mind to?
I don’t know. Though it’s suspicious that Gurman’s report happened a while after there was an exodus of talent from the project in early 2021. They saw the writing on the wall.
It took two more years for the sword to fall on the project. If reports are to be believed, the team was issued an ultimatum to come up with a product to ship in the next few years. My guess is that they came up with that product and realized it would be a more expensive Lucid Air. That might have been great in 2017 or even 2019, but at this point, not only are there numerous companies trying to use the Tesla playbook, but most of the major automakers have awakened from their slumber. A $100,000 Apple sedan in 2018 might be the start of something big. The same car in 2028 is a footnote. The opportunity to change the world has passed.
Mistakes were madeIt seems like Project Titan lacked a leader with a clear vision (or at least lacked a leader with the ability to implement their vision), and then someone steered the entire project off course while chasing an unattainable dream. (Apple would’ve been better off shipping that Tesla-like sedan in 2018 and then iterating for a decade.)
But was Project Titan’s whole existence a mistake? Not so fast.
If you’re an incumbent like Apple, your biggest threat is your own complacency. Apple should constantly be trying to identify areas of interest where it could make a difference in the world with an investment of the company’s enormous resources.
Take visionOS. The Vision Pro is an interesting experiment that might have some fascinating applications today and in the next few years. But where it makes the most sense, and where it justifies Apple’s massive investment, is as a long-term play designed to stave off any possibility of some other company cracking a future wearable item that makes the iPhone obsolete.
The iPhone is half of Apple’s business. Apple should be spending money and time trying to envision its replacement—and ensuring that Apple is the company that’ll popularize that product.
I like Apple taking bets like Project Titan. Of course, there was an opportunity cost to it. If Apple wasn’t dallying with computer vision models, perhaps it would have invested in large language models. Probably not, but there’s no way to know. The longer the project continued, though, the more opportunities were missed. And it does feel like the project went on too long.
At least there’s a silver lining. You never know what will be salvaged from the wreckage of Apple’s car project. I would imagine that quite a bit of what was learned in Project Titan will benefit future Apple products. Of course, it’s unlikely that any of that will justify the enormous cost of the project—but that’s not the point.
Apple made a bet. Maybe the odds were bad. The bet was probably too large. And Apple threw some good money after bad in the hopes of chasing a jackpot. You win some, you lose some.
When it comes to planning the future, the only thing worse than making some bad bets is making no bets at all.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
You might have heard about the September 2023 MGM ransomware attack. But beyond the broken slot machines and other anecdotes is the fact that it’s an example of an emerging style of attack that we’ll certainly be seeing more of.
The dominant narrative has been that a single phone call hacked MGM, but that help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols. And there’s another factor that could have stopped the hackers in their tracks: it’s all about the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what Kolide learned when they researched the MGM hack (like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story), check out the Kolide Blog.
Aa a longtime Mac user, I’m just as aware of the platform’s limitations as I am its strengths. Chief among those limitations is—and has been for many years— gaming. Personally, though I played my fair share of Mac games throughout my teens and college years, I haven’t been an avid Mac gamer for a couple decades, first leaving for the greener pastures of PC gaming and then, eventually, the simpler world of consoles.
That’s why I found last year so interesting. Not only did Apple spend some significant time talking the talk about games with the release of its M2 Pro and Max chips and how good they were for gaming, but it even walked the walk with the WWDC release of its game porting toolkit.
As this year’s annual platform updates grow closer, Mac users are left wondering whether this is another flash in the pan from a company that has historically never gotten games, or if Apple might instead be poised to demonstrate that its commitment is more than just lip service.
Coming into portLast summer I tried giving the game porting toolkit a whirl on my M1 MacBook Air, which was then running the required macOS Sonoma beta. At the time installing the toolkit meant following a series of technical instructions, involving no small amount of command line work. Though I’m no stranger to spending time in Terminal, I ultimately didn’t even manage to get to the point of firing up a game.
This week, though, I noticed that one of the classic games of my teen years, Star Wars: Dark Forces1, had gotten the remastered treatment. That updated version was available for many of the consoles, as well as for Windows…but not for the Mac.
An updated version of a many years-old game seemed like ideal pickings for another stab at Apple’s toolkit: the gameplay wouldn’t be very demanding, but would also no doubt highlight any shortcomings in Apple’s technology.
Whisky makes it incredibly easy to install PC games—perhaps too easy.What a difference eight months makes. That’s in no small part due to Whisky, an app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the process, to the point where all I had to do was download Whisky and drag it into my Applications folder. It installed all the necessary under-the-hood software, leaving me with nothing but time on my hands.
So I grabbed the standalone installer for Dark Forces that I’d purchased from GOG.com2 and simply ran it. Less than ten minutes later, I was running around blasting pixelated stormtroopers.3 I even connected the Xbox controller I keep in my office and it worked seamlessly, with no additional setup (I was surprised to see that even Dark Forces‘s in-game UI knew I was using an Xbox controller and changed to reflect that).
Stormtroopers would be scarier if they could actually hit anything.The only issue I ran into was that the MIDI sound stuttered somewhat—all the sounds and music were intelligible, just with this additional audio artifact. Some digging around suggested workarounds involving replacement DLLs, which I gave a half-hearted shot at but had no luck.4
The once and future king of Mac gamingWindows gaming on the Mac is hardly new: over the years enthusiasts have used tools ranging from Apple’s Boot Camp to emulators like Parallels and VMware Fusion to translators like Wine and CrossOver to finagle PC games into running on Mac hardware. But all of those solutions were cumbersome to different degrees and served to alienate the people who just wanted playing games to be as simple as everything else on the Mac—nobody wants to hear that games work great if you just install these four pieces of software and tweak endless settings.
Apple’s said that its game porting toolkit is designed specifically for developers, to help them enable running their titles on the Mac. The idea being that it takes care of a certain base-level compatibility—to make sure titles are optimized and run well, companies have to put in some time.
What I wonder is just how well that’s paid off. There certainly hasn’t been an explosion in Mac gaming in the past several months, though, to be fair, games have long development timelines and large shops are probably not about to throw caution to the winds and embrace the Mac after all these years.
But has Apple done everything it can? I think the company’s only fighting half the battle here. The Mac has always suffered from a chicken-and-egg gaming problem: developers don’t want to commit resources to making games for a platform because there aren’t enough customers there; but the reason there aren’t enough customers is because there aren’t enough games.
The game porting toolkit attacks the developer side of the equation, but only brushes up against the other side: consumers.
If Apple really wants to jumpstart gaming on the Mac, it should bake the underlying technologies of the game porting toolkit directly into the system. Make installing and running a PC game as easy as if it were a Mac native title.
Make Moff Rebus canon again, cowards!Are there risks with this approach? Definitely. As I mentioned, the audio in my version of Dark Forces was sub-par and, from what I can see online, these kinds of edge cases are not uncommon. It’s not hard to imagine blame being leveled at Apple’s hardware and software for “not being up to the task” when the truth is that the titles simply need some extra care and attention to play at their best. Whisky already does a good job of trying to package in a lot of the ancillary software that can help make the right tweaks; there’s no reason Apple couldn’t apply a similar approach.
In the end, I’d argue that the potential benefits outweigh the risks: running PC games on the Mac at all is a pretty big coup, to say nothing of them running pretty well. If Apple’s really worried about a bad experience reflecting poorly on its products, it can throw up a splash screen disclaimer—come on, you guys love splash screen disclaimers!
The more demand from folks who are willing to play their games on the Mac, the better the chance that developers will be willing to at least invest the time to make sure their titles run well. And if that ends up being a gateway to making games that run natively on the Mac, well, then, mission accomplished. As impressive as Apple’s tools are, just chucking them at developers and expecting them to jump at the chance of being on the Mac doesn’t cut it.
- A title, let it be noted, that I actually owned for my Mac on CD-ROM! ↩
- GOG has its own GOG Galaxy client, but I wasn’t sure how that would play with Whisky, so I opted for the simplest route. ↩
- Almost 30 years of gaming means I am much, much better at this now. 🤣 ↩
- Though when I loaded it up later and listened through the headphones connected to my audio interface, it was much better. Weird! ↩
The end of Apple’s car project, the tasks we’d put an AI Siri to work on, hidden Apple OS features, and using the Apple Vision Pro in public.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple really sweated the launch of the Vision Pro. It brought select retail employees to Cupertino for multi-day training sessions in which participants tried the hardware and memorized the script to be used while demonstrating the hardware in stores. Those participants then went back to their Apple Stores and taught their co-workers what they had learned.
When the doors opened on launch day, the demos seemed to go pretty well. But it turns out that the Vision Pro is perhaps the most ergonomically complicated device Apple has ever made—and that getting it to fit on an array of faces needed more than a large selection of Light Seal sizes and a fancy app that scans your face.
Getting a good fit for the Vision Pro, it turns out, can take a human touch. And on this front, Apple has failed its retail employees and its customers alike.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
We discuss what an iOS release focused on AI features might look like, check in on our ongoing Vision Pro experiences, and discuss what the Apple Sports app might mean for Apple’s sports ambitions.
Go to the podcast page.
The September 2023 MGM hack quickly became one of the most notorious ransomware attacks in recent memory. Journalists and cybersecurity experts rushed to report on the broken slot machines, angry hotel guests, and the fateful phishing call to MGM’s help desk that started it all.
And, like a slick magic trick, the public’s attention was drawn in the wrong direction. Now, months later, we’re still missing something critical about the MGM hack. That’s because, for many of the most important questions about the breach, the popular answers are either incomplete or inaccurate. Those include: who hacked MGM, what tactics they used to breach the system, and how security teams can protect themselves against similar attacks.
Why is that a problem? Because it lets us write off the MGM hack as a one-off story, instead of an example of an emerging style of attack that we’ll certainly be seeing more of. And that leaves companies and security teams unprepared.
Who hacked MGM? Plenty of news stories have confidently blamed the MGM attack on either the Scattered Spider or ALPHV hacking group, but the truth is still murky, and likely involves a dangerous team up between different groups, each bringing their own expertise to the table.
Their attacks first use fluent English social engineering skills to get onto networks, where they then deploy sophisticated ransomware that quickly establishes persistence across multiple systems.
What tactics did they use? The dominant narrative has been that “a single phone call hacked MGM.” A phone vishing attack to MGM’s IT help desk is what started the hack, but there’s much more to it than that. The real issue is that this help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols, and probably wasn’t doing anything “wrong” when they gave the bad actors access to a super administrator account.
How can security teams protect themselves? Cybersecurity experts have centered most of their advice on user ID verification. But while it’s true that MGM’s help desk needed better ways of verifying employee identity, there’s another factor that should have stopped the hackers in their tracks.
That’s where you need to focus your attention. In fact, if you just focus your vision , you’ll find you’re already staring at the security story the pros have been missing.
It’s the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what we learned when we researched the MGM hack–like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story–check out the Kolide Blog.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide wants your business to be secure. Think of it like airport security: there are two lines, one to verify your identity and another to scan your carry-ons. In enterprise security, the first line is user authentication. The second line is scanning the devices themselves.
That second line doesn’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average solution is like eyeing a bag and listening to hear if there’s a ticking sound. And that’s assuming there’s a second line at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.
Unmanaged devices can be infected with malware, full of personally identifiable information, or even belong to a bad actor using phished employee credentials. Companies need device trust solutions that block devices from authenticating if they don’t meet minimum security requirements. That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates.
Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. Kolide can help close the gaps.
Left to right: Setting favorites in News, monitoring scores in Sports, setting a Live Activity in TV, and displaying the Live Activity on the home screen.When I got my first demo of the new Apple Sports app, I admit to being a little surprised: didn’t Apple already do live sports scores? Hadn’t I just seen the Arsenal score and play-by-play on my iPhone on Sunday morning when I was in the kitchen making breakfast?
I had. And it has led to a lot of confusion about what the Apple Sports app does and doesn’t do, which highlights just how scattered Apple’s current effort to bring information to sports fans really is. I imagine that it wasn’t planned to work this way, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple connects all of its disparate sports pieces eventually, but in the meantime things are a little confusing.
Let me attempt to clear it up a little bit.
The data sourceApple Sports may have debuted on Wednesday, but the data source that drives it has been around for a while now. It drives score information and alerts on tvOS and in the TV app. Since it’s a back-end service, there’s no way to tell if it’s been tweaked a bit for the launch of Apple Sports, but certainly Apple’s had a live-scores/play-by-play data feed for a while now, in public.
Set favorite teamsApple syncs your favorite teams and leagues1 across your Apple ID. You can set them in the Apple Sports app, but you can also do it in the News and the TV apps. (In News, tap on the Sports tab, then the three-dot icon, then tap Manage My Sports. In TV, scroll down and tap on Sports, then scroll to the bottom and tap Manage My Sports.)
This is also the reason why the Sports app isn’t embedding news stories about your favorite team the way the Stocks app does about business information. As Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue told me, the goal of the Sports app is to keep things simple and just display scores, fast. News about your favorite teams is elsewhere—namely, in the News app.
The TV appOn the iPhone, at least in the U.S. (I’m told this isn’t the case in the UK?!) the TV app has the ability to place the scores of your favorite teams in a Live Activity on your lock screen and in the Dynamic Island. In fact, it’s more than that: you can place games in a Live Activity by tapping on it in the TV app and then tapping Follow Live. (Not all games offer Live Activities, but those in most major leagues offer it.)
At least the Sports app includes a quick link to open the game in the TV app, from which you can either kick off a Live Activity or watch via a connected service. It’s a common misconception that the TV app only shows games shown by Apple or channels within Apple TV, but it works with any app that’s connected to the TV app. For example, last night I was able to tap on an NBA game in the Sports app, which opened it in the TV app. From there, I could tap again to open it in the Max app.
So simple it’s complicatedThis is the conundrum of the Apple Sports app: It avoids the complexity of adding a News tab and a TV tab and focuses on scores, which is good. But if you want to start a Live Activity or jump to watch the game, it’s at least one app and several taps away.
I don’t think the app will stay this simple. The name alone—it’s Apple Sports, not Apple Scores—suggests that Cue and his team have bigger plans. I have to imagine that eventually you’ll be able to follow games right in the app, and jump to video sources without needing an intermediary app.
But in the meantime, if you want a Live Activity for a game being shown in Apple Sports, tap the “Open in Apple TV” icon on that game and then tap Follow Live and you will be rewarded.
- Well, some leagues. I have no doubt Apple will keep adding leagues to the Scores data feed, including lower leagues and smaller sports. I see you, rugby fanatics. ↩
Fallout from the “Spulu” announcement from Disney, Fox, and WBD continues; picking apart HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” YouTube strategy; and what does Peacock have in common with the New York Jets?
Go to the podcast page.
How we’d use a HomePod with a screen, Apple’s new Sports app, Vision Pro impressions after a couple weeks, and what we use our iPhone’s Action button for.
Go to the podcast page.
I know the space beat is usually Jason’s bailiwick, but I really enjoyed this lovely piece about Voyager 1, which seems to be on its last legs after nearly half a century, in which it has traveled further from Earth than any other spacecraft. And there’s a tech angle too:
In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data. A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.
The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.
I always find it a little bit awe-inspiring to see these spacecraft—designed to be, in essence, disposable—that keep on doing their job for years past their expiration date; Opportunity on Mars is another good example. Would that all technology was designed in such a fashion.
Godspeed, Voyager. Maybe we’ll see you in about 250 years.1
- Yes, I know the one in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is Voyager 6, MOLTZ. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Apple Sports app wants to get you scores, fast.If you know one thing about Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, it’s probably this: Eddy Cue loves sports. He’s frequently spotted courtside at Golden State Warriors games, and when I talked to him last week he was fresh off a plane and still buzzing about how the Super Bowl ended the night before in Las Vegas.
If you love sports like Eddy Cue, you also probably find yourself trying to check scores like Eddy Cue, whether you’re working late or out to dinner or even (as I frequently find on weekend mornings when Arsenal is playing) walking the dog. The options to check scores on the iPhone aren’t great—I find myself using Google a lot of the time, though lately I’ve also been relying on Live Activities pushed from the Apple TV app.
It turns out that those scores, fed from Apple to the TV app and the Apple TV and a few select other places, are from a data source that Eddy Cue also cares about a lot. He’s been pushing it to be as close to real time as is technologically possible, right down to watching his phone and comparing it to the scoreboard at a Warriors game. And now that data source is driving Apple’s latest app, a free iPhone app called Apple Sports, which is debuting today.
“I just want to get the damn score of the game,” Cue says. “And it’s really hard to do, because it seems like it’s nobody’s core [feature].” In a sports data world increasingly driven by fantasy and betting, Apple’s not trying to build an adjunct to some other app business model. (There are some betting lines displayed in the app, but there’s also a setting down in the Settings app to turn them off if you don’t want to see them.)
“We said, ‘We’re going to make the best scores app that you could possibly make,'” Cue said.
You can select the teams and leagues that you follow—it’s the same following list you might have already made in the News or TV apps—and the main view of the Apple Sports app can be toggled from My Leagues to My Teams, depending on what scores you want to see. When games are live, they’re updated as close to realtime as possible, right down to the ticking clock. You can also back up to the previous day to see how your team did the night before, or tap Upcoming to see what’s happening later on in the week.
Tapping on a game will bring up a detailed game card, with more detail including stats and boxscores as well as play-by-play. (I’ve noticed this same data source in those Live Activities, which greet me on an early weekend morning with details about every shot Arsenal has missed.)
Each sport gets its own custom presentation, so while the app is launching with current in-season sports such as basketball (NBA and men’s and women’s NCAA), soccer (MLS, of course, but also Bundesliga, La Liga, Liga MX, Ligue 1, Premier League, and Serie A — but not the Champions League?!), and hockey (NHL), it’ll also support baseball (MLB), and other soccer (NWSL) and basketball (WNBA) leagues when their seasons begin. Fans of college basketball can also expect an update with a special tournament presentation for when March Madness hits.
NFL and college football will also be supported before their seasons start, so if you’re freaking out because you can’t add your favorite football team, relax—it’s a long way until training camp.
Apple Sports is also integrated with apps that offer live video, so you can jump over to the TV app or other connected apps and start watching the game live. The app is available today (February 21) in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom and requires iOS 17.2 or later.
One of the greatest strengths of Apple’s product line is its ability for interplay. Not only do its devices work closely with each other, but features that begin life on one platform often make their way to others. Touch ID, for example, started on the iPhone before jumping to iPad and Mac models. The same goes for Retina and True Tone displays. Heck, Apple silicon began as part of Apple’s mobile efforts and now powers its entire lineup.
As demonstrated by the proceeding, this shift tends to happen especially with devices at the more cutting-edge end of Apple’s portfolio. No surprise, really, given that those tend to be the places that the company is investing the most time, money, and resources in pushing the technological envelope.
Of course, the latest in cutting-edge tech from Apple these days is none other than the Vision Pro. It’s chock-full of expensive, complex technology and frankly, it would be a bigger shock if none of its advancements ever made their way to other Apple products. Now that the Vision Pro has been in the wild for a couple weeks, it’s a bit easier to figure out which applications might actually make sense on Apple’s other products.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Jason already makes excellent and informative figures for the annual Six Colors Apple Report Card. Here I’ll just add a few more that, hopefully, will also be informative and also go just a little ways beyond what can easily be accomplished in an application like Numbers or Excel.
For simplicity, let’s say there are three perspectives on the data that we might take. We might be interested in patterns in the answers, patterns amongst the respondents (i.e. the participants), and patterns in answers and respondents considered jointly, or so to speak relationally. I’ll show an example or two in each case.
The AnswersFirst let’s look at the distribution of answers to the questions. A small-multiple or faceted graph lets us see the distribution of answers with each question and between questions at the same time.
The distribution of answers for each question, arranged from top left to bottom right by mean score.This graph shows something of the variability within questions while also letting us make comparisons between them. Hardware Reliability has high scores and little variation. Meanwhile opinions on Software Quality are not terrible, but the mean score is dragged down by some particularly negative assessments. Opinions on developer relations, meanwhile, tend negative but are spread across the range of possible scores.
A second important thing to know about any survey of this sort is which questions people chose not to answer, and whether there is any structure or pattern in the non-responses. We can see right away that there is:
Non-response by question.The question on Developer Relations was skipped the most often by far, followed by the question on Homekit. No-one failed to answer the question on Hardware Reliability. We’ll return to these patterns in non-response below.
The RespondentsWe can dig a little deeper on patterns in the respondents’ answers. Just as we looked at the range of scores across questions, we can look at the range of scores awarded across respondents, too. In this next graph, we put the respondents on the y-axis and draw a little circle for every answer they gave. This lets us see how variably generous the survey participants were.
The distribution of answers by respondent, arranged from top to bottom by most to least generous on average.Some respondents use the full range of the scoring scale, others do not.
Questions and Responses TogetherFor social scientists, the most interesting patterns often arise in the way that kinds of answers are patterned across kinds of respondents. This isn’t the sort of survey where any additional information is collected from the participants, and there aren’t very many of them in any case. But even so we can do a little bit of shuffling of the rows and columns of our table of answers to bring out some features lurking in there.
Let’s look again at the answers that are missing. This time we take our table of responses Imagine a spreadsheet where the questions are in the columns and the survey respondents are in the rows. Each spreadsheet cell is a respondent’s score for a particular question, or it’s blank if they gave no answer. Now imagine we just mark all the cells as “present” or “absent”. Then we spend a bit of time shuffling the rows and columns around so that we get all the “presents” and “absents” as close together as we can, while still keeping each person’s answers together and not scrambling the content of any of the columns. (Actually we tell the computer to do this, but in the dim distant past people did indeed do this by hand on a kind of giant mechanical apparatus.) We get something like this:
Missingness matrix.This tells us that we have two main sorts of non-response. The big vertical black stripe towards the bottom of the first column shows that a lot of individual respondents just skipped the Developer Relations question, presumably on the grounds that they are not developers and weren’t in a position to give an informed answer. But most of them answered all the other questions. A smaller number of respondents took this attitude to the HomeKit question, too. Meanwhile at the top of the graph, across the columns, we can see that three or four respondents are responsible for most of the missingness across all the other questions. These respondents have views on Developer Relations, Hardware Reliability, Software Quality, and the Mac. But they skipped most of the other questions.
Finally, we can do this shuffling-the-rows-and-columns trick again with the answers as well as the missing data. There are lots of different ways to do this, but let’s follow the lead of Jacques Bertin, a French cartographer and pioneer modern data visualization who was particularly interested in teasing out the structure hidden in tabular data. Here we take everyone’s answers (the scores from 1 to 5) and shuffle our spreadsheet’s rows and columns again, trying to put people with the same pattern of answers across questions as close to one another as possible without actually scrambling the content of their responses. (This shuffling process is sometimes called “seriation”.) Then for each cell we draw a bar indicating the score. If it’s a good score, a 4 or a 5, we color it green. Otherwise we leave it as just an unfilled bar. If there’s no answer, we draw a flat line instead of a bar. Here’s what we get:
A Bertin matrix plot.This method can be very useful for picking out similarities across respondents (or types of respondent) as well as kinds of question. From the top down you can see the near-unanimity in agreement about Hardware Quality, gradually moving towards more disagreement about the state of Software, the iPhone, and Services, and on down to the most fractured case of Developer Relations, where respondents are split between those who award a reasonably high score, those who are altogether less impressed, and those who have no opinion.
Thanks again to Jason for sharing the data with me. Because it’s a relatively small survey, the challenge it offers to a visualization nerd like myself is finding ways to represent as much of the data as possible in an informative way in a single graph.
So many games at once! Now on the iPad, too.As fans of Major League Soccer are no doubt already aware, Wednesday marks the kickoff of the new season, the league’s second with Apple as its media partner. While the biggest new feature of the MLS-Apple partnership was undoubtedly last year’s mid-season addition of Lionel Messi to Inter Miami, this year Apple has added some new features of its own.
Probably most notably, Apple’s extending Multiview—its feature that allowed Apple TV users to watch up to four live games at one time—to the iPad for the first time. (Now iPad users can truly experience the wonder of the Quadbox.)
Apple has also added a MLS Season Pass item to the main navigation of the TV app, which will be visible for all users, all over the world, no matter their interest in American soccer. The MLS Season Pass page has an enhanced live schedule, now shows recently completed matches in addition to forthcoming events, and offers quick access to club-specific pages. You can jump to all clubs quickly, and select your favorite clubs to float them to the top.
The new playlist functionality allows users who are browsing a row of clips to quickly move between clips without constantly toggling between the video player and the main list of clips in a category.
As before, Apple is producing all games in both English and Spanish, with select matches also in French. All its studio shows are now produced in both English and Spanish, with the addition of a Spanish version of the MLS 360 whip-around show.
While the image quality of Apple’s broadcasts is quite good—clearly there’s some superior encoding and high bit rates going on there—they will still be in 1080 HD this year, rather than 4K. And while Apple Vision Pro users will be able to watch games, Apple hasn’t made any announcements about if any immersive or 3D content will be available.
In-game graphics have been upgraded this season with an emphasis on some new data points, including passing profiles and the distance covered by a player (either in a game or for the entire season).
While some games will be available for free, the bulk of the games will be a part of the MLS Season Pass subscription service which is $15/month or $99 for the season—$13/month or $79/season if you’re already an Apple TV+ subscriber. Full MLS season ticket holders get MLS Season Pass for free.
John Voorhees has a great roundup of gaming options for the Vision Pro, in and out of the App Store:
The lack of any kind of port significantly limits the type of gaming you can do in the Apple Vision Pro – or does it? Sure, even one USB-C port would make a big difference to gamers looking to play titles outside the App Store, but there is a surprisingly wide array of ways to play almost any game on the Vision Pro with the help of a combination of apps and hardware. The solutions run the gamut from simple to complex and span a range of price points. I’ve tried them all and have pointers on how to get started.
I haven’t spent much time with this yet, but I’m wondering if late-night gaming in Vision Pro might actually get me playing games more often.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Here’s a really thorough investigation of Apple Vision Pro from friend of the site zmknox’s perspective of being a low-vision user:
Using my calibration from one configuration doesn’t work properly with the other (I could launch some apps from the Home View, but not much else). So if I last used it with my contacts, I need to re-run eye setup to use it without them. Luckily, there’s a shortcut for this. Quadruple-clicking the Top Button will start eye setup, making it easy to get into without having to dive into Settings. I do wish they’d allow me to save two eye setups (a feature they already provide for users who may use Apple Vision Pro both with and without ZEISS Optical Inserts), but re-running setup isn’t a huge pain.
Come for their perspective, stay for the many tips about accessibility features.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Episode 500 prompts us to revisit predictions from episode 400 and make some new ones for episode 600. Myke also reveals his votes in the annual Six Colors Report Card and Jason adds some ratings of his own.
Go to the podcast page.
You know the drill: when you go through airport security there are two lines. In one, a TSA agent makes sure you’re the person in your passport photo. In the other, a machine scans your carry-on for explosives, weapons, or a normal-sized bottle of shampoo.
Enterprise security is much the same, but instead of passengers and luggage, we’re talking about end users and their devices. In the first line, user authentication verifies a user’s identity, and it’s gotten pretty sophisticated in the past few years, with SSO and MFA becoming more common.
But user devices don’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average device trust solution only looks at a handful of endpoint security factors, like OS updates and firewall. If this really were the TSA, that wouldn’t even be an x-ray machine, more like holding a bag to your ear and listening for a ticking sound.
And that’s assuming an organization looks at end user devices at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.
Unmanaged devices (those outside a company’s MDM) can be infected with malware, full of PII, or worse–they can belong to a bad actor using phished employee credentials.
And hey, there are valid reasons for a device not to be enrolled in MDM. Contractor devices, Linux machines, and employee phones all need to be able to access company resources. But there’s plenty of room for middle ground between “fully locked down and managed” and an open-door device policy.
Specifically, companies need device trust solutions that block devices from authenticating if they don’t meet minimum security requirements.
Even with phishing-resistant MFA, it’s frighteningly easy for bad actors to impersonate end users–in the case of the MGM hack, all it took was a call to the help desk. What could have prevented that attack (and so many others) was an unspoofable form of authentication for the device itself.
That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates. Kolide’s agent looks at hundreds of device properties (remember, our competitors only look at a handful). What’s more, our user-first, privacy-respecting approach means you can put it on machines outside MDM: contractor devices, mobile phones, and even Linux machines.
Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. But Kolide can help close the gaps. (And we won’t even make you take off your shoes.)
To learn more, please watch our on-demand demo.
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.
This is the ninth year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category. I received 58 replies, with the average results as shown below:
Since I used largely the same survey as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion compared to previous years. The net changes between 2022 and 2023 surveys is displayed below:
Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and commentary from the panelists.
MacGrade: A- (average score: 4.2, median score 4, last year: 4.2)
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “The first Apple Silicon Macs were such a profound leap forward in power and battery life that it’s hard to see how Apple could have done much better with the M2 and then the M3. The differences have been minor, and as usual, they’ve not been completely transparent about the purported benefits of the upgraded chips. That said, there’s still nothing close to any Mac with Apple Silicon and they’ve preserved their lead over the competition.”
John Gruber wrote: “By the end of the year, every single Mac in the lineup, save one, is arguably in the best shape that model has ever been.
“The 24-inch iMac skipped the M2 generation but got an update to the M3, along with Apple making it as clear as possible that they have no plans to make a 27-inch iMac with Apple silicon. I’m OK with that — I think a Studio Display with a Mac Mini is better solution. And those who miss the iMac Pro of the Intel era are better off with a Studio Display and Mac Studio.
“The Mac Pro is the only sour note in the lineup. It finally came to Apple silicon (hooray), but spec-wise it’s pretty much a Mac Studio with advanced I/O options (boo). If your work requires high-end I/O, that’s great. But if not, it’s hard to see anything the Mac Pro offers that the Mac Studio doesn’t, other than a higher price and consuming a lot more space on or under your desk. Even if this first Apple silicon Mac Pro is a disappointment though, I say it’s great news overall, because it’s a sign that Apple still wants the Mac Pro in its lineup. At some point in the next year or two, I expect Apple to unveil a Mac Pro with specs that race ahead of the Mac Studio. It’s just obviously the case that Apple silicon isn’t there yet.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “Apple Silicon continues to impress, and Apple seems to be making models people want… except, where is the 27-inch iMac? I don’t want to go down in screen real estate.”
Adam Engst wrote: “Although there is always room for quibbles, such as with the loss of the 27-inch iMac and the awkwardness of releasing the M2 Pro/Max MacBook Pros just nine months before the M3 Pro/Max models, Apple is hitting the Mac out of Apple Park. If anything, Apple’s next task is going to be to figure out what new general capabilities (perhaps AI-driven?) the Mac can be given that would give most people reason to look beyond the low-end chips. That said, the Studio Display remains a disappointment, particularly with respect to the camera, which was supposed to set a new standard rather than still paling in comparison to an iPhone in Continuity Camera mode.”
Christina Warren wrote: “What a year for the Mac! I had to look back at the excellent MacTracker to remind myself of all the new Macs we got in 2023. Not only did we get updates for every Mac across the lineup (with the exception of the 13” MacBook Air), the Apple silicon transition is now officially ‘complete.’ I do feel a little bad for anyone who dropped $4500 on an M2 Max MacBook Pro, only to see the M3 Max 10 months later. The quality of the Apple silicon chips are getting seriously refined and very good.
“I upgraded to a 14-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro this year (from a 14-inch M1 Max model) and if I’m honest, it was an upgrade I absolutely didn’t need to make. The performance gains over two years are real, but Apple knocked it out of the park so much, so early, that most people can buy a machine for years and literally not think about it. That’s definitely the biggest change from the late-stage Intel era. The 15-inch MacBook Air is probably the best laptop for most regular users, and I’m glad it exists. For the first time in years, most of the Mac lineup is finally cohesive and reasonably differentiated.
“I do, however, have complaints. First, shipping any laptop (or desktop for that matter), with 8GB of RAM today is criminal. It’s even worse when said 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro costs $1600. That’s unacceptable. The fact that Apple hasn’t changed the base RAM in a MacBook Pro since mid-2012 is out of step with reality, and as good as the Apple silicon chips are, I worry about encouraging even regular users to buy laptops with antiquated amounts of memory when the starting prices are so high.
“The Mac Pro, in my opinion, is the only clear miss in the lineup right now. It does not need to exist. It is a completely unnecessary product that will appeal to exactly seven people (all of whom probably work at Apple) and if Apple can’t do better, it should just retire the Mac Pro moniker once and for all. At least the Mac Studio with M2 Ultra exists. The iMac still exists, I guess, but Apple has clearly fallen out of love with my very favorite computer. Such is life. All in all, a great year for the Mac.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “Very solid continuation of the Mac lineup. Good hardware revisions and additions – putting the focus in the products that matter most to the lineup, clearing some things up and better positioning themselves for the future of Apple Silicon.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “Apple Silicon continues to lead the pack and Apple’s forethought on building in ML co-processing into ALL its devices puts them way ahead in the race for on-device AI. Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Intel are just now getting to the starting line. Abandoning the Touch Bar and Butterfly keyboard, and adding ports to the MacBook Pros, shows they’re finally listening to their users instead of arrogantly plowing ahead with poor designs.”
David Sparks wrote: “With Apple Silicon, Apple has brought powerful, power-efficient computing to everyone. You can do almost anything now with a MacBook Air. It’s amazing. Then there is the Mac Pro. The Apple Silicon transition was like an Olympic gymnast doing a perfect vault… and then stumbling on the landing. I expect that things didn’t go as Apple planned for the Mac Pro last year, and those things happen. Since they are still making one, they probably have a plan to sort it out. I just wish they’d share a little bit of it.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “2023 marked the end of the transition to Apple silicon. It may have taken longer than Apple anticipated, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Macs are running faster, cooler and longer than they ever could with Intel inside. All it cost was the Mac Pro’s dignity, which it just regained in 2019. The last Intel model was everything a Mac Pro should be—expandable, upgradeable and more powerful than anything else in the line. The new one is a Mac Studio with slots and optional wheels. That’s disappointing for users who were hoping to throw more GPU power at their problems.
“On the software front, Sonoma is proving to be a stable release, which is nice after a few years of bumpy builds. It’s hallmark feature is probably the addition Desktop Widgets. They aren’t for me though; call me when Dashboard is brought back to life. However, problems remain. Just try to walk someone though making a change in System Settings over a FaceTime call and you’ll want to hurl your iPhone into the nearest body of water. And look no farther than this blog post by Jason to relive the horror of setting up a new Mac. Apple has a lot of work to do in these areas, and I’m hopeful progress is being made on them for macOS 15 this year.”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “It’s difficult to ding Apple’s Mac performance. With Apple Silicon leading the way, the Mac hardware seems to be hitting all the sweet spots, and even the iMac finally got an M3 upgrade after 2 1/2 years. But they might as well have named the Mac Pro the ‘Mac Elite,’ priced way out of range for most professionals in most jobs. macOS security features that were individually good ideas have become a tangle of dozens of dialog boxes that simultaneously demand immediate attention and won’t respond because other dialogs are popping up.
“Apple pours its Mac resources into technologies we now know are critical to Apple Vision (VRKit, ARKit, Metal). Meanwhile, critical systems like Mail lose old plug-in functionality in favor of extensions that lack key features (and don’t implement their documented features thanks to bugs that go unfixed for years). Even using newer replacements for older kernel extensions (like Rogue Amoeba) still requires kernel access, a security setting that requires two reboots and disables Apple Pay. It’d be nice if 2024 Macs weren’t missing productivity features from 2008 Macs.”
John Siracusa wrote: “The new Mac Pro ended the Apple Silicon transition this year, not with a bang but a whimper. The promise of owning and controlling this particular ‘primary technology’ is that it allows Apple to make exactly the processors it needs for its specific products. The downside is that Apple now has to make the processors for all its products, including the exotic, high-end ones that sell in very low volumes. When it came time to open its wallet and pay for the monster SoC that the Mac Pro deserves—and that only the Mac Pro will ever use—Apple decided it could not stomach the ROI. So we got a Mac Pro with the same SoC as the tiny Mac Studio, and no support for discrete GPUs. Pretty much every other Mac continues to be amazing these days, so the Mac Pro didn’t drag the year down too much. And, hey, at least it still exists, leaving the door open for an Apology Mac Pro™ some time in the future.
“Apple’s pricing for Mac storage and RAM upgrades has been absurd for decades, but the lack of most other forms of configurability in recent years has really highlighted this problem. Apple seems to be carrying all of its (considerable) Mac profit margins on the backs of these two options, leading to upgrade prices that are often four times higher than market prices for the same amounts of storage and memory. This seems unsustainable to me, but maybe Apple’s sales figures tell it otherwise. Either way, it doesn’t feel great.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “The Mac Studio is the greatest Mac I’ve ever owned. Up until this point the M1 Air had my heart, but this thing is a powerhouse and it’s only getting better. Someday we’ll see the kind of modular capabilities of the Mac Pro in a more affordable model, but for now, one of these things maxed out is an amazing computing platform.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “There has never been a better Mac than almost any Mac you can get now. Their lineup is solid and makes sense. They’ve done a good job differentiating the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lines for portables and the Mac mini versus the Mac studio for desktops. Apple silicon is a beast. I think the biggest risk Apple has is that you just don’t really need to upgrade these machines very often.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “I think both the 15-inch MacBook Air and the base M3 MacBook Pro are very significant steps forward for the Mac. Their introductions meant that Apple finally divorced itself from pairing display specs with the processors those laptops run on. It was a great improvement for the lineup. The Mac Pro was a disappointment, although it doesn’t matter so much because the machine was of niche appeal anyway. But I hope that Apple can one day flex with a true trophy top-of-the-line Apple Silicon Mac.”
James Thomson wrote: “Apple Silicon continued to outpace everything else on the market – the M3 Max MBPs are significantly faster than even my M1 Ultra Mac Studio. The Mac Pro finally appeared, with more of an apologetic shrug for being late than any real fanfare. Sonoma seemed to deliver the relative lack of new features of a Snow Leopard style release, without the focus on stability and bug fixes. It feels almost as if everybody was working away on some other new product. Generally, the Mac trundled solidly along to its 40th birthday.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “I think that we’ve entered a new era for the Mac, with the M-series processors. I’m still rocking my M1 iMac, which I have sworn to keep for five years, along with an M2 MacBook Air, which may be my favorite Mac ever. With the speed and battery life of these new Macs, and the sustained though incremental improvements of the chips, Apple is on a roll.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “The Mac has become the focus of every PC OEM, while historically ignored or seen as just an annoyance (beyond the education segment). It’s clear that it now represents a threat especially in the higher segment of the market.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “This year seemed like a building year on the Mac platform instead of a revolution. The success of Apple silicon is such that even releasing new generations of chips that, with each one, are the most powerful in their class ever, just seems expected. Nevertheless, Apple built on strengths, rolled out a series of updates—particularly welcome with the iMac, which was overdue for a chip bump—and kept entry-level prices feeling quite reasonable. I felt there was a sense of stagnation on the Mac side in how these models were received, though—this might stem from the fact that people bought so many M-series Macs during the pandemic, particularly when the tech sector was flush with cash and hiring like mad, that seeing a modest performance update may feel blah. The Mac hardware grid seems pretty well populated, and I wonder if Apple will ever find a way to break out of the expectations they set. The iMac could surely use more variations, but is there room in a packed line-up?
“Sonoma is probably one of my favorite macOS updates in years. While System Settings is still awkward, the continued alignment of iOS/iPadOS and macOS makes working between platforms easier. I am not sure there is a marquee feature improvement—Apple’s Sonoma website promotes Screen Savers at the top of the list of what’s new! But I think the host of improvements make macOS more pleasant to use than Ventura. The improvements for video and videoconferencing are quite stunning, particularly when you factor in full Continuity Camera for iPhone integration. The video menu now centralizes a lot of scattered features and it takes some getting used to. But I feel like Apple finally got its feet under itself for centering video controls.”
Chance Miller wrote: “The Mac continues to move forward at an impressive rate, even three years into the Apple Silicon era. The 15-inch MacBook Air is an excellent addition to the lineup that I think more people are buying than some of us think. The Mac Pro sits in an awkward spot, but at least it has Apple Silicon inside now. I’m still hoping that Apple can make that long-rumored ‘Extreme’ Apple Silicon chip at some point. Right now, it’s pretty hard to justify choosing a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio. At long last, 2023 was also the year the Touch Bar died. The new entry-level MacBook Pro is a far more compelling machine than its predecessor, even if it is a bit more expensive. That gorgeous ProMotion display is more than enough to justify the price increase in my book.”
Nick Heer wrote: “Apple started the year with MacBook Pro updates and, somehow, ended the year with more MacBook Pro updates. macOS is increasingly showing the strain of looking and feeling more like iOS while retaining the things which make it a Mac.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “Apple’s Mac lineup is solid, if only a tad boring. Apple Silicon Macs are great and I love my M2 MacBook Air (arguably, the best laptop Apple’s ever made), but now that we’ve had M-series Macs for over three years, the novelty of Apple Silicon has somewhat worn off. While in Windows land companies are making OLED laptops, laptops with touch, laptops with two screens, and other weird and fun things, Apple’s still making basic, regular laptops without touch input. I understand Apple not wanting to go full-weird like ASUS or Lenovo often do, but making a computer without touch input in 2023 feels… just wrong to me at this point.
“At the same time, I found Apple’s newfound commitment to gaming on the Mac fascinating and an area worth keeping an eye on in the future. Are a handful of AAA games coming to the Mac a sign of much bigger ambitions? Can Apple’s work on GPUs compete in the long term with Nvidia and AMD? Is there a future in which Apple may bring back eGPU support for Macs, perhaps thanks to the higher bandwidth afforded by Thunderbolt 5? I hope to get answers to some of these questions in 2024.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “While the narrative this year has focused on the M3 Pro and its ‘lack’ of performance upgrades, the base M3 and M3 Max received the biggest leap in performance since the M1. The product mix underwhelmed slightly, but the SoC itself exceeded all expectations.”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple’s MacBook Pro updates have come fairly frequently in recent years but this is the first time it’s worked out so we’ve had two updates in a calendar year. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the M3 MacBook Pros are [looks around then whispers] the fastest MacBooks evaaaah. True story. Also, we finally (FINALLY) got an update to the iMac line, with zippy new M3 processors. Not the best Mac year for sure, but a solid outing.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “I keep seeing fresh ideas in Windows laptops and wish Apple would apply some of that ambition to Macs. But I appreciate that Apple can’t afford to be experimental.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “While I know Apple has its reasons, I still feel that rolling out high-end chips to the lower end models creates confusion at the top. I believe Apple will eventually move to releasing the fastest chips to the performance machines first.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “The M3 chips were a nice update, and it’s nice to see the 14-inch Macbook Pro drop in price. I’m also very glad to see the useless 13-inch MacBook Pro die, finally.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “The M3 itself is awesome but many users are still quite happy with their M1, myself included. macOS was kinda ho-hum, but fit the widgets everywhere theme.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Macs are so good these days! It’s a dream come true.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Although I will remain forever annoyed that the new (black! for real this time!) MacBook Pro series was announced literally the day after my new work MBP had shipped, it was nevertheless a very good year for the Mac. The Midnight MacBook Air that I bought for personal use is also a great machine — it was my first Apple Silicon Mac, and the battery life really is as amazing as promised.”
Dan Seifert wrote: “The Mac hasn’t missed since the Apple Silicon transition and 2023 was no different. It had some weirdness — two generations of MacBook Pro models released in the same calendar year can be confusing to consumers, albeit not terrible — but the Mac is still in a better place than it’s been in decades. Although the 15-inch MacBook Air didn’t seem to ignite a fire in consumers, it’s still a great computer that was long overdue in Apple’s lineup and I’m glad the option for those wanting a MacBook with a bigger screen, but not wanting to pay $2500 to get it, is there. Points off for Apple’s continued insistence in starting with a measly 8GB of RAM in its computers and then its absurd pricing for RAM and storage upgrades. It’s beyond time for that to be adjusted to be closer in line with market component rates.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “On the Mac, Apple is chugging along. M2 to M3 transition handled well, Back to (Space) Black for the MacBook Pro, at last the big-screened MacBook Air (not that anyone seems to be buying it). Even a Mac Pro, not that anyone buys them either.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I wish Apple would release the Mac Studio alongside the Pro/Max chips and simply offer an Ultra option five months later when that chip is available. There’s not enough time between Mac Studio availability and the next Mac Studio-relevant M-series chip being released. I do not want to buy a Mac Studio with M3 Max when 3 months later the M4 Max will be a thing.”
Peter Cohen wrote: “Much has been made about Apple’s push for gaming legitimacy with the M3-based Macs. To be frank, it’s hard to be optimistic about their efforts – there are so many factors that keep the Mac marginalized as a game platform which Apple has no control over, like the dominance of Windows APIs and programming knowledge with game developers, Nvidia’s GPUs, and a general gaming malaise from Mac users. Regardless, the Mac’s Apple Silicon transition is paying huge dividends we didn’t see during the Intel Mac era.”
Dan Moren wrote: “The Mac continues to absolutely kill it. M2 Pro/Max and the M3 generation in a single year? My only concern is whether Apple can continue to sustain this pace of development.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “It was great to see the M3 chips make their debut in MacBook Pros, but I would like to have seen them spread to more of the product line as well. The move to Sonoma seemed to go smoothly, and a few new features on the software side, like enhanced screen sharing and Safari profiles actually make my life better.”
Ben Long wrote: “I was at the Apple Store on Union Square earlier this year and was shocked at how much it feels like walking into a T-mobile store. The store is geared sop heavily toward phones and iPads – the Macs were on a single table. For an aging computer nerd, it’s hard not to feel blah about the state of personal computing because the PC is no longer the foundation of personal computing. I can’t blame Apple for following where the market goes, and I think they’re doing a fine job of servicing what the desktop computer market is right now, but for me the exciting computer stuff is not happening at Apple. They are an appliance store.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Mac hardware is in a great place except for the lack of options for displays larger than the iMac. SSD pricing is looking even more unreasonable. It’s a shame that the Magic peripherals still use Lightning. The software side is still a mess, both in terms of reliability and design. I like Safari profiles.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “The new 15″ size for the MacBook Air is a great option for non-power users, but it’s a shame it arrived so long after its smaller sibling that it gave significant pause about whether to wait for the next generation. Can’t complain about two MacBook Pro updates in the same year including the simultaneous debuts of M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The iMac update was underwhelming considering how old the M1 model was, and it didn’t bring a highly desired larger model.”
Casey Liss wrote: “The Mac continues to fire on all cylinders. I almost complained about Apple not updating the Mac mini… but sure enough, it was updated last January. So many Macs shipped in 2023 that last January seems far, far away. What a lovely change of pace. Even the Mac Pro got refreshed, finally entering the Apple Silicon era. Granted, the purpose of the Mac Pro is questionable at best, but still, it got attention. Apple Silicon continues to be a revelation. It is not all things to all people, but damned if it isn’t close. Incredible performance, incredible battery life, little heat. With Intel, you could choose one, or maybe two, of those pillars. With Apple Silicon, all three are available. After years of being ignored, it just feels so damn good to matter again.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “It’s hard to say much bad about the Mac right now. If someone walks into an Apple Store today, they’re going to walk out with a very good computer no matter what they get, and something that is miles better than the Intel Mac they’re probably upgrading from. The Mac Pro is the only model that gets a real raised eyebrow from me, as it seems to have less of a reason to exist now (especially at its price point) than it ever has before. I also can’t help but wonder what the next step for the Mac is. Apple has basically perfected the current designs, but what’s the next exciting hardware and interaction innovation on the Mac? iPads and Macs have basically the same internal guts these days, and I can’t help but think about what a portable Mac running on iPad-like hardware could look like one day.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The Mac continues to be in an amazing place thanks to Apple silicon. The 15-inch Air rounded out the consumer line this year, and the M3 updates further propelled the MacBook Pro forward as the best all-around computer in the world for nearly anything.”
iPhoneGrade: A- (average score: 4.1, median score 4, last year: 3.9)
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “Two important accessibility features debuted this year: Assistive Access and Speech Access. Assistive Access provides a simplified iOS interface for folks with cognitive disabilities, or whose capacity may have been diminished by age. Android has offered this for years, and it’s great to see Apple making a first stab at it. Speech Access leverages machine learning in an incredibly useful and very Apple way. Apple may not openly call Personal Voice an AI feature, but it is, and it’s legitimately a good thing, and a technologically interesting thing for Apple to do.”
Christina Warren wrote: “At a certain point, you get tired of writing ‘Apple’s best phones ever,’ and the returns on the phones are definitely diminishing, year over year. Still, the iPhone 15 lineup is great, even if the only real new feature we got was USB-C. I love the 15 Pro Max and its 5× zoom, but I love not having to carry an extra Lightning cable even more. Great phones. I do wish we’d get fun colors on the Pro models again.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “Honestly, I find phones incredibly boring now. No more real innovation, just evolution.”
Josh Centers wrote: “USB-C is great, but this has the worst battery life of any new iPhone I’ve ever owned, dating back to the iPhone 4.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “The iPhone 15 Pro Max is the first genuinely great big phone from Apple. It’s well balanced, and the titanium frame makes it feel noticeably lighter than previous models.”
John Gruber wrote: “The new iPhone 15 lineup is great, especially the 15 Pro models. The weight reduction is dramatic, and the titanium feels so much nicer in hand. iOS 17 feels like what it is: a stable, mature operating system. Apple has gone through two major transitions with iOS: the ground-up UI redesign with iOS 7 (can you believe that was 10 years ago?) and the all-screen, no-more-home-button system redesign with the iPhone X. Nothing major has changed since, and nothing seems to need to.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “As a long-time member of the Big iPhone Club, I couldn’t be happier with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The Titanium rails and aluminum frame make it noticeably lighter and the USB-C port makes it much easier to live with. The 5× optical zoom changes the types of photos and videos the iPhone is capable of creating, and it’s been a lot of fun using it at sporting events and school plays. The camera is the mainstream feature of the iPhone. I’m not sure the Action Button is, but I love that Apple gave us the ability to hook it up to Shortcuts. I’m using it to send ideas to my task manager and it’s great.
“On the software front, I’ve been encouraged over the last several years over Apple’s emphasis on its first-party productivity apps like Notes, Reminders and Mail. Apple continues to push them forward while keeping in mind that they are apps made for the masses.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “They’ve reached peak iPhone and I’m fine with that. It remains the most important and relevant computing device on the planet.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “While from a technology perspective there might be little difference between android flagships and iPhone, the overall user experience coupled with the app ecosystem remains superior. This year in particular I want to call out Apple’s focus on accessibility.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “The new action button and titanium seem small but have an outsized impact when you hold and use the Pro models. The pancake camera may be limited to the Pro Max for now, but heralds a really practical optics improvement that will likely trickle down to the ‘smaller’ sibling. And I, for one, am a huge fan of the USB-C port.”
Nick Heer wrote: “The iPhone 15 lineup is, on the surface, even more of a modest update than usual, but it seems to be in service of approaching some kind of idealized smartphone. Think about how much cooler iPhone models could look if they were made in color, though.”
Dan Seifert wrote: “Of Apple’s entire product line, the one that gets me the least excited these days is the iPhone. It’s so massive and important to Apple’s business, yet has felt so stagnant for so many years. This year I upgraded my 13 Pro to a 15 Pro, largely lured in by the hopes of a lighter phone, but after five months, I’m struggling to feel like it was worth it. The improvements that Apple has been focusing on in camera and raw chip performance do not make a significant difference to me, and I think we’re long overdue for Apple to take some risks and actually push the industry forward with the iPhone. Otherwise, the iPhone will continue its trajectory toward appliance status.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The iPhone 15 Pro was an excellent refresh to an already-great line. The iPhone continues to be the most important and most frequently used computer in most of its customers’ lives, and it’s easy to take for granted just how well and reliably it works.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “The camera, combined with USB-C, ACES and additional ProRes support really pushed the iPhone to a new level.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “iPhone lineup seems to have something for everyone right now (unless you want an itty bitty phone). From the iPhone SE to iPhone 15 Pro with the 3× optical zoom, what’s not to like?”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I’ve wanted a dedicated camera button for a very long time (and submitted feedback to Apple about it years ago) so I’m very happy about it. Also impressive is the performance bump and running two recent Resident Evil games on my phone, though I still think of this sort of thing as a temporarily available tech demo as these sorts of iOS games tend to stop working within a year or two, from past experience.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “Love the titanium design, the weight reduction, and big fan of USB C and the 5× telephoto. A very solid refresh overall, nothing earth-shattering, but as much as I could want from a design revision year.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “There are fewer surprises with the iPhone every year. The camera will be better, the phone will be faster… But no surprise isn’t a bad thing. The new iPhones are great. I love my iPhone.”
Dan Moren wrote: “A fine year of updates to the iPhone, but no real standout features. The titanium exterior of the Pro is welcome; it’s made me go caseless for the first time.”
James Thomson wrote: “Unsurprisingly, these are still the best iPhones ever made. iOS got more updates than I was expecting, given the focus on visionOS. Just don’t give two thumbs up during your therapy.”
Ben Long wrote: “I don’t like large phones and Apple’s mostly into large phones. I get that I’m in the minority but, again, it makes it hard for me to get excited about what they’re doing.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “USB-C, a lighter titanium construction, improved battery, and one of the best camera additions the iPhone has seen in years… What more could you ask for?”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “As someone who doesn’t do a lot of photography and remains extremely skeptical of gaming on iOS, I downgraded my iPhone 14 Pro to an iPhone 15 this year. It came in pink, and I certainly never felt like my 14 pro was underpowered. I still miss the iPhone Mini form-factor, though! I sort of wish I had kept my iPhone 13 mini, and just held onto it until it was actually unusable in some way.”
Casey Liss wrote: “I love my iPhone 15 Pro Max — my first large phone. It still feels bigger than I’d prefer, a few months later. I still love the 5× tetraprism lens. The battery life only feels marginally better than my 14 Pro. On the plus side, this phone is strikingly light. I’m all-in on titanium on the Pro phones. Plus, the Natural finish looks so good. That said, Color Czar, more fun colors on the pro phones, please! The iPhones 15 got the Dynamic Island, which I still really like. It’s not the sort of thing that has dramatically changed my relationship with my iPhone, but I find the Dynamic Island very useful. Having the Island in more places will lead to broader adoption, which is better for all of us with Islands on our phones.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “The iPhone 15 Pro is great, though I’m not totally happy with the camera processing and depth of field. The iPhone 15 is way too slippery. I still wish for a smaller phone. iOS 17 is fine, though not very exciting.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “The industrial design of the iPhone 15 series is up there with some of the best of the iPhone. The matte glass treatment for iPhone 15 and the titanium casing for the Pro models will make this a memorable generation for years to come.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “It’s honestly just another premium smartphone right now: a ‘wow’ for style, a shrug for features and functions. Samsung’s and Google’s cameras have mostly surpassed Apple’s. And the Pixel’s AI features are the kind of useful ‘Why doesn’t MY phone do that?’ magic that used to be associated with the iPhone.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “Points for finally moving to USB-C and the iPhone is still best in class. Nevertheless, it’s hard to get excited about a product that doesn’t change much year after year. Buggy iOS software still plagues the platform. And it seems pretty clear to me that Apple backdoored its own devices for someone, probably the NSA. Did they have a choice? Probably not, but it undermines the security and privacy story they want to tell.”
John Moltz wrote: “The new phones are nice phones. They should come in better colors. And smaller sizes. That is all I have to say on the matter.”
Rosemary Orchard wrote: “The action button, and titanium frame on the pro line is really great.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “Annual updates remain pretty iterative, and we could really use a significant change to freshen things up. The Action button offers some nice customizability options, but it seems like many people (including me) aren’t finding a good reason to use it.The regular models got Dynamic Island, but after a year of it being available on the Pro models it still feels underutilized.”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “The iPhone’s biggest problem is expectations: new hardware doesn’t make the same leaps each year that were possible when the category was new. I hate the ‘but what have you done for me lately’ mentality, but it’s the question Apple must answer to drive upgrade sales.”
Adam Engst wrote: “The iPhone 15 Pro doesn’t improve on the iPhone 14 Pro in any significant way. The Action button is a nice idea, but proves difficult to build into muscle memory. While the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s tetraprism camera is impressive, it’s annoying that getting it requires being forced to use an insanely large phone. Where’s the iPhone 15 Pro Mini?”
Chance Miller wrote: “The new 5× camera has been a home run for me. I’ve already found myself looking back at pictures and videos from it far more fondly than I ever have pictures and videos from the 3× telephoto camera on previous iPhones. The ability to record spatial video for Vision Pro is also a nice bonus, even if you do have to make some compromises in video quality. The new FineWoven iPhone cases are pretty awful. I hope Apple has already gone back to the drawing board and has something better planned for the iPhone 16 launch. iOS 17 was a solid upgrade, headlined by things like Live Voicemail and Stand By for me. Interactive widgets are useful, but not as useful as I had expected them to be.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “The iPhone 15 Pro line, and specifically the iPhone 15 Pro Max, is a slam dunk update. The improved optical zoom at 5× is something I use every day to take funny pictures of my dogs, usually when they’re running at the park. The weight reduction of the iPhone 15 Pro Max was nice, but the real stars of the show for me were the addition of USB-C in lieu of Lightning and the Action button. The latter has allowed me to take my usage of Shortcuts to the next level by having a system-wide activation method that no longer requires me to run shortcuts from widgets or the share sheet. When I want to quickly create a new task or frame some of my screenshots now, I just have to long-press a button. I even created a system to assign more than one shortcut to the Action button, and I’m working on ways to turn the Action button into a “contextual” physical shortcut that changes its behavior depending on the app that I’m using. Guess what? Buttons are great.
“The adoption of USB-C is just icing on the cake for these new iPhones. Regardless of whether or not Apple was going to switch to USB-C anyway without the EU forcing their hand, the net benefit for me has been the fact that the iPhone is now part of my existing ecosystem of USB-C accessories that all use the same connector. From battery packs to USB-C glasses and other peripherals, USB-C has meant greater flexibility in terms of what I can connect to my iPhone on a daily basis, and I couldn’t be happier with Apple’s ‘decision.'”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “I think iOS has gone through a sort of transformation conceptually. Building on what it has been, Apple has increasingly thought about personal safety beyond data security. Check In promises to be the single biggest improvement in traveling safely once people understand how to use it best; it’s not the easiest feature to understand at first glance and you need a “safety buddy.” Communication Safety expanding to cover more communication types and formats helps people defeat harassment and unwanted images and video. Also Stolen Device Protection, Safety Check, and (improved in iOS 17/iPadOS 17 and Sonoma) Lockdown Mode. And don’t forget the mid-stream addition of full iCloud data protection in early 2023.”
iPadGrade: D (average score: 2.4, median score 2, last year: 3.0)
Matt Deatherage wrote: “I use my iPad Pro all the time, everywhere, for everything. Apple’s keyboard folio is a failure for me, though, as the keys just stop working after about a year.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “Updates were missing here. I think the current offerings are good. The real challenge is developing workflows that create a need to really upgrade. Most software uses very little of the Pro capacity.”
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple still isn’t doing much with the iPad. The new base model is entirely too expensive for its place in the market.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “The hardware is good, but Apple is having trouble figuring out what the hardware is for, resulting in a weird blend of the traditional iPad single-tasking and multitasking, resulting in a confusing user experience.”
Dan Seifert wrote: “This is the weirdest year for the iPad, simply because Apple didn’t release any new iPad models for the first time since the iPad debuted in 2010. I think that’s less of a problem than it looks like from the outside, because the iPad line is already sprawling and somewhat confusing, and the majority of the models in it don’t feel too out of date. On the positive side, iPadOS 17 doesn’t feel much different than 16, but Apple did address a lot of the problems that Stage Manager had at launch. It’s still not as flexible or easy to use as I’d like, but I can use it way more effectively now when I have to. I think we’d all like Apple to really give the aging iPad Pro a proper redesign, which by all accounts is likely coming this year. And then Apple needs to simplify the lineup: cut the price of the 10th Gen model below $400, jettison the 9th Gen, and put some distance between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro, which are far too similar for most people.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “No new hardware in 2023 was a drag. But Apple keeps finding ways to make the iPad more valuable.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “I don’t fault the company for not releasing new iPads this year, and I don’t think we need annual upgrades to iPads. But I think the iPad has plateaued, and we’re unlikely to see many changes going forward. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve found that I’ve been using my iPad mini 6 much more than my 11″ iPad Pro in recent times, and I hope Apple will continue upgrading the mini, and perhaps increasing the screen size a bit, through reduced bezels.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “What is there even to say about the iPad in 2023? With the exception of a couple changes to iPadOS, there was nothing to talk about. Apple did manage to sneak in a couple of updates to Stage Manager that make the feature tolerable – and actually pretty good – to use compared to iPadOS 16’s disaster. Apple needs to get serious about the iPad again in 2024 with both hardware and software, and I hope they will deliver on this front.”
Nick Heer wrote: “It was a rough year for the iPad, but you have to give Apple credit for meaningful Stage Manager changes, and finally bringing Final Cut and Logic to the platform.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Addressed some of the critical Stage Manager problems just one year after the feature was first introduced with iPadOS 16.”
John Siracusa wrote: “A year without new iPads is not a good year for the iPad. As we exited 2022, the iPad line was confusing and messy. It remained so for all of 2023.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The iPad continues to serve many casual fans well, but disappoint many pros. The hardware lineup is a confusing, outdated mess, which will hopefully be resolved in 2024.”
John Gruber wrote: “That there was no new iPad hardware this year makes it hard to give it a high grade. Worse, the existing lineup is rather confusing. iPadOS remains fine, but to me still seems like the no-man’s land platform: nowhere near as capable productivity-wise as a Mac; nowhere near as portable as an iPhone. Next year better bring clarity some “wow” to the iPad lineup.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “If you had told me in 2018—when the iPad was being marketed as a seeming Mac replacement—that the eventual release of “pro apps for iPad” would be reduced to a press release in a year without a single hardware update, I’d have thought (a) you were insane, (b) Apple was doomed.”
David Sparks wrote: “The iPad, to me, remains a disappointment not because of what it is but because of what it could be. I use mine often, but also often set it down because the next thing I need to do is too difficult (or impossible) on iPad. When the iPad launched (in 2010), I expected it would be much more than it is now in 2024. It may be unfair to judge a product against expectations, yet I feel, at this point, it is justified.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “I love the iPad. I often use my M1 iPad Pro as a laptop replacement, but the product line still feels disjointed and iPadOS still isn’t nailing it. As an aside this is the year I got my pilot’s license and learned how iPads are absolutely indispensable in the cockpit. It’s incredible how they’ve changed aviation.”
Christina Warren wrote: “Apple finally figured out the Mac lineup; I hope they can do the same for the iPad lineup this year.”
James Thomson wrote: “The difficult middle child, the iPad sits sulking in the corner as everybody coos over the new arrival of the Vision Pro, while the older iPhone actually pays all the bills.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “iPads are landscape-first devices for many, yet only one iPad in the lineup has the camera in a place that makes you look good in landscape. Oh, and there are 3 products named Apple Pencil and Apple has 2 elaborate spreadsheets on their marketing page to help you know which model to buy. On the plus side, Stage Manager is notably better than it was last year, and Final Cut Pro & Logic Pro coming to the iPad after years of hopes and dreams were big wins for the platform.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “I start to fear that the growth of the Mac, especially in enterprise, will limit the attention given to the iPad until we see a foldable—yes, I am still convinced we will see a foldable iPad before we see a foldable iPhone.”
Chance Miller wrote: “There was no new iPad hardware in 2023, and that’s not a bad thing. I see nothing wrong with Apple taking its time to release meaningful iPad hardware updates. I certainly don’t think the world needed another update to the iPad Pro where the only change was a new processor inside. iPadOS 17 made some very nice improvements to Stage Manager. I was happy to see Apple make these changes just one year after the feature first launched. We don’t always see Apple make those year-over-year improvements. For me, these Stage Manager upgrades mean I can actually use it without totally losing my mind.”
Casey Liss wrote: “The iPad remains a device in Apple’s lineup. I replaced my 2018 iPad Pro in late 2022, getting myself a M2 iPad Pro then. I love that device, despite the fact that iPadOS actively prevents me from getting many things done, and the hardware is mostly unchanged from back in 2018. Oh, and you need a flow chart to figure out what Apple Pencil to buy these days.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “I recently had a family member ask me what iPad they should buy, because after they visited Apple’s website, they were confused. I told them that was perfectly reasonable, as the iPad lineup is a mess of different features and specs. The same could be said for iPadOS, with its multi-tier approach to multitasking. I would love to know how many iPad owners uses their devices in the classic one-app-at-a-time mode vs. using Split Screen and Slide Over vs. Stage Manager. I know each of these modes have their fans, but I still think a lot of iPadOS needs a rethink. Personally, I have basically given up on using an iPad for much more than social media, reading and video watching. With Apple silicon, Mac notebooks are just a much better tool for what I need to do each day.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I am looking forward to some iPad lineup cleanup in 2024. It’s a confusing mix of Apple Pencil compatibility, camera locations, and functionality.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “The iPad feels stuck. For the first time since they released the iPad, I no longer really use one. The Mac is more satisfying when I’m sitting on the couch or at my desk and the iPhone is good enough the rest of the time.”
Ben Long wrote: “I honestly couldn’t tell you if Apple released a new iPad this year. I get very confused by their nomenclature – I always have to look up the difference between a regular iPad and Airy iPad. But I think one reason I can’t tell you if they released anything new is that the product is so solid that I just don’t need to keep track and if they’re not making radical advancements I don’t really care because what I’ve got now works so well for what I want.”
Jeff Carlson wrote: “Does Apple remember it has an iPad line? On one hand, given how the iPad hardware has outpaced software for years, I can almost understand not putting out new hardware just for new hardware’s sake. But that seems very un-Apple-like.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “No upgrades for a whole year? But you can’t really blame them for not improving an underperforming platform. I wonder if their heart is really in it.”
Wearables and Apple WatchGrade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 4, last year: 4.4)
Apple Watch specifically: Grade: B- (average score: 3.4, median score 3, last year: 4.2)
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “watchOS 10 felt like a step backwards. I didn’t like the reorganization of basic controls—I find myself constantly fumbling, four months into using, for basic navigation. My much-used Timer app was ridiculously badly revised. The only bright spot was the Snoopy watch face.”
Christina Warren wrote: “AirPods continue to be the best new product Apple has introduced since the iPad — possibly since the iPhone — and I gladly upgraded from the Lightning AirPod Pro 2s to the USB-C ones and have zero regrets. I’m still using AirPods Max in 2023/2024, even though they are objectively overpriced for what they are. The worst part is, even though a rumor or a refresh is imminent, if they died tomorrow, I’d almost certainly buy new ones, even though they are by every measure, not well-designed or a reasonable value. And that basically says it all. Apple is so good at wireless audio for people in their ecosystem that the device-switching feature is just too good to pass up. The Apple Watch update this year felt mid, but I’m not mad at it. I’m happy with my Series 8. And Apple Watch remains the best-in-class smartwatch on the planet.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “Very underwhelming year for Apple Watch. Series 9 and Ultra 2 offer little beyond their predecessors, with even the significant jump in chip generations not doing much for the user experience. Double Tap was one of the key features, didn’t arrive until a few weeks after the hardware launched, and I haven’t used it a single time outside of testing it out. watchOS 10 brought a much-needed overhaul, but not everyone loved all of the changes. AirPods Pro were the only ones to get an update in 2023, and that was only a shift to USB-C and a couple of other very minor tweaks.”
Peter Cohen wrote: “This was an iterative, unexceptional year for the Apple Watch, punctuated by a big wet raspberry from Masimo at the end of it, which is continuing to drag Apple down in the new year. The mishegas around the O2 sensor doesn’t take away from Apple’s utter dominance in the smartwatch market, but it does seem to be a glaring tactical misstep from a company that usually knows better.”
James Thomson wrote: “One last hurrah before the biggest wearable in Apple history. The AirPods Pro 2 (and 2.5) still seem to be products from several years into the future. The Apple Watches were deemed so good they had to stop selling them.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “The Watch and Ultra have now reached the stage where they’re just ticking over (ha). The blood oxygen sensor row was interesting as part of Apple’s wider problems, but nobody actually needs a blood oxygen sensor unless they’re seriously ill. AirPods are quietly (sorry) getting better and better – the mid-year Pro revision is a big improvement.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “The tiny changes to the Apple Watch don’t even merit annual upgrades any more. I think Apple could upgrade the regular Apple Watch and the Ultra in alternate years and make each upgrade look more substantial. I would like to see a smaller Ultra; there are lots of women, and men with small wrists, who would like to wear that model.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra2 is (lawsuits excepted), truly what an Apple Watch was meant to be. If I’m going to have a computer on my wrist, it might as well have a large, flat, bright screen with a battery that can last 2 days and go everywhere with me. I have smallish wrists, and the Ultra2 surprisingly fits me just fine.”
Dr. Drang wrote: “Apart from the AirPods Max, Apple’s wearables are pretty much unbeatable. I see Apple Watches and non Max AirPods everywhere on every type of person.”
Casey Liss wrote: “The Apple Watch got a new SoC… finally. But otherwise, there wasn’t much here in 2023. But some innovation here would be nice. watchOS 10 has been hit-or-miss. A lot of changes seemed to be made for change’s sake, which is frustrating. But ultimately Apple seemed to land in the right spot with most of this year’s updates, including the return of swipe-to-change-faces. There’s no indication that the legal dispute with Masimo is going to be resolved anytime soon. That… does not bode well. AirPods Pro MkII are incredible. I did not believe the hype from those who upgraded over the OG AirPods Pro. I was wrong. They really are phenomenal. Plus, they quickly got bumped to get a USB-C charging case, which is excellent.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “Apple’s $549 AirPods Max have fewer features than the majority of the Beats lineup. If that’s not neglect, I don’t know what is.”
John Gruber wrote: “The Series 9 models don’t look any different from Series 8, and the Ultra 2 doesn’t look any different from the Ultra 1, but inside, the new S9 SiP chip provides noticeably better battery life — which at this point is really one of the platform’s only weaknesses. WatchOS 10 is the biggest re-think of the software platform ever. Far more colorful, a bit more ‘computer on your wrist,’ and I think widgets are generally more useful on Apple Watch than apps are. AirPods Pro 3 are just terrific, and the new Adaptive noise control mode is amazing for my day-to-day usage.”
David Sparks wrote: “I like the risks they took with watchOS this year. Overall, the Apple Watch is better because of it. Also, I’m on year two of my Apple Watch Ultra and it still makes me smile when I look at it.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Why can’t on-device Siri do more?”
Ben Long wrote: “A re-vamp of the basic Apple Watch seems due. Not because there’s anything wrong with the old watch, but because I’m curious to see what that might be like. As for wearables, Apple’s disposable approach to wearability really turns my stomach. I try to use my AirPods as little as possible (opting for corded when I’m at home and saving the AirPods for outdoor use) because I feel like I need to make them last as long as I can before consigning their little toxic selves to the landfill. And the Watch isn’t much better – $80 and a week without a watch to get a new battery?? I’ve got a watch that’s 40 years old that I can take down the street and get the battery replaced for 15 bucks…”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “Here’s the thing. All of Apple’s watches are really good. For MANY users, even an SE is a terrific choice. That’s worth a lot in the marketplace.”
Dan Moren wrote: “AirPods Pro continue to be the best headphones I’ve ever owned. I used to have like three pairs of headphones for different tasks, now with the exception of my wired monitors for podcasting, the AirPods Pro is used for everything else. Outstanding. The addition of Adaptive mode and Conversation Awareness have only made a great product better, and I’m glad that USB-C is now an option. The Apple Watch had kind of a nothing year, with the exception of the whole patent fight at the 11th hour. Kind of feels like it’s in a holding pattern until next year.”
Adam Engst wrote: “As with other updates, the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 are better than their predecessors, but not in any way that would encourage an upgrade. The double-tap gesture sounded good, but like the Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro, fails the muscle memory test. It’s just never useful since you have to raise your wrist and look at the watch to invoke it. The second-generation AirPods Pro are pretty good, but not life-changing.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “The Ultra 2 didn’t have many improvements, but it’s clear there’s no competition for the best-in-class Apple Watch line. They’re more durable than the Pixel Watch, are more customizable than Samsung’s due to the standardized bands, and darn it, I won’t leave home without mine. The AirPods Pro are overpriced and their sound is underwhelming but they win the field due to their tight integration with the ecosystem. And the new Adaptive Audio features are pretty impressive. On the plus side, no one complains about the white boogers hanging from your ears any more.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “Apple Watch’s iPhone requirement continues to rankle. It poisons Apple’s solemn (and frequent) mantra that “improving health will be Apple’s greatest contribution to humanity.” Requiring a user of the world’s most popular mobile OS to switch to an iPhone — even if they already own an iPad or a Mac, either of which appears technically capable of setting up and syncing an Apple Watch — feels petty and corporate.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “While Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 are nice upgrades, they didn’t break much new ground this year. I’ve become disenchanted with the AirPod lineup over the years, but if you let me count Beats for the Beats Fit Pro I’m still a fan.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “This was one of the best quality of life updates to WatchOS since it came out. The updates to AirPods, especially the Pro, feel like the product has finally matured. The new audio modes, improved device switching, and FindMy improvements all packed a big punch.”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple needs to get its house in order on the Watch 9. Customers shouldn’t have to deal with patent confusion and they also shouldn’t be charged the same amount now for a Watch 9 without blood oxygen sensing as they were three months ago with blood oxygen sensing. The improvements the AirPods are solid.”
Dan Seifert wrote: “As much as I like a lot of the design flourishes in WatchOS 10, many of the changes feel like a step backward. I don’t think it’s any easier to access the control center by hitting the side button than it was to swipe up from the bottom, and I rarely find myself using the new widgets that are there. Switching between multiple watch faces was made much more annoying until Apple added a toggle to revert it back to the old method in a later update. The software updates for the AirPods Pro added some really nice features that improved their performance and user experience. I do wish Apple would do something with the over three year old AirPods Max, though—they are long overdue for a rethink.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “The Vision Pro isn’t a fully realized product yet, but it’s certainly the most exciting device to come from Apple in the past decade.”
Chance Miller wrote: “Does Apple really need to release a new Apple Watch every year? I don’t think so, and this year’s Apple Watch refresh was proof. I’m still a very happy first-generation Apple Watch Ultra user, and nothing about the second-generation even remotely tempted me to upgrade. I’m sure Double Tap is useful, but I truly don’t think it needed to be tied to new Apple Watch hardware. The most impressive feature of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 is on-device Siri. It makes Siri noticeably faster, and allows you to ask Siri about your health data for the first time. But at the end of the day, it’s still Siri. AirPods Max came out three years ago, and it’s embarrassing that Apple still sells them for $549. Don’t get me wrong, I own AirPods Max and I use them every day. I just wish Apple would pay them just a little bit of attention.”
Nick Heer wrote: “AirPods updates were basically only in software, and the changes to Automatic Switching have been more of a nuisance for me. Apple did introduce the Vision Pro, its first computer you can wear on your face if you live in the United States. Alas, it was not a 2023 product.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “I’m perfectly content with my first-generation Apple Watch Ultra, so I didn’t feel compelled to upgrade to a new Apple Watch in 2023. Embracing widgets and rethinking watchOS’ structure and app UIs was the right call, but I still feel like Apple is missing a big opportunity by not allowing users to design their own custom watch faces that go beyond the limitations of the system’s built-in ones. We saw a minor update to AirPods Pro with USB-C and low-latency audio for Vision Pro in 2023, but another year went by without an update to my favorite over-ear wireless headphones, the AirPods Max. Those have felt like a forgotten product for quite some time now; I hope 2024 will bring a revitalization of that lineup, alongside redesigned regular AirPods.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “This is the second year in a row where the year-over-year upgrades are so minute that even as a nerd who obsesses over the little things, I can’t think of much to latch onto here that’s new. The new SoC might pay dividends down the road, but today the new models run watchOS just as well as the last 2 models in my side-by-side testing. Meanwhile, the double tap gesture which is the headline feature feels like a dud, as I find myself still using my nose to tap what I want in instances where I don’t have a free hand. And then there’s watchOS 10, which made some good improvements to app design, but then changes like how you bring up Control Center are still confusing me months later.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “Apple Watch remains the leader in the category. Ultra has broadened its share in the market, appealing to fitness enthusiast and lifestyle consumers.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “There’s no need for upgrading from a prior watch for double tap. Users were better off finding last year’s model at a sharp discount. What could Apple have been working on in the wearables space that left the rest of the product line stuck in last year?”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “I really like watchOS 10’s new, full-color designs Apple and third-party developers are shipping. This work makes the Watch feel more whimsical and fun. Sadly, the update also brought a shuffling of the core OS, with the side button being remapped to Control Center instead of the Dock, a change that I still think was the wrong move. I would love a setting to change this back, like the one Apple recently added to return the ability to swipe between watch faces without needing to press first.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “I got an Apple Watch Ultra this year and I really love it. The battery life totally changes my relationship with the product. It took me some time, but I have really come to appreciate Conversation Mode and Adaptive Audio on AirPods Pro.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Double Tap is useful, sometimes. watchOS 10 took some big swings, and somewhat succeeded. AirPods Pro keep getting better thanks to new software features. But AirPods Max languishes, and even the base model AirPods don’t have a USB-C case option.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “Apple Watch Series 9 finally gets a new chip… not that I can tell. The new finger tap gesture is more useful than expected, but I’m not sure it’s really enough for an annual product. Rumors of watch band incompatibility in the next year or two will backfire, and I hope they turn out to be false. I’m also a bit annoyed over the AirPods Pro 2 – they should have initially released with USB-C, and this half-step of a new version of AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C and some enhancements for Vision Pro feels very messy.”
Apple TVGrade: C (average score: 3.0, median score 3, last year: 3.6)
Stephen Hackett wrote: “The Apple TV hardware has been so overpriced and overpowered for so long, it feels like I’m wasting everyone’s time by mentioning it again. (Also again: Apple, please add Find My support for the Apple TV remote—my kids are always losing that thing.) tvOS continues to feel like it’s trapped between Apple’s vision for the platform and what it can work out with streaming giants like Netflix. Until recently, even Apple’s own strategy was unclear in places, but the recent retirement of Apple’s legacy media apps have helped clear that up.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “Apple TV is just…a thing that exists. To be fair, a streaming box is mostly judged by how little you notice it (both as a physical object near the TV, and as the thing that connects you to Netflix). But at these prices, AI upscaling or the ability to stream content from the device directly would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
Dan Moren wrote: “tvOS desperately needs a makeover. The future of TV ain’t apps anymore, and a giant grid of icons as the home screen is a waste. Apple’s TV+ app needs fewer ads and more customization for the user, but that’s the eternal push/pull of selling a product and a service that are so tied together.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Nothing very much happened with Apple TV hardware, and tvOS sometimes feels like the unloved stepchild even while the content on TV+ gets huge amounts poured in. The TV app is remarkably frustrating.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “I hate the silver controller and greatly dislike the evolution of the Apple TV interface. It really seems like Apple has given up the simplicity that made the Apple TV great and are slowly falling back to what everyone else does. As someone that has bought every Apple TV since v1 and uses it as my sole entertainment device, it find these developments frustrating.”
John Gruber wrote: “The big change in tvOS is moving the iTunes Movie and TV stores into the TV app. Overall that’s a wash for me, but it’s slightly irritating insofar as I really only ever buy or rent movies nowadays — my TV-show-watching goes through streaming apps. But the “Store” tab in the TV app gives prominent placement on the main screen to a row full of popular TV shows. All I want to see are movies. The best change in tvOS this year, though, is that the circular up/down/left/right wheel on the remote now works like it should have all along: you can run your finger around it in circles to scroll and scrub, just like using the scroll wheel on an iPod of yore. No idea why it didn’t work like this all along, but I’m sure glad it does now.”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “The Apple TV app has gone all in on the philosophy Steve Jobs always rejected: instead of putting your content front and center, it shunts you to the side to make you wade through what Apple wants you to see. Preview the next episodes in your Up Next list? Nope, that space belongs to Apple TV+ programs now, and you can’t reclaim it even if you subscribe. Below my “Up Next” queue are SIX rows of, essentially, ads for content Apple wants me to watch or buy. Only at the bottom of the third screen do I get the “For You” feed, with more ad rows interspersed from there to the end.
“A new season of a show I watch started two weeks ago, and it didn’t show up in the TV app for ten days, despite the apps with the actual show being updated on premiere night. At odd times the TV app still refuses to open Paramount+ shows in the app because I don’t subscribe to the Paramount+ Apple TV channel. I do subscribe to the BritBox Apple TV channel, which often “forgets” to add new shows for weeks or months after they’re available in the BritBox app. The whole thing acts like the only purpose of the app is driving Apple TV+ and subscription revenue, like it couldn’t care less about what I actually want to watch. I use it much less these days.”
Christina Warren wrote: “No new hardware and a buggy software update that made some very bad changes, especially for people who have large collections of content purchased through Apple. I could rant about this here, but maybe I should submit this as an op-ed for Six Colors instead. (Editor: Yes please, Christina!)”
Steven Aquino wrote: “I’m still waiting for tvOS to have an ‘iOS 7 moment’ where it’s completely rethought. I’d like the TV app to become part of the main interface a la Google TV. I think a grid of icons on such a giant screen is wasted potential in many ways, although I appreciate the family resemblance. In the meantime, it was nice to see tvOS get Control Center and FaceTime, however imperfect for a first pass.”
Chance Miller wrote: “tvOS 17 made a surprising number of improvements to the Apple TV, including VPN support and FaceTime support. It also adds an extra column of app icons, so you can see six icons in a row instead of five. That sounds like a small change, but being able to put six icons in the top row of apps is very useful. I still think the Apple TV is the best streaming box money can buy, even though it didn’t get any changes in 2023. It does everything I want it to do, and it does almost all of it perfectly. I just wish it was a little bit cheaper.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “Some of the advancements for tvOS were great (like FaceTime continuity camera), but the hardware still feels uninspiring.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “It’s nice, but it’s kind of boring now, isn’t it?”
Leo Laporte wrote: “Match a lack of hardware updates with a regressive tvOS 17.2 update and you have a platform that’s been sadly abused by Apple. And it’s STILL the best streamer out there. But it could be so much better.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “I would only recommend an Apple TV to the most privacy-obsessed individual. I don’t really like the UI, and the Roku is so much cheaper for a device that is, for most people, equally or more useful.
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “I am not really sure what else Apple can do in this segment that is hardware, and I feel as Vision Pro grows that is where the TV play will go.”
Casey Liss wrote: “I know I’m one of the few, but I freaking love my Apple TV. It’s the only thing we use to watch anything on our television — the only other thing hooked up to it is our Nintendo Switch. Even our cable TV is consumed through the Apple TV thanks to the wonderful Channels app. Not a lot happened in Apple TV land in 2023, but this is a space where I don’t feel like I need a ton of innovation. tvOS mostly stays out of my way, but also had some neat innovations this year. Control Center got better; FaceTime on Apple TV is actually quite nice. Being able to locate my TV remote via the Remote app is also excellent.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “There is no other product out there where I can watch TV without being tracked. The UX is pretty solid, the overall quality is excellent, and the only issues are those streamers that don’t want to play nice with Apple. (Get over it, Netflix.) I’ve tried other streaming devices and nothing comes close, especially as competitors keep adding more ads.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “Nothing really new or exciting here. It continues to be my Smart TV platform of choice, but nothing really interesting to me in the software development of the platform. I can’t remember the last time I downloaded a new app for it…”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple shipped no new TV hardware and removed several legacy software features. Do you want people to buy the Apple TV or not?”
Adam Engst wrote: “Yawn. The only thing that’s at all interesting is the addition of Continuity Camera to the Apple TV for FaceTime and Zoom—it got me to upgrade my fourth-generation Apple TV to a current Apple TV 4K, which was completely unnecessary otherwise.”
Jeff Carlson wrote: “After years of people (commenters, pundits, et. al) asking for something new from the Apple TV, we got… a few interface refreshments that are more confusing? Apple needs to stop trying to be clever and make it more clear how to access controls instead of relying on gestures to reveal invisible items. And why is it when I want to turn on or off subtitles, each time is a game of “which playback interface will I get this time?”
Josh Centers wrote: “The Apple TV is in the best place it’s ever been. We’re seeing regular hardware updates, the price point is justifiable, and tvOS is darn solid.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “tvOS 17 brought more features to the television than nearly any other annual update; it’s a shame that only Myke Hurley cares.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The Apple TV continues to be fine.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “OMG TV OS is a nightmare. How did this get past QA and management? I wish I could downgrade. UI is totally messed up. Old things don’t work and there are so many bugs it needs insecticide. It almost as if the entire OS team was preoccupied with something and this was turned over to summer interns.”
Peter Cohen wrote: “On one hand, Apple’s done an excellent job getting Apple TV software onto, well, everything—it’s built into our smart TV and even in our cable set top box. On the other hand, the Apple TV hardware itself isn’t worth bothering with, at least until Apple gives it a big refresh and adds a lot of new capability. Also, I think Apple TV hardware as a target is dragging down the viability of Apple Arcade offerings. Apple should have a box that – while not competing toe-to-toe with Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo – provides a superlative home gaming experience using the significant ecosystem Apple already developed. Right now it’s just a miserable, second-rate experience.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “I appreciate Apple’s effort to streamline tvOS but I feel like putting everything in the AppleTV app is a mistake. The Home Screen is slimmed down a bit but the AppleTV app is messy and confusing.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “I upgraded to a 3rd gen Apple TV 4K this year just to take advantage of FaceTime for tvOS. It’s a selling point for an Apple TV by itself. The theme of awkwardness continues for me, as Apple needs to provide more controls for video positioning. However, I’m generally a big fan of finally turning a big TV into a big video call device.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “tvOS 17 was a really strong update. You wouldn’t believe how much joy having one extra app icon per row on the home screen can bring. Features like FaceTime via Continuity Camera are begging for (future) dedicated hardware accessories, but being able to use your iPhone in a pinch is nice for now.”
John Siracusa wrote: “I’m part of the generation that thinks video should start playing when I hit the play button. This doesn’t always happen when I’m using streaming apps on Apple TV. I often find apps frozen or unresponsive. Is this Apple’s fault? Maybe not, but it is Apple’s problem—and mine. Also, I still think the Apple TV remote could use some further improvements.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “The hardware and remote haven’t improved. The software is poorly designed and increasingly unreliable.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “I’m a fan of the updates in tvOS 17, and I love my Apple TV because, at the end of the day, it’s the streaming box with the best UI compared to other devices I tested last year. My only criticism is that it’s too expensive compared to the competition; I’d like to see Apple diversify this lineup with more affordable entry options for people who just want to have a nice, reliable streaming box hooked up to their TVs.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “Apple gets points for still having what I think is the best smart TV interface out there, but I also feel like every update to tvOS is making the experience slightly worse. The TV app used to be a place that felt customized for me with my watch queue front and center, but now if feels like a place for Apple to advertise movies on their store, Apple TV+ shows they really want me to care about, and oh yeah, did you know that Messi joined Miami?! My watch queue is still there, but more and more it feels like opening Netflix; my queue is there, but most of the screen is taken up by what they want me to care about over what I actually care about.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “No hardware update for Apple TV in 2023, but that seems to be fine unless you’re waiting for a radical change to design and/or functionality like some sort of combined Apple TV and HomePod device. tvOS got a nice refresh to clean things up and improve functionality.”
ServicesGrade: C+ (average score: 3.3, median score 3, last year: 3.8)
Casey Liss wrote: “Apple services in 2023 were a bit of a dichotomy. On the one side, Apple TV+ seems to be firing on all cylinders. It’s quickly becoming the place for good TV; the way HBO used to be. Fitness+ is great, and though they’re innovating slower than I’d like, new features like Stacks and Plans are welcome. Apple Music the service is still pretty great, even if the client apps are so/so. News+ is… fine… but I do like the daily crosswords. So far so good.
“Things fall down for me in a couple of places: value-for-money, and stability. In the value-for-money department, Apple One used to be $30/month. This was expensive, but felt like the value was good but not great. It is now nearly $40/month, and it’s unclear what those price hikes have bought us. We certainly aren’t getting any more iCloud storage, which is still criminally low. Regarding stability, iCloud is still pretty good, but not quite rock-solid. That remains frustrating, both as a user and a developer. Additionally, both as a vendor and as a customer, I’ve seen Apple Pay — which used to be darn near flawless — have a lot of authorization issues late in the year. This is incredibly frustrating.”
Chance Miller wrote: “Apple Arcade, Apple News+, and Apple TV+ all got more expensive in 2023, as did the corresponding Apple One bundles. This was the first year I’ve actually questioned my Apple One Premier subscription, which now costs $37.95 per month! The math still seems to work out in favor of Apple One Premier for me, but the buffer is a lot closer than before. For instance, Apple TV+ is pretty hard to recommend at $9.99 per month. If it wasn’t included in my Apple One bundle, I don’t think I’d be a year-round subscriber. Apple News+ now includes The Athletic, which more than offsets the price increase for me. I’ve been a paying subscriber to The Athletic for years, so this is a big win in my book. Also, bonus points for Apple News+ adding crossword puzzles. I love crossword puzzles, and Apple’s are very good.”
Christina Warren wrote: “I’m not super happy with the price increases, if I’m honest. Inflation as a reason is BS when these services are almost pure profit. If you’re going to raise my rates 15% for Apple One Premier, at least give me some extra iCloud storage or remove the 100,000 song limit on Apple Music. The quality of the services is fine. I still won’t use iCloud as a default file storage service for serious work, but it mostly works these days. Aside from the song limit BS, Apple Music is very serviceable and has good audio quality. (Spotify is better for sharing with friends, for recommendations, and on the Mac. Apple Music remains unusable on the Mac.) Apple TV+ is not HBO, but it has quietly made a name for itself for high quality programming. The notable thing to me, is that individually, not a single Apple service (except maybe AppleCare) is best-in-class. However, the sum of all the parts and the integration with the devices and OSes makes them work.”
John Gruber wrote: “Lots of great shows and movies on TV+. Slow Horses, Silo, Hijack, For All Mankind, and Flowers of the Killer Moon were all standouts. iCloud remains secure, fast, and reliable. So much seamless continuity (including via Continuity-branded features) across devices. But I’ll repeat this gripe from previous years: it’s miserly that Apple is still offering only a mere 5 GB of storage at the free tier, and have left the paid-tier storage allotments unchanged since like forever. I wonder how many zillions of iPhone users out there don’t have device backups because they only have a free iCloud account with 5 GB? The Apple One bundle is a good deal, but the free iCloud tier should be genuinely useful for backing up a modern iPhone.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “High marks for everything but AppleCare. Avenues to get high-level support on tough issues have been closed off and we’re at the mercy of the wizard behind the door in Engineering. My crankiness is the result of a now nine-month case open with Apple for a $5000 MacBook Pro that they acknowledge has something wrong with it.”
Steven Hackett wrote: “Apple’s services offerings feel like they’ve been in stasis for a while. A lot of them are good, some are okay, and the ad-infested Apple News+ continues to be bafflingly bad. What is less baffling is Apple’s upselling of these services. I understand this is a growth area for the company, but it’s hard not to think that iOS feels like a yard sale sometimes, with red badges and full-screen interstitials tied to services junking up the place.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “I’ve really enjoyed Apple TV+ this year. Great stuff.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “I rely heavily on Apple services in my life, from file storage to photo sync to music streaming. Meanwhile Apple TV+ seems to have really hit its stride with consistently releasing good shows and Apple Pay continues to be an essential tool for merchants and customers alike. Outside of the iCloud.com web app, I think Apple’s services are basically all things I can easily recommend.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “TV+ is a great product, and Fitness+ is underrated. The rest is taken for granted; like so much of Apple, it’s just stuff that we expect to work reliably in the background, like the rotation of the Earth, even though it’s far more complex (duh) than that.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Dealing with Apple advertising in the OS is getting really annoying.”
Ben Long wrote: “I don’t use a lot of Apple services, just ApplePay, Apple Card and iCloud. They’re all fine and do what I expect, but I get VERY tired of Apple pushing all the other services at me through every corner of my various devices. It feels very Microsoft.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “I use a lot of Apple services, but nothing particularly bugged me up or down. This year I went through a 5-month iCloud syncing problem for gigabytes of data that resolved after hours of calls to Apple with no explanation. That bothered me, but it’s peculiar to me, for sure. It’s also still incredible that the starting free tier for iCloud is 5 GB. As I have written in previous years, Apple should give some percentage of any Apple mobile device you purchase as free storage. They should probably simply make the 50 GB iCloud free to anyone who buys any Apple mobile device ever, drop the 50 GB and 200 GB iCloud+ tiers, and move to 500 GB, 2 TB, 6 GB, and 12 TB as the only paid tiers.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Apple TV+ has some of the best programming around: Silo, Foundation, For All Mankind, Lessons in Chemistry, Slow Horses, Shrinking… and those are just from this year! I’m enjoying feeling like the company is into the prestige sci-fi TV business. That said, the rate hikes have put a ding in the value proposition for me, and I still don’t feel like Apple News+ or Apple Arcade offers me anything—I just get them because it’s cheaper with the bundle than if I don’t. Apple Card and Apple Pay are still standouts, though I worry about the former’s long term prospects for survival.”
Josh Centers wrote: “They jacked up prices without adding much new, so I don’t have much good to say here.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “Price increases across several of the services were unsurprisingly not well-received. Apple TV+ continues to offer a solid selection of content but with a limited library that makes it tough to compete with the streaming heavyweights. But with everybody raising prices, Apple still remains one of the cheaper options.”
John Moltz wrote: “Prices went up in the same year we had an actors and writers strike, pushing out timelines for shows. That’s a bad look. Viewers shouldn’t be the ones paying for your tough guy tactics with unions.”
Dr. Drang wrote: “Apple Music can’t do things I want and insists on doing things I don’t want. A sorry descendant of iTunes.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “I use a lot of these services: I pay for Apple TV+, Apple Music, iCloud; I regularly use Apple Card, and Apple Pay regularly; I use Apple News without the plus. I feel I get good value from those services for which I pay. I find Apple News most disappointing, but that is as much caused by bad writing by the content providers as it is the service itself.”
Nick Heer wrote: “A classical-specific experience for Apple Music has been a long time coming, but the result feels half-baked. The rest of Apple’s services feel fine; not great, but fine. Points for a rapid rollout of Advanced Data Protection worldwide.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “Apple services, for me, is a mixed bag. Fitness, Apple Pay, and Apple Care continue to perform well. Music has great features but often quirky workflows. Apple News+ is, in my opinion, not user-centric. Not being able to truly block sources from the interface is a good example. You know there are business reasons for this… and that user satisfaction is not one of them.”
David Sparks wrote: “I continue to enjoy Apple TV+ content more than I expected to. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but find much of Apple’s content compelling. Overall, Apple has done a good job of providing compelling services and I’m okay with what I’m paying for them. At the low end, however, Apple should, at this point, be able to give folks more than 5GB of free data. It’s baffling.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “Increase iCloud’s base storage sizes, you cowards.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “They’re overpriced but Apple wins again due to their robust ecosystem (and lock-in). It’s such a mixed bag. News+ is useless. Apple Pay is a star. iCloud is just annoying. Yet I continue to buy them all. Strategically, Apple One is a winner, even if individual services are sometimes lacking.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “The TV+ content slate continues to be top-tier. Slow Horses and For All Mankind were among my top shows of the year again. Shrinking was a real gem, and I cannot wait for more from that show. Outside of that I am finding it harder and harder to judge the quality of Apple’s services. Maybe it’s a good thing if I do not have too much bad to point to, but I am continually wary of how much they want me to pay them on a monthly basis.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “Apple rocks services. Sure the technorati call it a Walled Garden, but mainstream users love it. They want it to just work and it does with great content. But what’s up with iCloud and 5gb free? Don’t nickel and dime users.”
Jeff Carlson wrote: “Things still nag: Apple News insisting on showing a placeholder for channels I’ve set to ignore, telling me it’s been ignored; the mess that is the Music app on macOS.”
Marco Arment wrote: “Apple TV+ is really growing nicely. Show quality continues to be high, and even after its first price increase, it feels very worthwhile.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “A realization I had recently is Apple TV+ is by far my favorite streaming service. The quantity to quality ratio is exceptionally high, in my opinion.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Apple has put out great content for Apple TV+, but honestly not that much of it. Music is fine, and Classical Music is nice for enthusiasts, of which I am not one. News+ is really nice when I remember to look at it, which is almost never (i.e., basically only when I want to read something from WSJ and I remember that I can do that in News+). I doubt I’d recommend the highest level Apple One subscription to a normal person. The Apple Card is very cool, and the savings account feature is neat.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “It’s hard to view price increases across the board without any improvements to the services themselves as a positive.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “Top ratings for Apple TV+. Under the hood, all my services in Apple One have worked nearly flawlessly. Apple finally added more storage options to iCloud which is critical for those of us hitting multi-terrabyte photo libraries.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “I continue to have reliability problems with iMessage, and this year it lost several months of conversations. There was also a widespread bug where editing related names in Contacts would delete them from all devices. Siri is still slow and unreliable. The services apps are just not good.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “Still only 5 GB base storage for iCloud. This should be an international scandal. The EU should mandate that cloud storage be increased for devices.”
Peter Cohen wrote: “The rising price of Apple services hasn’t translated into a lot more use for my family. Instead, we just seem to be treading water and paying more for what we’re already using. As a kaiju fan I’m very, very fond of ‘Monarch’ and hope they continue to do more.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “On the one hand, Apple’s services have worked reliably for me last year: Apple Music continues to lead in terms of design and lyrics, and has improved its recommendation features with a new personalized discovery station; Apple Originals were some of my most watched shows in 2023. On the other hand…nothing much has changed in 2023? I still would like to see more features to make iCloud Drive a viable alternative to Dropbox, an iCloud-based version of Time Machine for all Apple devices, and a higher tier of Apple Arcade to give me access to AAA games that Apple seems so interested in bringing to their platforms lately. If Apple wants me to give them money every month, they should try new things more often.”
Adam Engst wrote: “The significant price increases this year don’t feel like they were accompanied by any changes that make me want to pay more. Instead, they’re driving me to drop Apple One Premier (by eliminating Apple TV+, which doesn’t have enough decent shows to bother paying for regularly).”
John Siracusa wrote: “Prices have increased and service quality has not. Maybe it’s just inflation, but I think we should at least get improved client apps to go along with our price hikes. Instead, many of the Apple’s service apps are degrading. Is anyone actually happy with the Music app on macOS, or the News+ reading experience on any platform?”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “As with Apple TV, Apple News+ acts a lot like it doesn’t care much what you do once you’ve subscribed. It constantly tells me there are ‘New Stories’ at the top when there are not. I can’t even reverse-pinch to zoom while reading on an iPad, and that makes no sense. iCloud seems more reliable while Messages seems less so, refusing to send more than ever. I don’t need Siri to become ChatGPT, but if I ask for a song in my library by both artist and album name, it would be nice if it stopped playing songs that matched neither.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “I use many of the Apple services on a daily basis and they are dependable like never before.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “Apple Arcade continues to disappoint, and while I’m glad they added more iCloud storage options, they are too expensive.”
HomeKit/Home automationGrade: C- (average score: 2.8, median score 3, last year: 2.7)
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple Home is a hot mess, largely thanks to tacked on Matter support that has introduced chaos into what was once a tight ecosystem. I have no idea what devices will work and which won’t. I’ve lost confidence in the platform.”
Jeff Carlson wrote: “Is it the year of Thread? Year of Matter? Will this stuff ever be as reliable as it should?”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “It’s become ever so much easier to find devices that work with HomeKit (or at least can be mashed in using Homebridge). HomeKit Secure video allows me to trust cameras more than I was able to before. I still find the mix between Scenes and Automations highly confusing but if I document everything I can sometimes recreate my successes.”
Christina Warren wrote: “All of this continues to be a mess and bad.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “As an Apple user, I love using HomeKit for continuity and the like, but there are way too many ‘No Response’ messages for accessories—without much, if any, respite.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “HomeKit is largely in limbo due to the extremely slow (and lazy) Matter rollout. That’s not Apple’s fault. No, Apple’s fault is much greater: letting last year’s putrid Home app redesign go another year without any quality of life improvements or bug fixes.”
James Thomson wrote: “HomeKit remained pretty much unchanged from 2022. Maybe it’s all quiet because something big is in the pipeline, but I think I have made that exact same prediction before more than once. Matter didn’t materialise. Siri is stagnant. Perhaps it is just the comparison to the far more articulate (and frequently inaccurate) LLM products, but Siri no longer feels fit for purpose.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “I got my first HomePod. The hardware is good, but I was shocked that there’s a bug where it can’t actually see many of the albums I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store. The automation features are more clunky and limited than I expected given how long the’ve been around.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “I noticed some minor improvements to Homekit – I integrate with Ikea smart lights and a Hive sensor, and it has been quicker to respond since the big OS updates in September.”
Nick Heer wrote: “All I remember is, when I upgraded to the ‘more reliable’ Home architecture, it broke the two minor automations I have for a single smart thermostat.”
Marco Arment wrote: “HomeKit seems no more or less reliable than other smart-home systems. It doesn’t seem like it’s getting much love, but it continues to mostly work.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “Matter, the long-anticipated ‘savior’ of the smart home, came and…very little changed. Adoption among third-party manufacturers has been slow and scattershot and, if anything, I’ve had more headaches upgrading older devices in my home to Matter than I’ve seen practical benefits from this new technology. At the same time, just like with Apple TV, I believe HomeKit provides a superior interface and performance compared to other smart home platforms (I’ve tried them all), so I continue using it happily.”
John Gruber wrote: “I’ll repeat my line from last year: Big picture, this whole thing still feels like it’s always poised to get good ‘next year.’ 2023 wasn’t that year (again).”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “I feel like I say the same thing every year but the Home app and HomeKit devices are just very bad and stuck in the past. Nothing about the Home app or HomeKit is exciting. Siri still regularly asks me to authorize a HomeKit request using my iPhone. I can’t think of a more inconvenient way to automate a home.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “HomeKit feels like it hasn’t advanced very much in recent years, and the introduction of Matter seems to have only introduced more areas where things can go wrong. I rely heavily on HomeKit in my home, but I can’t really point to anything about my experience that improved over the course of 2023.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “I’ve given up on HomeKit, for the most part. I need devices that integrate better into an overall system, and I haven’t fully bought into the HomeKit ecosystem, which leaves me with a few devices I can use in the Home app, and a bunch of devices I can’t. I find Alexa integration a lot more universal and handier. I have high hopes for Matter, though.”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “I haven’t moved much into Thread, but I rely on HomeKit every day The system needs better error propagation and reporting; I’d love to hear Siri tell me ‘Your lights were last accessible at 4:55 PM” rather than “the lamp is not responding.’ I suspect licenses need to be cheaper to drive further adoption, but I also suspect that’s not happening in a services-driven world where customers are viewed, as one former Apple exec notably put it, as ‘people with our money in their pockets.'”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “I love that Apple is making a regular size HomePod again, but it was a bit disappointing they changed almost nothing compared to the original from 2018. But I’m glad it’s back, at all. Not much new to speak of this year for Home overall.”
Steven Hackett wrote: “The big HomePod is back! Matter is here! Neither of these things make much of a difference to my life! However, one day Matter may matter, making it easier to add all sorts of things to HomeKit. And maybe one day the HomePod will grow a screen, which would be an instant-buy for my kitchen. Until those futures arrive, HomeKit continues power all sorts of stuff around my house, quietly and reliably. I rarely think about my smart home setup, and that’s the best praise I could give it.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “Still flaky, though I still use it regularly.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “Apple should own this category, but the home automation space is so fragmented, and the players so unwilling to cooperate that everyone comes a cropper. Especially the poor homeowner that’s trying to get it to work. I guess HomeKit is the best in a very weak field but that’s faint praise. Matter still doesn’t matter.”
Rosemary Orchard wrote: “The new architecture and matter support finally rolled out, and that will result in a better HomeKit experience for everyone long term.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “I added a few HomeKit devices this year, and they’re fine. The Home app remains a confusing mess. And Matter hasn’t lived up to its billing as the Holy Grail for ineroperability.”
Adam Engst wrote: “I’m torn here because I really like using all the HomeKit light switches I’ve installed via Siri and automations, so much so that I disliked having to fuss with switches when staying with family over the holidays. But at the same time, Siri doesn’t recognize commands as reliably as it should, and it’s possibly even getting worse. Matter was supposed to be a big deal but has been completely confusing and underwhelming.”
Chance Miller wrote: “The Home app is still a mess, Matter has been a major disappointment, and Siri is still unreliable for even the most basic smart home tasks. To make matters worse, Apple botched the launch of a new architecture for the Home app and HomeKit. This feature launched with iOS 16.2, but was quickly pulled after people said it broke compatibility with a bunch of their accessories. Apple eventually relaunched the new architecture with iOS 16.4, but has anyone actually noticed any material improvements? On the bright side, Apple released a new full-size HomePod in 2023. Siri problems aside, it works great and sounds great. I still hope Apple has more in the works for smart home hardware, though.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Matter has been a flop out of the gate, and Apple’s ‘new home architecture’ hasn’t changed anything for me. Basic features like being able to disable a smart home appliance still aren’t available, and the company has been super quiet on the HomePod front. The whole segment feels stagnant.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “HomeKit, Matter, and the Home App continue to struggle in a fragmented partner program. Nothing “just works” or even works all the time. I think Apple needs to build the core (Thermostat, Camera, Light, Outlet and Lock) and let everyone else exapnd from there.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “Another neglected product.”
Dan Seifert wrote: “The Matter smart home platform rollout has been a disaster, and I think most people should still wait before investing in it. But anecdotally, my experience with HomeKit and the Home app improved quite a bit over the course of 2023, to where it is faster, more reliable, and more consistent than it ever was before. A big part of that is down to the devices you plug into it, and I changed every lightbulb in my house to Philips Hue late in the year because the Nanoleaf bulbs were just too unreliable, but the Home app’s automations and dashboard are much more consistent and reliable than ever before. Apple still needs to improve automations though — it’s bonkers that I need to use a third party app to hack multiple conditions into an automation and there still isn’t an optimal way to set up motion-sensor-based lighting automations without resorting to a lot of convoluted workarounds.”
John Siracusa wrote: “Siri continues to be a boat-anchor weighing down the HomePod and other HomeKit accessories.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “This is the first year where it all just worked. I have a very complex home automation setup bridged into Home and Home + Siri have become something I use constantly, and it all works well and consistently.”
Peter Cohen wrote: “Here I thought Matter would be HomeKit’s salvation and it’s turned home automation into an even bigger mess. I hope the industry can work out the issues with Matter in 2024.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Same as it ever was. HomeKit is unreliable, and doesn’t work with enough devices. It pains me that I have to run Homebridge. That’s not necessarily Apple’s fault, but it’s also not not Apple’s fault. Matter seems to be a total nothingburger. Same story: not their fault, but not not their fault. Though I’ve never owned a HomePod, I’ve heard continual grumbling of them failing. No thanks.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “Stability continues to be a bit uneven for me, with HomeKit accessories that once worked for years no longer working through the Home app but continuing to work through their vendor apps. Restrictions on who has to be logged into an Apple TV/HomePod for it to be used as a hub continue to annoy.”
Hardware reliabilityGrade: A+ (average score: 4.6, median score 5, last year: 4.5)
John Gruber wrote: “No news is great news in this category.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “The unreliable touch ID sensor on my keyboard, and a weird new bluetooth issue on my M1 Mac Studio give me pause.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “You pay a price for Apple kit, but at least it works reliably and Apple does the best job in the business standing behind their products.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Apple’s hardware quality remains very good. Even my 2017 MacBook Pro (the one with The Bad Keyboard) steadfastly refused to break — I upgraded to a 15-inch MacBook Air because the performance was no longer adequate, but the hardware itself was infuriatingly intact. Even the battery wasn’t that bad! iPhones and iPads are also pretty much rock-solid these days.
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “First year I’ve had with 100% no problems across all devices. Most of my family the same. (Late in 2023, my older’s 6-month old MBA required a trackpad replacement, which took THREE TRIPS to the Apple Store—maddening.)”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “Did I mention my 9-month AppleCare case on my MacBook Pro? I know stuff goes wrong and normally a hardware problem doesn’t phase me. It’s when a company doesn’t support the device when it fails that makes a low reliabiltiy score the result.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “Anecdata, of course, but I haven’t had a hardware issue with any Apple products in years.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The core products — iPhones, iPads, Macs, Watches, AirPods — are all remarkably reliable these days. Just don’t expect HomePods to work for very long.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “Great quality never grows old and in the instance of a lemon, swift replacement. AppleCare+ is a good deal for iPhone users where just one slip and drip outweighs the cost. It’s the only device contract I make sure all family members have.”
Chance Miller wrote: “All of my Apple hardware is rock solid, and seems to be getting better almost every year. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is also the most durable iPhone I’ve ever owned, and my first-generation Apple Watch Ultra still looks as good as it did on day one. It’s been a few months since I got my 14-inch MacBook Pro in space black, and it’s cleaner than my midnight MacBook Air ever was.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “I’m struggling to think of any real reliability disaster from 2023. The thermal problems with iPhone 15 at launch do come to mind, but feel like a non-issue these days.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Hardware’s pretty great!”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “As always, Apple is best in class when it comes to hardware reliability.”
Christina Warren wrote: “I had no service incidents this year that were not my own fault. Everything seems to be firing on all cylinders, hardware wise.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “An overall very strong year in this department.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “I got a brand new Mac Studio early in the year, and had to take it back because it was generating tons of random visual artifacts on the screen. First Mac I’ve ever had to return.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “My anecdata is that I bought an iPhone 15 Pro, and the USB-C connector didn’t charge reliably, so it had to have the internals replaced. Since then, fine. I haven’t heard any other tales of woe, so assume things are generally going as they should.”
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple devices last for so long that I’m less and less inclined to update regularly. That sort of reliability and longevity is unheard of in tech.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “I get the desire to move away from leather, but Apple’s FineWoven material is simply terrible. I baby my devices, and while my leather iPhone cases would darken around the edges and eventually get a few nicks as I got toward the end of my yearly ownership cycle, the edges of my FineWoven case started peeling off within two months.”
Nick Heer wrote: “My MacBook Pro survived a glass of water all over its keyboard.”
Dan Moren wrote: “I rarely if ever have a problem with an Apple product that can be traced to the hardware.”
Casey Liss wrote: “I’ve had virtually no hardware issues, and can’t think of any ‘gates’ from this year. Apple is killing it in this department.”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple hardware had a tough time of it in the late 2010s and continues to improve in the 2020s.”
Ben Long wrote: “What can I say, the things that work just stay working and the things that are broken (like the flaky USB performance on my Trash Can Mac Pro) stay broken. Can’t complain about any of it. And it’s all still so pretty.”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “In the past six years I’ve needed some iPhone and iPad replacements, but nothing in the past few. The keyboard folio needs better quality.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “All my hardware has been working well this year.”
Dr. Drang wrote: “Everyone in my family has Apple products, and they never fail.”
Software qualityGrade: B (average score: 3.6, median score 4, last year: 3.4)
David Sparks wrote: “macOS, in particular, feels like it is on an upswing. The last few updates have been solid. I also like the way Apple is now able to release so many new features to all platforms at once. It didn’t used to be that way.”
Dr. Drang wrote: “I update my iPhone to the newest iOS release within a day or two of it coming out. I don’t update my Macs for months. I typically don’t see the new features as worth the risk of the bugs and dumbed-down interfaces that seem to accompany every new macOS release. Still angry about what they did to System Settings.”
Marco Arment wrote: “I’m so happy, and relieved, to be at a point where I can honestly say that Apple’s software quality is currently great overall.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “Mostly good. Exceptions are tvOS and iPad multitasking, which seems to be deigned to not not look like ‘classical’ multitasking everyone knows how to use.”
Steven Hackett wrote: “Living in Apple’s ecosystem continues to come with weird bugs. Personally, I’ve seen Messages crashes on my Mac, Fitness competitions fail to update and iOS widgets refuse to update, all in the last 24 hours. None of these are show-stopping issues, but they are annoying. Even more annoying is the lack of tools to troubleshoot these issues. Too often the only answer is to reboot a device to log out of iCloud. The former isn’t a big deal, but the latter is a real pain… especially if you have to use System Settings on the Mac to do so.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Everything on macOS, and to a lesser extent iOS, still feels buggy: the same old bugs that never get fixed, plus some new ones. Bug reports are ignored. macOS Sonoma replaced Mail plug-ins with Mail extensions, but even after three major releases the API still doesn’t work properly. Sometimes Gatekeeper erroneously reports that apps downloaded from outside the Mac App Store are damaged and refuses to open them, with no way to override this except using Terminal—the worst possible first launch experience. Xcode 15 shipped with known bugs that prevented building apps for older versions of macOS, and it took three months for these to be fixed. It has now been almost ten years since Swift was released, and the compiler is still buggy and slow. SwiftData shipped this year in an immature state.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Do MacOS and iOS annoy me sometimes? Yes. Do I ever, even for a moment, consider switching to Windows and/or Android? Absolutely not. My current employer supports Macs in a very half-hearted fashion, but I still have a better experience, overall, than the average Windows user.
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I submitted a lot of software suggestions in 2023, and I think the general theme of most of those is that Apple doesn’t seem to use their own apps. For example, parental controls under Screen Time is missing a lot of obvious features to make it more useful for parents, and there’s also an obvious loophole kids can use to get past downtime limits for a very long time. And that’s when the limits don’t mysteriously disappear due to a bug.
“Or consider how a screen time request for more time appears on Apple Watch, yet the options provided are all non-functional. You can pick something like ‘Approve for 15 minutes’ and it does nothing, you have to take out your phone and do it there. Another example is the Books app overhaul: They made it much worse, and a bug made it so that the books I was reading didn’t show up anywhere in a list. About a week later, the “Continue” list started to appear with the books I had touched since the app update. By then I had made a new collection of books that I was actively reading so I wouldn’t have to depend on Apple to track that for me. Beyond that, the entire ‘Read Now’ tab is almost entirely ads, which mirrors the awful overhaul of the TV app some years back. This is not a good experience. Taking all of my 2023 feedback into account, and seeing how much from prior years remains unfixed, I just don’t think they’re doing a great job.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “I’m running the latest version of macOS Sonoma on my almost 5-year-old iMac. I’ve probably written hundreds of thousands of words on this thing over the years, and the OS has always been rock-solid for me. It’s a badge of honor to get such longevity from a product, and it starts with the software. Apple deserves the utmost credit for supporting an ostensibly outmoded piece of kit so well.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Many highlights, but so many bugs.”
Nick Heer wrote: “I am not sure what I ought to expect, but it is surely possible to achieve a higher standard than this.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Like hardware, Apple had a very strong year for software reliability. Everything worked well. Some features missed their original launch dates but still came out before the end of the calendar year, in good form.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “Sonoma was decent, and it only broke a few things. That’s about the most I can say for it. Not blown away by any new features, and actually annoyed by a few things like the ways Notifications have changed, the new Systems Settings setup, and the #@!$ Video Reactions that started showing up in the middle of remote therapy sessions.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “I think Apple is at the top of the software heap but the attempt to sync all experiences feels like it is slowly losing some of the simplicity that the company was known for.”
John Gruber wrote: “I’ll keep it short: I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “iOS / iPadOS and macOS Sonoma were both stable upgrades, though there remain plenty of bugs that I’d like to see fixed. Apple could take a year off and work on bug fixing, rather than add new features.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “Apple continues to struggle in both usability and reliability. There are so many examples of poor Apple UI, from the ridiculous System Settings in Sonoma to the eternally confusing Apple Music. At least Apple stays on top of bug fixes and security updates. They do a better job fixing their problems than anyone else in the business. Which ain’t saying much.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “It’s fine. It’s just no longer exceptional.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “A few years ago the general vibe was that Apple’s software quality had fallen off a cliff, and it seems like they’ve recovered from that. Most Apple apps are very solid these days, and while there are some bugs across all platforms, I think we’re in a pretty good place.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “Nothing ever crashes. It’s great.”
Christina Warren wrote: “I appreciate that Apple is trying to slow-roll new features. (Sprints! They are clearly shipping in sprints now rather than all at once.) But as I say every year, I wouldn’t mind another Snow Leopard year. The thing is, I don’t think that new software stuff really sells new products the way Apple thinks it does. The hardware, especially on Mac, has been the story for the last few years, and on iOS, you get a new phone when your old one feels laggy or there is a really good trade-in offer (people up upgrade yearly like me are outliers, as we should be). So why not take a year to really focus on consistency and bug fixing and stability? I think macOS needs this most but I wouldn’t be mad to see this across the line.”
Chance Miller wrote: “The software on all of my devices seems more reliable than ever. Apple is also getting better and better at addressing bugs quickly, especially on the iPhone. They aren’t afraid to release multiple smaller point-updates to fix problems, instead of waiting to bundle everything into one bigger update.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “We are long past the days where my Mac would run for weeks without crashing, but for the most part everything is reliable.”
Casey Liss wrote: “New shiny continues to trump reliability. It’s not awful, but it’s not great. Same as it ever was.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “While I do manage to run into odd glitches from time to time, I think macOS Sonoma and iOS 17 (and even tvOS) have been the most reliable upgrades in a long time. I also find the enhancements to be plentiful and beneficial.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “Sonoma is Apple’s most stable version of macOS in years—but that’s less praiseworthy than it may seem.”
Ben Long wrote: “Nothing new for 2023 here, just the continuation of a years’-long trend. I think Apple has broken a lot of UI things and needs to fix them and I feel like their software continues to be less reliable than it used to be. In general software QA continues to feel lacking. And don’t get me started on the disaster that is the Music app. Oh what I would give to be able to use iTunes 3! Or SoundJam! All that said, when I look at my non-computer-nerd friends, I see them asking me fewer and fewer questions. Managing an iPhone or iPad seems very bulletproof for the typical user, and I think that’s very impressive.”
James Thomson wrote: “Minus one point for the state of the screensaver framework in Sonoma alone.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “The number of old, unfixed bugs is staggering, and their lack of attention to UI details in the OS is troubling.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Better than expected, but still needs a lot of work tightening up loose functionality and squashing bugs.”
John Siracusa wrote: “Several performance and correctness regressions in the macOS window manager have compounded the longstanding bugs in basic macOS features. It’s death by a thousand cuts, with an occasional (temporary) severing of an entire limb. iOS and iPadOS are doing better, but they have the same kinds of problems as macOS. My family’s Screen Time information still doesn’t match up across multiple devices. I don’t even bother looking anymore because the numbers never agree. Screen Time is not a new feature, and it still doesn’t quite work.”
Developer relationsGrade: C (average score: 3.0, median score 3, last year: 2.8)
Matt Birchler wrote: “Thanks to things like generative A.I. sucking the oxygen out of the tech space in 2023, it seems like developer relations were a non-story basically all year. I think App Store restrictions are still something that Apple will have to reckon with (and regulators will force the issue if Apple doesn’t change some policies), and I also think that Apple releasing a brand new platform that should have endless possibilities, but will be locked down by Apple’s restrictions, will bring up these conversations again in 2024.”
James Thomson wrote: “WWDC steadily improves, and is becoming more of an actual event again. The developer labs for the Vision Pro were excellent, and it feels like that half of developer relations are firing on all cylinders. But Apple continues to pick fights with the world in the name of extracting maximum revenue from developers, and it seems like all their chickens are going to come home to roost soon.”
Christina Warren wrote: “Apple is committing more code to GitHub, even if they don’t make it obvious, which is awesome. The Mac Game Porting Toolkit was the best surprise from WWDC. The Epic lawsuit might be over but the EU stuff is just getting started, it’ll be interesting to see how side loading will be implemented in Europe.”
Matt Deatherage wrote: “I worry Xcode Cloud is the start of treating developers even more as a revenue source than as ‘the symbiotic partners we need for our products to have any value.'”
John Moltz wrote: “The company has fought tooth and nail against any changes to the App Store rules. This not only hurts developers, it hurts customers as well.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Apple has made it clear that it thinks little of developers.”
Josh Centers wrote: “What developer haven’t they pissed off? Big developers don’t even want to support VisionOS. Independent Mac developers are worried Apple will demand 27% of sales. Onboarding a user onto a Mac app is a nightmare due to all the security prompts. Apple’s developer relations have never been worse and it would take years to repair the damage, assuming Apple even cares.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “I’m not a developer so I shouldn’t comment, but I still hear howls of pain from App Store devs. Apple must fix their approval process: it’s bizarrely capricious.”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “Developers have been asking for new App Store features for years, but Apple only implements them under the force of a court order. That’s not a good look.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Apple has really screwed the pooch here. Its increasing desire to cling on to every possible penny from the App Store is making it take incredibly developer-hostile positions. One has to wonder: is Apple concerned that Google will lose its DOJ antitrust case and be banned from paying to be the search default, which will tank Apple’s revenues and profits? Might that be why it’s trying to hold on to every penny? Whichever, it’s now reaping what it sowed: at the time that it wants to launch a new platform (visionOS) it is being thoroughly snubbed by the most important big developers such as Netflix, YouTube and Spotify. This isn’t a good position for Apple. Small developers can’t fill the gap the big ones leave. And they may not want to. Apple needs Susan Prescott (who apparently took over as VP of dev relations some time in 2023) to first persuade the board that it needs to play nice, and then to persuade developers that it will.”
Ben Long wrote: “I get very frustrated with AppStore Connect and some of the other online developer resources. There are a lot of areas that are poorly designed and, overall, those resources are very flaky. A lot of ‘that didn’t work, try again later’ type messages.”
Chance Miller wrote: “WWDC 2023 had a clear focus on getting developers as excited about Vision Pro and visionOS as possible. The developer labs for Vision Pro seem to have been quite popular and useful for those who attended them. Apple never lifted the so-called “pause” on casino and gambling ads in the App Store. I suppose that’s a point in their favor. For the App Store, big changes are coming in 2024 whether Apple likes it or not.”
John Gruber wrote: “Third year in a row with the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unimproved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers want to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “Based on what I heard from developers over the past few months, Apple really dropped the ball in terms of providing indie app makers with dev units of the Vision Pro. The very people who are going to carry this new platform for the time being given the absence of bigger names were the ones who couldn’t test their apps on actual hardware. That seems wrong and shortsighted.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Developer relations remain positive, especially for indies, but increasingly many bigger companies are getting rubbed up the wrong way by App Store policies. And yet Apple changes almost nothing until a government forces them to.”
John Siracusa wrote: “Apple has launched a major new platform in 2024 with the Vision Pro, and a lot of the developer conversation around it in 2023 was focused on the kinds of apps that won’t be possible due to Apple’s restrictions. Developers now assume the worst when it comes to dealing with Apple, which is dispiriting for everyone involved.”
Marco Arment wrote: “Developer relations are slowly improving. The tools and documentation are noticeably progressing, and drama around App Store rules and greed was fairly low this year.
Michael Tsai wrote: “The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, and communication. Nothing seems to be getting better. Apple does not act as though it really cares about developers or their success, and developers see Apple as more an impediment than a help in building, maintaining, and distributing their products.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “I think Apple does very well for most developers. Large developers want to keep more of the income and small developers want to release products at the last minute. For the 70% in the middle, a methodical process that doesn’t try to push the envelope of acceptability is a very stable environment.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Apple’s hubris serves them well (truly!) in so many areas, but this is not one of them. Apple has released a new platform, their first in a decade, and they can’t help but continue to thumb their noses at developers on the regular. Some of this is on the verge of being rectified by regulation and/or legislation. Apple must see these compulsory changes coming down the pike, and yet here we are.
“Given that we’ve had a fifteen year history of Apple behaving this way, even a small amount of concessions probably won’t change your average developer’s opinion. At this point, the same developers who were deeply enthusiastic to develop for Apple’s platforms are now doing so despite Apple. This hubris can be manifested in small but frustrating ways. When the Vision Pro was launched, only a handful of developers got access to developer kits, and none of them were Indies. Even Indies who are deeply enthusiastic about Apple’s platforms weren’t given a developer kit. Why not? I also remain absolutely appalled by the completely tone-deaf website about how to write better Feedbacks/Radars. Feedback is a black hole in which effort and time goes, never to return.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “WWDC has a great vibe this year and I think Apple did a great job in trying to encourage developers to get excited for visionOS.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “It’s anecdotal but devs I talk to say Apple has been great.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “it will be interesting to see the response to Vision Pro this year. I am still disappointed we have not seen more for Mac.”
Environmental, social and societal impactGrade: B (average score: 3.8, median score 4, last year: 3.4)
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Shipping a carbon neutral watch is a big deal, even if 20% of that is achieved via purchasing carbon credits.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “I was really impressed by the Carbon Neutral advancements this year, and want to give them top marks for this. But overall I feel like it has become too complicated to be able to judge a company of this size as being a net ‘good’ for the world.”
Rosemary Orchard wrote: “They’re working really hard on being environmentally sustainable, which all large companies should do.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “Apple 2030 is a noble goal, but I hope Mother Nature doesn’t find out Apple’s stance on right-to-repair.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “With the exception of education. Apple is still pushing iPads that are costly, can’t be shared and need an expensive keyboard to really make them useful.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Apple’s reliance on China continues to trouble me. However, its renewed concentration on doing what’s right for the environment is impressive and worth celebrating. The fact that some Apple Watches are now 100% carbon-neutral — including charging — is astonishing. Also, I liked the Mother Nature skit at WWDC. So phooey on all of you that didn’t.”
James Thomson wrote: “Mother Nature personally gave Apple the all clear, so that has to be worth a point or two.”
Dan Moren wrote: “I’m sure Apple would like us to laud it for its environmental stances, especially its attempts at carbon neutrality, but their achievements have been sullied by criticism of exactly how they’re achieving that carbon neutrality, and they did perhaps too much patting themselves on the back with the Mother Nature sketch. Throw in the company’s ongoing attempts to stymie organized labor at its retail stores, and Apple is starting to feel a bit like the behemoth it is instead of the scrappy upstart it always wants to be perceived as.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “Apple’s environmental goals are inspiring, and I didn’t even mind that Mother Nature video. Less mining means fewer troubling work environments around the world, which is another big win for humanity. I would like Apple to put more of its weight behind climate change legislation in the US and around the world. On the social front, Apple’s response to unionization efforts in some of its retail locations hasn’t been stellar. That’s something worth keeping an eye on in the future.”
Marco Arment wrote: “Apple’s aggressive environmental efforts are laudable, impressive, and hopefully effective. They remain far too close to and dependent on China.”
Dr. Drang wrote: “Still good on the environment. Still good on inclusion with regard to its customers. Still poor on labor relations.”
Chance Miller wrote: “Apple released its first carbon neutral products, which shouldn’t be overlooked as Apple works toward its goal of becoming completely carbon neutral by 2030. The Home app in iOS 17 also added a new “Grid Forecast” feature that shows you a prediction of when your energy provider will be generating electricity from carbon-neutral sources like solar and wind. Features like Grid Forecast and iOS 16’s Clean Energy Charging are still in their early days, but I think they could go a long way toward educating Apple users about how they can be mindful of their environmental impact. I wish Apple had paused advertising on Twitter sooner than it actually did. I also didn’t appreciate Tim Cook’s lackluster justification for why Apple was still advertising on the platform in the first place.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “I appreciate product changes that will get Apple to its stated carbon neutrality goals. Some of Apple’s virtue signaling was a bit ham-handed. I would always prefer that environmental claims could be independently audited, and that a focus on sustainability would also address the issue of how often Apple is expected to ship upgraded products. That’s also a challenge for Apple customers, when they consider how often a new phone, watch or pair of AirPods is needed.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “I would measure Apple’s accessibility programs top notch and the company’s education initiatives near the bottom. Everything else falls in the middle.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Apple’s commitments to accessibility and privacy remain stellar.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “As usual, it feels like Apple could be doing more and better. They say not to let perfect be the enemy of good, but since I am not in charge of anything, I feel I can complain with impunity. Is Apple trying harder than many others in the areas of environmentalism, DEI, accessibility, etc.? Probably. Are they doing the most they reasonably could be? I don’t think so.
Steven Aquino wrote: “As someone with a lifelong stutter that makes communication trying, it was heartening to see Apple put so much energy into speech-oriented accessibility features this year. The Personal Voice functionality (and accompanying THE LOST VOICE short film) is a standout.”
John Gruber wrote: “Another repeat comment, but another good year on this front: Climate/carbon is the societal area where a company like Apple can and should make the most difference, and I’m hard-pressed to think how they could be doing more than they are, practically. 2023 saw the launch of several entirely carbon-neutral Apple Watch configurations. We’re living in sensitive times on other social issues, and Apple seems to be managing that very astutely and honestly.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “Better than most, though they do their share of greenwashing (such as claiming that some Apple Watch models are carbon neutral). And I should ding another point for that dumb sketch they did in June about the environment.”
John Moltz wrote: “I grade on the capitalism curve. Apple certainly cares from a public perception standpoint — after all, Mother Nature helped introduce the iPhone 15 — but it does do better than probably any of its competitors in trying to be less hurtful to the environment. It still falls down horribly on labor relations, which is inexcusable for the richest company ever.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “I upped my score this year due to Apple’s strong security and privacy updates to iCloud and devices. I can finally lock my iCloud down and encrypt everything. That’s huge.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “The attempt to make the Watch carbon-neutral is laudable, though there are serious doubts about the way it’s achieved: “carbon offsets”, i.e. planting trees somewhere, is a business riddled with scams.”
Leo Laporte wrote: “Apple continues to have an outsized impact on the tech industry. Rightly so. They are careful in what they do, pay attention to their consumers, and make damn good products. Their commitment to diversity and accessibility is clear. Considering they’re in the business of filling landfills they do a decent job of keeping it green and I believe they’re trying to do better. Tim Cook gets credit for balancing social responsibility with padding profits. He’s walking a tightrope and I don’t think there’s a net, even if there is a three trillion dollar pot of gold on the other side.”
Ben Long wrote: “Overall they seem to back up their diversity/human rights work with real action. They’re so-so on their environmental efforts but better than most. But to my eye they are, without a doubt, a monopoly that needs to be broken up. We used to complain about Microsoft selling an OS and a browser? Hell, we used to complain about Apple selling an OS and a word processing and paint program. Now we’re fine with them selling the software, the hardware, and all the media you consume? That’s bad for consumers, creators, artists, and society at large.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “I’m very pleased with their green initiatives, and while the textile bands didn’t work out to replace leather, at least they tried.”
Matt Birchler wrote: “No matter how many offsets they’re using to achieve their carbon neutral goals, it’s good to see the biggest consumer company in the world bragging about moving the right direction here and it will inspire (pressure?) other companies to do the same.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “Speaking as a rather wilted flower child, I see Apple as being more of a force for good than most huge corporations, but hardly perfect. I’m rather alarmed about Apple’s move to close down a San Diego office and move its employees to Texas, given that Texas is a hostile environment for women these days, especially those of child-bearing years.”
Any other comments?Dan Seifert wrote: “For 2023, the vast majority of Apple’s products felt like they were in a holding pattern, waiting for the next big turn in their development. The tweaks to the iPhone and Apple Watch were overall pretty minor and the iPad just didn’t show up to school. The Mac is perhaps the only one that continued its forward trajectory this year, though 2023 was far from as impactful as prior recent years have been. Obviously 2024 has already brought more excitement with the launch of the Vision Pro, but I’m hoping we see some real movement in Apple’s other product lines too.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Apple definitely had some ups and some downs this year, but I reflect on the year as a whole as a solid year for Apple. The iPhone and Mac are boing doing extremely well. The Apple Watch isn’t exciting, but it’s carrying on. And Apple Vision Pro! A whole new platform! The only place where things took a turn for the worse was iPad. Just about everything else I think was either status quo or an improvement. My overall rating for this year would be a 4, if such a thing existed.”
Alex Lindsay wrote: “Overall, I think Apple head and shoulders above its competition. However, I think the company is on the verge of losing the elegant solution it once commanded. Every update seems to be more complex without always providing the proportionate benefits.”
Michael Gartenberg wrote: “Apple is Apple. No it’s not Apple days of the breathless Steve Jobs keynote. Yes, product launches post-Covid feel like slick two-hour infomercials that would go well on late night cable—but they do bring stability and mean there won’t be unexpected crashes. Tim Cook has shown to be excellent at what he does best: keeping the trains running toward trillion dollar valuations. Jobs wisely didn’t name someone like Ive as a successor. Apple hasn’t had a moonshot in a long time and I wonder if Vision Pro might be pushing the envelope a little too hard. Stilll, people are making predictions too fast. The 128k Macintosh (as they used to be called) was a flop. It took a Scully to make it work with Mac Plus and II. At the end of the day, Apple makes great products with stunning displays that Apple can’t wait to users to get their hands on. And get their hands on them they do.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “Honestly, I don’t really care about anything Apple does outside the Mac and macOS. I have a phone, iPad and watch, but honestly don’t really care about them at all, other than that they work when I want them to work. I don’t use them for work, and have no need for the latest and greatest of any of them. New iPhones and iPads are always just some iteration of existing hardware with more better faster whatevers, but nothing that excites me. Another slab of generic metal and glass. The Vision Pro might have been exciting, but not at $3500.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I think of how far we’ve come from the four quadrant product grid. I realize things aren’t so simple anymore, but they also don’t need to be so messy. The Vision Pro is a nice example – it’s overpriced and few will buy one. Eight years from now, we’ll have six different models at various price points and feature sets. In an ideal world, Apple would care just a bit more about the user experience. I don’t mean just in each product, but also in how they roll them out. When the M4 Max is announced, wouldn’t it be better for customers to be able to buy whichever Mac works best for them with the new chip? Do we need a new M-series chip annually if the product line can’t keep up? Does the Vision Pro need to cost $3500? How much would it cost without the external screen? Are they out of touch? Apple products have always been priced juuuuust on the wrong side of comfortable. Vision Pro is about twice that amount.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Looking forward to the Vision Pro category in next year’s survey.”
Christina Warren wrote: “A very good year for Apple, largely led by Mac hardware. I look forward to seeing some hopefully beefy Mac minis in 2024!”
Andy Ihnatko wrote: “Super-excited about the Vision Pro. It could be Apple’s next iPhone. It could be their next Newton MessagePad.”
John Moltz wrote: “While Apple has made Watches that were ridiculously expensive and now makes the Vision Pro which is quite expensive but probably priced not that unfairly, I am constantly amazed at how it ships a $600 Mac and a $330 iPad, both of which are really solid devices. The company is a bit of an enigma even now.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Obviously next year there will be a slot for the Vision Pro. There’s a lot of potential in this – personally I think it will settle down as an entertainment product, with spatial video from sports being a potentially huge attractor. But you need the entertainment apps on it… and that’s going to be one of the big challenges for the coming year: not antagonising developers, and perhaps even accepting less money in order to foster better long-term relations.”
Zac Hall wrote: “You ever think about the fact that Tim Cook could be the first Apple CEO to retire?”
Ben Long wrote: “Re-reading this, I realize I sound very negative. But I expect a lot from Apple and do hold them to a particular standard, and when you’re in the lead you should be held to a higher standard. At the end of the day, I never consider switching any of my devices to an Android/Windows alternative because Apple still far exceeds the user experience of those devices. Sometimes I look wistfully at Linux machines, because I’d love to not be tied to a huge corporation, and to have more control over when and how I upgrade, but we live in a world now where your computer life requires an entire ecosystem and, more than any single feature or product, it is the ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ quality of the Apple ecosystem that keeps me on-board.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “This felt like the year of ‘no fuss.’ Despite my iCloud sync problems, I had to think the least about problems with Apple and felt the best about buying new hardware that I have since 2020?”
Federico Viticci wrote: “As we close the book on 2023 and look forward to 2024, a big question looms over Apple: are they really ‘late’ to AI, or were they waiting to release a more useful application of AI with LLM-powered iOS features that are going to benefit hundreds of millions of people in ways that go beyond texting with a chatbot? I want to believe that Apple’s rumored rethinking of iOS 18 around artificial intelligence will see Shortcuts take a prominent role and allow users to control their devices and apps in ways that aren’t possible today. iOS updates have been pretty iterative and unsurprising for the past few years, and iOS 17 was no exception. That’s not a bad thing (interactive widgets are great!), but I’m ready for something new and different.”
NotesI didn’t vote in the survey. Thanks to all of those who who participated: Shahid Kamal Ahmad, Steven Aquino , Marco Arment, Charles Arthur, Matt Birchler, Shelly Brisbin, Jeff Carlson, Robert Carter, Josh Centers, Michael E. Cohen, Peter Cohen, Matt Deatherage, Jessica Dennis, Dr. Drang, Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Lex Friedman, Michael Gartenberg, Rob Griffiths, John Gruber, Stephen Hackett, Zac Hall, Dave Hamilton, Devindra Hardawar, Nick Heer, Myke Hurley, Andy Ihnatko, Paul Kafasis, Joe Kissell, Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Casey Liss, Ben Long, Roman Loyola, Brian Mattucci, Benjamin Mayo, Kirk McElhearn, Carolina Milanesi, Chance Miller, Rich Mogull, John Moltz, Dan Moren, Quinn Nelson, Rosemary Orchard, Dan Seifert, Allison Sheridan, Rich Siegel, Brent Simmons, John Siracusa, Eric Slivka, David Smith, David Sparks, Brett Terpstra, James Thomson, Michael Tsai, Federico Viticci, Christina Warren, and Gabe Weatherhead. And thanks to Khoi Vinh for suggesting this concept back in October of 2015.
All our previous surveys are available via our Apple Report Card archive page.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari – stopping you from being followed by ads around the web. Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Our desks’ peripheral setups, how we watch movies, hand typing vs. dictation, and whether we’ve seen Apple Vision Pro users in the wild.
Go to the podcast page.
No matter what you think of its future prospects, we can all agree that the Vision Pro is weird, right? One of the world’s most powerful companies has spent a decade preparing to ship a new product and platform that’s embodied in a $3500 VR headset that lets you use apps in 3-D space.
After a decade of steady and boring iteration, the Vision Pro is… not that. And I love it.
Apple is so disciplined and conservative with its product choices and has largely benefited from that tendency. Pretty much every hardware product Apple ships sells in such great numbers that it makes it awfully hard to experiment in public. (The Sony-made displays in the Vision Pro are available in such limited supply that Apple won’t even be able to sell a million of them in the first year, which is probably just as well since the product is very much a version 1.0.)
But while I admire the great care Apple takes before it brings a product to market, I do sometimes think that the company is missing out on some potentially great products because they’re not willing to get weird—and risk failure. Consider the original MacBook Air, which was deeply weird—but led to a second-generation model that became the template for Apple’s laptop design for the next decade!
The technology already exists today for Apple to create some wild stuff, the likes of which we’ve never seen from them. The Vision Pro has broken the seal. Let’s get weird, Apple.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
When it comes to accessibility, Apple is reliable. A person with disabilities who wants to use the company’s tech can count on assistive features with familiar names and functions being there across an array of platforms.
Though Macs got the VoiceOver screen reader first, the modern era of Apple access really began in 2009 when basic accessibility features came to the iPhone. Through the introductions of the iPad and Apple Watch and AppleTV models running software based on iOS, the accessibility suite has advanced, always building on the baseline, with just a few hiccups along the way. And once a feature debuts on one platform, it generally finds its way to all of them, with tweaks included to account for differences in the way you use a watch, a tablet or a computer.
So it isn’t surprising that Vision Pro accessibility builds on what’s gone before. What is surprising is the mix of real innovation here, along with some decidedly version 1.0 explorations of what’s possible.
Accessible Impressions: The Short VersionI don’t own a Vision Pro — my experience so far has only come at an Apple Store demo, so I have an incomplete picture. At my demo, I focused on whether I, with my particular flavor of low vision, could use this thing, and what my experience could say about how Apple has approached Vision Pro accessibility generally. This is my first chance to look into the future. I’ll need more time with the device before I can assess the usability of a challenging technology for everyone who wants that chance.
Going in, I was pretty sure that eye tracking would not be the way I interacted with the headset. I’m extremely near-sighted and sensitive to light. So I was prepared and warned Kevin, the retail employee setting up my demo, that I would most likely need to use VoiceOver or one of several pointer control methods that don’t require a well-aimed eye gaze. I didn’t opt to use VoiceOver beyond an initial run-through because I wanted to use my vision as much as I could, and there was more to learn about working around eye gaze than by using a screen reader. As an Apple product with its roots in iOS, the VoiceOver experience promised to be routine.
The accessibility experience began with device setup. Scanning my face to fit the light seal went smoothly, with Kevin guiding me as I turned my face to show the iPhone all angles. Without that help, I would have required VoiceOver, as I do when I set up Face ID on my own devices.
Next, I showed my high-powered reading glasses to Kevin. I don’t wear them when I use a computer or my phone, but they’re helpful when reading printed documents. They have thick prescription lenses, and I had guessed that there would be no Zeiss insert available at the store that matched them. Based on filling out the Zeiss prescription form for Vision Pro, it is possible to get an insert for my prescription. I was shocked by that, since they’re so heavy. Based on what I learned later in the demo, I feel relatively certain I could have benefited from an insert matching my lenses – at least for using the Vision Pro as a computer, if not for consuming entertainment.
Finally, because I wouldn’t be using eye tracking, I didn’t calibrate with the series of dots most users do, but simply matched my palms to onscreen prints to support the hand-based pointer options. The process was simple and quick, which was helpful since Kevin later had to reboot my device and redo the setup process when some of my gestures weren’t working.
Inside the GogglesWith accessibility at the forefront of what I wanted to accomplish, Kevin, whose iPad showed him what I was seeing and allowed him to guide the experience if need be, directed me to accessibility settings, where we enabled VoiceOver just long enough to show me how I could use it to move through the many other options. You can also use the screen reader to set up a Vision Pro independently, with a triple-click of the digital crown during startup. This option mirrors what’s available on an iOS device or Mac. You can use Siri to turn VoiceOver and most other accessibility features on and off quickly once you’ve got the device up and running.
Kevin showed me Zoom, which applies magnification to a frame onscreen by default. I found out later that you can zoom the full screen and that a turn of the digital crown will increase the zoom level in either mode. Sadly, the default-level zooming I did during my demo, without knowing how to increase magnification, didn’t make the text large enough for me to read, though I could see it and could select highlighted items with some guidance. There are also text size adjustments, which I wasn’t able to try at the store.
Next, Kevin showed me how to use pointer control to pick an alternative to eye tracking. Pointer control is the first instance in which the Vision Pro’s accessibility innovation really comes through. At different times during the demo, I used my wrist, index finger, or head to move a pointer that I could see onscreen. Like an iPad pointer controlled by a trackpad or mouse, the Vision Pro pointer is round and, to my eyes, visible but not very big. (It is apparently possible to adjust the size and color of the pointer.)
On a Mac, you can make the pointer larger and locate it with a gesture if you lose it onscreen. Those would be great features for a future Vision Pro update.
Each pointer control method was effective and a little mind-blowing at first. Pointing with my head was surprisingly effective, and during the half-hour of the demo at least, I never experienced motion sickness while I wore the headset.
A number of reviewers, including Jason, have written that a keyboard and trackpad are important accessories for Vision Pro productivity. I agree, and would especially urge those with disabilities that allow them to use input devices to get them. Though I didn’t have the chance to type on the virtual keyboard, I’ve seen it, and I’m certain that hardware is a far more accessible option. A trackpad and appropriately modified onscreen pointer would certainly make working on the device possible for me.
Sizzle and SubstanceWith a few accessibility settings enabled, I was ready to begin an abbreviated version of the canned Apple demo. I had difficulty making scrolling gestures work reliably, which meant less time moving through the selection of photos and Safari pages I was shown. I think a large part of the problem had to do with learning the rhythm of using my fingers or wrist to locate and select items and then the standard Vision Pro pinch and scroll gestures to act on them. Using VoiceOver instead of pointer control or having more time to practice all of these new gestures would almost certainly make me a more competent navigator, but in the demo environment, I was less than successful.
Knowing that the immersive video section was designed to create a mind-blowing finale to the demo, I let Kevin know that I was ready to stop struggling with Web pages and photo scrolling. We went back to the main app window, where I was told to open AppleTV+. Floating on top of a beautiful lake environment, the app window’s contrast wasn’t as pronounced as I needed it to be, and I couldn’t see app icons well enough to identify them. My guide patiently directed me to the app icon I wanted. Same for opening the demo video inside the Apple TV app. There was too much going on here, on a screen that was too far from my eyeballs, for me to select the item I needed to view. Kevin finally got me to the right place on screen, and I sat back for a much more relaxing few minutes in the company of Alicia Keys, birthday party kids, and a rhino.
The immersive video was great! I was able to see the 3D effects, experience the impossible viewing angles on a sports field, and feel as if I were truly inside the experience. Immersive video, and the Vision Pro as consumption device, I get!
Looking into Vision Pro was, I decided later, like looking through a window or watching TV from across the room.
To view a phone or a Mac, my eyes need to be a mere inch from the screen. So, interacting with settings and then the app screen was a hugely different experience than writing this article on my Mac. A high-power lens insert or full-screen zoom might make it possible to read, write, and navigate Vision Pro, but I’m not really sure about that. During my demo, I felt as if I could never get close enough to the screen. It’s one of the biggest variables in low vision. Where do you need to be, relative to the content you want to read or see, to get the best view? And whatever you do to find that perfect balance, how does the way you interact with a computer screen differ from the way you view a TV or movie screen? I don’t really want to wear reading glasses when I’m watching Avatar.
A Bigger PictureAs I wrote here back in June, a device that relies on eye tracking and fairly simple hand gestures as default modes of input offers great accessibility benefits to some people who can’t use keyboards, mice, and trackpads in the usual way. Evaluating how well the Vision Pro works as a computer alternative for someone with physical and motor needs is beyond the scope of my 30-minute, vision-focused demo, as well as my own life experience.
And it’s worth pointing out that features like Voice Control and AssistiveTouch, which are designed to make the iOS interface more usable by folks with physical and motor challenges, are all also there on Vision Pro. In terms of a sheer number of features, it’s an impressive collection of tools, made more by the fact that they’ve each been a part of Apple’s other platforms for multiple releases, giving users with a variety of needs the time to find their strengths and weaknesses.
Aspirational AccessibilityI know a number of blind or visually impaired folks who are excited about the Vision Pro. They’re Apple enthusiasts and embracers of new tech like most of us hanging out at Six Colors. But when I’ve asked blind colleagues what they want from Vision Pro, the conversation almost always moves to the future—not the opportunity to do computing tasks on a head-mounted device or even to watch a movie in the headset. Many blind people want Vision Pro to be an eyesight alternative or assistant, a way to see the world, identifying both the wondrous and the mundane.
Today, AI-powered iOS apps can describe a person, find a doorway, or read just the important bits of a food label aloud. A combination of a device camera, AI, and human interaction can assist a blind person in navigating to an appointment on foot or in a vehicle. Eventually, my blind friends assume, Vision Pro will be able to do all of these things, essentially allowing the wearer to “look” at the world around them and extract knowledge from it in meaningful ways. Eventually, these users assume Vision Pro’s cameras will be able to describe what they see. Developers will be able to harness camera data to interpret images beyond what’s literally visible. And the headset, or a smaller, lighter reincarnation of it, will be suitable for walking around outdoors.
For the blind tech enthusiasts I know, that’s the ultimate promise of Vision Pro. For now, it’s an expensive way to do what many are already doing with devices they carry. But one that offers both a solid start on the road to full accessibility and an enticing treasure map to the future.
Shelly discusses this issue more on the latest episode of the Parallel podcast.
After some brief European DMA follow-up, we dive deep on our extended impressions of the Vision Pro and visionOS, including Jason’s full review.
Go to the podcast page.
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web.
It’s a native Safari content blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac that’s been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.
Over 280,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Remove ad trackers, annoyances and background crypto-mining scripts
- Browse common websites 2.0x faster
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
Disney, Fox, and WBD come together to create a sports streaming joint venture, but what does it all mean? [Downstream+ subscribers also get to hear us discuss Disney’s Epic investment, Sports Corner updates, and the most streamed originals of last year.]
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide helps its customers keep their devices in compliance, which keeps their company data safe.
Kolide has seen a rise in cyber liability insurance issues recently. Companies are investing more in security insurance and less in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Kolide has seen its cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years. It turns out that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software. Read Kolide’s full blog post to learn more about their findings.
It’s been a very long time since Apple released a product as speculative and impractical as the Vision Pro, its $3499 first-generation “spatial computing” headset. Led by Apple, today’s technology industry sells billions and billions of dollars worth of technology to a grateful public that uses our smartphones, laptops, and other devices in nearly every aspect of our lives.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a kid, personal computers were just beginning to arrive in homes and schools. As I anticipated the arrival of the Vision Pro, I kept remembering the earliest days of the PC, the days when Apple IIs, TRS-80s, and Commodore PETs ruled.
In those days, computer technology wasn’t practical. You’d spend the equivalent of $5000 in today’s money on a computer, bring it home, and be immediately confronted with the big question: “Well, now what?”
And yet people bought them, mostly because they got the sense that this was the first step into a new era. Being a Gen X’er means that you were probably told at some point in your young life that “computers are the future”—a meaningless statement that nonetheless turned out to be absolutely true. People didn’t know just what it all meant, but it was new and clearly where the world was headed, and for some adventurous souls (or those who broke down and listened to the begging from their kids), that was all that was required.
I first learned what buyer’s remorse felt like about 12 hours after coming home with a new computer. New computers were exciting, but then what? There was very little software available, and the suggestions your computer salesperson would give to adults were impractical things like keeping a recipe database or balancing your checkbook. As for me, I’ll just say there was a lot of 10 PRINT “JASON IS GREAT” 20 GOTO 10 in those days.
This moment very much reminds me of that moment. Like those early computers, the Vision Pro is an expensive piece of cutting-edge technology that strongly suggests a possible future. (Is it really the future? That, we don’t know.) There are very few use cases for which I can say that, yes, the Vision Pro is a smart investment at $3499. Getting a taste of the future isn’t cheap, and it’s not especially practical, but it’s such a rare opportunity that it can sometimes be worth it anyway.
Beneath the bandIf there’s one thing I’m absolutely certain about when it comes to the Vision Pro, it’s this: This is the most impressive piece of Apple hardware I’ve ever seen. There will be some powerful debates about what the Vision Pro represents and what it costs, and whether or not it needs to exist… but it’s worth stopping for a moment to appreciate the technological object that Apple has designed, built, and put into mass production.
The Vision Pro is all glass and aluminum on the outside. In contrast to something like the Meta Quest 3, with its alien and off-putting triple sensor array, the Vision Pro’s black ski-goggle thing actually looks… okay?
Apple’s focus on softer materials also shines through, with lots of thoughtful fabric loops to do things like pull off one of the two included headbands or remove the included (and pleasantly soft) front cover. I’m sure Apple would have preferred to include only a single band in the box, so the presence of two—the delightful elastic, “3-d knitted” Solo Knit Band and the more utilitarian Dual Loop Band—suggests that it couldn’t find a single design that would serve everyone reliably. (I’ve also heard through the grapevine that the Solo Knit Band is more intended for short sessions, and the Dual Loop Band is better for extended use.)
I initially found the Solo Knit Band uncomfortable, putting pressure on my forehead that was immediately painful. But I found great success using the Dual Loop Band, which is far less elegant (the straps tighten via hook-and-loop attachment, while the Solo Knit Band has a dial you can turn) but felt far more comfortable initially. (Over time, as I adapted to the feel of the Vision Pro, I was also able to wear the Solo Knit Band successfully, though it was still not as comfortable as the Dual Loop Band.)
Once I got the Dual Loop Band adjusted properly, I got the answer to the question that I’ve been wondering about since I first tried the device last June: Can I use it for any real length of time without getting a splitting headache? As it turns out, yes. With the Dual Loop holding the Vision Pro firmly in place and spreading the weight across my entire head, I have been able to use it for around six hours a day without discomfort.
But that’s me. As Apple obviously found out when it was designing this thing, everyone’s head shape is unique and what works for one person won’t work for another. (I also can’t tell you if using the Vision Pro will make you motion sick, but I can tell you that it never did for me.) All I can tell you is that extended use of the Vision Pro can be done.
The rest of the Vision Pro’s standard accompaniment of accessories are the Light Seal (which attaches to the Vision Pro itself all around the interior frame), a cushion (which attaches to the Light Seal and provides comfort for the load-bearing area on your cheekbones and forehead), and corrective lenses (which are optional, but required in my case). These pieces come in different variations to fit an array of head shapes. They’re made of high-quality materials and attach magnetically. It all feels very civilized, though if you try to grab a Vision Pro by the cushion or seal, they’ll just pop off. (Fortunately, they pop right back on—the ease of magnetic attachment goes both ways.) I am slowly training myself to pick the Vision Pro up by the front hardware or the loop band, not by the light seal or cushion.
The Zeiss corrective lenses are interesting. They snap in magnetically, and I believe they’re automatically detected by the Vision Pro, but you still have to scan a card provided with the lenses in order to pair them with the device. Apparently, the Vision Pro adapts its optics based on the details of the prescription lenses that are installed. It feels like a weird extra step that shouldn’t be necessary. (If you lose the card, you can retrieve your settings from Zeiss’s website by entering the lenses’ serial number, which is inscribed on them.)
To generate Spatial Audio, the Vision Pro comes with a pair of audio pods—small directional speakers—pointed at your ears from a couple of inches away, located just where the Audio Strap (which is directly connected to the Vision Pro) connects to the head strap. The sound is aimed right at your ears, which remain uncovered.
Apple wants to layer software on top of the real world.This fits perfectly with Apple’s entire philosophy of this product, which is to overlay software (including audio playback) onto the real world rather than cutting you off from reality. When I use the Vision Pro, the sound generated by the system mixes with the sound of my real-world environment. Apple even goes so far as to process the sound to make it sound like it’s coming from your environment, using reverb and spatial effects to make things feel more natural. (The best way to notice the difference is to dial in a virtual environment while listening to audio, such as the voices from a FaceTime call. As you go from the real world to a virtual environment, the system audio will subtly change.)
The sound quality is remarkable, given that these audio pods are a couple of inches away and beaming right into my ears. They’re not as good as my AirPods Pro, and of course, everyone around me can hear what I’m listening to, too. (That’s why the first rule of Vision Pro etiquette is to use a pair of Bluetooth headphones when you’re around other people. AirPods Pro with Transparency turned on seems like the most appropriate approach if you’re going to be in a mixed environment.)
The Vision Pro has two buttons: a flat button just above the left eyebrow and a Digital Crown above the right. The left button acts as a shortcut to Capture (the Vision Pro equivalent of the Camera app) if you want to grab a spatial video or photo. It also can be double-tapped to approve a purchase in the App Store, and if you press both buttons down together, it’ll take a screenshot of your current view and place it in the Photos library.
When I first saw that Apple had put a Digital Crown on the Vision Pro, I was skeptical: As clever as it was on the Apple Watch as a riff on watch crowns, should the Digital Crown really travel elsewhere? (I don’t use AirPods Max, so I can’t judge how it’s used there.) But now I think that the Digital Crown has infected Apple’s hardware designers in a good way: They’ve discovered that there can be some delightful computer interfaces attached to a physical dial1, and since the Digital Crown is also a pressable button, it’s a much more versatile bit of hardware input.
Still, Apple’s announcement that the Digital Crown was going to be dedicated to dialing you into or out of virtual environments seemed like a bit of a stretch, reminiscent of early Apple Watch features like Digital Touch—in other words, a hardware decision based more on philosophy and tone setting than how regular people might use the product.
Now that I’ve used the Vision Pro for a while, though, I’ve come around to Apple’s point of view. The Vision Pro’s entire philosophy is about not cutting you off from reality by default, but sometimes, you want to enter a fully immersive environment to reduce distractions. Turning the Digital Crown is a pleasant, easy way to do that, and I especially appreciate the ability to dial in a certain degree of isolation—for example, just in front of me but not to the sides or back, so I can still see some of the real world.
I admit I’m still trying to figure out exactly the right times to be immersed and the right times not to be. Sometimes, it’s about anticipation: I know my wife’s in the house and is going to come and check on me in a little bit, and I don’t want to miss her when she arrives. When I’m alone, I suspect the decision will lean towards entering a more distraction-free zone. Sometimes, I write with headphones in, even if I’m home alone, because it completely isolates me from the world, and that flips a switch somewhere in my brain. I feel like turning on an immersive scene has a similar effect, so that I can exit the usual scene and enter a different—and let’s be honest, less cluttered—space. Or maybe it’s just the act of going elsewhere—like writing at a cafe instead of at my kitchen table—that puts me in a different frame of mind.
Pressing the Digital Crown is the most important single gesture on the entire device since it brings up the Vision Pro equivalent of the Home Screen: a tabbed list of apps, people, and virtual environments. Pressing and holding the Digital Crown also re-centers the entire virtual environment, which is helpful if you’ve really lost track of where all your stuff is and everything seems off-kilter.
No discussion of the Vision Pro can be complete without mentioning the device’s battery. In a battle between the elegant and the practical, practical has won out: Apple has lightened the weight of the Vision Pro hardware by tethering it to an external battery you need to keep in a pocket or next to you as you work. There’s no getting around its awkwardness, and on numerous occasions, I have gotten up only to discover I’m trailing a battery behind me.
But the truth is, most of the time I’ve used the Vision Pro, I’ve been seated. So the battery has ended up being more like a buffer to allow me to keep using the Vision Pro until I remember to plug it into power. Obviously, if you’re someplace without USB power, the two- to three-hour battery life will limit what you can do, but these days, even most airlines offer USB power to the seat.
I think Apple made the right trade-off here, but the external battery seems like the feature of the Vision Pro that will make us look back from the future and shake our heads.
Just add a keyboard, if you want toAdding a keyboard is a major Vision Pro productivity boost. A trackpad can also add precision.Now let’s talk accessories. For my money, the single best Vision Pro accessory is the $99 Apple Magic Keyboard. Text input on the Vision Pro is… doable, but painful. You can either poke at a virtual floating keyboard or type by tapping your fingers together while your eyes dance from letter to letter, slowly pecking out your message.
I paired a late-model Magic Keyboard with the Vision Pro, and things got a lot better. The obnoxious floating keyboard mostly vanished, replaced by a tiny HUD that shows you what you’ve typed and gives you access to predictive text while floating right above the keyboard in a pretty remarkable bit of AR magic. The setup isn’t perfect—those floating keyboard things keep popping up and getting in the way before disappearing when I press a key—but I imagine these bugs will be shaken out in time.
You can also pair a Magic Trackpad (but not a mouse), though you’ll basically need to sit at a table or desk since it isn’t really designed for lap use.2 I sat down at my otherwise empty dining room table with a keyboard and trackpad and the Vision Pro and was able to get a lot of work done. The trackpad works inside individual apps very much like it does in iPadOS, and the pointer moves between windows with ease.
Adding a trackpad isn’t as much of a game-changer as adding a keyboard since it’s pretty easy to navigate using gaze and hand gestures. Of course, the trackpad is better at precision work, such as text selection. And using a keyboard and trackpad together certainly makes the Vision Pro computing experience seem more familiar. (Of course, if you are planning on using the Vision Pro primarily with a Mac, you can use its keyboard and trackpad to accomplish the same thing via Universal Control.)
A brand-new operating systemThe Settings app will feel quite familiar, especially to iPad users.The Vision Pro isn’t just new hardware—it’s the start of a new Apple operating system, visionOS. Of course, visionOS is based on the same core as the operating systems that run the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and more.
The operating system it’s most like is iPadOS; in fact, in the simplest terms the Vision Pro feels like a spatial iPad—it’s largely running iPad-style apps, except you can open a seemingly infinite number of windows and put them all around you. (That also means that we are probably due for a new battle in the iPad Wars, where some people valiantly try to get all their work done on a new Apple platform while other people angrily tell them to just use a Mac. Oh boy, can’t wait.)
Within half an hour of starting to explore visionOS, I felt something I hadn’t experienced in some time, namely the feel of using a 1.0 operating system. Newly-shipped OSes just have a certain special something about them. They’re delightfully new and yet clearly unfinished around the edges. Most commonly, I ran into issues where there was a new feature implemented in a single way, with no customization options or preferences to be set. I would also sometimes just run into weird bugs that could only be solved with a reboot. It happens. Version 1.0 is about shipping features—adding fancy customization comes later, along with a lot of bug fixes.
I was able to quickly access Bluetooth settings by looking (up) to Control Center.But because visionOS is built on such a venerable foundation—Apple’s been shipping devices running a version of this operating system for 17 years—it’s mostly functional and familiar. The Settings app on the Vision Pro will be familiar to any iPhone or iPad user. I knew just where to go to change my autocorrect settings so that the system wouldn’t automatically change what I type on a hardware keyboard—because it’s literally the same place it is on iPadOS. Once I installed the 1Password iPad app, I was able to auto-fill passwords everywhere, just as I can on my iPad. And once you learn how to access Control Center (looking up at and tapping on an icon brings up a menu of options including Control Center), everything sort of falls into place.
Because it can display lots of windows placed utterly arbitrarily inside a 3D space, visionOS is, in some ways, the most Mac-like thing Apple has shipped since the Mac. Unfortunately, as we learned when Apple introduced Stage Manager to iPadOS, Apple’s modern operating systems have no foundation of window management. The lack of any organizational principles becomes readily apparent once you start scattering windows all over your house.
I know, I know, it’s a 1.0, and that means options come later. But window management should be high on Apple’s priority list. I’d like to be able to see a list of windows or running apps, retrieve individual windows from wherever I’ve left them, hide or show sets of apps, or even toggle between different “spaces” with different sets of windows—all of which are remembered. Everything feels so ephemeral right now. I have no confidence that anything I set up won’t be torn down the next time I put on the Vision Pro or move to a different room. And no window positioning seems to survive a reboot.
A visionOS native app (Runestone, left) and an iPad app (1Writer, right).Apple made a great decision to allow iPad apps on visionOS, and the ones I’ve tried really work well. They also seem denser than visionOS windows, which I like—visionOS windows all seem a little too large, with big text and huge controls. Maybe that’s a function of an eye-driven interface needing big targets to hit, but the end result is that a workspace full of visionOS windows fills up fast, and ends up less dense than, say, a Mac with a big display or several displays. If part of the point of spatial computing is to take advantage of some of the productivity gains of having large or multiple monitors, visionOS apps seem to be scaled a bit too large.
This situation could be aided if Apple allowed them to be minimized in some way. Some apps, like Music, have the ability to be minimized into small windows that provide basic controls without taking up a lot of space. This is probably a concept that should be brought to every visionOS app. I find myself closing apps that are useful because I don’t need them at the moment, and they get in the way. I’d rather be able to minimize them into an icon or a small widget-like information display and then toggle them back to full size when I need them. I guess I’ll put that on the visionOS 2.0 wishlist.
To launch apps in visionOS, you can either use voice commands—”Siri open Messages” really does work—or tap on the Digital Crown to bring up the visionOS launcher. Just as in the early days of watchOS, Apple is content to provide a very simplified app launcher for its brand-new platform—it’s just an alphabetized set of icons, 13 per page. Obviously, that won’t scale. (I’m already fantasizing about being able to favorite apps or customize that first app screen.) Compatible apps from iPadOS appear in their own folder, called Compatible Apps, on the first page of the launcher.
Apps open in their own windows, right in front of you. Unlike on the Mac, all of visionOS’s controls are at the bottom of windows. The controls are a circle (which becomes a close box when you look at it) and a horizontal line (which lets you move the window when you pinch your fingers together as you’re looking at it). Pinching on a window and then relocating it is my favorite gesture in all of visionOS, a tactile experience that almost turns window management into a fun game.
To resize a window, you look at the bottom left or right corners, and the window controls slide over to become a curved indicator. When that curved indicator appears, you can pinch your fingers together and then move your hand to change the dimensions of the window. (iPad apps can have an additional icon at the top right of the screen, which you can use to change a window’s orientation from horizontal to vertical.) I found myself frequently frustrated when a window would refuse to get narrower or taller—presumably another legacy of iOS, where window resizing is pretty limited.
The primary input mechanism of visionOS is your gaze—literally whatever you’re looking at right now—and hand gestures. It takes some getting used to, but after just a few days, it felt natural to me. For this all to work, Apple’s eye tracking and hand tracking have to be close to perfect.
It’s very, very good, but I definitely noticed times when I couldn’t quite get the Vision Pro to recognize what I was looking at until I moved my head in that direction. Items at the periphery of the interface were the most likely to be difficult to select, and moving my head so that they were more central generally solved the problem. After a while, that movement also became second nature to me—a little like looking up a little bit when I’m reading so that the reading area of my progressive lenses is in the right place. Human brains are pretty adaptable, fortunately.
When it works, the detection of hand gestures also feels like magic. However, there is a learning curve. I kept realizing that when I looked to my left and tried to tap my fingers on my right hand together, it would sometimes fail—because the act of moving my head to the left had taken my right hand out of the Vision Pro’s field of vision. I imagine that I will continue to internalize these rules as I use the device, but it’s important to remember that it’s not magic or psychic and if it can’t see your hands, it can’t register your gestures. (Sure would be nice if my Apple Watch could use its sensors to register taps when my hands weren’t visible, though.)
I also found that, at times, I was plagued by non-gestures being recognized as gestures. Some of this probably goes down to Apple needing to improve its training models so that my fingers resting on the Bluetooth keyboard aren’t misinterpreted as being a tap, causing erroneous text selection. As my cat jumped onto my lap and I began scratching her head—only to wreak havoc on my Vision Pro interface—I also wondered if there should be a Siri command to temporarily lock out hand tracking.
While visionOS is Mac-like in terms of window management, it’s unfortunately iPad- and iPhone-like in its utter rejection of support for multiple users. Apple offers something called Guest Mode, but it’s severely lacking: It requires the primary user to be present, the guest has to undergo the entire eye-tracking setup process, and the moment the guest takes the Vision Pro off, all of that data is thrown away so the next time they want to use the device they have to start from scratch.
More than any other iOS-based product, Vision Pro is a product that deserves multiple-user support. In the past few days, I’ve found myself wanting to show various discoveries to my wife, only to realize she’d have to go through setup all over again… so I haven’t bothered. Even allowing guests to save their basic biometric data would be a step in the right direction, but true multi-user support really should exist. Optic ID, the biometric authentication system built into the Vision Pro, should be able to recognize different eyes and switch users, just as Touch ID does on macOS. The Vision Pro’s Light Shield, cushion, and corrective lenses are all made to be personalized and modular, so they can easily be swapped in and out. The same should be the case for users.
Speaking of Optic ID, it’s essentially transparent and magical when it works. You literally see an icon; the Vision Pro scans your eyes, recognizes them as yours, and unlocks the device. However, I struggled to get the feature to work consistently. It took me a half-dozen attempts before I could successfully enroll my eyes in Optic ID. Unlocking the device also frequently fails, leaving me to re-seat it on my head and open my eyes in a death glare until I finally get the thing to unlock.
It’s also a Mac accessoryMy MacBook Air just got a lot larger.One of the very best features of visionOS is Mac Virtual Display (MVD), which lets a nearby Mac put its entire interface in a Vision Pro window. This is a feature that probably won’t replace a nice, big monitor for most people—you can get one of those for a lot less than the cost of a Vision Pro—but is an amazing way to make a 13- or 14-inch Apple laptop suddenly act like it’s got an expansive desktop display, no matter where you are. This will be especially great in tight spaces like airplanes and hotel rooms.
In general, I found text on an MVD to be less sharp than text from iPad or visionOS apps, though if you blow the screen up big and lean in close, it still looks pretty good. Having access to a Mac window inside of visionOS also immediately makes the entire system more functional since the Mac can still run all sorts of software that Apple’s other platforms just can’t run.
And it gets better. Because when you use a Mac (any Mac, not just laptops) with Vision Pro in MVD mode, your Mac’s keyboard and trackpad automatically connect to your Vision Pro via Universal Control, a feature that rolled out a couple of years ago that let you do things like drive an iPad from a Mac, or a Mac from an iPad using a Smart Keyboard. Universal Control was a fun feature as it was, but I’ve now placed a new strand of red yarn on my conspiracy board as I begin to suspect that visionOS was the endgame for Universal Control all along.
In any event, you can use your Mac’s trackpad to control every item in your virtual space, not just the Mac itself. Want to scroll over to an iPad app off to the left? Just move the pointer off the Mac in that direction, and it pops into the iPad app with the telltale iPadOS circular pointer. You can even click and drag to rearrange visionOS windows in virtual space. It feels revelatory, like seeing the matrix.
Bless the hearts of OS daredevils who will build up visionOS productivity systems using nothing more than a paired keyboard and trackpad, but for my money, the ultimate visionOS productivity setup will pair a Vision Pro with a MacBook on your lap. It’s like using a Mac that can also project holograms.
The silver screenSo much of the story of this product is about what it’s trying to become and where it’s going—and rightly so. But if there’s one place where it feels like the Vision Pro has already arrived, it’s video playback.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time watching 3D movies on the Meta Quest 2 and 3, enough to make me realize that solo entertainment is absolutely a use case for these sorts of devices. And the Vision Pro leaves me with no doubt that this device’s display—two separate tiny OLED displays, each of 4K-ish resolution, one for each eye—is the absolute best on the planet in a consumer device.
The Vision Pro creates a legitimately great movie-watching experience. 3D movies look much better than they ever did in the movie theater since they’re being beamed at full brightness right into your eyes. Since we’re all so familiar with “flat” 2D content, it’s actually a great way to judge the displays since there’s no real novelty in watching a plain old YouTube video or a TV show. The image quality is superb.
It’s the immersive stuff where Apple has really transcended my expectations. These are stereoscopic views with near-180-degree fields of view, and they feel unlike any sort of entertainment form I’ve experienced before. But they also feel new and experimental, which is exciting. Is it better to shoot these videos like traditional films, with different perspectives and cuts, or to keep the camera still, like we’re a fly on the wall of a special scene? And should the subjects of these videos engage with the audience, or will we be creeped out and want to hide when Alicia Keys sings directly to us?
The only solution is for Apple and its partners to just try everything. Recordings of live theater would be amazing in this format. So would concerts. (Taylor, record an immersive version of Eras Tour for Disney+!) And most of all, sports will shine in this format. Apple has existing relationships with sports leagues as well as sports rights holders. I hope that in the next few months, we see immersive highlights and maybe, just maybe, an attempt at live immersive broadcasting. Take me courtside. Put me in the dugout. Let me float above a soccer pitch.
Another way of immersing yourself in media is by opening multiple windows of content at once. Unfortunately, the relatively rudimentary multitasking functionality of iOS and iPadOS is going to bite visionOS. This device should be ideal for watching multiple streams of content: Imagine playing the NBA on Max to my upper left, ESPN on my upper right, and the MLB app dead center!
You’ll need to imagine it, because it doesn’t work like that. Instead, what generally happens is that when you play one video, the other video stops. I don’t like this on iPadOS, but it’s deadly on visionOS. It needs to be like the Mac, where I can open multiple apps and browser windows and have a bunch of different audio and video playing, and it’s no problem. If I create a cacophony, that’s my problem—I created it, and I can sort it out myself! visionOS needs to be similarly unchained in this regard.
On top of that, app developers need to let their apps spawn as many different windows as their users want. I should be able to put myself at the center of an Adrian Veidt-like video wall in my Vision Pro space if I want.
Are you not entertained?Unlike every other VR headset in existence, the Vision Pro’s marketing hasn’t been focused on games. Still, at launch, Apple made sure there were several Vision Pro games available in Apple Arcade. These aren’t the kind of immersive experiences we’ve come to expect from VR platforms, though. Instead, there are some augmented-reality experiences (What the Golf and Game Room both put their game boards right on my living room coffee table), and even the more familiar VR games (Synth Riders, Super Fruit Ninja) took place in my actual space, with the occasional portal into another world.
It’s not just Apple’s philosophy that the Vision Pro is primarily for augmented experiences rather than replacing all of reality with something new—it’s also that the input mechanism on the Vision Pro is based on hand tracking. There are many advantages to using hand tracking, most notably that you aren’t required to grab a couple of controllers every time you put the headset on. But controllers are really, really good for video games because they offer precise input (both in terms of motion and in terms of button presses) that hand tracking just can’t.
Unless Apple or a partner decides to build optional hand controllers, Vision Pro games are probably going to be more slanted toward simple interactions, 3-D object experiences, and games played with traditional game controllers.
I’m not convinced that games like Synth Riders and Super Fruit Ninja are going to work. I’m not exactly an expert Beat Saber player, but I do enjoy it; playing Synth Riders felt imprecise and frustrating. Super Fruit Ninja feels like a game that could legitimately have been designed for the Meta Quest, but the game kept missing my hand swipes. It just didn’t feel like this was the sort of input the Vision Pro was designed for.
Capturing 3-D memoriesThe Vision Pro isn’t just a 3-D display; it’s a 3-D capture device. Cameras on both sides of the Vision Pro allow you to capture spatial video and still photos, and you can also view spatial videos shot by the iPhone 15 Pro.
It’s a give-and-take. Videos shot in 4K HDR are going to look way better than videos shot today in spatial formats, but they’ll lack that magical depth effect. Videos and photos that are close to subjects and where there’s action happening in multiple levels of depth are going to pop in 3-D; landscapes and other “flat” subjects would benefit from being shot with the highest quality camera setting you can choose.
But Apple is on to something with its 3-D captures: Looking at intimate stereo captures has a way of creating an emotional, visceral response that flat images don’t really replicate. (There’s a reason Apple’s demo videos frequently involve kids.) I don’t know if this sense will fade as we all get used to watching 3-D captures, but it’s accurate to say that watching a 3-D image of your own life feels a bit like stepping back into a frozen memory.
The spatial videos captured by the Vision Pro look better than the ones captured by the iPhone 15 Pro, at least to my eyes. They’re square rather than wide, and the increased distance between the two cameras means the 3-D effects are more pronounced. That said, I’m not going to be toting my Vision Pro out in public to capture key life events, so I’m glad that the iPhone 15 can shoot spatial video and I will try to remember to take more of it in the future! I just hope that on future models shooting spatial video isn’t such a compromise to picture quality.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/kayak-pano.mp4Panoramas shine in visionOS.Now, let’s talk about the real, unexpected star of the Vision Pro media experience: panoramas! I’ve been shooting panoramas for years, even back to the days of film cameras. (I was building Quicktime VR panoramas in the 1990s!) The iPhone has been able to shoot panoramas for a very long time now, and you can view them on your devices, and they look… fine. They’re wide. Great.
But view them on a Vision Pro, and they’re gripping. visionOS takes your panoramas and expands them to fill as much of your view as they possibly can, removing distortion and mapping them on the 3-D space around you. They’re not full 360 images, of course, but they’re still really impressive. I kind of want to use some of them as environments! (Note to Apple: using generative AI to transform panoramas into 360 environments to be used in Vision Pro would be swell.) I didn’t have quite the emotional response to panoramas of long-ago vacation scenes as I did to 3-D videos and pictures, but it was close! Seeing a friend give a toast at another friend’s wedding, and being able to look around to spot other people in the crowd… that was special.
Digital DoppelgängerThe valley is less uncanny in context.How do you let people wearing VR goggles on their faces participate in videoconferences? It’s a real problem, and Apple’s solution is more ambitious than the one most of us had been expecting for years. With Memojis, Apple built an entire cartoon avatar system that could be (optionally) personalized and would dynamically react to your facial expressions. Then it chucked the whole thing in the bin and built Digital Personas instead. (Part of the decision might involve that Memojis are built using Apple’s older SceneKit technology rather than the new RealityKit that’s the foundation of visionOS.)
Digital Personas are technically amazing. To create one, you take off the Vision Pro and hold its sensor-laden front toward you. It scans your face, asking you to turn left and right and up and down, smile with and without teeth, raise your eyebrows, and close your eyes. From this, it builds (in a very short period of time, maybe 30 seconds?) a 3-D replica of your head that’s animated in real time based on your facial expressions, which are detected using cameras inside and outside of the Vision Pro. It is absolutely amazing, bananas technology on both sides of that equation, and the result is that if you’ve ever wanted to be a character in a video game, now you can be!
As impressive as the tech is, it’s not quite all there yet. The “uncanny valley” is a famous concept about making something just real enough that our brains rebel at its unreality, and it’s a fair criticism of Digital Personas to say that they tend to fall within it. They are simultaneously incredibly impressive and not quite good enough, at least out of context. I struggled to get my Digital Persona to look anything like me, and it still looks like my face has been stuck on the front of a brick.
But a funny thing happened on the way to me slagging Digital Personas: I spent time in FaceTime calls and Zoom calls with friends of mine, all of us using our Digital Personas. And in that context, where it’s your friend’s voice and conversation and facial expression cues, it gets a lot easier to forgive or accept the weirdness of the Digital Personas. As stills, out of context, Digital Personas are off-putting. In the context of a conversation, they’re okay—and I assume they’re only going to get better from here.
Apple’s got a lot of work to do on Digital Personas beyond just making them better. First off, visionOS should be able to store more than one at a time and should offer more customization options (like quickly swapping eyewear preferences). When you make a Digital Persona, that look sticks with you—put on makeup or a suit, and your Digital Persona will always look like that. That can be cool—you don’t have to primp for your next meeting!—but it also forces your persona into the same context at all times.
And then there’s the issue of people not particularly liking what their persona looks like or how it represents them. Apple needs to offer alternatives to Digital Personas, ones that are less realistic or more generic so that people who are uncomfortable with their personas aren’t locked out of using video conferencing when they’re using a Vision Pro. As one friend of mine said to me, “I don’t want to use my dumb old face—I want to be a cool space monster!” You could do that with Memoji, and it should be a direction for Digital Personas, too.
The eyes of your Digital Persona can also populate the EyeSight display, a separate outward-facing display that acts as an indicator of what you’re doing (including if you’re capturing video or photos). If you can see a person in the real world and they can see you, Vision Pro puts a version of your Digital Persona’s eyes on the screen to make it look like you’re seeing through the Vision Pro hardware. Sort of. I don’t really have a lot to say about this feature other than that externally indicating status is important and that it probably didn’t require the added cost and weight of a whole display.
So is this the future?When I was a kid, they told us we needed to learn about computers because they were the future, and that assumption was proven right. But does the Vision Pro represent the future of computing?
Apple certainly believes so. The entire design of the Vision Pro and visionOS is focused on augmented reality first, and for a reason: This is Apple’s attempt to slowly build toward a product that is as unobstrusive as glasses but offers all the same augmentation powers as the Vision Pro. That kind of display hardware and miniaturization doesn’t exist now—it’s probably a decade away, if not more. But the fastest way to get us there is for Apple to ship the Vision Pro and drive both hardware and software development forward toward that goal.
The reason Apple is doing this is because more than half of its business is the iPhone, and that means one of the few existential threats to Apple’s success as a company is some future tech that makes the smartphone obsolete. A device that’s as powerful as a smartphone but is projected entirely into our own vision is a pretty good candidate for that.
In the long run, I think that augmented vision is inevitable, and by spending decades on this technology, Apple is going to position itself to be a major player in that field. Software developers and hardware manufacturers should be paying attention.
But regardless of whether or not something based on visionOS is the computing product of the future and a huge source for growth for Apple in the 2030s, the Vision Pro is a real-life product today. And it needs to be judged as such.
Leaving price aside for the moment, I think it’s worth considering what the Vision Pro is good at. It’s a great movie player, offering 3-D and immersive experiences that go beyond anything else that’s out there. It’s also an iPad-level computing device that can optionally integrate with the Mac to take a small laptop screen and make it part of a larger world. I’m not sure whether a lot of people will want to spend their entire workday inside a VR headset, but the last few days have taught me that I can certainly do it, and it’s just fine.
Compared to those early personal computers, the Vision Pro is actually a better value, thanks to the existing software ecosystem that allows it to be useful right out of the box. But still, this is a product you buy either because you have a very specific use case that makes it worth the cost or because you just want to have a taste of the future. (No judgment here.)
At least there are clear use cases. Even with immersive video in its infancy, it’s a great solo entertainment device, so if you find yourself watching movies and TV without other people around, it might be worth it. If you travel a lot and find yourself in cramped airline seats and tiny hotel rooms, or if your home or office is too small to fit a full desk setup with a big monitor, you’ll find that the Vision Pro is a bit of a TARDIS3: everything’s bigger on the inside.
It’s fine if none of those use cases fit you—this is a pricey first-generation product that’s finding its way. But it might still be worth musing a little bit about where the product might go. It’s easy to imagine visionOS evolving—1.0 operating systems have nothing but green fields of space to grow and develop—and early adopters and app developers will help steer the platform’s direction. Most notable to me is the device’s lack of proper sharing features—there’s no way to get the feeling that another Vision Pro user is present in your space, and even if there are two people in the same physical room, both using Vision Pro, they can’t look at the same virtual objects.
On the hardware side, there’s also plenty of room to grow. This may be the cutting edge, but that display could get even better, with support for higher resolutions and frame rates. The field of view also needs to get wider—it’s currently about what I can see in my glasses, but the blackness in my peripheral vision means that I rarely forget that I’m wearing a headset. The device needs to get light enough to integrate a battery and then get lighter still. The sensors can improve so that the passthrough video looks even more realistic. And, of course, improved CPU and graphics power will bring more realistic rendering of virtual objects, including those Digital Personas.
Perhaps most importantly, the very name Vision Pro implies that there will one day be an Apple Vision, a product that’s more affordable and presumably will ship in greater quantities.
Coming of age at the moment that computers began appearing in homes and classrooms had a huge impact on my life. We were exploring technology so new that nobody really understood what it was for or what could be done with it. You can draw a direct line from the first time I typed in a BASIC program to my choice of career.
I don’t know if the Vision Pro will predict the future like those early computers did. But I do know that it’s so new and weird and interesting that it brings back all those feelings of wonder and enthusiasm and curiosity that I felt in those early days. Wherever this product goes, whatever it does, it’s certainly going to be a fun ride.
- Panic’s Playdate, an indie handheld game console with a little flip-out crank, is a similar example. More radial input devices, please! ↩
- Apple should just make a keyboard/trackpad combo deck for this thing. In the meantime, TwelveSouth will sell you a MagicBridge for $50. ↩
- The time machine in “Doctor Who,” which is tiny on the outside but enormous on the inside. In other words, the Vision Pro lets you make tiny spaces seem enormous. ↩
Our favorite PC/Mac apps; the apps we use for photo-taking, editing, and sharing; our thoughts on Vision Pro Personas; and our interest (or lack thereof) in Bluesky amidst potential social media saturation.
Go to the podcast page.
The age of the Vision Pro is upon us!
By now the reviews are out, the first adopters have received their devices, and anybody who wants a demo of the future of spatial computing can walk into an Apple Store and try Apple’s headset.
But it’s worth remembering throughout all of this that the Vision Pro is—hopefully—more than just a gimmicky device; it’s a brand new platform that’s going to evolve and change as it makes contact with the real world. There are bound to be shortcomings, places where third-party apps will eventually fill in gaps, and areas where Apple will continue to innovate and improve, even before a new version of the hardware inevitably comes out.
Case in point: there are a handful of places where Apple has spent very little time talking about the Vision Pro’s capabilities—in some cases because those capabilities are limited or simply aren’t present at all. If you look closer, there’s often a very clear reason why that’s so, but it also means that there’s clearly room for Apple to make forays into new arenas as the platform develops.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
After a brief bit of DMA follow-up and a recap of Apple’s quarterly financial results, the rest of the episode is all about our first few days with the Apple Vision Pro.
Go to the podcast page.
When MGM Resorts suffered a $100 million hack in September, CEO Bill Hornbuckle wasn’t too worried about the lost revenue, because cyber insurance would cover the tab. “I can only imagine what next year’s bill will be,” he joked.
Weeks later, on a call with analysts, Hornbuckle complained about the “staggering” rise of insurance costs in the past few years.
This story neatly illustrates the crisis in cyber liability coverage. For years, companies have invested more in security insurance than in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Some large enterprises are responding to the increased costs by creating their own “captive carriers,” insurance providers that exist only to serve them. But that’s clearly not an option for small businesses, which are more likely to go without insurance altogether.
According to Andrew Bucci, VP of Sales at Amplified Insurance Partners, “It’s going to come to a point where some people may have to self-insure, which means that they don’t take a cyber policy out and they just cross their fingers they don’t have some sort of breach.” That’s a huge gamble for SMBs, since they could be driven to bankruptcy by a single security incident.
At Kolide, we’ve seen our cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years, and we got curious about:
- What’s driving the increases?
- Who really needs cybersecurity insurance?
- How can the average company reduce their premiums?
What we found was that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software.
Read the full blog to learn more about our findings.
Like everyone else—okay, not everyone, but I’d guess a surprising percentage of the Six Colors audience—I took possession of an Apple Vision Pro on Friday. I’ve already spent many, many hours using it, but it’s a whole new Apple platform and it’s going to take me some time to digest it all.
In the meantime, I’ve gotten a bunch of questions from readers and listeners about the device, so I thought I’d make my first piece about the Vision Pro an FAQ story. You’re reading it now! (Apologies if I re-use some of these observations in my eventual full review. Recycling is good for the earth.)
How do you connect a trackpad and keyboard?
With a MacBook Air in my lap, I get a big virtual Mac screen and Universal Control over visionOS apps.Like pretty much any Apple device, you can directly connect a Vision Pro to external pointing devices—at least, you can connect the Magic Trackpad and some Bluetooth keyboards. I was able to get a Magic Keyboard connected to it simply by opening the Bluetooth area of the Settings app and selecting the Magic Keyboard. It really couldn’t have been easier.
Once a keyboard and trackpad are connected, you can mix and match those input devices with the input from your gaze and hand gestures. If you’ve ever used a pointer on an iPad, you know how it works—there’s a little dot that will dance from window to window, and it behaves just like the pointer does on iPadOS.
If you’re using the Vision Pro with a Mac, it’s even easier to connect input devices—because your Mac’s own pointing device and keyboard will also extend into the visionOS environment via Universal Control. (I guess we need to add Universal Control to the list of Apple features that might have been secretly developed with visionOS in mind?) For example, just as I wrote this paragraph I received a new Slack message, via the Slack app running on the Vision Pro. I used my Mac’s trackpad to move the pointer off the edge of the Mac display and into Slack on the Vision Pro, where I clicked on the message and even typed a reply.
I don’t understand how you can work in a large visual environment if you’re in a tight space. Doesn’t that break your brain?
You’re going to have to trust me—this window appears behind the wall in 3-D.With the exception of your hands, windows in visionOS occlude objects in the real world. This means you can put windows deeper than actual space. And yeah, it breaks your brain a little if you think about it. If it really freaks you out, the best answer is probably to dial in an Environment, because all of those have been artfully composed to not have any occluding objects anywhere within range.
This is hard to get across in flat screenshots, but I was able to sit a desk in my son’s room, right up against the wall, and place a window deep behind behind the posters on the wall. The discontinuity didn’t really bother me. Then again, visionOS space is so weird that my brain may have already noped out and turned itself off for the day.
Isn’t it weird that eye tracking means you can’t look at one thing while you’re doing something else?
This question refers to an interesting phenomenon that a lot of us are discovering as we start using the Vision Pro: Turns out that we cut corners! You finish one task over here while moving your eyes to the next task… only to discover that in an operating system that uses eye tracking to assume intent, you’ve potentially disrupted the first task prematurely.
I don’t know how this is going to all play out in terms of extended use, but I’d bet that it won’t take too much time for people to get used to the concept that your gaze is your pointer. It’s also quite possible that people who are committed to doing real work on a Vision Pro will want to bring a keyboard and trackpad with them, at which point the device kind of becomes a big 3-D iPad you wear on your face.
Can you really do work on this thing?
Sure. If you’ll prefer it to other devices really remains to be seen. If you connect it to a Mac, you can do anything you do on your Mac while wearing the Vision Pro. If you don’t, as long as your key iPad apps are available, you can pretty much do everything you can on an iPad. And believe it or not, people do get work done on the iPad.
For “real” work do you think you’d be using pass-through or immersive?
Look, everyone’s brains are different. I sometimes put headphones in to write articles even though there’s nobody around, because something about the isolation shifts my brain into a different gear. I can see how dropping out your normal environment and replacing it with something else might be helpful for productivity. I have tried to work in the Vision Pro in both scenarios, and I don’t think I’ve settled on an answer.
Do streaming apps do clever things with screen shape?
Yes indeed! One benefit of having windows that are unbounded by the shape of a physical screen is that they can be the shape they need to be. So I was able to call up an old 4:3 X-Men cartoon on Disney+, and the screen was indeed 4:3. Likewise, the Max app displayed Casablanca in an appropriate 1.37:1 frame.
I’m curious about the quality of the virtual screen. Like how good does it look?
A virtual Mac display laid on top of a Studio Display. (It’s not as good.)To test this, I sat down at my Studio Display and then connected to my Mac and re-sized the resulting visionOS window to match the size of the Studio Display. Neat trick, but no—the resulting window isn’t as good as seeing your display with your own two eyes.
The Vision Pro isn’t going to be a display replacement in that way, but it doesn’t need to be. There are plenty of scenarios where you just don’t have a big screen available. I can now work on a MacBook Air screen with a vastly large amount of screen space, for example—even if the resolution is a little bit lower than if I used the native display. (And of course, in addition to the Mac screen, I’ve got several ancillary windows floating in space to the right, left, and above the Mac’s virtual display.)
If you don’t have room for a big display, or can’t bring one with you, having a virtual one can be a big benefit. But if I was just sitting at my desk working on my Mac with connected Studio Display, I’d just use my display.
Do apps persist across sessions?
Yes, but not reboots. Which, if you think of it, is kind of a bummer—if you go to the trouble of placing a bunch of Widgetsmith windows exactly where you want them throughout your house, the last thing you want to do is lose them when you reboot. Apple’s going to have to re-think the concept of geographical persistence as visionOS evolves.
Reboots aside, apps do live in physical spaces. I left my Settings app in the other room yesterday. (Relax, you can summon left behind windows if you need to.)
Can you lie down on your back and watch a movie on the ceiling like Tim Cook and have the back of your head be comfortable?
Sure. I watched 20 minutes of Moana while staring up at the blue sky and clouds above Joshua Tree and it was so tranquil and comfortable that my wife thought I was asleep.
How is the video quality compared to, say, the Meta Quest?
I have a Quest 3 and it’s not even close—it’s safe to say that the displays in the Vision Pro are the best ones available to consumers today. Movies look great, and Apple’s immersive videos are spectacular.
Could you take the Vision Pro on a trip with no iPad or MacBook?
Probably, though I doubt I would. This isn’t a device you should use around other people, so I’d probably still bring one or both depending on what kind of trip it was. Using this with a Mac so that I’ve got a big display wherever I go would be pretty awesome, actually.
If you walk behind a big window, what’s on the back?
Nothing. It’s just a featureless rectangle.
How fast can you type on the virtual keyboard, compared to gazing at letters and pinching?
The problem with taking typing tests while typing via gaze is that you can’t see what you’re supposed to type next! Text input on Vision Pro is a real problem. Apple’s floating keyboard gets in the way and I’m not sure either method really works effectively. Voice sure seems to be a better option here, but even that needs to be executed better than it currently is.
If you’re doing a lot of text input, use a bluetooth keyboard or Universal Control.
Can we take Apple at its word that this is a “spatial computer” you can do stuff with? What is it like actually to do things with the interface, and what is your sense of the power/utility/limits of this spatial interface metaphor?
This is the kind of stuff I will need to address in my full review. What I will say after a day and a half is that the Vision Pro is most definitely a computer. It feels like the most computery device Apple makes, after the Mac itself. A lot of that is the fact that it’s got a freeform multi-window interface.
Unlike most headsets in the market, the Vision Pro is not a games console. It’ll play games, and movies, and may even do well at both—but you can play games and watch movies on your Mac, too. That doesn’t change that it’s also a full-fledged computer. So is the Vision Pro, in a lot of ways. Whether people will want to take advantage of those features, that’s the real question.
Did you write this story entirely while using a Vision Pro?
Yes, all but this last bit and inserting all the images.
My thanks to Whisper Memos for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Whisper Memos is a an iPhone/Apple Watch app that lets you record voice memos, and in turn sends you an email with perfect transcription. Your text is automatically divided into paragraphs so you can just start reading. Under the hood, it uses the Whisper AI model, which yields excellent results in any language.
Whisper Memos is built for convenience: You can record by pressing a button on your iPhone lock screen, or from a complication on your Apple Watch. Check out Whisper Memos today. You’ll be amazed at how fast, accurate, and reliable it is at preserving your precious thoughts.
Apple’s fiscal first quarter of 2024 is in the books, and now we know it was the company’s second-largest and most profitable of all time. It also showed year-over-year growth for the first time in a few quarters, undoubtedly warming the money-green hearts of financial analysts everywhere.
As usual, I generated some charts and listened in on the analyst call. Here are a few quick things I felt it was worth highlighting.
AI insecurityAs has been clear on the last few analyst calls, Apple is feeling a bit defensive about being left behind in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While Apple has invested in AI and ML in numerous ways- the neural engine, ML features in various apps, and the OS itself- it doesn’t have a generative AI product or a large language model, the two kinds of AI that have captured the world’s imagination.
That is why, during his prepared statement on Thursday’s call, Apple CEO Tim Cook went out of his way to discuss future Apple software developments!
As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in… technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence, where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort, and we’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.
Not a product announcement, not even a feature announcement—but a tangible promise that Apple’s going to announce some big AI features later this year. (As Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported, Apple’s OS updates at WWDC this summer are expected to feature heaps of new AI features.)
Responding to a question later on in the call, Cook played it again:
In terms of generative AI… we have a lot of work going on internally, as I’ve alluded to before. Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves. And so we’re going to hold that to this as well. But we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.
Cook seems to acknowledge that he’s a bit out of his comfort zone in teasing anything, but clearly, he feels the need to do a little of that when it comes to AI. I think he’s right- it’s a signal that Apple knows what people are interested in and that it’s got something coming.
Tim Cook loves all his kids equallyAnalyst Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America asked Cook a question that I thought was pretty sharp: Could Apple’s CEO liken the company’s expectations for the early days of the Vision Pro to any of the company’s other product lines? In other words, is this an iPhone-like thing, or an Apple Watch, or an iPad? Analysts are all about trying to figure out what the future will hold. Why not ask Tim Cook?
Tim wouldn’t have it, of course:
You know, each product has its own journey, and so I wouldn’t want to compare it to any one in particular. I would just say we couldn’t be more excited internally…. And so we’ll see and report the results of it in the wearables category that you’re familiar with.
“Each product has its own journey.” They should put that on a T-shirt.
Products that are solidThe iPhone, which accounted for nearly 60 percent of Apple’s overall revenue in the launch quarter of the iPhone 15, managed to show a little growth, improving 6% versus the year-ago quarter. That’s not exactly a rocketing growth spurt, but it’s the second-best iPhone quarter ever and a sign that the iPhone business probably has more (slow) growth in it. Given how big a part of Apple’s overall business the product is, it really is the case that as the iPhone goes, so goes Apple.
The Mac also did pretty well! It was only up 1% year over year, but four of its last six quarters have featured double-digit negative growth numbers. When you stare at the overall Mac revenue chart, though, things look pretty solid. Yes, the Mac went through a couple of years of huge growth, but it seems to be coming back to a new, higher floor of around $7 or $8 billion per quarter. Apple reported that the overall number of active Macs reached another all-time high. Not bad for a 40-year-old.
Products that are not so solidThe iPad had a quarter that actually looked okay sequentially- it was larger than the three quarters that preceded it. The problem is that the iPad is usually a seasonal product that does well in the holiday quarter, and this year’s holiday quarter was 25 percent lower. Ouch. On the other hand, Apple sold $7 billion worth of iPads, none of which were released in 2023. For a stale product line, maybe that’s not so bad?
Apple’s Wearables, Home, and Accessories category seems like it’s stuck in a hole. Once the category that piled up enormous growth, it was down 11% year over year, and that was the sixth down quarter in the last seven. It’s also two straight holiday quarters of revenue regression in a very seasonal category. Apple tried to put a brave face on it, but between AirPods and HomePods and Apple Watch, nothing is moving the needle. This is a category that needs some attention.
Oh, but you’re saying, step aside! Here comes Vision Pro! And, well, sure. But let me get this ripped-open envelope and a pencil and do some quick math. Let’s say Apple sells 150,000 Vision Pros this quarter at an average selling price of $3750. That’s $560 million, more or less. That’s a great start, but it’s a drop in the bucket of the $12 billion that the category did last quarter. Vision Pro may end up being a big part of this category, but in the short term, it’ll need to be compelling upgrades to Apple Watch and AirPods Pro, and maybe something—anything—interesting in the home category.
The quintessentially Apple momentI know that most of this stuff is scripted, and in fact, on Thursday, it even sounded like Tim Cook’s opening statement was pre-recorded?! But still, these calls are an opportunity for Apple executives to express themselves in ways that might not fit as well in a press release. And this bit from Cook struck me:
We are announcing these results on the eve of what is sure to be an historic day as we enter the era of spatial computing. Starting tomorrow, Apple Vision Pro, the most advanced personal electronics device ever, will be available in Apple stores… Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary device built on decades of Apple innovation, and it’s years ahead of anything else. Apple Vision Pro has a groundbreaking new input system and thousands of innovations, and it will unlock incredible experiences for users and developers that are simply not possible on any other device….
We can’t wait for people to experience the magic for themselves…. Moments like these are what we live for at Apple. They are why we do what we do. They’re why we’re so unflinchingly dedicated to groundbreaking innovation and why we’re so focused on pushing technology to its limits as we work to enrich the lives of our users.
That’s the Apple brand promise, and the attitude of a whole lot of people who work at Apple, in a nutshell.
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spent time with financial analysts on a scheduled phone call after reporting the company’s quarterly results. Here’s our complete transcript.
Tim Cook’s prepared remarksGood afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $119.6 billion for the December quarter, up 2% from a year ago, despite having one less week in the quarter. EPS was $2.18, up 16% from a year ago, and an all-time record.
We achieved revenue records across more than two dozen countries and regions, including all-time records in Europe and rest of Asia Pacific. We also continue to see strong double-digit growth in many emerging markets, with all-time records in Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, and Turkey, as well as December quarter records in India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile.
In services, we set an all-time revenue record with paid subscriptions growing double digits year over year, and I’m pleased to announce today that we have set a new record for our install base, which has now surpassed 2.2 billion active devices.
We are announcing these results on the eve of what is sure to be an historic day as we enter the era of spatial computing. Starting tomorrow, Apple Vision Pro, the most advanced personal electronics device ever, will be available in Apple stores for customers in the U.S., with expansion to other countries later this year. Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary device built on decades of Apple innovation, and it’s years ahead of anything else. Apple Vision Pro has a groundbreaking new input system and thousands of innovations, and it will unlock incredible experiences for users and developers that are simply not possible on any other device.
There’s already so much excitement behind this product from reviewers. customers, and developers. They are praising everything from the incredible experience of watching a movie on a 100-foot screen to remarkable new machine learning capabilities like hand tracking and room mapping. We can’t wait for people to experience the magic for themselves.
Moments like these are what we live for at Apple. They are why we do what we do. They’re why we’re so unflinchingly dedicated to groundbreaking innovation and why we’re so focused on pushing technology to its limits as we work to enrich the lives of our users. As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in these and other technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence, where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort, and we’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.
Now let’s turn to the results for the December quarter, beginning with iPhone.
We’re proud to report that revenue came in at $69.7 billion, 6% higher than a year ago. The iPhone 15 lineup has earned glowing reviews and been embraced by customers. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus feature a gorgeous new design with color-infused back glass and contoured edges, Dynamic Island, A16 Bionic, and a new 48-megapixel camera system. And the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max set the gold standard for smartphones with a beautiful and lighter titanium design, industry-leading performance with A17 Pro, and our most advanced camera system with the equivalent of seven pro lenses and the ability to record spatial video. Features like Emergency SOS and and roadside assistance via satellite bring peace of mind to users when they travel, and I’m grateful for every note I’ve received about their life-saving impact.
Turning to Mac, revenue came in at $7.8 billion, up 1% year over year, driven by the strength of our latest M3-powered MacBook Pro models in spite of having one less week of sales. Just last week, we got to wish Mac a happy 40th birthday. When it was introduced 40 years ago, Mac changed everything, and through the years it has done so again and again. Recently, we have been on a tremendous pace of innovation. Since the introduction of Apple Silicon in 2020, we’ve been proud to offer our users unmatched performance and power, along with a remarkable neural engine for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
This past fall, we had an amazing launch of the latest generation of Apple Silicon for Mac, M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. These chips break new ground in power and performance, empowering users to do more than they ever could before, whether they’re making a musical masterpiece using the latest features in Logic Pro or beating their high score in a graphics-intensive game. A favorite among students, business owners, artists, and video editors, our MacBook Pro lineup is the world’s best pro notebook family. And iMac, the world’s most capable and best-selling all-in-one, is now faster than ever thanks to M3.
In iPad, revenue for the December quarter was $7 billion, down 25% year-over-year due to a difficult compare with the launch of the M2 iPad Pro and the 10th generation iPad during the December quarter last year, and one less week of sales. iPad remains the most versatile, capable, and elegant tablet on the market today. It continues to be the go-to device for students, creatives, and more, with customers loving iPad’s incredible combination of portability and performance. Powerful apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad allow video and music creators to unleash their creativity in new ways that are only possible on iPad. iPad continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible on a tablet.
In Wearables, Home, and Accessories, revenue came in at $12 billion, down 11% from a year ago due to a difficult compare with the launch timing of several products in this category and the impact of the 14th week last year. Across our latest Apple Watch lineup, we’re enabling and encouraging our users to live a healthier day while making Apple Watch even more intuitive to use. The new double-tap gesture on Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 make it easier to answer calls, play and pause music, or take a photo with iPhone. I’ve been deeply moved by the many touching stories about how features like irregular rhythm notification and fall detection helped Apple Watch users when they needed it most. And for the first time ever, users can choose a carbon-neutral option of any new Apple Watch. Meanwhile, our AirPods lineup continued to be a holiday favorite.
In Services, we set an all-time revenue record of $23.1 billion, an 11% year-over-year increase. Because we had one less week this quarter, this growth represents an acceleration from the September quarter, and we achieved all-time revenue records across advertising, cloud services, payment services, and video, as well as December quarter records in App Store and AppleCare.
Across our services, we’re constantly growing our offerings to give users even more to love. With the redesigned Apple TV app, we’ve made it easier for subscribers to enjoy all their favorite shows, movies, and sports, including Apple TV+ hits like Masters of the Air, Monarch, and Slow Horses. We’re proud to be a part of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film that has moved audiences and earned more than 200 accolades, including Best Film of the Year from the New York Film Critics Circle, nine BAFTA nominations, a Golden Globe win, and ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Across all Apple TV+ productions, we’ve now earned 2,050 award nominations and 450 wins since we’ve introduced the service.
We’re also excited to have a new season of Major League Soccer kicking off this month. We’re looking forward to seeing Lionel Messi return to the field, and to following all of our favorite teams in what is sure to be an incredible season. And we’re counting down to the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show featuring Usher.
Turning to retail, in recent months we opened three stores, including our 100th store in Asia Pacific. Throughout the holidays, our team members pulled out all the stops to help customers find the perfect gift, and I know our U.S. team members are especially excited to begin demoing Apple Vision Pro for our customers tomorrow.
At Apple, we live and breathe innovation. We are driven to pioneer new technology that can enrich our customers’ lives, and we’re just as intentional about showing up with our values and being a force for good in the world. February is Black History Month, and to honor it, we’ve launched our new Black Unity Collection, which includes the Black Unity Sport Loop Band. This year’s designs reflect a lasting commitment to working toward a more equitable world. We also continue to do essential work through our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, and we’re proud to continue providing grants to organizations that are making a real impact in the world.
In recent months, we’ve also taken significant strides in our environmental work. We’re partnering with suppliers to bring more clean energy online for Apple production. We’re using more recycled materials than ever before and more energy efficient transportation than ever before, and each day we are taking more and more steps toward becoming 100% carbon neutral across all of our products by 2030.
Apple is a company that has never shied away from big challenges. That’s because we are grounded by a deep sense of purpose and guided by core belief in the transformative power of innovation. And so, we are optimistic about the future, confident in the long term, and as excited as we’ve ever been to deliver for our users like only Apple can. With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s prepared remarksThank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone.
Revenue for the December quarter was $119.6 billion, up 2% from last year. During the December quarter a year ago, two unique factors affected our results. First, we had an additional week in the quarter, and second, we had COVID-related factory shutdowns that limited iPhone supply. We estimate that the net impact of these two factors resulted in a two percentage point headwind to our revenue performance this quarter.
We set all-time revenue records in Europe and rest of Asia Pacific, and continue to see strong performance across our emerging markets, with double-digit growth in the majority of the emerging markets we track. Products revenue was $96.5 billion, flat compared to last year, driven by strength in iPhone, offset by challenging compares for iPad and wearables home and accessories, and one less week of sales this year across the entire portfolio.
Thanks to our unparalleled customer loyalty and very strong levels of customer satisfaction, our total installed base of active devices set a new record across all products and all geographic segments and is now over 2.2 billion active devices.
Services revenue set an all-time record of $23.1 billion, up 11% year-over-year. When we take into account the extra week last year, this represents a sequential acceleration of growth from the September quarter. We’re very pleased with our services performance in both developed and emerging markets, with all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and rest of Asia-Pacific.
Company gross margin was 45.9%, up 70 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 39.4%, up 280 basis points sequentially, also driven by leverage and mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 72.8%, up 190 basis points from last quarter, due to a more favorable mix. Operating expenses were $14.5 billion. We’re at the midpoint of the guidance range we provided and up 1% year-over-year. Net income was $33.9 billion, up $3.9 billion from last year. Diluted EPS was $2.18, up 16% versus last year and an all-time record, and operating cash flow was was very strong at $39.9 billion.
Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was $69.7 billion, up 6% year over year. We set all-time records in several countries and regions, including Latin America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and Korea, as well as December quarter records in India and Indonesia. Our iPhone active install base grew to a new all-time high, and we had an all-time record number of iPhone upgraders during the quarter. Customers are loving the new iPhone 15 family, with the latest reports from 451 Research indicating customer satisfaction of 99% in the U.S. In fact, many iPhone models were among the top-selling smartphones around the world during the quarter. According to a survey from Kantar, iPhones were four out of the top five models in the U.S. and Japan, four out of the top six models in urban China and the UK, and all top five models in Australia.
Mac generated revenue of $7.8 billion and returned to growth, despite one less week of sales this year. This represents a significant acceleration from the September quarter, when we faced a challenging compare due to the supply disruptions and subsequent demand recapture we experienced a year ago. Customer response to our latest iMac and MacBook Pro models powered by the M3 chips has been great and our Mac install base reached an all-time high, with almost half of Mac buyers during the quarter being new to the product. Also, 451 Research recently reported customer satisfaction of 97% for Mac in the U.S.
iPad was $7 billion in revenue, down 25% year over year. iPad faced a difficult compare, because during the December quarter last year, we launched the new iPad Pro and iPad 10th generation, and we had an extra week of sales. However, the iPad install base continues to grow and is an all-time high, with over half of the customers who purchase iPads during the quarter being new to the product. And customer satisfaction for iPad was recently measured at 98% in the U.S.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $12 billion, down 11% year over year due to a challenging launch compare and the extra week a year ago. This time last year, we had the full quarter benefit from the launches of the AirPods Pro second generation, the Watch SE, and the first Watch Ultra. We continue to attract new customers to Apple Watch. Nearly two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. And the latest reports from 451 Research indicate customer satisfaction of 96% in the U.S.
And in services, we were very pleased with our double-digit growth, which was driven by the strength of our ecosystem. Our installed base is now over 2.2 billion active devices and continues to grow nicely, establishing a solid foundation for the future expansion of our services business. And we continue to see increased customer engagement with our services. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reach a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double digits year over year. Also, our paid subscriptions showed strong double-digit growth. We have well over 1 billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. Finally, we continue to build on the breadth and the quality of our current services. From Oscar-nominated theatrical releases with Apple TV+, to more publications on News+, like The Athletic, and exciting new games on Arcade.
Turning to enterprise, we continue to see many business customers leverage Apple products to improve productivity and drive innovation. Target recently added the latest M3 MacBook Pro to their existing deployment of thousands of Macs, enabling employees across various departments to do their best work. In emerging markets, Zoho, a leading technology company headquartered in India, offers its 15,000-plus global employees a choice of devices, with 80% of their workforce using iPhone for work and nearly two-thirds of them choosing Mac as their primary computer.
With the upcoming launch of Apple Vision Pro, we are seeing strong excitement in enterprise. Leading organizations across many industries, such as Walmart, Nike, Vanguard, Striker, Bloomberg and SAP have started leveraging and investing in Apple Vision Pro as the new platform to bring innovative spatial computing experiences to their customers and employees. From everyday productivity to collaborative product design to immersive training, we cannot wait to see the amazing things our enterprise customers will create in the months and years to come.
Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $173 billion in cash and marketable securities. We decreased commercial paper by $4 billion, leaving us with total debt of $108 billion. As a result, net cash was $65 billion at the end of the quarter, and our goal of becoming net cash neutral over time remains unchanged.
During the quarter, we returned nearly $27 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $20.5 billion through open market repurchases of 112 million Apple shares. We also retired an additional 6 million shares in the final settlement of our 19th ASR. As usual, we will provide an update to our capital return program when we report results at the end of this quarter.
As we move ahead into the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suaseni referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter, and we expect foreign exchange to be a revenue headwind of about two percentage points on a year-over-year basis.
As a reminder, in the December quarter a year ago, we faced significant supply constraints on the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max due to COVID-19 factory shutdowns, and in the March quarter a year ago, we were able to replenish channel inventory and fulfill significant pent-up demand from the constraints. We estimate that this impact added close to $5 billion to the March quarter’s total revenue last year. When we remove this impact from last year’s revenue, we expect both our March quarter total company revenue and iPhone revenue to be similar to a year ago. For our services business, we expect a similar double-digit growth rate to what we reported in the December quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 46% and 47%. We expect OPEX to be between $14.3 and $14.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $50 million—excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments—and our tax rate to be around 16%. Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 24 cents per share of common stock, payable on February 15, 2024, to shareholders of record as of February 12, 2024. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Analyst Q&AEric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Hey, guys. Good evening. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two, and congrats on the nice quarter here. Luca, maybe if we start with you, can you unpackage some of the services drivers a bit for us? Obviously, really nice outperformance in the December quarter versus your expectations of record gross margin implies your higher margin businesses were likely the sources of outperformance. But can you maybe just clarify a bit how we should think about services growth for the March quarter? And then speak to some of those underlying drivers, you know, in the December quarter and then in the March quarter, what the different puts and takes would be, and then I have a follow-up, please. Thank you.
Luca Maestri: Thanks, Eric, for the question. Let’s start with the December quarter. As we said, up 11%, $23.1 billion is an all-time record for us with all-time records in the Americas, in Europe, and the rest of Asia Pac, so it was pretty broad-based geographically and very strong across all the services categories because we had all-time revenue records for cloud, for payments, for video, and for advertising, and December quarter records for the App Store and for AppleCare. Obviously last year we had an extra week. So the underlying Performance is stronger than the 11% that we have reported.
I think the entire ecosystem is doing well, because we continue to see growth and new all-time highs in both transacting accounts and paid accounts, which is obviously very important, and paid subscriptions continue to grow strong double digits. Just as a reference, we have more than a billion paid subscriptions across all the services on our platform. This is more than double the number of paid subscriptions that we had only four years ago, so obviously… very significant growth there.
What I said during the prepared remarks around the March quarter, I mentioned that we will continue to grow double digits at a percentage that is similar to what we reported for the December quarter. We don’t provide guidance around the different services categories, so we will provide more color when we report in three months.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Okay. Thank you, Luca. And then, Tim, you know, really nice to see your installed base reach a record high, again, against all products and geos. You know, I’m wondering if you could share a bit more detail about the new users you were able to onboard over the last 12 months, meaning how might this new cohort look different from past cohorts, either in terms of geographic representation or skewed to certain products or even other monetization trends might differ from past cohorts, and that’s it for me. Thanks so much.
Tim Cook: Yes, hi Eric, I would say emerging markets have been a very key area of strength for us. You know, if you look at it, India grew in revenue terms, strong double digits in the December quarter and hit a quarter revenue record. The other emerging markets like Indonesia also hit a quarterly record, and we had several regions with records, from Latin America to the Middle East, and that theme has been pretty consistent across the other quarters of the year as well, and so, emerging markets, very, very important, and I feel like we’re doing a great job there.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: Hey, good afternoon. I just have two questions as well. First on services, just on the outlook for the March quarter for a similar double-digit growth rate as the December quarter, I’m just wondering, why won’t it be potentially faster, given that the December quarter obviously had a headwind from the extra week comp, and I’d also think that some of the pricing uplifts on select AppleOne services that were implemented last winter should help in the March quarter. Any additional thoughts there would be great in terms of what some of your assumptions are, and then I have a quick follow-up.
Luca Maestri: Yeah, we’ll see how the the quarter develops. I would point to two things. One is the fact that we mentioned that we expect a couple of points of negative foreign exchange in the March quarter, and foreign exchange was essentially flat for us in the December quarter, so you’ve got a bit of a headwind there, and then when you look at the progression of our services business over the last few quarters, the compares for March are slightly more difficult than the compares for December.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you, Luca, and then my second question: It was very interesting to hear about some of the enterprise customer investments into Vision Pro. Could you maybe just talk about some of the efforts to support the Vision Pro developer ecosystem? And it was also good to hear about the potential upcoming announcements on AI, so any thoughts there would also be helpful. Thank you.
Tim Cook: Yeah. Hi. We are incredibly excited about the enterprise opportunities with Vision Pro. I’ve seen several demos from different companies. Luca mentioned several in his opening remarks, but Walmart has a very cool merchandising app. There are firms that are doing design collaboration apps. There are field service applications. Really all over the map. There are applications for command center kind of things. SAP has really gotten behind it, and of course SAP is in so many of companies that I think there will be a great opportunity for us in enterprise and we couldn’t be more excited about where things are right now. We’re obviously looking forward to tomorrow. This has been multiple years of efforts from so many people across Apple and really it took a whole of company effort to to bring it to this far.
In terms of generative AI, which I would guess is your focus, we have a lot of work going on internally as I’ve alluded to before. Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves, and so we’re going to hold that to this as well. But we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: I have two questions as well. First, on iPhone, there have been concerns around replacement cycles lengthening, China competition intensifying, and you still beat iPhone revenues despite the weaker performance in China. Curious how you’re thinking about the 15 cycle overall, given what you saw in the December quarter.
Tim Cook: Hi, it’s Tim. We were up 6%, as we mentioned in the opening remarks. We’re happy with that performance. Underneath there… We had really strong performance in several parts of the world with all-time records in Europe and rest of Asia Pacific. As I’d mentioned earlier, we did particularly well in several emerging markets from Latin America to the Middle East, and we set December quarter records in India and Indonesia, and so, really some spectacular broad-based reactions to iPhone.
We also importantly set an all-time record worldwide for iPhone upgraders, and the install base hit a new all-time high, consistent with our overall devices. So there’s a lot of good things—Luca mentioned in his opening comments that iPhones were four out of the top five smartphone models in the U.S. and Japan and four out of the top six in urban China and the UK, and all top five in Australia. And the customer satisfaction level for iPhone 15 hit 99%. If you look at iPhone 15 since the announcement of it and shipment in September, so this is including some of Q4, and you compare that to iPhone 14 over the same period of time, iPhone 15 is outselling iPhone 14. And so we feel very good about that, and the upgraders hitting a record is particularly exciting for us.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Great, thank you Tim. And as a follow-up, obviously you’re just launching the Vision Pro and it’s an entirely new category. It’s a price point that’s a much higher starting price point relative to most of your other, probably over the last decade, product introductions. But just wondering, how would you measure the success of Vision Pro over time and which Apple products’ adoption curve would you look at as potentially the most similar? And is there a way in which we could think Vision Pro could eclipse, maybe something like the iPad in revenue over time? Thank you.
Tim Cook: You know, each product has its own journey, and so I wouldn’t want to compare it to any one in particular. I would just say we couldn’t be more excited internally. We’ve gotten an incredible amount of excitement from developers and from customers that can’t wait till tomorrow to pick up their units, and we’re incredibly proud to be able to be able to demo the unit in so many of our stores in the U.S. starting tomorrow for people that want to check it out. And so we’ll see and report the results of it in the wearables category that you’re familiar with. I think that if you look at it from a price point of view, there’s an incredible amount of technology that’s packed into the product. There’s 5,000 patents in the product, and it’s of course built on many innovations that Apple has spent multiple years on, from silicon to displays, and significant AI and machine learning, all of the hand tracking, the room mapping, all of this stuff is driven by AI, and so we’re incredibly excited about it. I can’t wait to be in the store for tomorrow and see the reaction myself.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: First off, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what are you seeing in China right now. I think from a geographic basis, one of the few places that was down double digits while everything else was growing. So I’m hoping you’d spend a bit of time discussing what are you seeing there from a competitive perspective and more importantly from a demand perspective in China?
Tim Cook: Yeah, if you look at iPhone in China mainland, which I think has been the focus of a lot of interest, and you look at it in constant currency, so more of an operational view, we were down mid-single digits on iPhone. And so it was the other things that drove the larger contraction year-over-year. On the good news side, we had solid growth on upgraders year-over-year in mainland China, and we had four of the top six smartphone models in urban China. Also, IDC just put out a note that you may have seen where we were the top brand for the full year and for the December quarter. And so there’s some good news along with—obviously, we’d prefer not to contract.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore Fair enough, and then as a follow up, you folks have implemented a fair bit of changes around the apps for in Europe post the DMA implementation there. Can you just touch on what are some of the key updates and then Luca, does NetApp at all, do you see it having any significant impact financially to your services or the broader Apple P&L statement.
Tim Cook: Yeah, you know, let me try to answer a little bit of both and then Luca can add some comments to it. We announced a number of changes last week in Europe that would be in effect beginning in March. So the last month of the first calendar quarter or the second fiscal quarter. Some of the things that we announced include alternate billing opportunities, alternate app stores or marketplaces, if you will. We’re also opening NFC for new capabilities for banking and wallet apps, and so these are some of the things that we announced. If you think about what we’ve done over the years, we’ve really majored on privacy, security, and usability, and we’ve tried our best to get as close to the past in terms of the things that people love about our ecosystem as we can, but we’re going to fall short of providing the maximum amount that we could supply because we need to comply with the regulation. And so in terms of predicting the choices that developers and users will make, it’s very difficult to do that with precision, and so we’ll see what happens in March.
Luca Maestri: Yes, and Amit, as Tim said, these are changes that we’re going to be implementing in March. A lot will depend on the choices that will be made. Just to keep it in context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global App Store1 revenue.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: I guess the first question I want to just ask and maybe unpack a little bit more, just remarkable trends that we’re seeing in your product gross margin specifically. So I’m curious as we look forward, I guess on this last quarter, were there any kind of benefits you’re seeing from just the purchase component obligations that you put in place, let’s say a year ago, and that’s flowing through, and how are you thinking about the component pricing environment as we think about that gross margin into the March quarter and looking forward?
Luca Maestri: Yes, on the product side—and then maybe I’ll make a comment in total for the company—on the product side our gross margins increased sequentially 280 basis points, so obviously a very significant increase. I would say the two primary components of the increase are a favorable mix—of course, iPhone did very well, we did very well with our high-end models—and leverage, of course. It’s the biggest quarter of the year for us, and so we get the leverage effect. We had a partial offset negative impact from foreign exchange, but net-net obviously very significant improvement, and we had very similar dynamics on the services side where we increased sequentially 190 basis points, also in this case due to a more favorable mix, and so the combined effect of the two businesses gave us the 45.9 at the total company level, which is up 70% sequentially. You’ve heard from my prepared remarks that we are guiding total company gross margin to 46 to 47%, which is an additional expansion of margins compared to the already very strong results of the December quarter.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Okay. And then the second question I was just going to ask, you know, Tim, you alluded to kind of your excitement around generative AI and some announcements that we should think about maybe later this year. One of the things that stands out to me is that your capital expenditures has actually come down this last year. I’m curious, as you look to lean in more to generative AI, is there something we should consider about the CapEx intensity at Apple to make investments, to really set the table for a generative AI kind of platform as we move forward? Just given some of the things that we’ve seen from some other large tech companies.
Luca Maestri: I’ll take the question, Aaron. We’ve always said we will never under-invest in the business, so we are making all the investments that are necessary throughout our product development, software development, services development. And so we will continue to invest in every area of the business and at the appropriate level, and we’re very excited about what’s in store for us for the rest of the year.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Thank you for taking my question. For Luca, a clarification and question: The $5 billion impact in March quarter, is that for product revenue or is that total company revenue? And along the same path, you highlighted the strong gross margins and I understand last year some of the commodity costs were deflationary, but it looks like it’s going to be inflationary right now. And also you’ve done some of the Mac conversions, the silicon conversions. So I’m just trying to figure out how much juice is there more to squeeze on the gross margin side, and then I’ll follow up with Tim.
Luca Maestri: Yeah, so the first part of the question was around the $5 billion—oh, as I mentioned, a year ago we had this disruption of supply on iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max because of the factory shutdown due to the COVID-19 situation, and so essentially there was pent-up demand as we exited the December quarter that got fulfilled, and we also did the channel fill associated with it during the March quarter. So the close to $5 billion that I mentioned is entirely related to iPhone.
On the gross margin side, obviously we are at very high levels of gross margin, and I’ll repeat what I said before. We’ve had good expansion over the last few quarters, and now we are guiding to 46%-47%, and that takes into account everything that is going on, which is the commodity environment, which is the foreign exchange situation, and obviously the product and services mix, and outcome of this is the guidance which obviously is very strong and we’re very happy with it.
Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Thanks a lot, Luca, and then a follow-up for Tim. Tim, it’s very interesting to hear your comments on enterprise, and historically, Apple has been a consumer-centric company, and now with Vision Pro, Mac, etc., penetrating more into the enterprise. I’m kind of curious how to think about Apple of the future. Would it still be consumer centric or do you think it’s going to be more enterprise focused also as we get into the future. Thank you very much.
Tim Cook: We’ve really concluded that we can do both. That if you look at it, what has happened over the last several years is that employees are in a position in many companies to choose their own technology that is the best for them, and so it sort of took some of the central command from the traditional company and decentralized the decision-making. That is a huge advantage for Apple, because there’s a lot of people out there that want to use a Mac. They’re using a Mac at home. They’d like to use one in the office as well. iPad has also benefited from that. Vision Pro, when you look at the ton of use cases—I mean, we’re starting with a million apps and 600-plus that are have been designed particularly for Vision Pro. When I look at what is coming out of enterprise, it’s some of the most innovative things I’ve seen come out of enterprise in a long time. And so I think, like there is for the Mac and iPad and of course iPhone has been in enterprise since since the early days of iPhone, I think there’s a nice opportunity there for Vision Pro as well.
David Vogt, UBS: So, Tim and Luca, I appreciate the strength of the emerging markets like India and the other names that you kind of listed on the call, but can you kind of maybe spend some time on the Americas? Obviously, that was relatively flat. You touched on China. But what are you seeing in that market from the carriers here in the states, and is the sale cycle elongating or the replacement cycle elongating, and in your view what has to change to kind of maybe reaccelerate that business in the Americas particularly in the iPhone business? And then, I just want to make sure I understand sort of a guide, so when I think about the $5 billion pull forward last year in the March quarter from a channel fill percentage perspective. Even if I back that out last quarter, or I back it out this quarter, the March quarter, this would be sort of the softest quarter since the COVID pandemic. Obviously, I know Americas, as I just touched on, is a little bit softer than China, which you cleared up earlier. But you know, how do you think about the differences in sort of the macro conditions by region? And again do you have a sense for, are we nearing a trough from a macro demand perspective or how long do you think this particular weakness persists?
Tim Cook: Let me take the first part of your question about Americas. If you look at the U.S., which obviously drives the vast majority of the revenue in Americas, we grew in the December quarter from an iPhone business point of view, and the install base hit an all-time high. If you look at the replacement cycle, it’s very difficult to measure the replacement cycle at any given point, and so what we focus on internally a lot is the active install base and obviously the sales over usually a cycle, and we feel better about those things. If you look at who’s selling what in the U.S., the iPhone is four out of the top five selling smartphones in the U.S. and of course the customer satisfaction in the U.S., as we alluded to earlier, is 99%. So we feel very, very good about what our position is in the U.S.
Luca Maestri: And I would add to that, keep in mind, obviously, the extra week that we had a year ago, that obviously makes the compare a bit distorted. On the March quarter guide, I would point to you that obviously the COVID years had a lot of—let’s say turmoil in it, a lot of volatility that typically you wouldn’t see. If you look at our sequential progression from December to March this year, versus pre-COVID, versus like a more normal environment, it’s actually stronger than those years.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Just wanted to clarify on China, Tim, I think last quarter you still thought it was a growth market. Obviously you know that there’s some concerns recently and given what we saw in the quarter, is there something that we can kind of point to where you feel that that market can resume growth in the future? And I’m wondering if you’re still upbeat about that prospect, and then I just have a quick follow-up.
Tim Cook: Ben, we’ve been in China for 30 years, and, I remain very optimistic about China over the long term. And I feel good about hitting a new install base number, a high water mark, and very good about the growth in upgraders year over year during the quarter.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Great, thanks Tim, and just in terms of AI, I know you’re not going to talk about your plans, but are you a believer in the edge thesis that AI and processing on smartphones and devices like yours is going to have a huge role in AI and AI apps, and that it’s something you guys can take advantage of?
Tim Cook: Let me just say that I think there’s a huge opportunity for Apple with gen AI and AI, and without getting into more details and getting out in front of myself.
- Corrected 3/29. This was transcribed as “absolute revenue” in error. ↩
Apple reported its first fiscal quarter results on Thursday, with revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2% versus the same quarter a year ago. Overall, it was the company’s second best quarter ever in terms of revenue and profit, behind only the first quarter of fiscal 2022. Mac sales ended a string of down quarters to nudge up slightly; iPhone sales were also up. iPad sales were down double digits, as were wearables. Services growth slowed somewhat, but was still up double digits.
We’ve got some analysis of what was said, or read our transcript of the quarterly call with analysts; we also broke down all the numbers live on YouTube!
Now, on with the charts!
Taking apart Apple’s EU plans, our journeys into the portable monitor craze, what browsers we use, and how we manage saving links for later.
Go to the podcast page.
As you’re probably aware, there was a big anniversary last week. But the Mac wasn’t the only venerable Apple-related institution to hit the big four-oh on January 24. Once Steve Jobs wowed the 1984 Apple Investor Meeting at the Flint Center in Cupertino with his introduction of the original Macintosh, attendees emerged from the auditorium to be greeted by people handing out the first issue of the world’s newest computer magazine: Macworld.
Yes, it’s Macworld’s 40th as well. As you might expect from the relative health of the technology and media industries, the story of Macworld does not quite follow the same trajectory as the story of the Mac. (In the earliest days, Macworld was more successful than the Mac!)
As the person who has probably been associated with Macworld for two-thirds of its existence—I joined the staff in the fall of 1997, and I’m writing this in 2024—it’s only appropriate that I take you on a little trip down memory lane.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Just before launch, Jason has some second impressions of the Apple Vision Pro. But before the new-platform excitement starts, there’s the matter of Apple’s response to the EU and a complicated set of new iOS policies and features.
Go to the podcast page.
When I reviewed the Level Bolt a couple years ago, I was generally impressed with its unobtrusive nature and HomeKit integration.
But though I’ve continued to use the Bolt since then, I’ve become keenly aware that its reliance on Bluetooth as its wireless connectivity of choice is letting down the side. Fundamentally, Bluetooth just isn’t the right choice for a smart lock: it’s not inherently designed for proximity and it’s always been temperamental. For better or worse, that lack of reliability meant that, for me, the Bolt has ended up being little more than a lock of average intelligence.
In the meantime, smart lock technology has moved on. Fortunately, Level hasn’t been standing still either. Enter the Level Lock+, an upgraded version of Level’s flagship smart lock which, in addition to Bluetooth, has added NFC, enabling support for Apple’s home key standard. That felt like a good enough reason for me to check it out, and Level kindly provided me with a review unit to put through its paces.
The Lock+ essentially replaces both the Level Lock and Level Lock – Touch Edition, providing a single model with all the bells and whistles. No surprise, all those bells and whistles come at a price: the Level Lock+ retails for $349, though that includes the Connect Wi-Fi bridge as part of the package (more on which in a bit).
Unlike the Bolt, the Level Lock+ is a complete replacement for your existing deadbolt, complete with keyway and turn paddle. But like the Bolt, the Lock+ excels by not standing out: if you don’t tell anyone that it’s a smart lock, literally nobody will ever know. Level offers the Lock+ in four finishes to match those of common door hardware: Matte Black, Satin Chrome, Satin Nickel, and Polished Brass. I opted for the last, which blends in nicely with my existing door hardware.
In addition to the lock and installation hardware (which includes two strike plates of different sizes and a longer cap for the bolt to adjust to different door sizes), the Lock+ package bundles a CR2 battery to power the motor, a pair of keys, and a pair of NFC key fobs.
The art of installationI probably had an easier time installing the Lock+ than most users: I was already using the Level Bolt, and the internal mechanism of the Lock+ is basically the same size and shape. That meant I just had to remove my existing deadbolt, pull out the Bolt’s two parts (its internal motor and the bolt itself), and replace it with the Lock+’s own equivalents.
There was one trepidatious moment where I realized I hadn’t measured to make sure the Lock+ was the same size, a fact I only discovered when the plate of the deadbolt seemed just a smidge larger than the hole in my door. Fortunately, a few whaps with a rubber mallet and everything was copacetic.1
With the Lock+ hardware in place, I just had to attach the keyway and paddle, screw them together, and pop in the battery. All in, the whole process took maybe 10 minutes.
(Though I do have to add an asterisk to the end because of everybody’s favorite: software. When I initially set up the lock, I ran into some trouble adding it in HomeKit, mainly because I’d neglected to rename my existing Bolt and tried to use the same name for the Lock+. This ended up with the HomeKit process failing; ultimately, I had to reset the Lock+, which required removing the back housing and pressing a tiny button on it. It was a problem largely of my own making, and the second time around worked just fine.)
Depending on your setup, one downside to the Lock+ over the Bolt might be the physical keyway. Since the Bolt uses your existing deadbolt, you can keep your existing keys; that’s handy if you have several locks keyed the same. You can rekey the Lock+ to any existing key, but Level recommends using a professional locksmith. While I’ve rekeyed a few locks in the last couple years, I wasn’t brave enough to take this on with the review unit, so I was stuck with an extra key on my keychain.
And, of course, the Level Lock+, like all other smart locks, is always subject to the vagaries of your particular door. Level highly recommends making sure your door opens and closes smoothly before proceeding with installation.
Make sure you’re connectedAs with the Bolt, once the Lock+ is set up, you can access it from either the Level app or the Home app. The former offers a few features unavailable via HomeKit, including the ability to create time-limited passes for others (for which they themselves will need to download the Level app), code physical NFC keycards (available from Level for a separate cost), and tweak settings like volume level and range. In truth, I rarely use it beyond setup.
For those who don’t use HomeKit, Level+ is now enabling integration for Google Home and Amazon Alexa, but there’s a catch: you’ll need to use the Level Connect included along with the Lock+. The Connect (which you can also buy separately) is essentially a Bluetooth-to-Wi-Fi bridge: plug it in within 20 feet of your Lock+ and you can access the lock’s functionality via your network. Unfortunately, each Connect only works with a single lock, which could definitely get a bit cumbersome if you want to have several in your house.
This is one place that HomeKit has a major advantage, since if you already have a compatible home hub (an Apple TV or a HomePod), it already handles all of this functionality for you.
There’s one more wrinkle in the connectivity story: though Level has said that its smart locks have Thread radios and would be updated to support Matter, the company has yet to deploy that functionality—supposedly it’s due for 2024, but given the continued evolution of the Matter standard, it may be a while yet. Thus, in the meantime, the Level Connect.
Home key advantageAnd now for the main event, the raison d’être for this review: Level’s support for Apple’s home key standard. I admit to some envy about Jason’s home-key-compatible smart lock, and now that I’ve actually used it for several weeks, I can say that envy was well justified: home key is a fantastic feature, and I can’t imagine ever investing in a smart lock that doesn’t support it.
For those who haven’t yet taken the plunge, home key allows you to use your Apple Watch or iPhone to lock or unlock your door just by holding the device nearby. And, with Express Mode enabled, there’s no need to even unlock or wake up your device. In practice, I’ve ended up almost always using my Apple Watch for this, given that it doesn’t require me to dig into my pocket to pull out my phone—at which point, why not just get my keys?
To me, home key is far superior to the location-based auto-unlock/auto-lock option that the Bolt offered2. For one thing, it requires intentionality on a user’s part, which vastly reduces both false positives and false negatives. For another, it improves precision: given the proximity basis of NFC, the locking/unlocking is immediate, as opposed to the Bluetooth location-based system, which could have a significant lag time.
In my usage, the home key functionality is almost completely reliable. About 95 percent of the time, it works exactly as I expect. About 5 percent of the time, I’ve run into issues where I needed to have my watch positioned just right3, or there was a mechanical issue where the door didn’t lock correctly because, for example, it wasn’t all the way closed.4 In both those cases, I’ve always been able to get the door to open with home key, it just took slightly longer. I think I’ve used the physical key maybe once in the weeks that I’ve had the Lock+ installed.
To put it bluntly: This is how a smart lock should work.
Sharing access requires setting up passes in the Level app.I have run into one asterisk to the home key functionality, however: sharing. For those who are members of your household, it’s no problem—my wife immediately had access to the home key for our house once I’d added it, no additional configuration required. But if we want to share access to the smart lock with, say, a friend visiting from out of town or a contractor, we’d still have to go through Level’s system; you can’t share iOS home keys with people who aren’t in your household. (Some smart locks do have “passes” that can be managed through the Home app, but Level doesn’t appear to support that functionality.) That said, this is an Apple issue, not a Level one, and it’s a feature I’d hope to see the company add in a future iOS update.
Reach out and touch somethingThe Lock+ offers other features, but the only one I’ve used routinely is the “Touch to Lock” feature. With this enabled, you can put a finger on the outside lock housing and it will automatically engage the lock. This means you don’t even have to use your device to lock the door behind you, which I find extremely convenient. And since you’re locking the door, there’s not really a security concern. You can, however, set up a time window within which this feature is available after either the lock is used and/or it detects the door opening or closing.
Once or twice I’ve accidentally hit the housing when the door was opening and triggered it, but those incidents have been rare, and it just means you have to unlock it again (usually when the door is open, so no big deal).
There is a similar “Touch to Unlock” feature, but I haven’t bothered turning that one on, largely because it relies on the Bluetooth geolocation features that I found so unreliable in the Bolt. I do, however, appreciate that there’s a separate aspect of this feature, which lets you use Touch to Unlock within ten seconds of Touch to Lock, in case you suddenly realize you left something inside.
Verdict: It’s a lockWhat I predominantly liked about the Level Bolt was its inconspicuous nature married with its smart features, and the Lock+ improves upon that in almost every way. The addition of home key support is a home run5, the Touch to Lock feature is way more useful than I thought it would be, and even though I had to replace my existing deadbolt, the Lock+ styling is seamless.
At $349, the Lock+ is definitely not cheap. Other home key compatible locks, such as the Schlage Encode Plus and the Yale Assure Lock 2, can be had for under $300. Both also include keypads as part of their housings, however, which may or may not appeal to you from an aesthetic or functional standpoint.6
But having used the Lock+ for several weeks now, I’m hard-pressed to want to go back to the Bolt, which had started to feel like a smart lock in name only. In addition to hopefully getting my own Lock+ to replace this review unit, I’m also planning on adding one to our front door when we refinish it later this year. As skeptical as I’ve been in the past about smart locks, home key has made me a believer, and I’m ready to ditch my keys for good.
Update: An earlier version of this article misstated the price of other smart locks: they can be had for under $300, not under $200.
- Though, as of this writing, I have not yet tried to remove that piece. 😅 ↩
- I should note, these automatic features are still available with the Lock+; I just didn’t enable them. ↩
- Bear in mind, I’ve been testing this entirely in cold weather, which means a) there’s usually a heavy coat sleeve over my Watch, making it a little harder to line up correctly and b) the fit of my door has changed, due to temperature and humidity. Hurray for the variable New England climate! ↩
- I opted to leave the Lock+’s audio feedback on, having previously disabled it on the Bolt, in order to better know when the locking completely successfully. ↩
- Sorry, not sorry. ↩
- For what it’s worth, Level does sell an external keypad for $79. ↩
“Record a voice memo, receive it as email.”
Whisper Memos is a an iPhone/Apple Watch app that lets you record voice memos, and in turn sends you an email with perfect transcription. Your text is automatically divided into paragraphs so you can just start reading.
Under the hood, it uses an AI model called Whisper, which yields perfect results in any language.
It’s built for convenience: You can record by pressing a button on your iPhone lock screen, or from a complication on your Apple Watch.
So, check out Whisper Memos today. You’ll be amazed at how fast, accurate, and reliable it is at preserving your precious thoughts.
Over at MacStories, our pal John Voorhees does an excellent job of breaking down Apple’s new App Store regulations in Europe:
A corollary to this point to keep in mind is that Apple is making these changes because it has to under EU law. It’s clear from the tone of the company’s press release and our conversations with its representatives that they strongly believe the changes are bad for the security and privacy of its users. By extension, it’s also clear that Apple doesn’t think the benefits to users imposed by the EU’s regulations outweigh those privacy and security tradeoffs. And that, right there, is where reasonable people can differ and what will continue to fuel this debate for a long time.
This issue is complex and far from over: the EU still has to respond to Apple’s proposal before we know exactly what the final rules will look like. John’s examination is very thorough and a must-read for understanding exactly what’s going on here from an Apple strategic level, as well as the dust and bolts of what the company is proposing.
If you’re going to take away anything from this whole episode, I think the most important point is this isn’t a case where either Apple or the EU are wholly on the side of right. Apple may very well care about the security of its users, but it also wants to protect its profit cut from the App Store and the use of its platform. The EU may want to curtail the reach of big technology companies when it comes to their citizens’ best interests, but it also is a large organization that doesn’t entirely understand what’s feasible from a technological perspective and has its own ideological axes to grind. It’s always imperative to interrogate where an argument stems from and who stands to gain.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block video ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Shortcuts maven Matthew Cassinelli proposes a useful enhancement to Apple Podcasts:
However, I think Apple needs to go one step further in their next step and add timestamps to Apple Podcasts, a long-overdue feature that’d enable users to share links to individual moments within a podcast, directly to a specific point in the transcript.
Similar to what’s already now available for Transcripts, listeners could tap on a paragraph, seek to the beginning of a sentence, and the use the Share sheet to not only “Copy” the text, but “Copy link at timestamp” – something I’m surprised didn’t come along with this feature.
This is a great idea and frankly, I’m kind of surprised that Apple hasn’t offered this feature already. As Matt points out, it’s in a couple of the company’s other apps, and third party options like Overcast provide this kind of functionality. Sharing a podcast episode is good, but sometimes you want to tell somebody “Hey, listen to this part right here.” Having a way to quickly and easily send that excerpt to someone seems like a no-brainer.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
More than a year ago, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman broke the story that Apple was actively preparing to allow alternative app stores on iOS in Europe, among other changes, as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Four hundred and eight days later, here we are.
These are huge changes. Apple claims there are going to be more than 600 new APIs for app developers, along with numerous other alterations to policies and technology required by the DMA. You can see why Apple has essentially been working on this since the iOS 17 development process started a year ago—this is essentially an entire segment of the iOS 17 update that was never announced last June but instead sat and waited for a final rollout just as the DMA was about to take effect.
As is painfully clear from Apple’s press release on Thursday, the company deeply dislikes being mandated by law to make these changes. At every turn, while assuring the public that Apple is going to do its best to keep users as safe and secure as possible, it stops to point out that the DMA will make iOS less secure.
There’s no denying that these changes increase the danger for EU iPhone users. Apple has spent a decade honing the techniques it will use in the EU in a vital testbed—the Mac. While I wouldn’t call the Mac a hotbed of malware and scams, there’s far more of it on the Mac than there is on the iPhone. There will undoubtedly be more of it in the EU, post-DMA-rollout, than before.
But also new to the EU will be true competition with Apple in browsers and app stores. The economics of app sales in Europe will change. Apps that might never have been approved by Apple will have other avenues for sale. App developers fed up with Apple’s 30 percent cut will be able to strike out on their own.
For years, Apple has been preparing for this moment, not just by introducing features like notarization on the Mac, but by denouncing the concept of “sideloading” apps (i.e., loading them from outside the App Store) as a danger to all users. Beginning in March, the entire world will be watching the EU to see if Apple’s warnings were true—or if it was just a smokescreen designed to scare regulators and legislators out of creating laws like the DMA.
Here’s what Apple says is going to change:
Alternative app marketplaces. It doesn’t seem like Apple will let any old developer offer apps on their websites, as is the case on macOS. Instead, Apple has created a new set of tools that allow developers to build alternate app stores. If you’re a developer who wants to make an app—let’s say a video game emulator, since those are frequently rejected from the App Store—you can’t sell it or give it away yourself. You’ll need to find a place in an alternative app store.
Altstore has been a sideloading marketplace on iOS for a while now, taking advantage of bugs and limitations in iOS. According to Altstore, it’s going legit in the EU, doing the work to become an official “alternative marketplace.” You can bet Facebook and Epic Games will be there. I’d imagine that SetApp, the seven-year-old app subscription service, will jump in, too. (Apple will apparently require that alternative app marketplaces show proof of a substantial line of credit—presumably to prevent fly-by-night operations that show up, take everyone’s money, and run.)
Apple will also let users set an app marketplace other than the App Store as their default. That’ll be weird.
Alternative payment systems. Not only will apps in the EU be able to link out to external websites, but even in-app purchases and subscriptions can bypass Apple and use other means. Apple has built new APIs for developers to use for both of these scenarios.
Alternative browser engines. While there are currently several web browsers on iOS, they’re all using Safari’s rendering engine, WebKit, under the hood. That’s because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines on the platform, period. This will change in the EU, which means that (for example) Google Chrome on the iPhone in Europe could use Google’s rendering engine. This has intriguing web-app implications since some web apps just don’t run on Safari but do run on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Contactless payment without Wallet. Currently, all apps that want to use the iPhone’s tap-to-pay functionality for purchases, transit passes, and even door locks all run through Apple’s Wallet app. Apple will now allow apps to access Apple’s tap-to-pay hardware directly throughout the European Economic Area (which includes non-EU countries Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.) In the EU, Apple will let a third-party app be the default for tap-to-pay transactions.
I’m not clear on how this will make things better for users, but it does mean that EU banks will be able to force users to open their apps to pay for things, presumably bypassing Apple taking a cut of Apple Pay transactions.
It’s not an app free-for-all. App developers who go outside the App Store will still need to notarize their apps, which allows Apple to scan them for malware and cryptographically sign them. That signature allows the operating system to identify if an app has been modified in any way, which is a good security feature, and it allows Apple to revoke its security approval if the developer turns out to be distributing malware.
Part of the notarization process will actually contain data about the app and its functionality, including screenshots—and that information will be displayed by iOS when an app is going to be installed from an alternative source. This means that what we think of now as an app’s “App Store description” will actually ride along with an app outside the App Store. And Apple will see it beforehand and approve it.
In addition to notarization, Apple is adding new features that will warn users of what they’re getting themselves into. Apps on the App Store that use payment processors other than Apple will get a warning label. Warnings will also appear in the app when going to non-Apple processors, and Apple will add layers of the App Review process itself to make sure that apps communicate that they’re not using Apple’s services.
It may seem like Apple has essentially reserved the right to reject all apps from its platform, even those in alternative app marketplaces, by rejecting notarization. But in practice, it’s unlikely to happen. Not only is Apple’s five-year track record on Mac notarization pretty clean, but Apple knows that the EU is watching the company carefully, and any capricious use of these security features would be frowned upon.
App developers: Deal or no deal? As a part of its announcements, Apple has offered app developers completely new financial terms—if they want them. Under the new terms, developers on the App Store pay either 10% (for small developers, down from 15%) or 17% (down from 30%). There’s an additional 3% fee if they use Apple’s payment processing. For large developers, it’s a dramatic reduction in the amount of money Apple’s taking from every purchase—presumably as an inducement to keep apps in the App Store.
There’s one other interesting catch to this new set of terms: A new “Core Technology Fee” that Apple is charging for access to its development tools and operating systems. Presumably convinced that demanding that developers outside the App Store continue to pay Apple 27% of sales might not fly with EU regulators, Apple has instead built a new fee system that charges 50 euro cents per year for (essentially) each active user.
So let’s say you’re Spotify, and you have roughly 40 million iPhone users in the EU. You’d pay Apple €19.5 million a year for access to its platforms, but you’d be able to sell your own subscriptions separately, without Apple forcing you into Apple’s payment systems and taking a cut (30% for year one, 15% after that). Spotify will have to do the math on that one and make a decision.
Apple gives app developers the first million users for free, which means this will be much less likely to hurt small developers. As we already saw when Apple cut its percentage share from small developers in half, Apple doesn’t care about money from small developers—it just wants to make sure that the big boys are paying up.
It’s also important to note that these new terms are not required. If an app developer doesn’t want to use an alternative payment method or alternative distribution, it can stay in the App Store as is, and the existing App Store terms apply. Developers of free and low-cost apps may want to choose these options as insurance against their app going viral—the last thing an indie developer of a free app wants is for their app to go viral and discover they owe Apple a million Euros.
So what happens next?Developers got access to the software and documentation that enables these features on Thursday when the iOS 17.4 developer beta was released. Given that the DMA goes into effect in March, iOS 17.4 will ship by then—and then this grand experiment begins.
If you’re not in the EU, nothing should change. Will there be sneaky ways to “move” to Europe and install software outside the App Store? I’d imagine that Apple has tried very hard to make that impossible, but there are always workarounds, and I imagine a new game of cat-and-mouse will ensue.
That said, the existence of these features almost certainly ensures that the EU won’t be the only place to have them. Undoubtedly, every other legislator and regulator in the world is watching this situation and preparing their own DMA-like regulations. Some may rush in, while others may wait and see just what happens.
After all, we don’t actually know how this will go. Apple has insisted all along that features like these increase the danger for users and that all of its policies were designed to protect its customers. Of course, the other perspective is that these policies were also created in order to give Apple complete control over both policy and economics on the App Store and to generate enormous amounts of App Store revenue without any competition.
Both things can be true. I think it’s certainly the case that the EU rules will create a cottage industry of scammers who will provide detailed instructions about how to bypass Apple’s safety settings and then overcharge them or spy on them or do other nefarious deeds. We know this because it already happens on the Mac!
I have to think that Apple will have a team of security people watching carefully as these features roll out across the EU. But there will also be a team of PR people ready to publicize any incident that feeds into Apple’s narrative about the DMA endangering EU citizens.
This is a risky game for Apple, though. As the rest of the world watches to see the result of what will happen in Europe, Apple’s statements about the dangers of sideloading will be put to the test. If there aren’t major security issues with the rollout of these new features, Apple’s protests will be revealed as toothless and self-serving, and these changes will likely be mirrored all over the world.
I don’t think Apple is actually rooting for EU customers using these new features to be victims of crimes and scams—because that will reflect badly on Apple, not just the DMA. But I do think that Apple executives are confident that such ugly events are inevitable—and the company will be poised to loudly point them out and blame the DMA.
We didn’t upload this. Apple just… did it.Among the changes in iOS 17.4 is one that’ll be an enormous improvement in podcast accessibility: transcripts in the Podcasts app.
When a podcast episode has a transcript available, an icon resembling a speech bubble appears in the bottom left corner of the playback screen. Tapping it brings up a transcript, highlighted in real time—very much in the style of Apple Music lyrics, but with smaller text. You can search transcripts, select text, and tap on text to jump to that point in the podcast.
Apple has detailed how this will work on the creator side: By default, Apple’s backend systems will find a new episode of a podcast and transcribe it. When a new podcast episode drops, the transcript won’t be available right away—but will appear once Apple has had a chance to consume it.
Transcripts will be done by Apple by default. Podcasters will also be able to use their own transcripts, rather than Apple’s, by opting in to that feature in Apple Podcasts Connect and then supplying a transcript (in VTT or SRT format) and embedding the transcript URL in a <podcast:transcript> field in their podcast RSS. (It appears that private podcasts—like our own Six Colors podcast for members—won’t be auto-transcribed by Apple, but they should be able to still provide their own transcript and have that picked up by Apple.)
Speaking as a prolific podcaster, I’m really happy that Apple has provided this feature because it dramatically improves the accessibility of our podcasts. Transcription technology has only recently gotten good enough to make automated transcripts readable, but the ideal solution to the problem was always to have platform owners like Apple build in this technology themselves.
iOS 17.4 is in beta now and should be out for everyone by March.
There’s a lot to unpack in Apple’s announcements about its changes for the European Union, and we’ll certainly be digging into that, but the company actually announced another big change that will apply across the globe:
Today, Apple is introducing new options for how apps globally can deliver in-app experiences to users, including streaming games and mini-programs. Developers can now submit a single app with the capability to stream all of the games offered in their catalog.
Apps will also be able to provide enhanced discovery opportunities for streaming games, mini-apps, mini-games, chatbots, and plug-ins that are found within their apps.
Additionally, mini-apps, mini-games, chatbots, and plug-ins will be able to incorporate Apple’s In-App Purchase system to offer their users paid digital content or services for the first time, such as a subscription for an individual chatbot.
As you might recall, this was a source of contention between Apple and Microsoft back in 2020, when the latter was working on an iOS version of its GamePass service, but ended up not being able to release it because of App Store rules.
It certainly seems as though that (along with competing services from Sony and Nvidia) will now be possible, though so far I haven’t seen any comment from those companies about whether or not they plan to bring them to market.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My feature for The Verge on the Mac’s 40th anniversary came together surprisingly quickly, given that the anniversary has been four decades in the making. As I was writing it, I realized I was leading off with interviews I had done with Steve Jobs for the Mac’s 20th and with Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and Bud Tribble for the Mac’s 30th anniversary.
It made me realize that the article ideally should have the voice of someone at the Apple of today, too. One of the conditions of my interview with Jobs—hard to believe it’s half the Mac’s life ago, now—was that I only talk to him about the future, not the past. It’s a tough task, asking someone about the future when you’re supposed to be interested in the past, but that’s just how Apple rolls—then and now. It’s always focused on what’s next, a bit of corporate culture instilled by Jobs himself.
The obvious choice was Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. Joz has been working at Apple since 1986, and I first remember encountering him at an early PowerBook briefing. In a tight timeframe, I managed to get a few quick questions into Joz for the Mac’s 40th anniversary.
The issue I keep coming back to (apparently every 10 years!) is how since 2001 Apple just keeps adding new non-Mac product lines. (A new one on the way in a couple of weeks.) The Mac is roughly 10% of Apple’s business. So how do you give love to a platform that is only a fraction of your business when there’s another platform that’s more than half your business?
“The Mac is the foundation of Apple… and today 40 years later it remains a critical part of our business that we continue to invest in,” Joswiak said. “Through all of its changes and evolutions over the years, we couldn’t be more proud to say that the Mac is more popular and relevant than ever… It’s exciting to see more people switching to Mac than ever before. The Mac will always be part of Apple. It’s a product that runs deep within the company, and defines who we are.”
I asked Joswiak about where the Mac fits in among all these other platforms, and he pointed out that Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, runs on the Mac. “As a platform, the Mac is still breaking new ground and continuing to propel the concept of computing forward in unprecedented ways,” he said. “People can do things on a Mac laptop that they would have never dreamed possible 40 or even 10 years ago. And today, the Mac also plays an important complementary role to other devices in the Apple ecosystem, whether it’s iPhone, iPad, or soon… Vision Pro.”
As has been pointed out a lot today, the Mac is the unique tech product to have somehow survived and thrived over 40 years, when many hit products don’t manage even 10 years in the spotlight. I’ve got my own theories about why that is, but I was curious if Joswiak—who, again, has been around Apple since 1986—had his own theories.
“From the beginning, the Mac has always embraced big changes to stay at the forefront of personal computing,” he said. “It revolutionized the concept of the personal computer 40 years ago and is still doing so today — challenging the notion of what’s possible on a laptop or desktop computer. Mac has [led] with nearly every major technological wave… This constant evolution paired with our unrelenting dedication to the user experience across hardware, software, and design, has led the Mac to become a product that has not only stood the test of time, but that has built a loyalty among users like no other.”
There’s no denying that. From the very beginning to today, the attachment people feel for their Macs seems like it’s one of the product line’s definining characteristics. “People love their Mac,” Joswiak told me. “It’s hard to imagine any other PC that people love as much as the Mac. That was true with the very first Mac, and it’s still true with the Macs we make today.”
Our widget usage on smartphones, views on Palworld’s Nintendo resemblance, whether we’ve activated Stolen Device Protection, and our readiness to pay a premium for ad-free streaming amidst Netflix and Amazon’s pricing changes.
Go to the podcast page.
Another great Mac at 40 overview from my ol’ PC World counterpart Harry McCracken at Fast Company:
Even if everyone knows the 1984 Mac was a big deal, that doesn’t mean we fully understand it. I’m still gaining new appreciation for all the ways it mattered, despite following its progress from the start and being a Mac user—off and on—since 1987….
The most celebrated part of that original Mac was its software interface, which brimmed with new ideas, despite the lazy conventional wisdom that it merely imitated work done at Xerox’s PARC lab. But at the moment, I’m most fascinated by its industrial design. That petite all-in-one beige case, created by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, was unlike anything anyone had seen until then—at least outside of a kitchen. Jobs is said to have latched on to the Cuisinart food processor as design inspiration.
Harry’s also right about the classic Mac being both iconic and not particularly influential from a hardware standpoint. That classic Mac silhouette wasn’t really knocked off by competitors and only lasted in the Mac line for about a decade.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Happy birthday, Mac. I bought you a cake.Before I started writing my piece on the Mac’s 40th anniversary for The Verge, I was thinking of different ways to plot out the arc of the Mac’s history. I ended up going with the fact that the Mac has been the underdog for most of its existence, but I also considered plotting the Mac’s history as defined by the Mac’s four distinct processor eras.
The Innovation era (Motorola 680×0)The early days of the Mac were about justifying its existence as the first and most popular1 personal computer with what’s now a familiar graphical user interface style rather than being driven by a command line.
The IBM PC and the emerging DOS PC clone standard weren’t the only enemies here. Plenty of other platforms existed in the early days, including the one that generated most of Apple’s revenue, the Apple II.
History tends to flatten everything into simple narratives, so you might expect that the moment the Mac was introduced, Apple began pivoting away from the Apple II. That did not happen. Apple didn’t discontinue the last Apple II model until nearly a decade into the Mac’s existence. After the Mac was introduced, Apple kept introducing new Apple II models: The compact IIc three months later and the 16-bit IIGS more than two years later.
But the Mac started winning hearts and minds, especially in the design community, where the prospect of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) graphics and typography was just too powerful to ignore.
During this era, the Mac expanded, perhaps most notably with the Mac II, which was a more traditional standalone box with card slots and support for external monitors. The System, as Mac OS was called back then, also continued to advance, reaching a pinnacle with version 6.0.8 and then blowing right through it with the next milestone release.
System 7 was this era’s major reinvention of the Mac, and its introduction in 1991 gave the original Mac OS a decade of additional life. It was a game-changer, with proper multitasking support, system extensions, a revamped Apple Menu, file sharing, aliases, AppleScript, and a new full-color interface.
The Desperation era (PowerPC)But by the early 90s, Microsoft had made the graphical interface of Windows passable (with version 3.1) and then extremely Mac-like (with Windows 95). Apple was feeling pressure on the software front, and Motorola’s 6080×0 series processors were also reaching the end of their life.
In came PowerPC, a new chip series from an alliance of Apple, Motorola, and (of all companies!) IBM. The transition from Mac to Power Mac (as the first PowerPC-based Macs were named) led to a lot of trepidation in the Mac community, but Apple executed the whole thing incredibly well, including using clever code-translation software to ensure that older Mac apps would still run. (This transition would set the standard for subsequent Mac chip transitions, all of which were executed smoothly.)
This is more or less where I began my career as a professional Mac person rather than just a user and fan. The PowerPC transition was solid, but the overall market was getting ugly. Windows 95 really did change the game, because while old-school PC fans hated the Mac-ification of their computers, most regular people really did like the graphical interface!
Real talk: For Mac users, Windows 95 was a pale knock-off. But for PC users, it was good enough to completely eliminate any possible reason to switch to a Mac. That, combined with the rapid speed increases of Intel’s processors, made the “Wintel alliance” of this era basically a Death Star of computing. These were dark times.
Apple cycled through CEOs during this era and made a desperate stab at licensing Mac OS to clone-makers, a move aimed at expanding the market that ended up just cannibalizing Apple’s own Mac sales. (I admit that I bought a Power Computing clone during this era. It was great.)
Meanwhile, Mac OS was also reaching the end of its life cycle. Microsoft was working on a modern version of Windows, Windows NT, that added modern memory management, multiprocessor support, and many other features. Mac OS was patched and patched again to create ramshackle solutions to things like multitasking and multiprocessor support, but it was clear that Apple needed a new solution.
Unfortunately, the company botched its own next-generation Mac projects—and it had more than one. It went so far as to announce one, Copland, as “Mac OS 8″—and even showed it off at WWDC one year. It never shipped. What shipped in Mac OS 8 was a re-skinned version of System 7 with some extensions to keep the plates spinning while Apple’s desperation increased.
Apple’s Mac OS desperation ended up saving not just the Mac but the entire company. Rather than buying the shiny, new, and untested BeOS from former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gasseé, CEO Gil Amelio and CTO Ellen Hancock went with a more battle-tested, tried-and-true operating system: NeXTStep, from Steve Jobs’s NeXT. Oh, and Jobs came along in the deal… as an advisor. Sure. Yep.
You know the rest. Jobs took over, NexT became Mac OS X, the G3 iMac revived Apple’s fortunes and kept the company alive long enough to fund OS X development and the creation of the iPod and Apple retail stores, and things stabilized.
The Halo Effect era (Intel)The PowerPC alliance was falling apart. IBM’s new G5 processor gave the Mac some speed advantages over Intel PCs, but they suffered from heating problems that forced some Power Mac models to be liquid-cooled and utterly precluded Apple from building a G5 laptop. Famously, Steve Jobs said on stage that IBM would be supplying a G5 processor running at a gaudy 3GHz… but IBM never delivered.
NeXtSTEP had run on Intel processors, and deep within Apple, the OS-on-Intel skunkworks project had continued. This was its moment: Apple announced it was embarking on another processor transition, this time to Intel. The enemy had become an ally.
Psychologically, this was an enormous move for Apple. Intel had spent years branding itself as the standard in computing. Even when PowerPC chips had speed advantages over Intel chips, to explain why a chip with a lower clock speed was actually faster required a lengthy lecture about chip architecture that would put almost anyone to sleep. Apple’s sales pitch for the Mac was now a lot simpler: We have the same chips that they do.
It doesn’t seem like much, but during this period, it was incredibly reassuring. The iPod had helped rehab Apple’s brand with people who had never been Mac users before. It drew them to the new Apple retail stores, and the Mac was right there. People who had never had a fondness for Apple products now asked themselves: If I love this iPod so much, maybe I would like Apple’s computer, too?
It was called the iPod Halo Effect, and it was real. The fact that Macs ran Intel processors was an extra reassuring bullet point. A lot of people bought their first Macs during this period, reassured in part by the fact that Boot Camp and virtualization software existed that would allow them to also use Windows software in a pinch. (Most of them never needed to, but it eased their anxiety.)
During this era, the Mac was on the upswing. But as the iPhone and iPad entered Apple’s product line and siphoned off attention from the Mac, the platform suffered from a deep malaise in the 2010s. I have theories about why this happened, but no tangible evidence. Maybe it was just the natural effect of focusing on other platforms, or maybe there were specific decisions made inside Apple to put the Mac on life support while it built a new computing platform based on the iPad.
Either way, the late 2010s Mac was plagued by bad laptop keyboards, OS updates that lacked complete support for new features on iOS, a dearth of new Mac software, and a couple of compatibility-breaking OS updates that wiped out lots of apps from the early days of OS X. It was a bad decade for Intel, too, and that showed in a bunch of lackluster chip updates that couldn’t match the innovation going on in Apple’s other product lines.
The Graduation era (Apple silicon)What a way to break out of the malaise! Apple switched the entire platform to chips based on the ones it had designed for the iPhone and iPad over the previous decade. Now, rather than being starved of the attention given to other Apple platforms, the Mac was being reinvigorated by the fruits of that labor.
Apple silicon Macs were faster than Intel Macs and far more power efficient. When the COVID pandemic hit, loads of people bought new Macs, driving the Mac to its two biggest sales years of all time. Not bad for a 40-year-old computing platform.
The big question is, what happens next? Nothing ever ends, after all. As I mentioned in my Verge article, the Mac’s move to Apple silicon can be viewed as a Faustian bargain. Apple’s long-term goal seems to be for developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac all together. In the end, does that mean that the Mac will be a container for “legacy” apps while most new apps are coming from Apple’s other platforms or the web?
It’s possible. But that prospect is better than a scenario where the Mac just can’t keep up because it doesn’t run any new apps. I’d also argue that the Mac has a unique position among Apple’s platforms: Not only is it where software development is done, but it’s also the only platform that can run iPhone/iPad apps and full Mac apps. It’s a superset of Apple’s platforms, not a subset. That’s a powerful place for the Mac to be.
I’m optimistic about the future of the Mac. Tech products come and go. The iPod was the biggest tech product of the early to mid-2000s, and these days, when you see the word, you’re more likely to think it’s a misspelling of “iPad.” Somehow, through three chip transitions and two entirely different operating systems, the Mac has survived.
More than that, the Mac has thrived. More people are using Macs today than at any other point in its existence. That’s miraculous, and it’s a testament to the Mac’s ability to change with the times while continuing to appeal.
Here’s to the next era, wherever it might take us.
- Sorry, Amiga fans. ↩
Jonathan Zufi, the author of the beautiful coffee table book ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation, has launched a new site called Happy 40th Birthday, Macintosh:
To celebrate this milestone, mac40th.com showcases every Macintosh desktop and portable Apple has ever made… The site is easy to use: you’ll see a continuous stream of random Macs – just keep clicking ‘Show me more Macs’ and that’s what you’ll get. If you’re a hard core Mac fan, this site should keep you busy for a very long time.
What a perfect celebration of the Mac. Just keep scrolling and clicking until you’ve gotten your fill.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Twenty years ago, on the Mac’s 20th anniversary, I asked Steve Jobs if the Mac would still be relevant to Apple in the age of the iPod. He scoffed at the prospect of the Mac not being important: “of course” it would be.
Yet, 10 years later, Apple’s revenue was increasingly dominated by the iPhone, and the recent success of the new iPad had provided another banner product for the company. When I interviewed Apple exec Phil Schiller for the Mac’s 30th anniversary, I found myself asking him about the Mac’s relevance, too. He also scoffed: “Our view is, the Mac keeps going forever,” he said.
Today marks 40 years since Jobs unveiled the original Macintosh at an event in Cupertino, and it once again feels right to ask what’s next for the Mac.
Continue reading on The Verge ↦
Forty years. In the world of technology, where many devices seem to evaporate after only a matter of months, lasting for a decade is an accomplishment—but four of them? It’s nearly unheard of.
And yet today marks the fortieth anniversary of the Macintosh, a device that—while it has certainly seen its ups and downs over the intervening years—has nevertheless been in constant production since that day Apple co-founder Steve Jobs first took the wraps off it back in 1984.
In that time it’s run on four different processor architectures and two major operating systems, making it bit of a computer of Theseus. It’s seen challengers rise and fall, been threatened with extinction more than once, and yet for all of that has emerged in recent years revitalized and stronger than ever.
Amongst Apple’s products, the iPhone may be more popular, the iPad more futuristic, and the Apple Watch a more impressive feat of engineering, but none have the emotional resonance of the 40-year-old pioneer of the personal computer. Ask any user who’s been around long enough, and no doubt their own personal story is intertwined with the Mac.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Sleeve 2’s customization is impressive, and it scrobbles too.I listen to music on my Mac all day long, but It’s been a long while since I’ve displayed the currently playing track anywhere. I’ve gotten back into the habit thanks to the $6 utility Sleeve 2 by Replay.
What made me instantly buy Sleeve was its extensive capability to customize the currently playing track information. You can choose to show album art at a wide range of sizes (or omit it entirely), with your choice of corner rounding. You can choose display track name, album name, and artist name, and display them in a variety of fonts and weights. There’s customization for text alignment, drop shadows, and pretty much anything else you might want. You can set the track information to float above everything, always say on the Desktop layer, or float above briefly when the track changes, then land back on the desktop.
Three different customizations that just scratch the surface.But what also distinguishes Sleeve 2 are the other Music-extending features that have been rolled in. The app integrates not just with Music (which I use) but Spotify, and it’ll also scrobble songs to Last.fm if you’re a latter-day scrobbler. And perhaps most importantly, it lets you program systemwide hot keys for controlling playback—and of course, you can opt to have those playback controls appear on the track information, too.
It’s the perfect example of a simple, low-cost Mac utility that makes life a little bit better. I’m happy to have my music back on my desktop again.
Celebrating 40 years of the Mac, we’ve gathered an all-star panel of longtime Mac users to pick the best Macs, Mac software, and Mac accessories, as well as induct a few events or devices into the Mac Hall of Shame.
Go to the podcast page.
Left to right: Boox Page, TCL NXTPAPER 11, Kobo Libra 2.I’ve been writing about e-readers—Kindles, Kobos, and the like—since the first month of this site’s existence. I write about them not just because I’m an enthusiastic user of the devices in this category but also because I’m fascinated by these strange devices that are so very different from the phones, tablets and computers that fill the rest of our lives.
This month, I’ve been using a few different devices that push the definition of an e-reader to its limits. As a result, I’ve ended up challenging myself to define exactly why I like e-readers—and why I’m not satisfied just using an iPad or an iPhone to read books.
The unlikely contendersA closer look at the Boox Page and TCL NXTPAPER 11.After a somewhat underwhelming experience with the Boox Leaf 2 and a strangely satisfying time with the phone-shaped Boox Palma, I decided to take one more trip to the parallel world of Boox devices, which run Android but have E-Ink displays rather than the traditional backlit screens found in modern smartphones.
This time, I tried out the $250 Boox Page, which has physical page-turn buttons and uses the same screen as the $190 Kobo Libra 2 and $160 Kindle Paperwhite. It was a pretty great experience—with all the caveats that I’ve brought up before when writing about an Android-driven E-Ink device.
It feels and looks like a Kindle or Kobo, but the Boox Page will run pretty much any Android app.When you buy a Kindle or Kobo, you can just turn it on and use it without any configuration beyond logging into your Amazon or Kobo accounts. Android devices aren’t like that—there’s a lot of work to get it the way you want it, including downloading apps and then configuring various extensions that make those apps behave better on the slow-refreshing E-Ink displays.
That all said, if you’re a relatively nerdy person who really wants a device that’s at the same level as the Kobo Libra or Kindle Paperwhite—but with slightly better hardware than both, as it’s got a flush screen like the Paperwhite and page-turn buttons like the Libra—you could be at home with the Boox Page. If you’re someone who wants access to the Kindle store and the Kobo store and the ability to read DRM-free ebooks with another reader (Moon Reader was my favorite, though there are many others), the Boox Page can do it all.
Unfortunately, I started down this Android tablet path largely because I wanted to read other stuff on the same device I use to read books. Think RSS feeds, newspapers, newsletters, and the rest. When it comes to this stuff, it’s hard to get past the fact that apps are built for fast-refreshing phone screens and just don’t work well with E-Ink displays. Even if you configure your RSS reader to be just right, you’ll end up having to jump to a web browser to read stuff that’s not contained in the feed—and the web experience on these devices just isn’t great.
So, while I really enjoyed reading several books on the Boox Page, I’m not sure there are enough good use cases for it. Even if you’re devoted to DRM-free ebooks, you can sideload those to either a Kindle or Kobo via an app like Calibre. I’ve been back on my Kobo Libra for the past few weeks, and it’s nice to have the simplicity, though I sure do miss the flush screen of the Page.
The NXTPAPER 11 displays color comics better than any black-and-white device, but it’s still just a tablet with a matte screen.But wait: What if someone could build a device that had a screen that looked like E-Ink but offered full color and refresh rates that matched phones and tablets? Someone did, sort of. Which is why I also spent a little time with the NXTPAPER 11, an 11-inch Android tablet from TCL that claims to offer “an e-book viewing feel.”
It’s weird. It’s a regular Android tablet with a regular tablet screen, but TCL has applied a coating to the screen that feels very much like a Paperlike iPad screen protector. It reduces blue light and glare and makes the display textured like paper. TCL has also shipped Android extensions that let you push the tablet into “reading mode,” which is basically a black-and-white mode meant to ape the look of an e-reader.
It… sort of works? Leaving aside that the tablet screen is so huge that it’s basically a two-page version of a Kindle, when it’s in reading mode and you’re using the Kindle app, it’s a pretty close approximation of the look and feel of reading a Kindle book. At night, the backlighting makes things a bit bright, but there’s a white-on-black mode that’s pretty good.
And, of course, it’s still a regular display—so I read full-color comics on it, and they looked very good. Beyond that, I could pretty much run any Android app I wanted, including RSS readers and newspaper apps, and it provided the substandard iPad experience I’d expect from an Android tablet. (Also, while the NXPAPER 11 had decent battery life for a tablet, it pales in comparison to the low power consumption of an E-Ink device.)
This made me ask myself: Did I really want an e-reader, or did I just want an iPad mini with a glare protector running in a black-and-white accessibility mode?
What do I want, really?Which brought me full circle. Nearly ten years ago, I wrote:
Backlit tablets just can’t compete with E-Ink-equipped Kindles when it comes to reading in the bright sun…. At night, the inverse applies. My Paperwhite, turned down all the way, is much darker than my iPad’s backlight at the lowest setting. Which means it’s much less likely to disturb my wife while she’s sleeping and I’m reading.
Whether dark or light or in between, I prefer reading on these devices. They never push notifications at me, I’m never tempted to switch over to Twitter or email, and the static black-and-white calm of words on a page evokes the best things about reading a paper book or newspaper.
This was a good reminder of what drew me to these devices in the first place. Namely:
- A reflective (rather than backlit) screen that’s readable in bright sunlight and offers gentle side lighting for use in the dark without being blindingly bright.
- Good ergonomics. A device should be light enough to be held in one hand easily, with dedicated page-turn buttons that don’t require me to do a lot of swiping and tapping just to read a book.
- No distractions. I shouldn’t be able to flip over to social media or read my email or do anything else on the device that isn’t reading text. As my friend and e-reader aficionado Scott McNulty told me, “The more features you add to an E-Ink device, the worse it gets.”
- Great battery life, with the ability to go a week or more without a charge.
In other words, while a $499 iPad mini with an anti-glare screen might be a pretty decent e-reader, it would fail most of these points. Even with anti-glare film, I doubt the iPad screen could match E-Ink’s visibility in bright light or its very low light capability, and volume buttons aren’t placed properly to act as comfortable page-turn buttons. And sure, I could keep my iPad in Do Not Disturb and make sure that no distracting apps were present on it, but would I want to? Am I going to buy two different iPads? No.
So, I’m back where I started. Last year, I read more than 50 books, and probably 99 percent of those pages were read on an E-Ink display. When I put my iPad down at night and pick up my Kobo, I’m saying goodbye to the outside world and focusing on the “printed” page. When I’m reading on an airplane, I’m not worried about draining my iPhone or iPad battery unnecessarily.
Maybe someday, the e-reader will be made irrelevant. But it’s been fifteen years since I bought my first Kindle, and it hasn’t happened so far. E-readers are really good at what they do—and when I say that I’ve tried the alternatives, I really mean it.
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 280,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
Nice article from last month by Vanity Fair‘s Charlotte Klein about the New York Times‘s puzzle team. And there’s even an Apple connection:
There’s been talk inside the paper even further back about the possibilities of expanding into games. About a decade ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave Mark Thompson, then CEO of the Times, and David Perpich, now publisher of The Athletic, some advice. The Times executives were in the Apple boardroom, demoing the NYT Now app—a short-lived attempt to attract young readers—NYT Cooking, and the new NYT Crossword app. The Times, said Cook, should really be the leader of digital puzzles, according to a source familiar with the discussion. (The Times declined to comment on this meeting.)
I’m an avid player of the Mini, Wordle, and Connections, but at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I think of those as my daily puzzle appetizers: the Times crossword remains the entrée.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 280,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Happy Vision Pro pre-order day to all who celebrate!
Whether or not you’re virtually lining up to buy one of Apple’s fancy new spatial computers, you may be wondering what choices will come up during the process. So, purely for science, I went through it to see all the options and tell you exactly what you’ll need to think about.
Put it in storageAs reported last week, the Vision Pro does have storage tiers, and now we know what they are and how much they’ll cost.
| Storage | Price | | --- | --- | | 256GB | $3499 | | 512GB | $3699 | | 1TB | $3899 |
Those are roughly on par with Apple storage tier increases on the iPhone and Macs1, and frankly, when you’re already paying $3500 for a device, a few hundred extra dollars doesn’t seem like quite the same percentage jump. (It’s also worth noting that Apple is, as usual, offering 0 percent financing, meaning you can also pay a low low monthly cost of $324.91 for 12 months for that 1TB model.)
The real question is why you’ll need all that storage. Apple helpfully details its rationale below the tiers:
How much storage you need depends on how you use Apple Vision Pro. More room means you can store more documents, spatial photos and spatial videos, music, and apps, as well as extensive video libraries and large data files.
Over time, you may add more content to Apple Vision Pro, so you’ll want to think about how your storage needs may change.
So, think apps and files that you want to download to the device—spatial photos, spatial video, and movies (especially 3D ones) probably being among the most likely things to eat up data if you’re downloading them to store locally. Good news, though, you won’t have to worry about storage for Netflix downloads.
Keep calm and add onOnce you’ve picked your storage tier, you’re not quite done yet. Apple is, of course, offering AppleCare+ for the Vision Pro, which will set you back a hefty $500 for two years or $24.99 per month until you decide to cancel it. But again, if you’ve paid $3500 for this cutting-edge product, the insurance may provide some peace of mind: It offers “unlimited repairs for accidental damage protection” (at a cost of $29 for accessory damage and $299 for “Other Accidental Damage”) and an Express Replacement Service, so you won’t be without a Vision Pro while yours is getting fixed.
Apple’s also selling a few accessories for the Vision Pro. Though a cover for the headset is included with the purchase, if you’re taking it on the go, you may well want the travel case, which provides a padded shell in which to put the Vision Pro, a strap for the external battery and a cozy little pouch of for your optical inserts. That will set you back a significant $199 (though I imagine it’s one place where third-party competitors will be more cheaply available).
There’s also the $49.95 Belkin Battery Holder clip, which lets you attach the Vision Pro’s external battery to a belt or pants, as well as a cross-body strap if you don’t have a convenient clipping location.
Speaking of external batteries, we know the Vision Pro’s battery life is rated for about 2 hours of general use or 2.5 hours of video watching, but don’t worry: Apple’s more than happy to sell you an additional battery pack for $199.
You can also buy a few of the other included accessories on their own, such as the Solo Knit Band ($99), the Dual Loop Band ($199). You can also buy a Light Seal package ($199), which includes two Light Seal Cushions; you’ll need to use the face-scanning process to get the right size. Light Seal Cushions ($29) are also available separately and come in four sizes: N, N+, W, and W+. (Good news: the cushion attaches magnetically and is machine washable.)
In addition to all those Vision Pro specific accessories, Apple’s also pushing other existing products that it thinks Vision Pro users might want: the Bluetooth Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, a Sony DualSense game controller, the USB-C AirPods Pro, the 30W USB-C power adapter and USB-C charge cable, and, of course, AirTags.
Top of the line or end of the lineWhich may of course set you thinking: sure, $3499 is expensive, but just how pricey can I make this thing?
Again, I’m not one to shy away from science, so let’s check it out. (I’m not including extra bands, Light Seals, or cushions, since it should be a while before you wear those out. And, of course, if you need optical inserts, you’ll be adding another $99-$149.)
| Item | Cost | | --- | --- | | Vision Pro 1TB | $3899 | | AppleCare+ | $499 | | Travel Case | $199 | | Magic Keyboard | $99 | | Magic Trackpad | $129 | | Battery Clip | $49.95 | | Sony DualSense | $69.95 | | AirPods Pro | $249 | | Extra Battery | $199 | | Extra Power Adapter | $39 | | Extra Charging Cable | $29 | | AirTag | $29 | | Total | $5489.90 |
Hey, still well shy of a maxed out MacStudio or a base-level Mac Pro, not to mention a gold first-edition Apple Watch. So there are definitely Apple products you could spend more money on, albeit perhaps ones with a more proven track record.
Apple’s not likely to detail exactly how many Vision Pros it sells, but it will be interesting to see if it provides any further information at the company’s quarterly financial call in a couple weeks.
- I’d forgotten that while it’s only $200 to go from a 256GB 11-inch iPad Pro to a 512GB model, it’s a whopping $600 between the 256GB configuration and the 1TB. ↩
After some Apple Vision Pro opinions, it’s time for a veritable Sports Pentagon of topics, including: Regional sports streaming alliances, the NFL cozying up to ESPN, Amazon cozying up to Diamond Sports, and the value of Peacock’s streamed playoff game.
Go to the podcast page.
Over at MacStories, John Voorhees has an interesting look at Vision Pro app compatibility:
As it turns out, it’s possible to tell if a developer has opted out by using App Store API endpoints. So, with a little help, we built a shortcut to check some of the most popular apps on the App Store.
Short answer: not a lot of native apps at present, and a lot of developers have opted out of even letting their iPad apps work in compatibility mode.
As John points out, this list is neither exhaustive nor necessarily perfectly reflective of ultimate app availability, as we’re still a few weeks away from the Vision Pro launch, and many apps have not been updated on the Store yet (including some known to have a Vision Pro app, such as Disney+).
Still, on the heels of news that Netflix won’t have a native Vision Pro or compatibility for its iPad app, there is definitely some question as to how many developers—and perhaps especially those at big companies—are planning on building apps for Apple’s spatial computing platform, at least at launch. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem in the making: developers don’t want to commit until they know there’s a market there, and the market may not develop if the apps aren’t there.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
[Content warning: Old Man Yells At Cloud.]
So Artifact, the news app startup from the creators of Instagram, is shutting down. There’s been a lot of analysis about the issue, and I agree with much of it.
There’s been a lot of cheap and bad “news content” on the Web for ages now, but in recent years, it seems to have gotten worse. In certain areas—I notice it with film and TV coverage as well as sports—a single bit of original reporting is breathlessly rewritten by dozens of sites, turning a juicy one-sentence quote into a thousand-word-long analysis with lots of backstory and relevant on-site links, all with subheads that answer questions Google users might ask. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
For all its boasting about using AI smarts, Artifact didn’t really cut through the noise. Surely an AI content engine could analyze articles and determine which piece was the original and which pieces added very little to the discussion? I’d hope that, eventually, someone will try to counteract this cottage industry of rewriting other people’s scraps for SEO hits with some intelligence that weights the original story over the word salad copycats. (Paging Google—this is supposed to be your area. And Apple News… what are you doing?)
But my favorite feature of Artifact was not its AI-influenced story browsing and categorization. I found it just as weird and off-putting as most other news aggregation apps that don’t allow me complete control over what I see. No, what I loved about Artifact was that you could take a meaningless clickbait headline and have the app read the story and write a new headline based on its contents.
Back in the day, when I learned how to write headlines (for newspapers!), the goal was to give the reader enough information to decide if they wanted to read that article. The Inverted Pyramid started above the story itself, even with key information in a headline and subhead that would let the reader decide if they wanted to bother reading that story.
But in the era of the web and news aggregators, headlines that give away pertinent information have become a lost art. Whole generations of editors have been trained to write coy headlines that will earn a click, even if the people who are clicking will be immediately disappointed by the truth of the story.
What’s most frustrating to me is that once this method of writing headlines is internalized, it’s very hard to break out of the habit. For instance, I subscribe to multiple news sites where you basically must pay in order to read articles… and yet the headlines are still clickbaity! San Francisco Chronicle, when you write, “This Bay Area city has a horrible secret,” I would like to know if it’s my city and if the secret is a serial killer or the lack of a good delicatessen.
This is where Artifact ruled, because its little AI agent would read that story and write a new headline. And if enough people said a headline was clickbait, all other users of the app would now see the AI headline instead of the original. Brilliant.
So let me put this out there to other creators of news apps, aggregators like Apple News but also RSS readers—this is a feature you should knock off. I would absolutely love to be able to see rewritten headlines for news sources that have failed to be forthcoming with factual headlines. Maybe the future of browsing news is an AI-driven service that writes good headlines so that I can make up my own mind about whether I want to read a story or not!
Anyway, I won’t miss Artifact much—but I will miss the perverse joy I felt everytime I had to ask an AI to improve on the work of a human being who has been miseducated about how headlines are supposed to work.
External linking on the App Store, bye-bye blood oxygen sensor, our Vision Pro plans, and the last time we bought physical media.
Go to the podcast page.
Personal Automations to keep my shower listening undisturbed.I’ve learned in recent years that I’ve become something of a minimalist. I like keeping things simple, preferring glanceable information to alerts that get in my face whether I want them or not. I’ve reduced the number of apps that have permission to bug me, and more recently, I’ve embraced Apple’s Focus Modes to silence the noise.
There were several situations in which I found myself often being bugged, mostly on my Apple Watch, when I didn’t want to be, including when I was working (writing or podcasting), working out, playing a sport, or showering.
I don’t blame the apps that bug me when I’m doing something else—in large part, I’ve asked them to do it. (And as for the ones I haven’t, they will be silenced immediately as punishment!)
As for friends and colleagues who text me, I don’t blame them, either—they’re treating the text message as the asynchronous medium it’s meant to be. But having a text message sitting out there, unanswered, drives me batty—I’ll want to answer it. What’s worse, if I do answer it—usually with a canned reply from my Apple Watch—that reply often serves as a sign that I’m ready to engage in a larger conversation when I’m not. But I’m the cause of the problem, not them, and I need to deal with it.
I’ve addressed these issues using a few different approaches.
Setting a Recording Focus.I’ve got a bunch of Stream Deck buttons that I press to start a podcast recording session, all of which run some sort of shortcut. I’ve added an additional couple of steps to all of them: when the session starts, I enter a Recording Focus Mode. And when the session ends, I turn that Focus off.
For writing, it’s trickier. I use different apps to write, and I use those apps in other contexts, so I’m largely triggering my Writing mode manually at this point. When I need to stick in my headphones and concentrate on writing, I will generally remember to click that box. I’d love to figure out some other way to automate this, but it may not be possible.
Workouts can automatically control the Fitness mode.To avoid typing entire conversations by swiping fingers on an Apple Watch while trying to run—it’s absurd, and I’m sure I look absurd when I’m doing it—I use an Apple-built feature. On the Apple Watch, open the Settings app, tap Focus, then tap Fitness.
You’ll see an option to Turn on automatically when starting a workout. Flip this switch on, and you’ll be in a Fitness mode when you’re exercising. When the workout ends, the Focus Mode turns itself off!
You might think I don’t need to turn off notifications when I’m in the shower because how could they possibly affect me in there? But here’s the thing: First, some notifications have the strange effect of dipping the sound playing from my podcast player—as if they’re going to make a noise, but they’re silenced, so they don’t! But the dipping still happens. It’s very distracting.
Also, I leave my iPhone just outside the shower in case I need to skip to a different podcast mid-shower, or back up, or whatever. My shower is transparent glass. When a notification comes in, I can see my phone light up. It doesn’t matter that I shouldn’t notice—I do, and it drives me batty. I suppose I should put it face down, but that doesn’t address the dipping audio issue.
It doesn’t matter, though, because I’m using two triggers in iOS 17 to run shortcuts that solve the whole problem. One of the most underrated features of the Shortcuts app on the iPhone is Personal Automations, which are triggered when the iPhone experiences some specific conditions. As of iOS 17, you can trigger a shortcut when your phone connects or disconnects from a specific Bluetooth device.
So I built a simple shortcut called “DND Toggle” that gets the current Focus status, and if there isn’t one, turns on Do Not Disturb. If there is one, it turns off that Focus Mode. Then, I specified that the shortcut should run every time my iPhone connects to my Bluetooth shower speaker. That’s it! Now, when I turn on the speaker, the automation runs, and my iPhone enters Do Not Disturb mode—which it remains in until I turn the speaker back off.
Location is a built-in trigger for a Focus mode.To address getting bugged while curling, I’m using a different Focus feature. I created a new mode called Curling (it’s got a snowflake icon, how cute!) and scrolled down in the settings for this mode to the Set a Schedule setting. Now, when I pull into the parking lot at the curling club, my phone enters Curling Mode. There’s a custom curling-themed wallpaper (for fun!), but more importantly, my notifications are silenced. When I leave the club, the mode ends. (In reality, it ends when I finish curling, assuming I’ve set a curling workout on my Apple Watch. As detailed above, the act of starting that workout means I’ll be placed in Fitness mode, and when I’ve finished, it’ll take me out of all Focus Modes.)
Now, as I write this, I’m realizing that maybe I could do with fewer Focus Modes since all of my modes are trying to do the same thing and have most of the same settings: let messages from my immediate family through, but nothing else. Maybe simplifying my Focus Modes will be a future project. But for now, I’ve got what I want: I don’t see interrupting messages until I’m done doing what I’m doing. It’s better this way. I recommend it!
Look, I don’t know if that recent report about the new OLED iPad Pro costing between $1500 and $2000 is accurate. It’s always tricky to predict product prices, since they’re decided deep inside Apple Park, not off on the supply chain from which most new-product rumors emanate.
But I do know this: Adding OLED to the iPad Pro is only going to make it more expensive. The current iPad Pro models start at $799 and $1099 and go up from there. (A 2TB 12.9-inch M2 iPad Pro with cellular, an Apple Pencil, and a Magic Keyboard will run you nearly $2900!) I would be surprised, frankly, if any OLED iPad Pro costs less than $999, and even a price that low seems unlikely.
We’re talking prices getting pretty comparable to those of Mac laptops, and that’s without factoring in the accessories. While dedicated iPad Pro users might not flinch at prices like that—or, more likely, will flinch and then roll their eyes and then pull out their wallets anyway—it’s asking a lot of other potential iPad buyers.
Is Apple risking the future of the iPad Pro by making it too expensive? Not necessarily. In fact, this might be one in a series of moves that will set up the iPad for future success at both the high-end and midrange of Apple’s product line.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
AppleVis, an organization devoted to empowering blind and low vision users of Apple products, has published its second annual Apple Vision Accessibility report card. The survey collects opinions of readers who use VoiceOver and the other vision-related accessibility features of Apple platforms.
Overall ratings were slightly down over the previous year, with the exception of tvOS, which improved from an average 3.5 out of 5, to 4.0. VoiceOver ratings were also down, with tvOS ticking up slightly. Braille users gave iOS, iPadOS and macOS noticeably higher ratings for 2023, with tvOS and watchOS taking hits. Low vision users rated all platforms higher for 2023 than in 2022.
In a year of OS releases that did not focus on new vision accessibility features, survey respondents were mostly concerned about ongoing bugs, though many acknowledged that a major long-standing macOS VoiceOver bug—known as the “Safari not responding” bug—had finally been fixed.
iOS and watchOS earned praise for new features, including new Braille options, and fine-grained control of licensed VoiceOver voices. The Point and Speak feature of iOS (only available on Pro and Pro Max phones) came in for criticism for being “not ready for prime time.”
A user named Sebby reflected the feelings of many respondents who want Apple to focus on fixing existing bugs before adding new features, especially on macOS. “We desperately need a Snow Leopard-like release for VoiceOver,” Sebby wrote.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The run-up to the Vision Pro launch continues. Apple on Tuesday shared some new information on the entertainment experiences users can expect, alongside recapping previously announced features like immersive Environments.
Among the content that will be available at launch is a catalog of 150 3D movies, including recent releases like Dune and *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; if you buy or have already purchased a movie that has a 3D version, you’ll get that for free. Apple also says some third-party services, including Disney+, will offer 3D versions of movies at launch.
It also provided specific information about content available as Apple Immersive Video, a 180-degree video format that puts users in the middle of an experience. At launch, that will include an Alicia Keys rehearsal session, a series following athletes including a tight-rope walk over the fjords, close encounters with wild life, and an immersive film with dinosaurs from Jon Favreau. That last one is also the launching point for an app called Encounter Dinosaur that will let you interact with three-dimensional models of the creatures. (At least some of these experiences were demoed for press last June.)
Unsurprisingly, the primary third-party partner mentioned for Vision Pro content is Disney, whose CEO Bob Iger also appeared during the keynote introducing the device. Apple confirms that Disney+ subscribers get access to their own immersive environments for watching content, including a theater inspired by Hollywood’s El Capitan, Monster, Inc.‘s Scare Floor, the Avengers Tower, and—in a shot no doubt aimed directly at me—Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder on Tatooine.
With just three days before the Vision Pro goes up for pre-order, and about two and a half weeks from release, Apple is clearly making a push to drive home the value of the Vision Pro, in an attempt to forestall criticism that the device is expensive and doesn’t have a clear use case.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
You might have seen a story making the rounds last week that the Chinese government was cracking down on people sending anti-government materials via Apple’s AirDrop feature, having compromised the security of the system.
I wondered, given the transient nature of these interactions, how exactly that was happening—sometimes these stories can be a bit overblown, especially when entities like the Chinese government—which certainly has a vested interested in looking omniscient—are involved.
But as usual, Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin did an excellent deep dive on this issue and helps explain why, yes, this is a real problem:
In 2021, researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another.
The exploit involves the use of colorfully named rainbow tables and relies at least somewhat on the Chinese government’s ability to pre-hash every single phone number in the country, thus making it trivial to use a given identifier and link it to a person.
But, as Goodin points out, Apple has been aware of this vulnerability since 2019 and despite there being options to improve the anonymity, has not made changes to the privacy of this feature. (Apple’s software also apparently keeps logs of prior AirDrop contacts, which is ripe for exploitation if someone gets hold of the physical device—a fact that some security researchers only learned in the course of this story.) Combined with previous AirDrop changes that had negative effects on dissident activity in the country1 and Apple’s complicated relationship with the Chinese government, it certainly presents an unappetizing picture.
To a certain degree, Apple relies on stories like this staying under the radar. Inaction can be presented as either ignorance or tacit compliance, whereas taking steps to improve the privacy of AirDrop might be construed by Beijing as a challenge to its authority—a stick situation for Apple, given how much it relies upon its relationship with the country for the production of its devices. But Apple also makes privacy a huge selling point of its devices—a subject of ad campaigns, a highlighted section in virtually every keynote—and the company surely doesn’t want to have to append an asterisk to all of those claims with the footnote “Except in China.”
- I still wouldn’t argue that change is a net negative, since it also prevents people from getting spammed with unwanted content, but it was first deployed in China, which certainly merited an eyebrow-raise. ↩
Vision Pro orders are happening this Friday, with the product shipping in a few weeks. We break down Apple’s announcement strategy and our reactions to the reactions to the news.
Go to the podcast page.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker. With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 280,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Where and how we watch media; whether any phone app justifies a bespoke hardware piece like Rabbit R1; intriguing tech revealed at CES; and the best pointing device for screens.
Go to the podcast page.
Nearly eight months after its introduction at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the Vision Pro is poised to go on sale: Apple has said that preorders for the device will begin on January 19, with the Vision Pro expected to be available in stores starting on February 2.
Despite being the company’s first new major platform in almost a decade, though, the fanfare for the Vision Pro’s arrival has been decidedly muted. Apple didn’t hold another event, opting instead for a press release and teaser ad, and the company didn’t add much in the way of new information about the product and its capabilities.
That’s not entirely surprising though: while we may have been accustomed to a certain style of product launch from Apple, the Vision Pro is a very different type of device, and that necessitates a very different kind of release.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
I love Rogue Amoeba’s Mac audio utilities, but in the Apple silicon era, installing them has been pretty rough, due to Apple requiring multiple reboots and a visit to Recovery Mode to perform a dubious-sounding reduction to a Mac’s “security policy.”
There is apparently great news on this front, however! Tucked into an otherwise perfectly nice summation of Rogue Amoeba’s year, CEO Paul Kafasis wrote:
We’ll soon be shipping updates that simplify things immensely. In fact, Airfoil, Audio Hijack, and Piezo will feature an installer-free setup that won’t even need your administrator password. Meanwhile, Loopback and SoundSource will use a new audio capture plugin called ARK that won’t require a single system restart. It’s going to be an incredible improvement to our user experience.
As someone who has had to reinstall Audio Hijack, Loopback, and SoundSource multiple times in the last few months… this is pretty fantastic news. (How in the world will Audio Hijack not even require an administrator password?! 1)
This has been a real pain point for more than three years, so kudos to everyone (presumably both inside Apple and at Rogue Amoeba) who worked on the problem and found a solution that lets some of macOS’s most clever and useful utilities run without these issues.
- macOS 14.2 introduced the System Audio Recording permission box shown above, but I’ve not discovered a single app that uses it… at least not yet? ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
ChatGPT at work inside a BBEdit 15 Worksheet.Two and a half years after BBEdit received its last major update, Bare Bones Software has updated the venerable Mac text editor to version 15.0.
The big new feature is the addition of support for ChatGPT via the same Worksheet interface BBEdit has used to interact with a command-line shell for many years. Like a Shell Worksheet, a ChatGPT Worksheet is an interactive BBEdit document: It looks like a regular text window (because it is one!), but when you type a command and press a hotkey (it’s Enter by default), that command is sent directly to ChatGPT, and the result appears right below it in the same document.
It’s a clever way for BBEdit to dip its toe into the large language model waters without implementing a Copilot-like code helper within documents themselves. Now, BBEdit users can toggle between a GPT worksheet and other documents, copying and pasting as needed, without leaving the app. I’ve used it a few times already, and it sure beats having to navigate to OpenAI’s website in order to grab some quick prototype code.
The new Cheat Sheets feature provides interactive floating palettes that can teach custom commands. For example, the Markdown Cheat Sheet not only shows various forms of Markdown but if you click on any of the examples, they’ll be automatically inserted into your document. They’re reminiscent of BBEdit’s Clippings feature, and unsurprisingly, one of the included Cheat Sheets contains all the placeholders used in building a BBEdit Clipping.
There’s also a new Minimap view, which lets you see a large thumbnail of a very long document, highlighting the portion that’s currently visible. You can navigate anywhere in a document by clicking on the Minimap. This feature will be useful for visually oriented users who need to navigate through very long documents.
As usual, there are dozens (Bare Bones says 200!) of new features in the lengthy release notes, including the addition of a grep pattern validity indicator in the Find window (so you don’t have to click before realizing you left off a parenthesis!), a big interface revision to the simple and powerful Text Factory in-app automation system, quick access to comparing different versions of the current document, a revamp of Project Settings so that they’re no longer modal, and improved Accessibility compatibility including Voiceover, Full Keyboard Access, and third-party utilities that rely on the Accessibility system such as Grammarly.
Every time there’s a new version of BBEdit, I’m inspired by the creativity that continues to flourish in a product that’s more than 30 years old. But there’s still more to do! The app’s support for Shortcuts is still quite meager, for example.
A new license for BBEdit 15 is $60, with upgrades from version 14 costing $30 and from earlier versions costing $40.
Way back when Google Reader went the way of all Google products (RIP), I ended up switching to Feedly, a web-based RSS service that had good integration with third-party clients. But this past week I decided to ditch it for good.
The truth is, I never really used Feedly’s web-based offerings, or its first-party apps on iPhone or the Mac (the latter of which was apparently quietly retired last year). Instead, I mainly used Feedly as the back-end for my RSS app of choice, Reeder.1
Lately, though, I’d noticed that certain feeds—especially those on smaller sites—just didn’t seem to update very quickly. That’s apparently by design: in part because those who paid for Feedly (which I never have) get faster updates, and in part because the polling interval seems to vary from site to site.2
Specifically I noticed that a post on my personal blog didn’t seem to be showing up, which a few people subscribed to my RSS feed let me know. That turned out to be mainly because of an issue in WordPress where my own RSS feeds were being cached, but even once I remedied that it still took a solid day for the post to show up in my own reader.
That seemed silly to me: I only subscribe to thirty-some feeds, probably about half of which are actually updated regularly, and I’d prefer for the control over when I get my items delivered to be in my own hands, not that of a middleman.
Fortunately, Reeder (like other RSS readers) at some point added the ability to subscribe to feeds within the app and have them synced between devices via iCloud. All I had to do was export the feeds from my Feedly account as an OPML file and import them into the iCloud account, something that took probably less than a minute.
It was really the simplicity of that last part that struck me: the fact that feed readers still rely on an open format that’s easily portable between apps and services. I’ve relied on RSS to do my job since I first started writing about the Mac back in the mid 2000s, and even in a world that’s become dominated by social media it’s still pretty effective. I kind of wish that other services made this kind of portability so easy and painless—after all, we should be in control of our own data, not some middleman.
I don’t want to knock Feedly here: I found their service stable and reliable for more than a decade, and not only did I not pay a dime for it, they didn’t put roadblocks in my way to leave. That’s actually pretty great, as far as service goes, and frankly I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t throw some money their way. But as the year starts off, I like the idea of removing some of the little tech annoyances that I just take as a given and seeing if I can make my life a little smoother.
- I was a longtime NetNewsWire user, and I still really like the app, but I’ve now been using Reeder for so long that it’s just the way my brain works. ↩
- Presumably this is a sort of caching system, as I imagine it doesn’t want to hit the same site x number of times for everybody in Feedly subscribed to it? ↩
Jason and Myke are back just in time to miss the Vision Pro shipping news, but they’ve still got time to catch up on the news they missed and preview their expectations for the year to come.
Go to the podcast page.
Wes Davis, writing at The Verge:
Game designer Sean Bates found an iPhone in a bush Sunday that had fallen from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 when it lost a part of its fuselage shortly after takeoff. The phone was undamaged, still on, and had the end of a sheared-off charging cable plugged in. Bates posted pictures of his discovery that afternoon, one of which included the screen showing a still-open email with a baggage receipt.
I don’t know if Apple wants to use that in a commercial, but it’s definitely the second-best endorsement of the iPhone’s robustness.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The goggles do…something? Well, you’ll find out soon enough: Apple announced on Monday that the Vision Pro will be available in the U.S. starting on February 2, with preorders starting next Friday, January 19.
Unsurprisingly, the spatial computer will be available at all Apple Stores in the U.S., but it’ll also be available via the online store as well—there’d been some speculation in recent weeks about whether or not that would be the case at launch, given the need for fitting particular accessories.
While we’re all plenty aware of the Vision Pro’s $3499 price tag, Apple’s also added some additional information. For one, the Vision Pro has 256GB of onboard storage (and, as far as we can tell, no options for more). For another, those users who need vision correction will be able to pick up optical inserts that attach magnetically: $99 for readers, and $149 for prescriptions, though the company doesn’t go into further detail about which prescriptions will be available or how you’ll convey that information.
And we now know exactly what’s in the box: in addition to the Vision Pro, it’ll include two different bands, a Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band; a Light Seal and two Light Seal Cushions; a cover for the front of the device; the battery and USB-C charging cable; a USB-C Power Adapter (for $3499, I’d hope so); and, most importantly, a Polishing Cloth.
The press release, which happens to drop on the same day that CES opens on Las Vegas and no doubt is intended to steal some thunder there, also suggests that the company won’t hold any further events to talk up the Vision Pro before its launch. Given that supplies are expected to be constrained, and the addressable market is on the smaller side, Apple’s no doubt banking on the fact that people who want to buy one already know all about it.
One big question mark is the retail experience, which Apple Store employees are being trained on now, according to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and others. The Vision Pro is perhaps the most challenging product from a store experience perspective, and it will be fascinating to see exactly how the company handles the sales and fit process—especially for physical stores versus online. But we’re sure to find out in short order.
Don’t get excited, it’s just… Calendar.Last month, I took a bit of an odyssey and explored the idea that maybe there aren’t that many must-have third-party apps, only nice-to-have ones. I wasn’t saying that everyone should dump all their software and return to their defaults, but I was saying that macOS’s default configuration has come a long way over the years and that the right approach to setting up a new Mac might be to start with the basics and then slowly add when you find you need a little bit more.
One of the apps I was thinking about while I wrote this was Flexibits’s Fantastical, which has been my calendar app for more than a decade. As a result of that decade spent away from Calendar, I’ve largely lost track of what separates a third-party app with a $57 annual subscription fee from the stuff Apple gives me for free with my devices.
I’ve also had a general sense that most of Flexibits’s recent updates to Fantastical focused on features that don’t actually improve my use of the app. I’m not open for meetings, so the Openings feature didn’t really land, and the meeting proposal feature ended up being much heavier and Fantastical-centric than just using a lightweight scheduling app like StrawPoll. It seems like most of the company’s focus over the past two years has been on refining those features, which might be wise for serving their core audience, but it just doesn’t register for me.
So, I decided to spend a few weeks without Fantastical, just using Apple’s Calendar app. Here’s what I learned.
Surviving on the defaultUnsurprisingly, the moment I switched back to Calendar, I lost a whole bunch of features. I was used to Fantastical’s split interface on my Mac and iPad, which lists all events on the left side of the screen and then displays my preferred interface, the Week view, on the right side. Apple just wants to show you the floating colored blobs. (On the iPad, Apple’s calendar also doesn’t display the start time of events in Week view, which was a drag.)
Apple’s got a bunch of Calendar widgets, but they’re inferior to Fantastical’s. The List view, in particular, is not nearly as information-dense as Fantastical’s list widget. Still, I switched over to Calendar’s.
I have a default set of calendars that I want to view at all times, but sometimes, I need to briefly toggle on other calendars so I can coordinate with my wife’s calendar or place something on a shared podcast calendar. I used Fantastical’s Calendar Sets feature to toggle between views, but there’s no such control available in Calendar. Instead, I built a Keyboard Maestro macro that clicks on specific calendar locations to make them disappear and reappear.
Three copies of every event.Speaking of multiple calendars, it’s baffling to me that Calendar is unable to display multiple identical events on different calendars as a single item. When I toggle into my podcast scheduling view, every Incomparable podcast becomes a cramped stack of three identical items: one for my calendar, one for the calendar used by panelists, and one for our public-facing calendar used by listeners and various automations.
But my biggest adaptation came in the menu bar. Fantastical offers a powerful menu bar app that lets me quickly add events and, more importantly, view a list of events for the next few days without needing to open the app. Calendar has… nothing?
Fantastical (left) and Itsycal (right) dropping down from the menu bar.I ended up solving this problem by using Itsycal, a free app by Mowglii Apps. Itsycal hit the spot, though it’s not quite as pretty as Fantastical’s menu bar item, and adding a new event requires a second keystroke and doesn’t support natural-language entry of events. You also can’t edit events from within Itsycal.
Starter calendarSo, after three weeks of using Apple’s apps on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, what’s the verdict? I feel like my original suggestion about defaults was pretty accurate, actually. Apple’s Calendar app is fine. It works, it’s serviceable, the widgets are fine, and with a free third-party utility, you can even get a nice quick-access calendar in the menu bar.
That said, it was also clear to me that Fantastical offers a much more useful and refined experience than Apple. Calendar feels pretty old and static, and some of its gaps are really baffling—especially quick access in the menu bar! Is Fantastical $57 a year better? (I should mention that there’s a free version of Fantastical, but it omits some features that Calendar offers.)
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? If you schedule a lot of meetings and have people schedule meetings with you, it’s probably a no-brainer! But for me, it was a little tougher. Still, after three weeks without, I feel like I’m willing to spend $57 a year just to get a nicer, better calendar experience than Apple offers. But I also would not hesitate to suggest that any new Mac user start with Calendar (and maybe Itsycal!) and try it out before considering spending extra on a fancier calendar app.
I wish Fantastical had given me more of a sense of forward motion and value over the last four years for my subscription fee. I wish Apple would take some lessons from Fantastical and strive to make the default Calendar app a little less generic.
Charlie Warzel’s beloved dog died last year, and he used an iPhone feature to memorialize her:
Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.
Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus.
Not only do I empathize with Warzel’s situation (we lost a beloved dog in August 2022), but as I wrote about last year, my wife and I also recently started using the Photo Shuffle feature that was introduced with iOS 16… and it’s pretty powerful.
Not a week goes by where my wife doesn’t show me one of the pictures of our kids (her phone is set to shuffle through photos in which either of our children’s faces has been identtified) that have surfaced on her phone’s lock screen. We’ve taken tens of thousands of photos of these children over two decades, and while many photos are familiar (the ones that we’ve printed out and framed, or put on calendars, or added to a Favorites list), the vast majority of them have largely gone unseen, filed away in an infinite iCloud Photo Library filing cabinet.
One of the magical thing about Photo Shuffle is that those obscure photos also keep floating to the top. They’re not necessarily the best or most polished, but they’re surprising and delightful.
Warzel writes that iOS has “taught me how to grieve,” and while I haven’t used Photo Shuffle to grapple with that particular emotion, just a few weeks after our dog died, our youngest child went off to college and we officially became empty nesters. I suppose the Photo Shuffle is filling a particular (but different) emotional need for us, too.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Where we’re putting our social media energy in 2024, which subscriptions we’re canceling, our opinions on the Apple Vision Pro, and what feature we want for our devices this year.
Go to the podcast page.
The Apple Watch 9 is back and the Vision Pro is nigh, but not for us.
Go to the podcast page.
Last year was a little quiet for Apple, but 2024 is going to be loud. The launch of the Vision Pro, a new product running a new operating system in a new category (for Apple), more or less guarantees it. But there’s a lot more than the release of the Vision Pro to Apple’s 2024.
Let’s take a look at what this year will offer through the lens of your longtime Apple-watching columnist and his somewhat cloudy crystal ball. How better to think about the future, after all, than to predict it on a website?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Happy New Year! In this extra-special episode, Jason and Myke pick their favorite Upgradies winners of the past ten years in each Upgradies category.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block video ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Our friend and colleague Joe Rosensteel has perhaps one of the best perspectives on the “Amazon Prime is adding ads” story:
Then investors wanted profit, not growth — The Netflix Correction — now it’s about generating money. So Prime Video, which was run as some “do whatever” business that basically amounted to brand advertising, and did weird stuff like buy MGM for way more than The Rings of Power and Citadel cost, now has to turn a profit.
Ads, ads as far as the eye can see.
More to the point, as Joe says, Prime is largely about the shipping benefit, with everything else as ancillary point. I know that when my wife and I were auditing our streaming subscriptions the other week, Prime was one of the ones that will basically never get cut, because free two-day delivery saves us money in the long run.1
- Apple One is also currently in that department, because of Apple Music and iCloud predominantly, but I can see a path to going à la carte there—not an option with Prime really. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The fate of Paramount Global hangs in the balance, and our favorites of the year. [Downstream+ subscribers get an extra half hour, including RSN collapses and potential streaming solutions, and our predictions for 2024.]
Go to the podcast page.
Behold, Studio B.Every so often, people express an interest in my tech set-up. I suppose it’s a natural interest among tech fans to compare gear? Whatever the reason, here’s an update in what stuff I’m using to get my work done as 2023 comes to an end.
In the garageMy primary office is in my garage, as it’s been for… oh, nearly a decade now! Good grief. The garage is attached to the house and there’s a door so that I don’t have to go outside to get to the rest of it. There’s no heating out here so I have an oil heater that I use in the winter, though these days I control it via an infrared blaster tied into HomeKit via HomeBridge. It’s nice out here. There’s carpet on the floor and a bunch of curtains to separate me from the storage shelves. It’s cozy.
My desk is a 60×30 Uplift V2 with a reclaimed fir desktop. An Apple Studio Display floats above the desk, attached to a RightAngle 2 VESA arm. The Studio Display is attached to an M1 Max Mac Studio (32GB RAM, 10 CPU cores, 24 GPU cores, 2TB SSD).
Attached to the Mac Studio are:
- A cheap Amazon USB-A hub
- A Magic Trackpad (permanently attached via USB)
- A Keychron Q1 keyboard made for me by Myke Hurley with Kiwi switches and “Severance”-style keycaps
- An Elgato Stream Deck
- A deconstructed Touch ID sensor using this case
- A USBPre2 audio interface. Connected to it: a Shure SM7B microphone, a Rolls MS111 mute switch, and ADV M5 custom-fit in-ear monitors. The microphone is mounted on an Elgato Wave LP low-profile boom arm.
- An Opal C1 webcam; I’ve had a lot of problems with this product and the company recently sent me a replacement. It’s more convenient than setting up Continuity Camera every time I do a video podcast (which is weekly these days).
- A 2TB Samsung T5 USB drive, which serves as a regular Carbon Copy Cloner target.
Enter… Studio BEarlier this year I decided that now that my oldest has graduated from college and not returned home, I could set up a second office space in her room. Even with that oil heater, after a cold winter morning working in the garage I often found myself shivering and having to stand under the shower for a long time to heat back up. We have forced-air heating in the house and an entirely unused room… so maybe I could solve this problem with a second workspace?
Cobbling together older office equipment that was still kicking around and a bunch of stuff I use when I travel, I’ve managed to assemble a pretty nice heated redoubt in the back bedroom. It starts with the very desk I started out with in 2013, a VertDesk that has since been used by my wife as a COVID work-from-home desk, as a book holder at our local library, and as a gaming monitor perch for my son when he was home last summer.
After a search for something better, I ended up biting the bullet and buying a refurbished Apple Studio Display—my second!—for Studio B. I don’t love how much I paid for it, but I have no complaints about the display itself. It’s great, and since I have one in both workspaces, it makes me feel at home in either space.
I have an M2 MacBook Air that I use when I travel, so it has now also become my designated Studio B computer—attached by a single Thunderbolt cable. I bought a TwelveSouth Curve Riser to bring the Studio Display to a more comfortable elevation, and that riser includes a shelf that’s the perfect place to slide a closed and docked laptop.
Attached to the Studio Display (and by extension, to any laptop that chooses to dock there, so my wife now has a desk workspace if she’s working at home) are:
- A Magic Keyboard
- My former go-to keyboard, the Vortex Race 3 with blue-and-white Drop MT3 Camilo keycaps and Cherry Brown switches.
- An Anker USB-C hub
- Another Elgato Stream Deck
- My travel microphone, a Shure MV7, mounted on my old Heil PL2T boom arm.
Working elsewhereI used to write for a few hours every week at a local Starbucks, though the pandemic basically ended that practice. Still, I do work around the house throughout the day and also travel from time to time.
My faithful computing companion is my M1 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which is the first device I check in the morning, the last one I check before going to sleep, and generally with me whenever I’m sitting on the couch. In the summer months, I’ll snap a Magic Keyboard on it and write in my backyard, and in the winter when I’m needing that go-to-the-café break, I’ll put it in a stand and write at the bar in my kitchen. (Current stand of choice: the TwelveSouth Duo. Keyboard of choice: the Keychron K6.)
When I travel, it’s the iPad Pro, the MacBook Air, and that Stream Deck and MV7 microphone from Studio B. (Sorry, Studio B, I need that stuff!)
We’ll see what 2024 brings in terms of my working life. I doubt I will convert my daughter’s room to an office and abandon the garage, but it’s not impossible. In the meantime, it’s been educational to switch frequently between two computers again. And has prompted me to turn iCloud Desktop and Document syncing on! But that’s a story for another year.
So it’s come to this: Another lap around the sun, another year over. Before the calendars flip over to 2024—a year so hilarious that I can’t believe it’s not a typo—I thought I’d share some of the stuff I really enjoyed in the year gone by.
Favorite appsI got to travel quite a bit more this year, and Flighty was my companion on those trips. Flighty provides up-to-the-minute information about upcoming and in-progress flights. It lets you add in the flights of friends and family, so you can get updates on their status, too. I used it to track everyone who was flying in for a family Thanksgiving from all over the West Coast, to plan my attack for airport pick-ups, and to know how much time I would need to move between gates for a plane change. It even kept me up to date while I was in the air via invisible push notifications over iMessage-only airplane Wi-Fi. This year brought a Flighty Apple Watch app and complication, which I’ve used a lot, too. At $48 a year, it’s not priced for casual travelers—but I hear from a lot of people who just pay $4 for a week of Flighty whenever they’re about to take a trip. For the last few years, it’s been my constant travel companion.
Cheers to Mimestream, the native Mac client for Gmail, which exited beta this year. I’ve never been a fan of Apple Mail, and as a Gmail user, I’d been using Google’s web view (filtered through the excellent MailPlane app) for ages. When MailPlane was discontinued, I despaired, but Mimestream arrived just in time. It’s a real, proper Mac app that does email right. I didn’t want to go back to Apple Mail, and I’m glad I don’t have to.
A thumbs up to Final Cut Pro for iPad, which arrived (along with Logic Pro for iPad) this year. I can’t say I’ve edited a lot of videos in FCP for iPad, but after years of complaining about Apple not supporting the iPad with its pro-level tools, it finally happened… and I was able to transfer my Final Cut Pro skills relatively quickly from Mac to iPad. Yes, there are a lot of rough edges, but it feels like Final Cut Pro is a legitimate app that’s got room to become something great on iPad.
Early this year, Twitter silently murdered third-party Twitter clients. Since my primary method of using social media was via Twitterrific, I basically saw my social media usage cut to a fraction at that moment. However—is this a good thing?—I’ve had a little bit of a rebound due to Ivory from Tapbots. It’s an iOS, iPadOS, and macOS client for Mastodon, and it’s now my primary window to social media. I see a lot of people talking about how social media sites don’t need anything except web pages and maybe an iPhone app. I guess we speak a different language: without dedicated Mac and iPad apps, my usage of any social media drops to almost nothing. Ivory is where I spend most of my social media time now, and it’s very good.
Hooray for Bartender, a venerable Mac menu bar organizational utility that reached a new milestone this year. Bartender 5 added design flourishes and automation features, but for me, it’s a must-have utility primarily because it lets me dramatically reduce the amount of clutter in my menu bar.
I come to praise OpenAI’s Whisper, which I used a lot this year to transcribe podcasts. I’ve primarily used Georgi Gerganov‘s C++ implementation, but Apple recently came out with its own accelerated example, and several Mac apps—most notably MacWhisper and Aiko—seek to provide a pretty Mac interface atop the basic power of Whisper. Whisper has its limitations, to be sure—most notably a lack of speaker detection—but it’s a staggeringly accurate technology. It’s entirely possible it will be utterly supplanted by some other AI model between now and next year, but 2023 was the year of Whisper for me.
After prodding from Myke Hurley, I got into the Marvel Snap strategy card game this year. I spent… uh, way too much time playing Marvel Snap. Like, 95 percent of all my recreational game time this year was probably flinging Carnage onto Wolverine and Nova and Deadpool and watching things explode. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m about to reach the end of the road with Snap. But it’s been a fun ride, and they can’t take that away from me.
The excellent iOS album-focused music app Longplay came out with a big update this year. I have been trying to listen to more albums (rather than playlist shuffles) this year, and I admire Longplay’s focus on creating an attractive space to search through albums and then play them in their entirety. My only real complaint is that I do most of my music playing on my Mac, and I’d love a Mac version. Maybe next year?
Favorite movies and TVMy favorite movie of the year was “Oppenheimer.” (I’m not a Christopher Nolan die-hard, and in fact have disliked a lot of his films, but this was the perfect story for his style and talent.) Other favorites: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (which had a very tough act to follow and did not disappoint!), Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeous memoir “Belfast” and “Air“, an amazingly entertaining movie about (believe it or not) basketball shoe sponsorships.
This was a great year for television, so let’s go to the hail of bullets:
- “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Paramount+) managed to one-up its amazing first season with a new clutch of standalone episodes that explore different tones and genres while being undeniably “Star Trek.”
- “The Bear” (Hulu/Disney+) also one-upped its first season, including three very different episodes that could all be strongly argued were the best single episode of TV all year. I know it’s got a weird name (It’s not about a bear; it’s about a bunch of broken people who are trying to work at a restaurant!), and on its face, it might not seem like your cup of tea, but if you like great television, you need to give it a chance. (For the record, my favorite episode of the season was “Honeydew,” which featured baker Marcus going to Copenhagen.)
- “Slow Horses” (Apple TV+) provided another stellar season with Gary Oldman as a spymaster who’s more than he appears while also being exactly who he appears, and his ragtag group of failed MI-5 agents who don’t have the common sense to accept that their careers are over. British spy drama at its finest.
- “Foundation” (Apple TV+) is the closest thing I’ve ever seen on TV to a wide-screen space opera novel. (Not Asimov’s books, on which the show is very loosely based—the really wild modern space opera stuff I read these days.) Season one started out a bit slow, but season two is just bananas sci-fi from start to finish. Yes, you will need to pay attention—the canvas is large, and the show doesn’t really hold your hand—but this is one of the most daring and visually interesting sci-fi series ever. Apple’s money is being well spent.
- “For All Mankind” (Apple TV+) returned this year with another strong season of alternate-universe space exploration, as NASA and the Soviet Union jointly operate a Mars base and consider mining a valuable asteroid. There are colossal accidents and a whole lot of dramatic situations, as you might expect. I love every minute of it, and you can hear me (and Dan) talk about it weekly on our NASA Vending Machine podcast.
- “The Last of Us” (HBO/Max) managed to take the classic video game with the familiar zombie apocalypse premise and make it absolutely worthy of a prestige HBO adaptation. I’m not sure what season two will bring, but season one was about as good as it gets, most notably episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” a digression from the main storyline featuring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
- “Reservation Dogs” (Hulu/Disney+) wrapped up its final season this year. It’s a bittersweet comedy-drama about a bunch of kids coming of age on a reservation in Oklahoma, and as with “The Bear,” I’d recommend you try it without any preconceptions because it is almost certainly not the show you think it is. It is hilarious and will make you cry. It’s sweet and ridiculous. It’s one of the best shows of this century.
- “Mrs. Davis” (Peacock) — Look, I don’t know what to tell you about “Mrs. Davis.” It’s an eight-episode miniseries by Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “Watchmen,” “The Leftovers”) and Tara Hernandez (“The Big Bang Theory”)—and if those credits seem a little wacky, you haven’t seen anything yet. “Mrs. Davis” is about a nun who is hired by a rogue Artificial Intelligence to find the holy grail. And it just gets weirder from there. I loved it. Try an episode, and you’ll know immediately if you’re in or out.
Favorite booksEvery year, I read all the award nominees for the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the year for The Incomparable Book Club. The best of the bunch this year was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. It’s a book about the nature of sentience, the threats of artificial intelligence, ecological disasters, and first contact with intelligent octopuses. Especially that last one.
The best book that I read this year that was published in 2023 was probably My Murder by Katie Williams, which is a credible sci-fi mystery in which a woman is resurrected by modern technology and begins to doubt if the neat solution to who killed her is really accurate. Along the way, there are questions about identity, a discussion of how technology is applied to favor some people over others, a fascinating depiction of the future of virtual reality, and one of the weirder support groups you’ll ever see.
My nonfiction pick is Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski. He’s maybe our greatest sportswriter, and if you love baseball, you should read this book.
I also read two older books that I loved: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1974 novel about two very different worlds and one person who travels between them. I always loved LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” but had never read the other famous novel in the loosely connected Hainish series. I finally changed that this year, and I’m glad I did. Uh, yeah, that book that everyone says is a masterpiece? It pretty much is. I just got there a little late.
The other book isn’t quite so old: 2012’s The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Fans of Sir Terry seem to dislike this book (and its sequels) because, well, they don’t feel much like Terry Pratchett novels. I get it. I really do. But I loved these books, and yes, I read all five books in the series in a matter of weeks. They are a real vibe. The premise is that people learn to travel across parallel Earths, all of which are lined up in an infinite sequence along a chain. Near ones are very much like our Earth; far ones are very different. Some have life, but very few have intelligent life. It is fair to describe The Long Earth as a book in which two guys float in a blimp, traveling slowly across parallel earths. I loved the sense of exploration and, very slowly, the picking up of intelligence that things may be much more complicated than anyone imagined.
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 280,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
Twitter was dead, to begin with. Five years later, we look at the Ghost Of Apple Future from a different perspective. There’s also some Holiday Ask Upgrade. And who let that history podcast in here?
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
Your author, looking a bit like he’s trapped in a Wes Anderson movie.Ever since the announcement earlier this year of Continuity Camera for tvOS, I’ve been looking forward to giving Zoom a try on the Apple TV. The app dropped with little fanfare earlier this month, and I finally got to give it a whirl, but the result was underwhelming, to say the least.
First, some background on my particular (and perhaps unique) situation. I play a few regular Dungeons & Dragons games with my wife and several friends via Zoom. Since my wife and I are both in the same room, it’s convenient to be able to display both the video call and our map (using Roll 20) on the big screen of our living room TV, rather than peering at a small laptop display. So I use my M1 MacBook Air, extend the desktop to my Apple TV, and then run the Zoom call and Chrome in split screen on the Apple TV.1
This approach has its downsides; for one thing, we’re looking at the TV, but since we still need to reach the trackpad and keyboard, the MacBook (and its camera) is usually on an ottoman in front of us. For another, neither the MacBook microphone nor camera are great, and it requires some awkward positioning to get everything framed up (and audible).
Offloading the call onto the Zoom app on the Apple TV while using my iPhone as the camera and mic seemed like it might simplify matters, but as so often happens with new technology, this is where things started to get sticky.
Not a joinerThe initial version of Zoom’s app on tvOS is bare-bones to say the least. Once you launch it and get your camera connected, you only have a few options: there are buttons for New Meeting and Join Meeting, and a tab that lets you view your contacts.
Here’s the thing: the way 90 percent of my Zoom calls work is by being sent a link, usually via email or Slack. Those links generally include the meeting ID and password, which are each strings of random numbers and letters.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to open those links on the Apple TV. So, instead, I have to enter the codes manually. The easiest way to do that is to use the TV Remote feature of Control Center on iOS to bring up a software keyboard, rather than laboriously entering those random characters via the Apple TV’s hardware remote. But of course, I’ve already got my phone acting as a camera and mounted atop the TV, so I have to use my iPad instead.2 When I tried this, I ran into a bug where the contextual pop-up menu with the Paste command would appear off the screen.
I eventually gave up and entered the eleven-digit meeting code via the hardware remote. And then finally, after a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the password to paste in as well.
(As a note, it seems as though once you’ve joined a meeting, it does show up in your Meeting History in the Zoom app for tvOS, so that may simplify matters in the future, but for those of us who rely on Zoom links, it’s still a definite annoyance.)
Meet not-so-cuteOnce I was able to join the meeting, the UI of the Zoom app is at least familiar, with little squares of video and a toolbar at the bottom. But even there, the tvOS is certainly far simpler than its counterpart on the Mac (and probably even than iOS).
Unfortunately, my problems hadn’t ended yet. The first issue I ran into was having the people on the other end of the call note that our audio was very quiet and muffled. Unfortunately—and this may be down to Apple—there was no way that I could find to boost the gain of the iPhone microphone. It may be that Continuity Microphone simply isn’t designed when people are sitting several feet away from the TV, though one would think that would be an issue on FaceTime on tvOS as well. In a subsequent test call with Jason, the audio quality was definitely lacking, and we were both able to hear our own audio coming through the other person’s speakers until we switched to AirPods. It definitely seems like Zoom’s vaunted noise cancellation doesn’t work nearly as well (if at all!) on tvOS, though it’s unclear whether that’s a limitation of the hardware or the software.
Your intrepid authors Zooming from their living rooms, with mixed results.In one attempt to deal with the muffled audio, I disabled the Noise Cancellation features via the app’s Settings menu, and that seemed to help make things louder at least. I also thought that perhaps changing Apple’s Continuity Microphone settings to one of the other options it now offers might help matters, but it turned out that Zoom on tvOS either doesn’t offer those options, or there’s a bug in tvOS’s Continuity Microphone system: I couldn’t change the mic mode off Standard, even though FaceTime on tvOS does offer both Wide Spectrum and Voice Isolation modes.
Similarly, when my wife asked me to turn off Center Stage because the constant motion was bugging her, I was pleased to discover that I could use the camera controls on tvOS to reframe the shot, centering us both…only those settings would not stick when I returned to Zoom. Instead, we were both cropped out of the image, with just the tops of our heads visible. On my subsequent call with Jason, this did seem to work, and in my test the option works just fine in FaceTime on tvOS, so it may have been a transient bug.3
Bigger pictureThere are some other issues that make this setup less than ideal, though they aren’t really Zoom’s fault. For one, the Belkin display mount I used, intended for external displays, doesn’t quite play nice with my TV—either that, or the TV itself isn’t totally steady, because I get a very minute (but still distracting) vibration of my camera image. Could I move the phone closer? Sure! But that would return us the issue of having the camera in one place while we’re looking another. Doable, but not as much of an improvement over my current situation.
Don’t adjust your computer monitor, I’m not moving.Secondly, though having Zoom on the TV and using Chrome on my laptop is a fine workaround, I would really love it if there were still some sort of split-screen support on tvOS for running multiple apps at a time (or, at least, for AirPlaying a screen to the Apple TV while also making a video call). I realize that may be kind of a niche usage, and possibly very intensive, but a man can dream.
Overall, though, what this experience really makes me long for is a holistic Apple device that is designed for video conferencing on a big screen. Even though such a device was reportedly in testing at some point, I think there’s even less of a chance of it coming to fruition now that Continuity Camera is supported on Apple TV. Even the idea of having an external mic or camera that you could connect somehow would be nice, but again, I think unlikely—the current Apple TV models have removed the USB port found on earlier versions.
So, in terms of improvements that could be made in the here and now, I’m hopeful that a future version of the Zoom app for tvOS will take better advantage of the platform features, bringing it on par with the FaceTime app. But until then, I’m going back to my functional—if sadly janky—MacBook setup.
- For those who, like me, came up with the brilliant solution of using my iPhone for Continuity Camera on the Mac while AirPlaying the Mac display to the Apple TV…sadly, Apple doesn’t support this. I suspect AirPlay and Continuity Camera are using some of the same underlying mechanisms, and thus this setup—currently anyway—runs into conflicts. ↩
- As far as I can tell, there’s no way to control an Apple TV from a Mac which, though I understand it’s probably a less frequent use case, still strikes me as a little odd. ↩
- Taking a screenshot of Zoom on tvOS is surprisingly hard: you have to use your Mac with QuickTime Player to capture a movie, then pull a frame from that. However, I couldn’t get it to work at all when a Zoom call was active—QuickTime Player just showed a black screen, even though the Apple TV displayed red bars around the sides to let you know the picture was being recorded. ↩
Our joyful tech moments in 2023, the most significant non-AI tech advancement or launch in 2023, tech anticipation for 2024, and a self-indulgent gift we’ve chosen for the holidays.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple is staring down the barrel of a Watch import ban and we have some investment advice for you that involves time travel.
Go to the podcast page.
Another trip around the sun, and for Apple, this felt like the calm before the storm. Next year, the Vision Pro will arrive, Apple will reportedly unleash new operating systems powered by next-generation AI, and the entire iPad product line will probably get updated.
Every year in this space, I try to predict what will happen during the next year. And just to be fair, every year in this space, I also grade my past predictions. (Be honest: how many pundits call attention to their prior year’s punditry?)
Last year I “predicted” the future in not one but two different articles. I’m going to say that I got more right than I got wrong, but I had hoped that 2023 would be a bit more earth-shaking than it turned out to be.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Apple Newsroom:
Apple and The Athletic today announced that Apple News+ subscribers now have access to The Athletic’s unrivaled sports journalism. The Athletic provides best-in-class team coverage, as well as coverage of the biggest and most compelling stories in sports daily, across the major sports leagues. Additionally, Wirecutter will be available for free to all Apple News users beginning early next year.
Well, this just got interesting. I’ve long thought News+ to be the least compelling of Apple’s services, but adding both The Athletic and The Wirecutter—both top-tier brands owned by The New York Times—definitely makes it more of an appeal to me. Those are both sites that I frequently run into paywall issues (despite my wife having a subscription to the Times that, apparently, does not include either of those sub-sites).
Frankly, adding the Times itself would be even more of a draw, but it’s certainly a possibility that these two brands are being used as a test case to see what how well this works out for the paper. (Presumably Apple is paying well.)
I do think the Apple News app still needs some attention, though. Right now, I still find it a big overwhelming firehose that I have little idea how to tune to my needs, despite the claims that the algorithm selects stories just for me. These days I still use Google News for my basic newsreading, but I’d be happy to dump it for Apple if the experience were to improve a bit.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s time for the 10th Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2023, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
Go to the podcast page.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security.
On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed.
Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.
Let’s talk about the second problem first. Sure, you could simply schedule updates for all your users, and have them restart during non-work hours. But this inevitably leads to disruptions and lost work. This, in turn, leads to users (especially executives) who simply demand to be left out of your update policy. The bottom line is: any forced restarts without user approval will lead to data loss events, and that makes them so unpopular that they are functionally unusable.
There is another class of tools that claim to get users to install updates themselves, through “nudges.” These reminders pop up with increasing frequency until users relent or the timer runs out. This is an improvement, since it involves users in the process, but users still tend to delay updating as long as possible (which for some tools can be indefinitely).
At Kolide, OS updates are the single most common issue customers want us to solve. They come to us because we have a unique (and uniquely effective) approach to device compliance.
With Kolide, when a user’s device–be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile–is out of compliance, we reach out to them with instructions on how to fix it.
The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta. (At present, Kolide is exclusive to Okta customers, but we plan to integrate with more SSO providers soon.)
If your fleet is littered with devices that stubbornly refuse to update, then consider these two principles:
- You can’t have a successful patch management policy without involving users.
- You can’t get users to install patches unless you give them both clear instructions and real consequences.
Installing OS updates is a top priority for both security and IT, and when you make it part of conditional access, you can finally get it done without massive lists of exemptions or massive piles of support tickets.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
Chance Miller at 9to5Mac writes:
In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States.
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.
The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the U.S. after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.
These kinds of patent disputes aren’t uncommon, but to get to the point that products are about to be pulled from shelves is surprising—usually they get nipped in the bud before then.
That said, it’s important to note that President Biden can override this order within a 60-day window that expires on December 25; after that point, Apple can appeal the decision. As Miller notes, this ban also won’t immediately apply to third-party resellers like Amazon, who have already purchased inventory from Apple, though if it does go into effect, those stores will presumably be depleted.
Doing this right at the culmination of the shopping season is kind of fascinating—on the one hand, it feels a bit as if Apple is playing chicken with the economy; even though most holiday shopping has probably been finished before Christmas Eve rolls around, it still means that anybody who gets an Apple gift card and wants to walk into the store after Christmas to get their Apple Watch is going to be out of luck. That’s not a great look for Apple, but it also doesn’t feel like something the administration particularly wants either, especially in the run-up to an election year.
The biggest question, to me, is whether Apple will choose to try and settle this matter with Masimo. Cupertino certainly has the money to make it go away, but it also doesn’t want to have to pay out if it doesn’t have to. The fact that the company hasn’t already settled suggests that it would rather pursue other routes if possible. (Unlike a lot of these patent disputes, which are often conducted by holding companies that have acquired large patent libraries purely for the purpose of suing big companies and getting payouts, Masimo is actually a health technology company that makes products related to pulse oximetry.)
Personally, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this story for this week.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.
Browser extensions that offer AI features, but steal user data, are everywhere. That’s why many companies—including Apple—have banned their employees from using large-language models. And that’s just one potential attack surface.
Kolide lets IT and security teams write checks that detect device compliance issues, and have started creating checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Here’s a video about how Kolide can help companies enforce device compliance.
Pastebot’s history window.Last week, I walked myself through the process of realizing the power of macOS Defaults and how, over the two decades of modern macOS, Apple has addressed most of the basic needs of the average user. At the end of that process, I ended up discovering that the most glaring feature omission in all of macOS might just be its lack of a clipboard manager.
Response to that discovery has been… interesting. All the true nerds wrote in to agree vociferously about how they simply couldn’t live without one. Everyone else… has apparently spent the entire time they’ve been using a computer not using one and can’t really understand why they should care!
Let me walk you through the reasons why non-nerds should care, why Apple should consider making this a built-in macOS feature, and what apps you should try out if you decide to go for it. (If you prefer YouTube, you should probably just watch this excellent video from Stephen Robles from earlier this year.)
Breaking traditionThe clipboard’s weird, right? The Mac is credited with popularizing graphical user interfaces, but the clipboard is this invisible place where data lives, unseen but waiting to re-emerge at a later time. Rachel Greenham called it a liminal space stuff floats in the other day, and she’s not wrong. It’s like a little pocket universe.
But the clipboard exists at the heart of one of the greatest features of the Mac: the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands on the Mac’s Edit menu. It’s such a fundamental part of the computing experience that it’s kind of hard to conceive of what you’d do if you needed to get text from that web browser to that email window or from that word processor to that to-do app. (Drag and drop, maybe? So fiddly.)
Using copy/cut and paste feels like second nature, even to people who don’t consider themselves particularly sophisticated computer users. You pull it from here and put it over there. Even though it’s kind of esoteric—you have to use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item—I feel like regular users get it, internalize it, and use it pretty quickly. (Full credit to the Lisa group at Apple, who invented it in 1980.)
For all this time, the macOS Clipboard has been capable of holding one thing. It could be an enormous image file or a couple of characters of plain text—but if you copy something new, the old one goes away. One in, one out. (On classic macOS, the included Scrapbook desk accessory was a clever workaround since you could load it up with as much junk as you liked and then take it out later.)
Apple’s keeping the clipboard relatively untouched1 for decades suggests its perfection as a concept and Apple’s implicit satisfaction with it. And yet… surely there’s more that could be done with it? For years, third-party apps have extended the clipboard in numerous ways, while Apple has done almost nothing.
Why a clipboard manager?If I’m going to suggest that Apple add clipboard management to macOS, I need to make a case that it’s going to be valued by regular people and not get in the way of normal use. Cluttering up the Mac interface with gewgaws is bad for the user experience.
What works to my advantage here is the clipboard’s invisibility. Even when you’re using a clipboard manager, that liminal space is still invisible, and so far as you and your Mac and all your apps know, it contains one single item. Copy in, paste out. Nothing changes!
But here’s the beauty of it: With a clipboard manager, that liminal space no longer holds a single item. Behind the single item, there’s a big stack of previous items—a bit like how a browser tab only holds a single page, but the browser history remembers every previous page you’ve visited. Imagine if you took the back button and history away from a web browser. (It would be bad.)
The magic moment of using a clipboard manager comes when you realize you need to access something that’s not the One True Item on the clipboard. If you’re using the standard Mac clipboard and you copy something priceless and then, a minute later, copy something useless—welp, too bad, the priceless thing is gone, and it’s never coming back. A good clipboard manager lets you use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item to view your previous clipboards, choose the item you want to fish out and bring it back.
And that’s my pitch for why macOS should have its own clipboard manager: Because it adds undo to the clipboard via a discoverable mechanism like a keyboard shortcut and an item in the Edit menu right next to Cut, Copy, and Paste. For me, it’s become part of my Mac muscle memory: command-backslash brings up a long list of clipboard history, from which I can retrieve what I want.
It gets better. Once you know that copying something to your clipboard doesn’t destroy what’s there, your use of the clipboard can become far more extensive. You lose the fear of wiping out something important, replaced with confidence that you can grab something in case you want it later and stash it away in the clipboard history.
Using a clipboard manager also reduces a lot of annoying clicking back and forth between different apps. If you need to copy five items from a document and paste them into five different web form boxes, you don’t need to tab back and forth and copy them one at a time. Just copy all five, then move to the web form and paste them from history. It’s so much less annoying!
Beyond the basicsPaste’s clipboard shelf.That’s my regular user case. Of course, there are power-user features that Apple could choose to implement—but in my opinion, they shouldn’t bother. Apple features are generally crowd-pleasers that leave a lot of the nitpicky details to be addressed by third-party apps. It should leave something for the third-party apps that I’m suggesting get Sherlocked.
Those power-user features can include things like semi-permanent “shelves” for commonly copied and pasted items or powerful filters that can convert clipboard content on the fly to different formats. (It’s pretty great to copy styled text and paste Markdown, for example.) Third-party clipboard managers let you add keystrokes for all sorts of items, including pasting two or three or more layers deep in the history. I’ve been using a clipboard manager for two decades, and even I don’t use most of these features, but they will absolutely fit perfectly into some workflows.
LaunchBar’s history window.If you don’t have a clipboard manager, where can you get one? First off, you might already be using one! I use LaunchBar, which has one, and Keyboard Maestro, which also has one. If you use the launcher apps Alfred or Raycast, you’ve already got a clipboard manager installed.
When my friend Todd Vaziri surveyed social media asking for suggestions for a clipboard manager, two apps were the most common standalone suggestions2: the $13 Pastebot, which Dan Moren uses, and the $30/year Paste, which is also available as part of the SetApp bundle.
I’d need to use both of those apps for a long time in order to write a deeply nuanced comparison. They’re different, each with its advantages, and you should be able to try both for free via one means or another so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Paste has a very visual “shelf” interface that some people will love (and which struck me as overkill), while PasteBot strikes me as being pretty much the platonic ideal of a third-party clipboard app. (Still, I’m sticking with LaunchBar. Muscle memory is powerful.)
Will it happen?Sometimes, Apple surprises us and releases new macOS features that are legitimately macOS features, not just spin-off features from iOS and iPadOS. But most of the work Apple does these days is building cross-device features. So, while I’d love to discover a future version of macOS with a basic clipboard history built in, I’d like to make a pitch that’s more extensive but might be a better sell inside Apple.
What if… clipboard history for all Apple devices? That’s right, iPad and iPhone too. The interface would be a bit more awkward there, but it’s already awkward and involves meaningful taps and floating menus… so would it be any worse? And then, to wrap it all together, your devices all use iCloud to sync your clipboard histories together so they’re accessible everywhere.
Of course, there are security and privacy issues here—but a lot of those issues were already addressed by Continuity Clipboard. I think they can be overcome if Apple’s sufficiently motivated, and the idea of being able to fish out a link I copied on my Mac a few hours ago on my iPad…. seems pretty great?
Anyway, enough dreaming. If you’re a Mac user, you can benefit from this feature now via a third-party utility, and it might even be one you’re already running! I can’t recommend using a clipboard manager highly enough. Even if all it ever does is spare you from accidentally copying over something important, it’ll be worth it.
- In 2016 Apple added Continuity Clipboard to iOS 10 and macOS Sierra. It shares that single clipboard across your devices… when it works. ↩
- Many others are also available. Far too many to list here. ↩
It’s finally happened: Netflix has made its viewing data public… via an Excel spreadsheet? Also: Disney+ and Hulu get connected in the U.S., it might be the endgame for Paramount Global, and your letters!
Go to the podcast page.
We’re just a couple weeks away from putting 2023 in our rearview mirror, so it’s time—as the natural order of things dictates—to cast our eyes back over the last twelve months and attempt to shape the events into some semblance of narrative.
The past year in Apple has certainly been eventful, ranging from big updates on the Mac line to totally absent iPads to a brand new product category to challenges from rivals and governments alike. Even if the company hasn’t had its most blockbuster financial results of all time, you’d be hard-pressed to say it hasn’t had its nose to the grindstone.
Of course, the big moves aren’t always the ones that are obvious from the outside; sometimes there are trends that really only become apparent when you have the chance to look at them in retrospect.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The additional security measures we use, tech resources for traveling abroad, our valuable vintage tech, and how we feel about crowdfunding.
Go to the podcast page.
Are things worse than they used to be or as bad as they always were?
Go to the podcast page.
The other week, I noticed that the amount of free disk space on my MacBook Air had dropped rather precipitously to under a few gigabytes. As I usually don’t store that many files on that machine—much less large ones—I went poking around to figure out what was eating up all my disk space1.
The culprit, as I reported on Mastodon, turned out to be a Mail log for my iCloud account2 that had ballooned to an astonishing 28GB—a not insignificant percentage of my 256GB drive. Popping it open, I scrolled through to see, yes, it was just as I expected, a text file logging data from my mail account. I figured something odd must have happened, deleted the file, and thought nothing more of it.
Fast forward to yesterday, when I went to download the latest macOS Sonoma update on that same machine and discovered that I didn’t have enough space. The straits were not quite as dire as before—I still had 20GB or so available, but not enough for the update to install itself. Despite that, the number seemed low, so I once again went in search of the reason.
And, once again, found that the same Mail log was up to almost 9GB. One time might be a mistake, but two, well, two meant it was time to locate the underlying issue. I popped open the file and took a closer look only to realize that this was logging all of my mail, explaining how the size had gone up so rapidly.
Doctor, doctor, Mr. MD—can you tell me please, what files are ailing me?Fortunately, it didn’t take long to uncover the source: an Apple discussion thread led me to the Mail app’s Connection Doctor (Window > Connection Doctor), an otherwise handy tool for troubleshooting mail issues. At the bottom of that window is a little check box “Log Connection Activity.” When that’s active (as I perhaps did at some point a few months back while troubleshooting my iCloud problems)3, Mail will start keeping extremely detailed logs, which can quickly reach very large file sizes.
I deactivated the setting and am pleased to report that the logs have been banished, and my disk space is once again my own. But let this be a warning to any who find themselves low on disk space: check those Mail logs, just in case!
- There are many great apps that can automate this process, of course, such as DaisyDisk and Grand Perspective, but I used the time-honored practice of sorting my folders by largest size and just drilling down until I found the biggest files. ↩
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail, should you be so intrigued. ↩- That said, I thought I’d done most of the troubleshooting for that issue on my Mac mini, not my MacBook Air—but who knows! ↩
John Siracusa joins Jason to discuss Beeper, this week’s Apple OS updates, next year’s expected Apple hardware (including iPads, Macs, and Vision Pro), and the power of the defaults on macOS. Also: How to eat cereal.
Go to the podcast page.
I’ve never really been someone who journals. At various points, I’ve tried: on and off throughout high-school and college, while I studied abroad, during a cross-country roadtrip, but these always seemed to peter out eventually. It’s led me to the conclusion that you’re either someone who can stick with keeping a journal or you’re not.
Though Apple may have great hopes for its new Journal app, I think it unlikely that it will transform the average person into an avid journal-keeper if they aren’t already. And, frankly, if they already are, I’m not sure Apple’s Journal app is going to sway those folks from their current journal of choice.
The Journal app was one of the big marquee announcements of iOS 17 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but like an increasing number of features announced as part of the company’s big annual software updates, it didn’t arrive with the initial release, instead getting pushed off to a subsequent update: iOS 17.2, which arrives today.
Like so many of Apple’s apps, Journal isn’t a wholly new idea: there are plenty of popular pre-existing journal apps for Apple’s platforms. But to set itself apart, Apple is applying the secret sauce—the fact that it is the platform owner and can leverage data that no third-party developer would ever have access to. That comes in the form of Journaling Suggestions, a machine learning-based feature that can gather all the data your iPhone has about you and try to synthesize it into a prompt for you to write about.
It’s a clever idea, and one that’s clearly meant to ease people into the habit of journaling by answering the age-old question “What do I write about?” But I’m not convinced it’s enough.
Journalist, not journal-erI’ve been using the Journal app on the iOS 17.2 beta for several weeks now, and despite my best intentions—including not just turning on the notifications that gently remind you to journal, but even keeping the Journal app on my Home Screen—I’ve racked up a grand total of nine journal entries.
As I looked back over the entries that I’d made, I came to the conclusion that Apple has kind of done this feature already—and arguably better—in the Photos app. Journaling Suggestions seem to use the same algorithm that Photo’s Memories do, looking at pictures and videos taken within a certain time period or at a certain location, and grouping them together with a theme. (And, indeed, Memories are even surfaced within the app’s suggestions at times.) But Photos does this automatically1, presenting memories as a fait accompli for you to revisit, rather than waiting for users to actively go in and manually create them.
Where Journal aims to differentiate itself from Memories is from the ability to bring in other data, such as music or podcasts you listened to, your workouts, and so on. I’m not sure that makes sense to me: Personally, I don’t find those to be things that I’m particularly interested in journaling about, much less revisiting later. Do I really care that on October 30 my wife started listening to Christmas music?2
I did find myself wondering if allowing for more information to be imported might perhaps make the app more compelling. I’m surprised that there’s no integration with HealthKit data beyond the meager ability to see workouts you’ve done, which it summarizes with a static screenshot. Apple’s recent mood-tracking features would seem perfect for a journaling app, but they’re absent here. And, of course, info from third-party apps—say you listen to podcasts in Overcast and not Apple Podcasts—are a non-starter.
A simple journal for a more elegant ageWhat I do appreciate with Journal purely from a design perspective is its focus on simplicity. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles or hidden features here: when you launch the app, it shows you a reverse chronological list of your journal entries, provides a filter menu so you can see those entries only containing specific types of data (photos, videos, music & podcasts, activity, places, etc.) or those you’ve bookmarked, and has a big honking + button for creating a new entry. That’s about it.
The list view is pretty basic: You can’t really tap on entries, which is a little odd; instead, you tap on items within the entry. That’ll display the item and a little metadata, but there’s not much to do with it at that point. Again, I found myself wondering why I’d choose to go back and view a photo or video in the Journal app rather than in Photos.
Creating a new entry will both recommend events for you to journal about, or show you a list of your most recent events. In some cases this even brings in memories from Photos. There are also what Apple calls “Reflection” prompts that suggest ideas to journal about, but I honestly never found myself inspired to write more. (No small part of which was my reluctance to spend a long time typing out an entry with my thumbs, because I am old and I find that uncomfortable.) However, Apple says that other apps will be able to take advantage of this suggestions framework, which is perhaps the unusual best part of this whole feature: third-party journaling apps, the ones that people have actively bought or downloaded because they’re passionate about journaling, stand to get better.
When you’re composing a journal entry, you can bring in pictures from photos, add your location, take a picture with the camera, or even record an audio clip. There’s also access to journaling suggestions here too, so you can easily get to recent locations you’ve been to or media you’ve consumed.
All by myselfUltimately, I found myself struck by the solitude of the Journal app. I get it, this is an introspective practice that one is supposed to do for oneself. There’s a reason that the Journal app is locked behind a biometric or passcode authentication. For me, personally, though, a big part of the joy of memories (and the capital ‘m’ Memories from Photos) is sharing them with other people. There’s no export options at all in Journal, no way to share them with anyone else other than to huddle around the same iPhone together. But that’s clearly the result of a deliberate choice Apple has made, and I can respect that decision, even if it’s not for me.
In the end, Journal feels a bit like Apple applied its trademark fixation on privacy to social networking: it’s a social network of one person, for one person. Which is perhaps admirable (and yes, oh-so-very Apple) in an age where we may spend way too much time broadcasting every thought we have. Can the Journal app steal time, attention, mindshare from the routine dopamine hits of the endless scroll? It might not be a bad thing if it did, but I think that the company has an uphill climb ahead of it. We’ll see if it can stay the course or if the Journal app finds itself a casualty of a world that’s moved online.
- Admittedly, with often mixed results, as our colleague Joe Rosensteel is fond of recounting. ↩
- Well, I mean, yes, I obviously do care, because that is way too early for any reasonable human to listen to Christmas music, but that’s not a fact I’m interested in either revisiting or saving for posterity. ↩
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.
In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools.
AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.
- Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al‘s APIs.
- Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
- Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records.
Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore.
At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.
- Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
- Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.
Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week regarding its indispensable audio utility Audio Hijack. It is one of my very favorite Mac utilities.
Audio Hijack lets you record and route any audio on your Mac, from individual applications like Safari or Zoom, hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, or even the audio output of the entire system. If you can hear it, you can record it or move it or alter it. Whatever you need to do with audio on your Mac, Audio Hijack can help:
- Record conversations from Zoom, FaceTime, and other VoIP apps
- Save streaming audio from the web
- Create podcasts, both remote and in-studio
- Digitize vinyl
- And so much more
Earlier this month, Rogue Amoeba shipped Audio Hijack 4.3, with a brand-new Transcribe block to turn any spoken audio into text. So in addition to all those bullet points above, and a half-dozen more I can think of, now it also lets you transcribe unlimited amounts of audio with no ongoing charges. You can transcribe from a microphone, an app, a file—whatever. Use it for meetings, or podcasts. It’s so clever. Read all about it in the Audio Hijack 4.3 blog post.
Through the end of December, Six Colors readers can save 20% by purchasing with coupon code 6C20AH. Visit the Audio Hijack site to download the free trial.
Our go-to photo apps, a budget-friendly tech favorite, iOS 17.2 excitement, and macOS Sonoma’s standout feature.
Go to the podcast page.
Ashley Belanger, writing at Ars Technica:
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report. Ars verified that Apple’s law enforcement guidelines now notes that push notification records “may be obtained with a subpoena or greater legal process.”
Push notifications aren’t run on an app-by-app basis; rather, they all travel through servers controlled by Apple and Google. These requests can give up a surprising amount of information, perhaps the least of which is the actual content of the notification. For example, it could reveal which app or device the notification was sent to, as well as presumably timestamp data. Even in cases where it didn’t reveal sensitive content, information could be gleaned from seemingly innocuous information. (I have no trouble believing that a sufficiently clever intelligence apparatus could, for example, use something like Apple or CARROT Weather’s live precipitation notifications to derive location information based on where it was raining at the time.)
Stopping these requests, which were issued by foreign governments, is difficult if not impossible. But allowing Apple to acknowledge them in its transparency reports is a step in the right direction; at the very least, it encourages developers to be more careful about any unencrypted information shared in those notifications.
This is the classic cat-and-mouse game of intelligence: governments and their agencies will always look for new information to exploit, while companies (hopefully) try to increasingly protect their information from snooping.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
VFX pro (and friend of the site) Todd Vaziri has had it up to here with movie studios pretending that movies full of CGI were shot with only practical effects:
Folks who follow me on Twitter (currently known as X) are probably aware of my years-old, depressing, frequently updated and repetitive thread pointing out studios and filmmakers downplaying or outright lying about the use of digital visual effects on their projects. “We did it all for real!” is the message given in interviews, production notes and featurettes. The truth is these movies frequently contain hundreds or even thousands of digital visual effects shots, and sometimes the sequences they’re directly referencing are made entirely out of digital effects.
Todd brought receipts. I can only assume studios do this because they think some viewers want to be sold “purity” and that means the illusion that all effects are practical? But there’s no such thing as “purity” and this sort of marketing insults so many filmmakers who work very hard to make incredible effects for the films we watch.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The default Sonoma experience on an M3 iMac.A question from reader Jack B. has led me on a journey of reflection about the result of Apple iterating on macOS for a couple of decades. “I’m hoping for a new MacBook Pro for the holidays,” he wrote. “Do you have any good pieces on Six Colors highlighting the best apps/utilities?”
The short answer is that we don’t, though we have written stories about our favorite apps of the year for most of the last decade. But I thought Jack’s suggestion was interesting, so I opened a file and started writing down my notes about what utilities I simply must install when I start using a new, default Mac.
The thing is, my personal list has been built up over time. It’s a bricolage of utilities that I’ve integrated over the years in order to offset some of the deficiencies of macOS. Sure, we all have specialized tools that we use to do our jobs, and I could list those somewhere, but what Jack was asking was far more general: What are good apps and utilities to augment macOS?
This is when I realized that, over the two decades I’ve been using what was once Mac OS X, Apple has filled in so many of the limitations of macOS that there’s precious little that I would consider a must-have utility today. The early days of OS X were rough. It was a new operating system with a lot of gaps in functionality, and third-party apps rushed in to fill the cracks. But over time, Apple did what it does—adding feature updates here and there that won’t satisfy every need of the power user but will satisfy everyone else.
I got the religion about launcher utilities when my old boss Rick LePage recommended LaunchBar to me (a couple of decades ago!). I was able to turbocharge the speed at which I controlled my Mac by using my fast typing skills, coupled with an intelligent launcher utility. Quicksilver was a similar popular utility back then, and then Alfred came along, and recently Raycast joined the party.
But all the while, since its introduction in 2005, Spotlight has kept getting better, faster, and more versatile. Can it do everything I use LaunchBar to do? Well, no, but it can come pretty close. So close, in fact, that I would hesitate to recommend any of these launcher utilities to someone starting out from scratch. Spotlight’s pretty great. It may be all you need. Start with that, and then, if you want to up your productivity game, bring on LaunchBar, Alfred, or Raycast.
Similarly, while I’m backing up my data eight ways to Sunday, the first step in backing up your Mac is plugging in a big enough hard drive and configuring Time Machine. It’s a great place to start. Yes, you probably want to do an offline backup because if your backup drive is located in the same place as your computer, they can both be destroyed in a fire, flood, or other natural disaster. So your next step might be something like Backblaze. And yes, you might want to go further and use a cloning utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. But Time Machine is, once again, a good start.
I’ve used Dropbox for years and paid for it for most of those years. There are still some Dropbox features that I use that iCloud hasn’t replicated, but that number has shrunk quite a lot in the last few years. iCloud has improved in reliability and added features like shared folders, which means it has more than enough features for most people who are living entirely in Apple’s ecosystem.
My first three installations on a new Mac are usually LaunchBar, Dropbox, and 1Password. But even when it comes to password management, Apple has built up functionality that’s so strong that it’s hard for me to recommend something else. Sure, if you’re sharing passwords with people on other platforms or if you yourself use other platforms, you’ll need more than what Apple offers. But if you’re just trying to generate and store strong passwords, one-time codes, or passkeys, Apple has you covered.
The more I think of it, the more I realize that Apple has identified the most common holes in macOS functionality and has systematically eliminated those holes for the broadest section of its Mac customers. Tools that once filled gaps are now just nice-to-have upgrades from the base Apple functionality.
The biggest gap I can think of that still exists is clipboard history. Many apps can act as clipboard managers—I’ve been using the one in LaunchBar for years, and Pastebot is a popular favorite—and once you use a clipboard manager, it’s hard to go back to Apple’s concept, unchanged in nearly 40 years, that there’s a single clipboard and once you copy something new, the old clipboard is gone forever. I now reflexively copy multiple items in one app and then paste those items into a different app rather than doing the old back-and-forth. I rely on the clipboard history to dig out an item from half an hour ago without having to look it up again.
Not to give Apple new ideas about how to make more utilities sort of obsolete, but imagine if macOS and iOS gave you the ability to access your clipboard history, synced across devices! Wow, that would be amazing—and given how locked down iOS is, it’s a feature that only Apple can provide.
Another area of interest is file management and automation. I recently wrote about how Folder Actions is somehow still a thing in macOS. Think about offering users the ability to select a folder in Finder or Files and build actions that would occur when those folders changed. Folder Actions enabled some of that, and utilities like Hazel have taken it to the extreme. Sure, power users can run wild with features like this, but I think regular users might appreciate being able to say, “When a file in this folder is older than 60 days, file it away somewhere else,” or “Delete all the disk image files in my downloads folder older than 60 days.” There’s something there.
I’m hesitant to suggest that Apple invest even more time in macOS window management given the existence of Spaces and Stage Manager, but Apple hasn’t upgraded the ability of users to move and resize windows within a space. Microsoft has invested a lot in this over on Windows, and there are several popular Mac windowing utilities such as Moom out there. It might be worth it for Apple to make it easier for users to quickly tile windows in order to tidy up their screens.
This is why I struggle with Jack’s question. For basic use, macOS is pretty solid and comes with a bunch of useful apps right out of the box, too. Sure, there are lots of great nerdy utilities you can use to spiff things up—I love SwiftBar, for example. And I still need a load of stuff specifically to do my job, like BBEdit and Logic Pro and Audio Hijack, and the list goes on.
But the truth is, unless you’re a longtime Mac user who has integrated your personal collection of utilities into the way you use your Mac, you might not need all that much. So that’s my advice for people getting new Macs who don’t carry that legacy with them: Start with what’s there and then explore when you find where the built-in tools can’t meet your needs.
Except a clipboard manager. You should totally use one of those. It’ll change your life.
I always knew that the Apple community had a bunch of different subcultures, but I was taken aback when Apple announced that it would add a new feature to iOS, and a bunch of people got angry about it. Why in the world would you argue against Apple adding a new feature that will make the iPhone user experience appreciably better for many users?
The new feature is RCS, which will dramatically improve the quality of text communication between people who use iPhones and people who use Android phones. (And yes, the timing of Apple’s announcement makes it clear to me that this is very much designed to take some of the political heat off of Apple in the European Union.)
I’ve always assumed that the Apple community would agree that Apple’s products should be great. We use these products, for work and home and life in general. We love it when they’re good and hate it when they’re bad.
Few would deny that trying to send texts or photos in Messages to Android users has been pretty awful for a very long time. Why wouldn’t you want that to get better?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Beeper, a startup led by former Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, announced a new version of its Android app that supports direct on-device compatibility1 for iMessage. Quinn Nelson has an excellent explanation video and Jacob Kastrenakes at the Verge has an article about it.
As Kastrenakes explains:
Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.
Can Apple just flip a couple of switches and stop these shenanigans? Based on how Beeper described its technology to Nelson and Kastrenakes, not easily. It’s not against the law for Beeper to circumvent Apple’s systems, and it uses a standard authentication method that’s also used by legitimate Apple devices.
In a time when Apple’s being assailed by multiple regulators for uncompetitive behavior, it would not look great if the company were to crush Beeper, even if it could do so easily. Instead, it might take a months- or years-long overhaul of its authentication systems to do so. And would it be worth it? Beeper is making a calculated gamble that Apple will let this go.
In the meantime, if you’re an Android user who desperately wants access to blue bubbles, here’s Beeper Mini.
- In other words, there’s no insecure server running in the middle that sees all your messages. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Myke returns to the show to discuss chip packaging (in the U.S.A.) and the potential of AI models to make using a computer easier. Then, by request, we spend some time talking about how we got into this business.
Go to the podcast page.
Audio Hijack lets you record any audio on your Mac, from individual applications like Safari or Zoom, hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, or even the audio output of the entire system. If you can hear it, you can record it. Whatever you need to do with audio on your Mac, Audio Hijack can help.
- Record conversations from Zoom, FaceTime, and other VoIP apps
- Save streaming audio from the web
- Create podcasts, both remote and in-studio
- Digitize vinyl
- And so much more
Earlier this month, Rogue Amoeba shipped Audio Hijack 4.3 with a brand-new Transcribe block to turn any spoken audio into text. The Mac’s best audio recording tool now also gives you unlimited transcription, with no on-going charges. Transcribe audio from a mic, an app, or a file. It’s great for video meetings, podcasts, and so much more. Read all about it in the Audio Hijack 4.3 blog post.
Through the end of December, Six Colors readers can save 20% by purchasing with coupon code 6C20AH. Visit the Audio Hijack site to download the free trial.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
The holiday season is peak streaming season, too! We discuss the seasonal opportunities for streamers, plus: your letters. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Amazon’s Black Friday NFL experiment, YouTube & Sunday Ticket, and the coming sports/RSN implosion.]
Go to the podcast page.
Speaking of e-readers, here’s an interesting profile of the small French e-reader company Vivlio by Romain Dillet at TechCrunch:
While Amazon’s Kindle is the clear leader and Rakuten’s Kobo the obvious challenger, Vivlio has been building an open European alternative to these two tech giants. And it proves that you can compete with tech giants with a team of 35 as long as you have a distinct strategy with different goals…
“The idea was to create a European coalition — well, French at first, but we’re trying to make it European now — a coalition of companies with similar interests, booksellers and retailers of cultural goods, around a French and then European solution,” Vivlio CEO David Dupré told me.
Vivlio’s got a partner for hardware and has built on the open-source Readium LCP copy protection scheme. As a fan of e-readers in general and weird e-readers in particular, it’s great to see a company other than Amazon’s Kindle and Rakuten’s Kobo trying to build a digital reading ecosystem.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Upon seeing this week’s announcement from Apple promoting the top titles of the year from Apple Books, along with a new Year in Review feature, I had likely the same thought as many: “Apple still cares about selling ebooks?”
To be fair, you can’t blame the company for being gun shy. Ten years ago, Apple found itself in the crosshairs of a Department of Justice investigation over price-fixing ebooks, and the fallout of that case not only impacted Apple’s existing foray into ebooks, but also likely cooled any fervor it had for competing in the market in the future.
Unfortunately, that case also ended up only solidifying the dominance of the market’s biggest player, Amazon. So, a decade on, could Apple still mount an effective challenge to that behemoth? Maybe. But not only would the will have to be present, but the company would have to take some pretty bold steps.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
A still from Apple’s lost voice film.Apple’s latest short film focusing on accessibility, released on Thursday and directed by Oscar-winner Taika Waititi, tells the story of a character’s search for his lost voice. The film promotes the Personal Voice and Live Speech features included in the latest versions of iOS and macOS.
The film is a children’s story narrated by Dr. Tristram Ingham, a New Zealand-based physician and disability advocate. Ingham lives with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a disease which causes progressive muscle degeneration, and leads to an inability to speak. His narration was created using Personal Voice on an iPhone. The film is also audio-described for those with visual impairments.
The film tells the story of a furry little character searching everywhere for his lost voice, with the aid of his friend, a young girl. There’s also an ebook, where the story appears in words and illustrations. Both are available now.
The film’s effectiveness and emotional impact does not come from the centering of disability, but from the lithe writing, imaginative visual vocabulary and trippy score, which is made up mostly of human voice samples. Like the best Apple promotional films, it is about what it’s about, far more than the products it inevitably promotes.
The film release coincides with the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is December 3. It was produced with the participation of organizations supporting people with speech disabilities.
Personal Voice debuted in iOS/iPadOS 17. It is intended for use by those who are at risk of losing the ability to speak. Many Personal Voice users have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which eventually causes loss of the ability to speak. After recording some 150 phrases to an iPhone or iPad, a synthetic version of the recorded voice is generated on-device. Once that’s done, the user can instruct Personal Voice to speak in the version of your voice that’s been created.
Live Speech, Apple’s other new speech accessibility feature, allows the user to type a phrase or sentence and have it spoken by the device. Think coffee orders or other quick interactions.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Turns out police departments are like some of my relatives: They see things on Facebook and uncritically pass them on without considering for one moment if what they’re posting is actually true.
Shira Ovide of the Washington Post covered the issue quite well in a recent newsletter, and Juli Clover of MacRumors wrote a nice summary of how an innocuous iOS 17 feature has been the latest target of unjustified panic:
There have been warnings about NameDrop popping up on Facebook. Police departments in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio, and other states have been suggesting that contact information can be shared “just by bringing your phones close together.” From the City of Chester Police Department in Ohio:
“IMPORTANT PRIVACY UPDATE: If you have an iPhone and have done the recent iOS 17 update, they have set a new feature called NameDrop defaulted to ON. This feature allows the sharing of your contact info just by bringing your phones close together. To shut this off go to Settings, General, AirDrop, Bringing Devices Together. Change to OFF.”
This is so bizarre. NameDrop is a feature that lets you AirDrop your contact information to someone else. For the feature to work, both phones need to be unlocked and one has to be placed directly over the other. The entire new tap-to-connect system is built to use physical proximity to confirm consent to sending or receiving data, replacing the old system in which you could leave your device open to AirDrop from all users—and receive all sorts of nasty unwanted stuff from nearby randos.1
Once the physical act of tapping is done—it takes a few seconds, there’s a prominent animation, it’s nothing that is going to happen accidentally—you are given the option to share your contact information with the other person, and get to choose which information is shared! If you only want to share a phone number and not your home address, you can do that! It’s entirely in the user’s control. (If someone nefarious approached you and wanted to steal your information, they’d be better off just grabbing your unlocked phone and running away with it.)
As Ovide wrote:
We spend too much time worrying about the wrong things in technology. And that is partly the fault of public officials and news organizations that can make anything sound scarier than it really is.
You also can’t die from touching fentanyl and nobody is poisoning or sticking razor blades in Halloween candy. But people believe this stuff, especially when it comes from an “authority” like the local police department.
I’m glad that so many sources are rushing to correct the original police department posts, but if you really want to get depressed, visit one and read the comments from all the people who are grateful for the misinformation. You’ll have to laugh to keep from crying.
- At Oracle Park in San Francisco, I was once AirDropped a photo of Dick Van Dyke, with the text, “You just got an unsolicited Dick pic.” ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
[February 2024 Update: Castro has new owners who say they’re committed to keeping Castro up and running.]
Castro has been a popular iOS podcast app for many years, but right now things look grim.
The cloud database that backs the service is broken and needs to be replaced. As a result, the app has broken. (You can’t even export subscriptions out of it, because even that function apparently relies on the cloud database.) “The team is in the progress of setting up a database replacement, which might take some time. We aim to have this completed ASAP,” said an Xtweet from @CastroPodcasts.
What’s worse, according to former Castro team member Mohit Mamoria, “Castro is being shut down over the next two months.”
Castro owner Tiny and the Castro team aren’t addressing Mamoria’s comments or responding to my emails. When I asked around, a couple of knowledgeable people told me that they’d heard Castro had been put on life support a few months ago and was unlikely to get any technical attention going forward. I can’t independently verify those secondhand comments, but they don’t contradict Mamoria’s statement. Podnews on Wednesday provided a bagful of evidence pointing to Castro’s imminent demise. (Update: Castro owner Tiny says they’re trying to find a new home for the app.)
The truth is, between Apple’s solid upgrades to the Podcast app and the rise of Spotify as a podcast-playing competitor, the squeeze has really been put on most podcast apps. Original Castro developers Supertop sold the app in 2018. Pocket Casts got acquired in 2018 and again in 2021. Stitcher shut down entirely.
It’s not that users don’t want better podcast apps. Clearly, the users of Castro and Pocket Casts and Overcast get features out of those apps that the two big apps just can’t match. But it can take a lot to drive users out of the arms of a default and into a quest to replace that default. The default app doesn’t have to be best in class—it just has to be good enough.
There’s power in being one of the incumbents, too. If you’re a Spotify customer, you don’t even need to change apps. If you’re in Apple’s ecosystem, using Podcasts adds integration with HomePods and Apple TV that other apps just can’t match.
I’m still an Overcast user, and it would take a lot for Apple’s Podcasts app to get me back. But I once had a list of must-have podcast app features that Apple failed to support that was as long as my arm; these days, I can probably count it on my fingers, and I might not need the second hand.
Which is to say, if Castro really is not long for this world, I fully expect that most of its users won’t go to Overcast or Pocket Casts, but will retreat to Apple or Spotify, companies that are unlikely to fail them, even if the cost is a little less customization or functionality. And a little more of the unique, open podcast ecosystem will be lost forever.
Our book-reading habits, what we do with our health data, how tech helps us around the house, and old software that we still have a crush on.
Go to the podcast page.
“I’ll say this for him, he’s consistent.”In the surest sign that the end of the year is nearing and that whatever happens in December stays in December, Apple dropped a bunch of its annual 2023 lists on Tuesday.
One of Books’s in-app reader types.In one of those weird new “Quick Read” pop-up posts on Apple Newsroom, Apple announced its top podcasts of 2023. (Please note that Apple only measures listening in its own Podcasts app, so Spotify and indie podcast apps aren’t counted.) The top podcasts are what you’d expect if you’ve ever looked at Apple’s podcast charts. Crime Junkie was the top show for the second year in a row and another crime show, Scamanda, was the top new show.
Apple Music Replay 2023 highlights also launched on Tuesday, and it is still weirdly a website and not something you can just see in the Music app. Replay actually exists all year round, but Apple expands it right at the end of the year. From the site, you can add a playlist with your top songs of 2023, which will actually update right through the end of the year and then live on with you in perpetuity.
(My Replay lists are never interesting, because I tend to find a few albums and songs from a few artists and play them endlessly. This is probably the fifth straight year that The 1975 reigns as my top artist, with nobody else close. My only surprise this year was that something called Dog Music was among my top selections. I have no idea what that is—it’s apparently a streaming radio station?—and while I do have a dog and I think I tried to play music for her once to reduce her separation anxiety, it’s not something I did long enough for it to make Apple’s charts. Apple’s ways are truly mysterious.)
Also also on Tuesday, Apple put out a proper press release but its new top books of 2023 list. Once again, this is a list entirely about people buying and reading in the Apple Books app.
Perhaps most notably, there’s now an Apple Music-style Year in Review feature that shows you about what you read during the year, including a profile about which one of six “reader types” you most conform to. Unlike Apple Music, the Books Year in Review feature is presented directly inside the Books app itself.
James Thomson joins Jason to celebrate Cyber Monday, generate an Apple Buying Guide, grapple with subscription (and human) burnout, and explore spatial videos and the current state of visionOS development.
Go to the podcast page.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security.
On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed.
Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.
Let’s talk about the second problem first. Sure, you could simply schedule updates for all your users, and have them restart during non-work hours. But this inevitably leads to disruptions and lost work. This, in turn, leads to users (especially executives) who simply demand to be left out of your update policy. The bottom line is: any forced restarts without user approval will lead to data loss events, and that makes them so unpopular that they are functionally unusable.
There is another class of tools that claim to get users to install updates themselves, through “nudges.” These reminders pop up with increasing frequency until users relent or the timer runs out. This is an improvement, since it involves users in the process, but users still tend to delay updating as long as possible (which for some tools can be indefinitely).
At Kolide, OS updates are the single most common issue customers want us to solve. They come to us because we have a unique (and uniquely effective) approach to device compliance.
With Kolide, when a user’s device–be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile–is out of compliance, we reach out to them with instructions on how to fix it.
The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta. (At present, Kolide is exclusive to Okta customers, but we plan to integrate with more SSO providers soon.)
If your fleet is littered with devices that stubbornly refuse to update, then consider these two principles:
- You can’t have a successful patch management policy without involving users.
- You can’t get users to install patches unless you give them both clear instructions and real consequences.
Installing OS updates is a top priority for both security and IT, and when you make it part of conditional access, you can finally get it done without massive lists of exemptions or massive piles of support tickets.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari – stopping you from being followed by ads around the web. Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Apple released its annual holidaytime videofun thingy! Hooray!
Don’t read this until after you’ve watched it. (Note to Apple Watch users: if your device starts lighting up with emergency medical alerts while you’re watching, just ignore them. Your grinchy heart is just growing three sizes in response to holiday sentiment and the sensors are misinterpreting that data as atrial fibrillation.)
OK. Pretty cool short, eh? The lady is shooting stop-motion animation with her iPhone, apparently using an app on her MacBook that takes advantage of the iPhone 15 Pro’s ability to shoot pictures in tethered mode. Over the course of four minutes, warm fuzzies are had. Almost literally. It’s all neat stuff and I sincerely applaud everybody involved in its creation.
A couple of things bothered me about the short, though.
First: I wish someone at Apple would explain to me on the record why the lady’s boss wasn’t played by Paul Giamatti. It’s such a total Paul Giamatti role that if Apple had produced this short inside the EU, some regulatory agency or another would have required Apple to hire Giamatti for the gig, no substitutes. In 2008, when Samsung cloned the iPhone with so much fidelity that it lit the fuse for years of vicious lawsuits, Samsung didn’t do that job nearly as well as how well Apple cloned Paul Giamatti when they booked this other actor.
Second: Something about the lady’s behavior nagged at me. The feeling lingered all afternoon and it took me a while to figure out what the issue was.
The story is short and simple. A lady suffers under an abrasive, if not fully abusive, boss. She exorcises her workplace anger through the ancient Klingon blood rite known as “stop-motion needle-felt animation.”
If you think about it, that’s absolutely stone-cold. Imagine if, instead, she took out her frustrations about her boss by drawing single-panel comics on her iPad. Each of her fantasy scenarios of her boss being injured, and humiliated, and, overall, deliberately made to feel as if God has turned His gaze of love far away from him, would have taken her twenty minutes to draw, max.
But stop-motion animation? With needle-felted figures?
How many weeks did it take her to complete just one of those humiliating scenes? She designed and constructed dolls, props, and sets; she invested lots of money and ingenuity in doing the lighting and rigging; she animated each shot one painstaking frame at a time; and then did all of the editing.
You must agree with me that this is an utterly psychopathic amount of work. It’s very correct to witness this behavior and then fear for that man’s safety out in the real world.
I’ll also point out that one of the little things the boss did that annoyed and angered her was that he noticed that she was very late for work. He communicated his disappointment in a quick, low-key way that drew no attention from the rest of the office. Close examination of the previous scene reveals why she was late that morning: she’d gotten so wrapped up in her whole Torture My Boss By Wooly Proxy project that she’d lost all track of time. She didn’t even leave her house for the office until five minutes before nine.
This speaks poorly of her. But it’s not the thing about the short that nagged at me all afternoon. It was the weird and fitful role of empathy in the story.
Scene: the boss makes the rounds of the office. In a manner that could be described either as “self-conscious and awkward” or “exactly how Paul Giamatti would have played that scene,” he hands out personal holiday gifts to the entire staff. The lady unwraps an utterly charming Christmas stocking that her boss clearly knitted himself.
Next, she happens to spot him dining alone, in a restaurant otherwise filled with groups and couples celebrating the holiday.
These two experiences help to humanize the boss in the lady’s eyes. She softens. The short ends with her starting to regard the man with fresh empathy and understanding.
OK. That’s sweet. Really. For the purposes of a four-minute short, it’s an efficient and effective story arc.
But the story dismisses something of critical importance: why didn’t she humanize her boss before the she learned that he was a fellow fan of the fiber arts? The boss was deserving of empathy and understanding from birth, because he’s a felllow human being. And yet the lady began extending that dignity to him just recently, and only because she chanced to see him eating alone and then she pitied him.
She got there in the end, which we should celebrate, but if not for the fact that only the ineffable forces of the universe have the right to judge, I’d be giving her, like, a B. Plus a fun sticker, because it keeps everything positive.
The messaging here is weird. On a side note, I also wonder: is the root of the problem between these two a simple generational difference in emotional user interfaces?
The boss isn’t mean to her. OK: not holding the elevator for her is a jerk move. But overall, he just seems like one of those people who are closed-off with his feelings overall. That sort of thing can easily come across as gruff. But is there anything to the trope of Millennials and Gen-Z requiring consistent emotional affirmations in the workplace, forms of reassurance that their Boomer bosses aren’t equipped to dispense?
Well, whatever. Empathy is the point of today’s sermon. Empathy requires each of us to never ever forget that we should treat fellow humans like human beings and not human-shaped objects. No exceptions and no excuses.
Simple? Oh, sure. But holy cats, it’s hard to get a consistent grip on the thing, isn’t it? It’s easier to know that we’ve misplaced our empathy than it is to be sure of what we should do with it.
The struggle’s worth it, though. Empathy is hands-down our most significant and important function. God or whatever put us here to practice empathy, and also because He or whatever couldn’t figure out how to make a huge awesome island made out of fun colorful plastic show up in the middle of the ocean all on its own.
So when the lady in the “Fuzzy Feelings” video exercises her empathy only conditionally, after she comes to pity her boss (itself a form of dehumanization), it comes across as… well, not wrong, but definitely odd.
Empathy from the machineI’ve given “Fuzzy Feelings” another close examination and I might have an explanation for all of this. The computers in the short are big clues. Obviously, the lady uses a sweet setup of Apple computers at home. At work, her desk seems to have a Windows machine. Whatever it is, it definitely isn’t anything manufactured by Apple. The keyboard and mouse are ergonomic, for a start.
Apple has a famous and somewhat silly policy about using its products as props in film: Macs and iPhones and iPads can never be in the hands of any of the bad guys. I’m not kidding. Apple is so fussy about this that one of my favorite recent movies had to resort to a downright comical piece of editing when the story required a bad guy to hand an iPad to a good guy.
So maybe the lady’s capacity for empathy is intact… but her ability to access it is influenced by her environments. When she’s in the office and her boss gives her a gentle rebuke for a legit HR infraction, her proximity to a Microsoft operating system influences her to choose a path of (needle-felted stop-motion) violence. When she’s at home, her heart is warmed by the benedictive greenhouse of Apple screens, and empathy blossoms. She performs a penance: the Needle-Felted Boss, which throughout its life had been a sinner in the eyes of a vengeful God and made to suffer daily judgments more fearful than he could comprehend, receives a new blessing from his Lord, in the form of a felty little dog.
Also a pair of replacement pants. That puppet was animated without his trousers for way more scenes than the need for shot-to-shot continuity would require.
Can we just agree that “Fuzzy Feelings” is a little bit weird?
Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes, from the littlest kindergarteners to the world’s most valuable and powerful corporations. What’s most important is how we respond to our mistakes, of course. Do we learn and grow? Do we deny and deflect? Or do we just give up?
What I’m saying is, Apple sometimes takes its failures and learns important lessons that inform its future attempts… but sometimes, it seems to just give up.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Choosing between noise cancellation and excellent audio quality in headphones, the impact of an unlimited supply of one thing on the world or your life, the significance of Apple’s adoption of RCS, and recommendations for Black Friday deals.
Go to the podcast page.
The possibilities that Apple will release a lower-cost MacBook, Apple’s difficulties in building a 5G radio to rival Qualcomm, Apple attempts to appease the EU by adopting RCS, and all hell breaks loose with OpenAI.
Go to the podcast page.
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web.
It’s a native Safari content blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac that’s been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.
Over 280,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Remove ad trackers, annoyances and background crypto-mining scripts
- Browse common websites 2.0x faster
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block video ads.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Disney’s going to own all of Hulu. Does this uniquely position them to be the most legitimate challenger to Netflix? We also discuss the power of platforms, Apple’s “Napoleon” opportunity, and Disney’s Marvel experimentation.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple has told Chance Miller of 9to5Mac that it will be supporting the RCS standard for messaging:
Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.
Here’s what this means:
- iPhone communications with Android devices via Messages will improve. Currently Messages uses the old SMS and MMS standards for sending texts and media to Android phones. RCS supports better image transfers, pass-along of location data (used in several Messages features), and more.
- It might mean that these messages are more secure than they used to be, though the fundamental security of RCS as a protocol is a little hazy. Apple says it’ll work with the GSM Association to improve the standard, which might include security improvements? We’ll see.
- It absolutely doesn’t mean that “green bubble shame” is going anywhere. There’s no way that Apple will promote RCS messages to blue bubbles in Messages. Not only does the blue bubble indicate that messages are from other Apple devices, it indicates that they’ve been sent securely using iMessage. It’s not just branding, it’s meaningful. It’s unclear if RCS messages will use green bubbles or some other color, but it won’t be iMessage blue for sure.
- This is coming in a software update next year, so either a late iOS 17 update or iOS 18.
Why is Apple doing this? It sure feels like a way to indicate its support of open standards at a time when it’s being investigated by various bodies, most notably in the European Union. Who knows if it’ll work?
Either way, this is a good announcement. It’s hard to believe that Apple still falls back to SMS and MMS for all communications with Android devices. RCS isn’t a replacement for iMessage, but it will improve chats with Android users within Messages. This hasn’t just been a user experience problem for Android users, it’s been one for iPhone users who have Android users in their lives.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Capturing spatial video on iPhone, our font opinions, whether we use journaling apps, and when we tell our non-techy friends to update their software.
Go to the podcast page.
App Store Awards finalists, WordPress woes, AI pins and the secret identity of Dan’s benefactor.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple Newsroom:
One year ago today, Apple’s groundbreaking safety service Emergency SOS via satellite became available on all iPhone 14 models in the U.S. and Canada. Now also available on the iPhone 15 lineup in 16 countries and regions, this innovative technology — which enables users to text with emergency services while outside of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage — has already made a significant impact, contributing to many lives being saved. Apple today announced it is extending free access to Emergency SOS via satellite for an additional year for existing iPhone 14 users.
Apple’s in an interesting position with this service. Even though its currently limited to emergency usage—which is hopefully a pretty small percentage of overall eligible iPhone users—satellite connectivity isn’t cheap.
I was pretty confident Apple would kick this can down the road, and now they have. My guess is that it might (next year or the year after) introduce a paid tier that lets you do more with satellite connectivity—non-emergency messaging, for example—and use a charge for that to essentially subsidize free emergency functionality for all users.
Yes, Apple wants to continue to make money on this, but it definitely doesn’t want to be in a position of having a customer unable to use the service because they didn’t pony up for the monthly cost—that would not be a great look in those “look at all the people who are still here to celebrate their birthday because of Apple technology” videos.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Artificial intelligence is the buzziest of buzzwords right now. But as rivals like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have gone full throttle on incorporating this latest hot technology into their products, Apple has taken a decidedly slower—if not uncharacteristic—approach that has more than a few critics lambasting the company for trailing behind its competitors.
Apple is, of course, no stranger to the use of machine learning in its products, though it’s tended to deploy that technology in more subtle ways that don’t scream “artificial intelligence.”
Still, if rumors are to be believed, Apple is going hard at building generative AI features in its software updates over the next year. Naturally, most people’s attention will probably go to Siri as one place the company could benefit from integrating the sort of technology demoed by others, but there are definitely other places throughout Apple’s software platforms where AI could make as big an impact—if not bigger—on users’ lives.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Last week, the startup Humane did a marketing blitz for its forthcoming AI Pin, a $699 wearable designed by a bunch of ex-Apple people that has been the subject of a lot of tech-industry buzz lately.
It’s a really interesting product. While it would be easy to focus on the company’s lackluster marketing video that featured actual AI hallucinations, I’m more interested in what this product says and doesn’t say about the current and future of tech.
I don’t think the AI Pin will succeed for numerous reasons, foremost among them being the fact that it seems to be a product designed to make your smartphone unnecessary or ancillary. It feels to me like this is the product’s point of view not because of a deep philosophical reason but because Humane is a company with investors that needs to ship and sell a hardware product and trying to attach to the side of Apple’s or Google’s smartphone operating systems makes this thing an expensive accessory instead of a revolutionary device.
It’s not a point of view that makes sense otherwise, because it seems to posit a world where people just hate their smartphones and can’t wait to be rid of them. This is the world as seen through a funhouse mirror. People love their smartphones. That’s why we’re all staring into them for hours and hours every day! The knock on smartphones is that people use them all the time, and maybe I guess we shouldn’t? But unless you’re going on some sort of digital fast, the results are in: people love using their smartphones. They’re the ultimate hit product of four or five decades of personal computers.
This is not to say the AI Pin doesn’t fit into some interesting niches. A personal constellation of devices—smartphone in your pocket, smartwatch on your wrist, maybe smart earbuds in your ears—gets more interesting when you consider that all of those devices are working together to collect information and communicate it back to you. And none of the devices I carry around daily look at the world around me. The AI Pin has a camera and clips on your shirt, so it’s able to see what you’re seeing and presumably do things with that information.
There’s a lot of potential here. The iPhone can do some amazing things when you hold its camera up—including figure out exactly where it is based on the buildings it can see, which is bananas—but mostly, that camera is looking at the inside of my pocket. Whether it’s glasses or a pin or something else1, there’s valuable data to be gained from seeing the world around us. It’s a sense that our devices are missing most of the time.
The AI Pin’s interface is built around a smart assistant that uses a large language model as an interface. Humane is highly unlikely to corner the market on this technology. Instead, it’s using the same stuff that will immediately permeate into all our devices—at least, as soon as it’s ready.
Humane’s vision for the future of human interfaces doesn’t seem wrong to me. Sooner or later, voice assistants driven by large language models are going to be good and reliable, and the game is going to change. I don’t know if Google Assistant and Alexa and Siri are going to molt into beautiful butterflies next year or the year after or in 2030, but it sure seems like it’s going to happen.
What excites me about this is that what computers are good at, fundamentally, is drudgery. Computer spreadsheets were the first killer app because they eliminated the need to write numbers down on paper, sharpen pencils and erase pencil marks, and do all that math in order to figure out whatever you wanted to learn. My favorite moments using computers are often figuring out ways I can use automation to take a task that requires me to click and type stuff for half an hour and reduce it to a single keyboard shortcut.
Now imagine the prospect of an intelligent assistant that knows every single fact in your personal array of data. It’s read all your saved notes, email, time tracking data, and contacts, and knows what was said in all your meetings and more. Instead of having to invent search terms and search multiple data repositories and wrack your brain to find exactly the right piece of information, the assistant can just do it because it’s got millions of cycles to burn doing the drudgery for you.
Humane’s marketing videos do a pretty good job of showing how this next wave of AI-based assistants will change how we interact with our devices. I think most people will still enjoy tapping on a smartphone, but more complex interactions can be simplified. Kevin Roose of the New York Times wrote about using ChatGPT to create an agent that knew all the rules of his child’s daycare provider, effectively teaching an assistant to answer very specific questions about when Circle Time is and when the facility is closed for the holiday break. Leo Laporte built a programming coach for the Lisp language in less than half an hour.
Sure, it’s all early days. Chatbots still hallucinate—sometimes in their own marketing videos. If my time as a computer user and an observer of the tech world has taught me anything, it’s that new technologies explode into existence quickly—but then take way longer than you expected to get really good. We’re post-explosion now, and things are moving quickly, but it might take a while for this stuff to truly fulfill its potential. (In the meantime, those who are enthusiastic about tech get to play with the new, messy stuff! It’s why it’s fun to be an early adopter.)
Anyway, this brings us to Apple. According to Mark Gurman, iOS 18 will be full of AI features. We’ll see what that amounts to. Apple is a very careful company, and generative AI still feels a bit wild, but given what Adobe’s doing in its apps, it feels like it’s past time for Apple to get involved.
Putting machine-learning-based features in apps, as Apple has been doing for years, is just fine. But it’s obvious that Siri needs to be replaced with something better and smarter and capable of leveraging Apple’s ecosystem to make itself a uniquely personal tool for users of Apple’s devices. My iPhone can read my mail and my notes and peer into my calendar and knows my contacts… it does all this already. The next step is for Apple and Siri to put it all together.
- Would ultra-wide-angle lenses on the outside of AirPods be able to stitch together a 360-degree view of the world around you? Only Apple’s product lab knows for sure, I suppose. ↩
Amazing story from Andy Lewis of The Ankler about the real-life veterans behind the dog tags worn by Alan Alda on the hall-of-fame sitcom “MASH”:
Often when he was putting the dog tags on in his dressing room, seemingly obtained by the costume designers of MASH*, he would ponder who the men were and where they served, even if they survived the war. The fact that there was only one tag for each, instead of the usual pair, made him wonder if they were alive or dead: “I didn’t know anything about them other than their names.”
Suffice it to say that now Alda, and the rest of us, know a lot more about these two men who served in World War II and never knew who ended up wearing their dog tags.
[Via Craig Calcaterra]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Spatial videos on iPhone, 2024 iPad updates, the Apple Watch as a health device, Apple pausing iOS development to fix bugs, the potential of AI interfaces, and the meaning of the “pro” label.
Go to the podcast page.
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 280,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.
Browser extensions that offer AI features, but steal user data, are everywhere. That’s why many companies—including Apple—have banned their employees from using large-language models. And that’s just one potential attack surface.
Kolide lets IT and security teams write checks that detect device compliance issues, and have started creating checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Here’s a video about how Kolide can help companies enforce device compliance.
Last week Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, posting another flat sales quarter even as profits (and services revenue) continue to rise. And as usual, I filled a bunch of numbers into a Number spreadsheet, ran my little charting Automator app, and out popped out a bunch of colorful charts.
It being the fiscal fourth quarter, of course, means it’s also the end of Apple’s fiscal year. And that gives me the opportunity to cart out a separate set of charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.
Let’s dig in to the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 25 years:
After the revenue rocketship that was fiscal 2021, the past two years have been a lot quieter. While 2022’s record revenue is the proverbial “tough compare,” the fact that the company has held on to most of the revenue from that record year and the enormous growth spurt in 2020 is still pretty impressive. Unless you are Wall Street and looking for signs of more growth.
Speaking of growth: The last two times Apple posted a blow-out fiscal year—2015 and 2018—it backslid the next year. That didn’t happen last year, but this year we did finally see the inevitable backslide. The key lesson here is, if you keep having those quantum leap years, Wall Street won’t get too grumpy when you have a few middling years afterward.
Of course, the driver of half Apple’s revenue is the iPhone, so as the iPhone goes, so goes Apple:
The iPhone’s slight backsliding in total revenue more or less matches Apple’s own story. Instead of spiking and then dropping down, as it did during the past boom years, this latest cycle featured a spike, a slight increase, and a slight drop. I don’t know what 2024 has in store for Apple, but I have my doubts that iPhone revenue is ever going down below $200 billion again.
Let’s look at the Mac, which followed up its record-breaking 2022 with a horrible year, relatively speaking:
2021 was a massive sales jump for the Mac, and 2022 took it even further. The combination of COVID lockdowns driving sales and Apple moving to Apple silicon led to Mac sales the likes of which we’d never seen before.
This year the Mac came back to Earth. At $29.4 billion, sales were actually up slightly from 2020’s $28.6 billion. What seemed like a rocket to the stratosphere now looks like a two year aberration. The good news for Apple is that after all those new sales, the Mac didn’t regress back to its late-2010s sales numbers. Instead, even with a precipitous decline in sales, the Mac sold more in 2023 than it did in 2020.
My guess is that the Mac will resume its slow build from this new baseline and we’ll see Mac sales in the low $30 billion range for the next few years. A less bullish person might warn that we’re still seeing the downward slope of the sales spike, but I really can’t imagine the Mac going below the numbers it consistently hit in the mid-2010s. I’m going to guess that 2021 and 2022 didn’t just feature existing Mac users refreshing their devices, but also new Mac users coming into the market, expanding the user base and pushing the “regular” Mac sales year to a new plateau. I guess we’ll see in a year.
Last year was rough for the iPad, but this year—with no new iPad announcements at all!—was rougher:
After a nice spike in 2021, iPad sales are down for the second consecutive year. However, it’s all a matter of perspective. Even in a year with no new iPads, $28 billion in iPad sales means that the iPad had its third best sales year since 2015.
Will history repeat itself, with the iPad receding into a six-year slide into the doldrums of low-$20-billion years? I’m doubtful. My expectations are that the iPad is going to live in the upper $20 billions now, and next year might be even better because of a complete refresh of the line.
Now let’s look at the popular and growing Services and Wearables, Home, and Accessories lines:
After eight straight years of annual growth, Wearables took the year off. $40 billion is still a huge number (more than double the 2018 total!) but there’s a lack of growth here that probably won’t be cured by the arrival of Vision Pro next year.
But Services continues to grow, and at a similar pace to its growth last year. Services has rapidly become Apple’s second most important financial line after the iPhone.
This brings us to the final chart, which I run here every year just to put all of Apple’s product lines in the proper context. When I run the numbers as individual charts, they all seem more or less the same. But they are very definitely not all created equal. (It’s still impressive to see Services lift away from the others, though.)
Meet you back here next year for more annual charts!
Last week, Apple reported its financial results, and they were the kind that answered the question, “Under what circumstances would financial analysts look askance at nearly $90 billion in revenue and $23 billion in profit?” (Answer: When that company is Apple, and it’s posted lower year-over-year revenue numbers in five of the last six quarters.)
After a couple of years of growth so sudden and massive that cosmologists are analyzing it for clues to the inflationary period during the first few moments of the universe, Apple has spent the year-plus… flat. Very huge and profitable flat, but flat nonetheless. Wall Street, so focused on growth, is a little perplexed.
As is tradition, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri hopped on a conference call with financial analysts after the results. And they let the rest of us listen in like little sneaky eavesdroppers. Here are a few of the things I took from what Apple’s execs had to say.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Troublesome software bugs, our thoughts on tech companies’ involvement in standards creation, iMessage interoperability, and what we think about video game movies and TV shows.
Go to the podcast page.
In this episode, alliances are formed and broken. Just like Dan’s trackpad.
Go to the podcast page.
Last month I wrote about how Apple’s cascade of macOS alerts and warnings ruin the Mac upgrade experience.
My point wasn’t to ask Apple to make the Mac less secure. It was for Apple to find some ways to improve the user experience while keeping Mac users safe by default. It feels like there’s an imbalance where security is being prioritized but the user experience is allowed to lag, and it’s a problem.
This issue was brought home to me last week when I was reviewing the M3 iMac and the M3 MacBook Pro. As a part of reviewing those computers, I used Migration Assistant to move a backup of my Mac Studio to the new systems via a USB drive. Sometimes I try to review a computer with nothing migrated over, but it can be a real slowdown and I didn’t really have any time to spare last week.
Anyway, by migrating, I got to (twice) experience Apple’s ideal process of moving every user from one Mac to the next. You start up your new computer, migrate from a backup of the old computer, and then start using the new one. There’s a lot that’s great about this process, and it’s so much better than what we used to have to do to move files over from one Mac to another.
And yet all of Apple’s security alerts got in the way again and spoiled the whole thing. Here’s a screenshot I took right after my new Mac booted for the first time after migration:
What’s happening here is that Migration Assistant has migrated all my apps, and has automatically launched any of them that are listed in Login Items or are set to automatically launch in the background. They all launch, all at once, and every single one of them then prompts me for permission to do all the things they already had permission to do on my previous Mac.
In this screen shot, I’ve dragged them apart, but in reality most of these windows appeared on top of each other. They float above every other window, and most of them want to open various portions of the Settings app. In the background, a few apps have launched with their own alert prompts, requesting that I perform more tasks in order to get the system ready.
This wasn’t the end of it, of course, because after dealing with one of these windows there was a pretty good chance the app in question would then spawn an additional window asking for a different permission. For the ones that require specific changes in the Settings app, I had to slide the Settings app somewhere where it wouldn’t be covered by various other floating windows and then deal with the requests there.
Often, different apps would seemingly fight over my attention, demanding that I go to a different portion to the Settings app. They would sometimes even demand permission I had already granted, since I was in the right part of Settings and decided to save time by approving a couple of apps at once.
At some point I also triggered this cascade of alerts, which was hilarious:
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/extension-blocked.mp4I had to click OK on all of those in order to move on, too.
Asking users for approval is a good impulse, but if you ask too many times, a user’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll approve anything. It is incumbent on Apple’s designers to build a user experience for approving permissions that is clear but convenient. It needs to not distract users with a fusillade of individual pop-up requests.
Setting up a new M3 iMac should be a pleasure. When I was done, I felt like a swarm of bees was buzzing in my head. Not great.
I really enjoyed this piece by Sam Byford of Multicore about how the Chinese smartphone market differs from the rest of the world:
Unlike the U.S., the Chinese phone market is extremely competitive from top to bottom. At the high end you have Apple, of course, then there are Android options from Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Vivo, all of which make legitimately excellent hardware at this point…. What this means is it’s really easy to switch phones in China. If you have an iPhone in the U.S., you’re likely locked into iMessage, but in China that’s a non-factor because of WeChat. If you have a Samsung phone in the U.S., meanwhile, your only other real high-end options are niche players like Google and OnePlus. Smartphone users in China — and there are more than a billion of them — can hop from Xiaomi to Apple to Huawei with much less friction.
Byford explains the important role Xiaomi plays in the ecosystem and why a camera brand like Leica would partner with a company that, to western eyes, seems like it’s making “knock-offs.”
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Jason has reviewed the new M3 iMac and M3 MacBook Pro, and Myke asks him for all the details. We also discuss why the large-iMac era is at an end, and review Apple’s recent quarterly financial results.
Go to the podcast page.
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.
In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools.
AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.
- Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al‘s APIs.
- Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
- Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records.
Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore.
At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.
- Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
- Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.
Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
After nearly two and a half years, the iMac has finally gotten its update. The venerable desktop Mac was a late addition to the first generation M1 processor, but now it’s in the vanguard of Apple’s M3 chip generation. As a result, the iMac isn’t just a colorful all-in-one desktop Mac—it’s also likely representative of the performance characteristics of every M3-based Mac to come, most notably the MacBook Air and Mac mini.
There are two stories here. Let’s start with the computer, and then I’ll get to the chip stuff.
A largely unchanged computerThe M1 iMac, released in May 2021, was an entirely new iMac design—and the M3 iMac doesn’t change a single thing. If you don’t remember that far back, here’s a quick recap: It’s an ultra-thin (11.5mm) slab that looks like an oversized iPad attached to a stand (or optional VESA mount). It comes in seven different color options—well, six colors and silver. A strong magnetic connector attaches the iMac to an external power brick that (optionally for the base model) also integrates an Ethernet jack. The 24-inch screen is at 4.5K resolution and is bright and colorful, though it can’t pop the brightness in dynamic range content like the MacBook Pro display can (it’s limited to 500 nits). It comes with color-matched accessories (yes, charged by color-matched Lightning cables).
We live in a world of laptops, in part because laptops are just so convenient. But as I revisit the iMac for the first time in a couple of years, I’m reminded of just how great this design is. It’s light (less than 10 pounds), making it easy to pick it up and carry it somewhere else (or reposition it on a desk). The screen isn’t huge, but it’s plenty for a lot of tasks—including most of the ones I perform regularly. The color choices mean it can stand out or fade in, depending on your preference and the setting. No, a desktop all-in-one isn’t for everyone, but if it’s for you, this design is just delightful.
Unfortunately, since this design is unchanged, that means that some of its flaws also remain unaddressed. In the intervening two-plus years since the iMac’s original release, Apple has released a Studio Display that comes in three different configuration options, including an adjustable stand. The iMac’s stand remains unadjustable and, in my opinion, inappropriately low. Given the cost of the adjustable Studio Display stand, I don’t expect Apple to integrate one into the base-model iMac—but it would’ve been a really nice option. Instead, these cute iMacs will end up sitting on a motley connection of books and boxes and stands in order to get them to a more ergonomic height.
Apple also hasn’t upgraded the FaceTime camera, which remains at 1080p. That’s the resolution you’ll find in laptops, but I had hoped for an upgrade on the desktop. It’s possible that the reception to the Apple Studio Display’s camera has scared Apple off the idea of building a higher-resolution camera with Center Stage into a desktop Mac—but I hope not. Apple needs to take another crack at that. Center Stage is a useful feature when you have a desktop Mac that cannot be as easily repositioned as a laptop. Apple needs to find a higher-quality webcam that can support Center Stage (as well as macOS Sonoma’s built-in options to manually pan and zoom the camera exactly the way you want it) and build it into future iMacs and external displays.
Also, since Apple moved the iMac to Retina displays nearly a decade ago, the company has abandoned its old concept of a “target display mode,” which allowed an unused iMac to be repurposed as an external display for a different computer. It’s already a little painful to think about how wasteful an all-in-one computer can be, given that displays can have lifespans vastly longer than the computers they’re attached to. Apple could assuage a lot of that frustration if it would engineer the iMac to double as a display for another device. Given the company’s commitment to the environment, perhaps it’s time to build a new Target Display Mode.
I should also probably list the iMac’s display size as one of its disappointments, but I don’t think I can. I know there are a lot of people out there who used to use 27-inch iMacs—I’m one of them. Now that the 27-inch Apple Studio Display exists, ready to be attached to a Mac mini or Mac Studio or any laptop you want, I’m not sure the world actually needs an additional size of iMac. And certainly not if the iMac can never be repurposed into a standalone display.
Apple told me that it has no plans to develop a 27-inch iMac again. If the company changes its mind and one day decides to make a bigger iMac, I’ll cheer… but I don’t think I’d go back to an iMac now that I’m able to work with a Studio Display and a Mac Studio.
While this review has largely treated the 24-inch iMac as a single computer, in truth, there are two distinct models, exactly as was the case with the M1 generation. There’s a $1299 base model and a more full-featured model that starts at $1499.
The $1299 model uses the a binned variant of the M3 processor—with eight, rather than ten, GPU cores (very much what Apple did with the M2 and the low-end 13-inch MacBook Air). It also only comes in silver, blue, green, and pink, so if you want purple, yellow, or orange, you’ll need to splurge. Finally, that base configuration ships with a Magic Keyboard that lacks Touch ID and a power brick that lacks Ethernet, though you can choose to upgrade both of those at the time you buy.
All base configurations of iMac come with 8GB of RAM. Either Apple thinks that’s enough RAM for low-end use, or it knows savvy users will immediately tack on a $200 upgrade to get to 16GB. Personally, I think 8GB of RAM is acceptable, if not ideal, for low-end use. If you are discerning enough about computers to read articles like this one on the Internet, and if you’ve got an extra $200 in your budget, it’s the upgrade most worth doing. (You can add more storage later via USB-C, but you can never add more RAM.)
The M3 debutsAs Apple enjoyed pointing out during its announcement of this new iMac and the new MacBook Pros, the M3 chip in the new iMac will absolutely destroy any Intel-based model in performance. If you’re considering an upgrade from an Intel-based Mac and are concerned about the “low-end” chip in the iMac, don’t sweat it. Even the least capable M3 chip is going to offer performance that will blow away older Intel-based Macs.
Apple’s also got a bit of a marketing advantage with the iMac in that there’s no M2-based model to compare it to. So, compared to the last iMac, performance gains will be greater than you’ll see on other M3 models. In multi-core performance, the iMac was 37 percent faster than an M1 system. And it was also 18 percent faster than an M2 MacBook Air in the same tests. In single-core tests, which basically isolate how fast an individual CPU core in each generation runs, the M3 was about 18 percent faster than M2 and 32 percent faster than M1.
Graphics gains were all over the place. The M3 has a new caching architecture that maximizes GPU throughput, as well as support for hardware-based ray tracing and mesh shading, all of which boost graphics performance. (Yes, the lighting effects in Resident Evil Village did look great on the iMac’s display.) The 10-core GPU iMac was only about 4 percent faster than a 10-core GPU M2 MacBook Air on a Geekbench 6.1 Metal test, but an eye-watering 234 percent faster than an 8-core GPU M2 MacBook Air on the new Cinebench 2024 GPU test.
In terms of pure CPU performance, it seems like the M3 is a larger leap from the M2 than the M2 was from the M1. On the graphics side, things seem to vary a bit more. The new M3 GPU is definitely faster, but in some circumstances, it appears to be spectacularly faster.
So, yes, it’s faster than the last one and faster than all previous Intel-based iMacs. I suspect that the power of the M3 iMac will satisfy anyone who chooses to buy one. With the exception of some particularly hairy audio and video work, I could happily use one as my main computer, too.
In fact, that’s unfair—the hairy audio and video work I do would get done fine on the M3 iMac. It would just take longer for those plug-ins and exports to run. Unless you’re trying to do something like edit a project with a half-dozen 8K video streams on an iMac—don’t do that!—this computer will do pretty much whatever you need.
I also very much look forward to Apple bringing this same chip into 2024 updates to the MacBook Air and the Mac mini. The Apple silicon era has been very, very good to Mac users, and the M3 generation continues the trend, this time with an extra boost on the graphics side.
Where the iMac fitsNot on the island!! (Apple)When the original iMac arrived, desktop computers still ruled. But these days, our lives are dominated by mobile devices. Often, families don’t share a single computer, with each family member using their own personal devices. So, what’s the role for today’s iMac?
Back in 2019, I tried to understand Apple’s approach to the iMac:
And yet, the iMac matters. Apple sells billions of dollars of iMacs a year, as shared home computers and corporate desktops and retail kiosks and dozens of other niches that still find value in having a computer with a big display and a simple aluminum exterior. No, it’s not what it was—it’s clear from my discussion with Apple’s iMac product manager that Apple has shifted its iMac messaging to be focused on specific use cases rather than attempting to sell it as a device with broad appeal.
Four and half years later, I continue to believe that Apple sees the iMac as more of a supporting player that needs to justify its existence by doing certain tasks better than an iPad, iPhone, or MacBook. Its biggest asset is its screen: A 24-inch screen will let you be productive in ways that smaller screens simply can’t. For many tasks—whether you’re editing photos or video or just watching a movie—bigger screens are just better.
By redesigning the iMac to have bright colors and making it thinner and lighter, Apple has repositioned the iMac as more fun, more mobile, and more likely to find itself a home. The days of the iMac being the default Mac for most users are long over, but today’s iMac does need to be flexible enough to slide into a kitchen (but not on the island!) or onto a makeshift workspace in the corner of a bedroom.
Today’s iMac is a utility player. I can’t say that I can find a place for it in my life, but it’s possible that you might find one in yours. Either way, the Apple silicon iMac is charismatic and fun. I’ve immensely enjoyed working on one in my house this past week. If there’s a place for one in your life, I expect you’ll love it too.
Like the M2 MacBook Pro released earlier this year, the new M3 MacBook Pro doesn’t look particularly new. It’s the third iteration of the excellent MacBook Pro redesign from 2021, featuring flat sides and curved corners and a spectacularly clear and bright display.
But, oh, this generation of MacBook Pro does offer a few new wrinkles. There’s the debut of the M3 processor, of course, with all three different chip variants available in the 14-inch model for the first time. And by dropping the old 13-inch MacBook Pro, Apple is making the modern MacBook Pro design available at a new, lower base price.
I’ve spent nearly a week with a 16-inch MacBook Pro running an M3 Max processor. And while the gorgeous screen and wide array of ports were quite familiar, the speed of the processor suggests that it’s never been more true that the MacBook Pro can be a Mac Pro in your backpack—if you want it to be.
Previously, on MacBook ProIn case you’ve never used a 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple silicon, here’s a quick tour of what this generation brings. Let’s start with the looks: the corners are noticeably curved but the edges are much tighter, eliminating the feeling of gentle, gradual curves.
The screen is the showcase on these laptops: a 120-hertz ProMotion display with a wide color gamut, backlit by mini-LED technology that allows it to run bright and peak even brighter, while also maintaining black levels that contribute to a remarkably extended level of dynamic range. It looks incredible when viewing HDR photos, movies, and TV shows. In the M3 models, the maximum brightness of the display in standard dynamic range mode (which is everything except those photos, movies, and TV shows, essentially) is brighter, with a maximum brightness that matches the Apple Studio Display. It’s a difficult one for Apple to call out as a feature boost—”it’s brighter in the mode that isn’t bright” is a tough sell—but the net result is that this display can get a lot brighter in the mode you’ll use 99% of the time.
There’s also a notch in the display. It’s not very big—a little more than 180 points wide and 30 points tall—but it’s smack in the middle of the menu bar. This allows Apple to pull the borders of the screen in—they’re much smaller than on previous MacBook Pros—while still keeping space for the 1080p webcam.
In practice, I never really notice the notch. It’s as high as the Menu Bar, so it doesn’t block content. Most apps don’t have enough menus to reach across the bar. (If you have too much stuff in your menu bar, I do highly recommend Bartender.)
Apple’s new standard Magic Keyboard is excellent, and returns traditional function keys while consigning the Touch Bar to the dustbin of history. Laptops with the Max or Pro chip will find three USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, including one on the right side. There’s also an SD card slot, back from the dead, and HDMI video out. And of course, MagSafe is available for fear-free magnetic charging that doesn’t take up one of the USB-C ports. (You can still charge via USB-C if you want, and the MagSafe cord goes to standard USB-C, so you can use any USB power brick—within reason—to charge via MagSafe.)
Apple laptop shades (top to bottom): Midnight, Silver, Space Gray, Space Black.Perhaps the most notable “design” change in these laptops is the introduction of a new color, available only on models with the M3 Pro or M3 Max processor: Space Black. According to Apple, this new color features a chemical change to the anodization seal on the device’s aluminum frame that makes it better at repelling liquids, including the oils that cause us to leave fingerprints all over our devices.
The Space Black MacBook Pro (beneath) definitely collects fewer fingerprints than the Midnight MacBook Air (above).The short version: Yes, the Space Black laptop’s a lot darker, and yes, it’s better than other Mac laptops at repelling fingerprints. But before you go to extremes, I also need to warn you: Space Black isn’t really black. It’s a dark metallic gray. It’s noticeably darker than any previous MacBook Pro, to be sure, but if you’re expecting black, like the old polycarbonate MacBook, or even ultra-dark, like the Midnight M2 MacBook Air, or even the black aluminum frame between the keys on the MacBook Pro keyboard, you won’t get it.
Three anodized objects under bright light: Space Black MacBook Pro (left), Midnight MacBook Air (right), with black SSD on top.As for fingerprints? I found that it was absolutely possible to put fingerprints all over the thing. But it was harder to do than on other laptops, including my beloved Midnight M2 MacBook Air. And it was easier to wipe them off. It’s a great step forward. Just don’t get outraged when you spot fingerprints on it, okay?
Questions of identityWhat makes a MacBook Pro a MacBook Pro? In the last couple of years, that had been a difficult question to answer because Apple sold a 13-inch MacBook Pro model that had few of the attributes of the 14- and 16-inch models—not the processor, not the design, not the arrays of microphones and speakers, not the full array of physical function keys, and most definitely not the spectacular XDR display.
With the M3 generation, Apple has rejiggered the lineup in a way that makes a lot more sense. The old 13-inch model has finally been retired, but its reason for existence—the ability to start the MacBook Pro line at a price lower than $2000—remains. After a couple of years in production, Apple is finally able to sell a version of the modern MacBook Pro, complete with that product-line-defining display, starting at $1599. But to reach even that price, the low-end model is equipped with the base M3 processor, the same one that powers the M3 iMac and will presumably appear in the MacBook Air and Mac mini as well.
This means that the M3 14-inch MacBook Pro will have all the limitations of the M3 processor, which (like its predecessors, the M1 and M2) has a pretty hard cap on USB ports and external displays. The M3 processor can only drive one external display, so—like the old 13″ MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air—this laptop won’t work in a setup with two external displays, not even with the lid closed. It’s also missing that convenient extra USB-C port on the opposite side of the laptop from the other two ports.
If my superlatives haven’t already made it clear, I think that today’s MacBook Pro is defined primarily by the display. The M1 and M2 processors were always part of the MacBook Pro line—and now, so is the M3. But buyers of the 13-inch MacBook Pro didn’t just have to settle for a lower-power chip—they had to use it in an outmoded package. I’m excited that every M3-era MacBook Pro has so many more features in common, even if a few have been omitted from the lowest-end model.
The chip storyAll three M3 variants are available as options on a 14-inch MacBook Pro.The MacBook Pro Apple supplied me for review was a 16-inch model with an M3 Max chip with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. Because I also reviewed the M3 iMac, it means that the only chip I didn’t get to test out is the M3 Pro, which has been more clearly positioned as a mid-range model. I look forward to seeing how that chip performs, since I didn’t get a chance to use it myself.
The M3 Max, meanwhile, seems to have improved over the prior chip generation in ways that the M3 and M3 Pro haven’t. This is the chip where Apple seems to be putting its foot to the floor, trying to generate maximum performance for its most demanding customers. (As a result, the chip ain’t cheap—you can’t get one in a MacBook Pro for less than $3199.)
These days, it’s awfully difficult to pin down the overall performance of any given chip. An Apple silicon processor has multiple CPU cores of two different types (performance and efficiency), GPU cores, Neural Engine cores, and of course other onboard processing blocks that are more efficient at specific tasks (like video encoding and decoding) than software would be. Depending on the kind of work you do and even the specific software (or even version of software!) you use, you may see very different results than someone else with different software and workflows.
Fortunately, when testing the M3 Max, a lot of my concerns were alleviated by the fact that it just seems faster in every conceivable dimension than its predecessors, usually by quite a lot. Individual M3 CPU core performance is better, of course, and in Geekbench’s multicore performance tests it couldn’t even be beaten by M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra chips. It’s not just that the M3 Max has 16 CPU cores; it’s that 12 of them are of the “performance” variety, half again as many as in the M2 Max, and CPU performance on Apple silicon tends to scale with the number of performance cores available. Apple has loaded the M3 Max with performance, and the results follow from that.
Apple’s new GPU architecture, which features a new cache-optimization feature that squeezes even more performance out of its graphics cores, also shines on M3 Max. In Geekbench’s Metal test, only the M2 Ultra with 76 GPU cores could beat the M3 Max with 40 cores. In Cinebench 2024 GPU rendering tests, the M3 Max almost tripled the score of an M2 Max MacBook Pro. In my (sort of boring) Final Cut Pro test—a 1080p export of a two-hour long video with eight separate HD streams—the MacBook Pro completed the job 14 percent faster than January’s M2 model.
For some tests, I switched the MacBook Pro into High Power Mode, which is now available on both 14- and 16-inch models in the M3 Max configuration. (Previously, it was only available on 16-inch models.) I didn’t actually find it made much of a difference in the tests I was running, but it sure did make the fans kick in at a very loud volume. With the exception of using some heavy CPU tasks in High Power Mode, the fans on the MacBook Pro were either silent or, in some heavier loads, audible but not obnoxious. But if you stress things out enough in High Power Mode, your laptop will sound more like a hair dryer. It’s all in the name of high performance, since all High Power Mode really does is let your fans blow as loud as they need to in order to keep the processor cranking as hard as it possibly can.
What to buy?Should you upgrade from an M2 MacBook Pro to an M3? Unless you are someone who regularly spends lots of money to get the most performance possible, no. (If you are that person, then absolutely yes!) If you bought an M1 MacBook Pro a couple of years ago… the decision is more difficult than I expected it to be. The M1 Pro and M1 Max chips’ performance is nothing to sneeze at, but the M3 Max chip is substantially faster. It’s a big jump.
As a longtime computer user, I have internalized many painful lessons about spending a lot of money on a computer only to see it rapidly eclipsed by newer, faster models. But as someone with an M1 Max Mac Studio from only a year and a half ago, uh… the M3 Max is so much faster that it’s making even me question my upgrade cycle.
A more interesting question comes at the low end of the MacBook Pro line. Apple’s done an admirable job at getting the starting price of this MacBook Pro $400 lower than it was in earlier generations. But there are a whole lot of tradeoffs baked into that $400 difference, not just the less capable processor but also less than half of the base RAM. If you want more than 8GB of RAM1, that low-end model is now just $200 short of the mid-range model with a better chip and even more RAM.
It makes me wonder how many of these base-model configurations Apple will really sell. For discerning buyers, they’re poorly configured in comparison to slightly more expensive models. They’re also still $300 more expensive than the previous base model, which will likely turn off some budget-minded users and corporate buyers.
I suspect Apple figures some of those users will instead consider the MacBook Air, which now comes in an appealing 15-inch model starting at $1299 and the classic 13-inch model at $1099. Even with storage and memory upgrades, those Airs are priced quite competitively. Yes, buying a MacBook Pro gets you that beautiful screen, active cooling, and a card reader slot, but it all comes at a price. It will be fascinating to see where all those buyers of the 13-inch MacBook Pro choose to go next.
But let me zoom back out to the big picture: Apple’s Mac laptop line, which makes up the vast bulk of new Mac sales, offers what might be the best array of options in the history of the Mac. The MacBook Air models offer value and screen-size options. The MacBook Pro offers a spectrum of laptops from a base model through a powerful (and, I suspect, popular) mid-range, leading to an all-out performance beast at the high end.
If you’re using a mid-range MacBook Pro from the M1 or M2 generations, I don’t think upgrading to an M3 Pro-based MacBook Pro is necessary. If you’re coming from Intel and haven’t taken the plunge yet, this is the perfect time. The 2021 MacBook Pro redesign still feels fresh and new, the display is amazing, and Apple silicon offers amazing performance and battery life without any major compatibility glitches.
But for power-conscious owners of an M1 Max MacBook Pro, it may be time to roll that laptop down or sell it off. The M3 Max chip is a whole lot faster. I know a lot of my app developer friends already have their orders in, and I think it’s the right call. The biggest performance boosts of the M3 generation come on the M3 Max, and during my time with the 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro, I was frequently reminded that it was the fastest computer I’d ever used. Returning to my M1 Max Mac Studio, I started a CPU-intensive podcast transcription task and wondered why it was taking so long. I had already gotten used to the speed of the M3 Max for intense tasks like that.
You’ll pay for the privilege, sure. But while the M3 and M3 Pro offer nice improvements to performance, the M3 Max goes all-out. If power and portability matter to you, it’s time to upgrade.
- Is 8GB of RAM usable in a modern Mac? I would argue it is, even though it’s not ideal. For a lot use cases, 8GB of RAM is acceptable. ↩
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spend an hour talking to investment analysts about the company’s just-completed quarter. And as always, we’ve got a transcript! Here it is, in its entirety…
Tim Cook’s opening remarksThank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is reporting revenue of $89.5 billion for the September quarter. We achieved an all-time revenue record in India as well as September quarter records in several countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia. Turkey, the UAE, Vietnam, and more. iPhone revenue came in ahead of our expectations, setting a September quarter record, as well as quarterly records in many markets, including China mainland, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and an all-time record in India. In Services, we set an all-time revenue record with double-digit growth and ahead of our expectations.
During the September quarter, we continue to face an uneven macroeconomic environment, including foreign exchange headwinds, and we’ve navigated these challenges by following the same principles that have always guided us. We’ve continued to invest in the future and manage for the long term. We’ve adapted continuously to circumstances beyond our control, while being thoughtful and deliberate on spending. And we’ve carved a path of groundbreaking innovations and delivered with excellence every step of the way. That includes Apple Vision Pro, which has gotten such an amazing response from developers who are currently creating truly incredible apps. We’re excited to get this magical product in the hands of customers early next year.
Now let me share more about our products, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue came in at $43.8 billion dollars, 3% higher than a year ago, and a new record for the September quarter. This fall, we were thrilled to debut the iPhone 15 lineup. The all-new iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus feature a gorgeous design, powerful cameras, and the intuitive dynamic island. Powered by the industry-leading A17 Pro, our iPhone 15 Pro lineup has a beautiful, strong, and durable titanium design, and the best iPhone camera system ever, including a 5x telephoto lens on iPhone 15 Pro Max. Customers are loving the entire iPhone 15 family, and reviews have been off the charts.
In Mac, revenue came in at $7.6 billion, down 34% year over year from the prior year’s record quarter. This was due to challenging market conditions as well as difficult compares against the supply disruptions and subsequent demand recapture we experienced a year ago. Earlier this week we were excited to unveil the next generation of Apple silicon with our incredible family of M3 chips, M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. We’re continuing to innovate at a tremendous pace. and our industry-leading lineup of personal computers just got even better. The new MacBook Pro lineup brings our most advanced technology to our pro users, while iMac, the world’s best-selling all-in-one, just got faster and more capable. And according to the latest data from Student Monitor, nearly two out of three college students chose a Mac. We couldn’t be more excited about the future.
Turning to iPad. Revenue for the September quarter was $6.4 billion. iPad sets the gold standard for tablets, and our competitors are unable to match the iPad experience that is enabled by our seamless integration of hardware and software. iPad is also our most versatile product. In classrooms around the world, it’s helping educators bring lessons to life while giving students a window into the world around them. And in artist workshops, design studios, and everywhere else creative minds come together, iPad supercharges the creative process, helping users take their ideas further than they ever could before.
Across wearables, home, and accessories, revenue came in at $9.3 billion. Apple Watch has become essential in our lives, and this is our best Apple Watch lineup ever. With Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, we’re giving people even more tools to stay safe and live healthy, active lives. With the new double-tap gesture, users can easily control Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 using just one hand and without touching the display. It feels like magic. Our latest Apple Watch lineup also includes our first-ever carbon-neutral products, a significant achievement of innovation and determination.
Apple’s unique ecosystem of hardware, software and services delivers an unparalleled user experience. During the quarter, we also had the chance to introduce a range of exciting new updates to our software that will allow users to get even more out of their devices. Whether it’s personalized contact posters and new FaceTime features in iOS 17, new tools for users to make their experience their own in macOS Sonoma and iPadOS 17, or a bold new look in watchOS 10 that lets you see and do more, faster than ever, Apple is delivering an even better, richer experience that users are loving.
Services revenue set an all-time record of $22.3 billion, a 16 percent year-over-year increase. We achieved all-time revenue records across App Store, advertising, AppleCare, iCloud, payment services and video, as well as a separate quarter revenue record in Apple Music. Whether subscribers are waking up to headlines on Apple News+, getting their morning workout in with Fitness+, feeling the beat with Apple Music on their way to work or school, or unwinding at the end of the day with Apple Arcade, we have so many different services to enrich their day. Apple TV+ continues to delight customers as well, with new and returning shows like The Morning Show, Lessons in Chemistry, and Monarch, we’re telling impactful stories that inspire imagination and stir the soul. Making movies that make a difference is also at the heart of Apple TV+, and we were thrilled to produce Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a powerful work of cinema that premiered in theaters around the world last month. We’re proud to say that since launch, just over four years ago, Apple TV+ has earned nearly 1,600 award nominations and nearly 400 wins. We also offer subscribers an unprecedented live sports experience with MLS Season Pass. We couldn’t be more pleased with how our partnership with Major League Sports soccer has gone in its first year. Subscriptions to MLS Season Pass have exceeded our expectations, and we’re excited to continue that momentum next year. With the playoffs now underway, we can’t wait to see who takes home the MLS Cup.
And nowhere does the magic of Apple come alive more than it does in our stores. Over the past year, we’ve continued to find ways to connect with even more customers. We welcomed customers to our first-ever retail locations in India. We also opened doors to new stores in Korea, China, and the U.K., and expanded the Apple Store online to Vietnam and Chile, and we have another store opening in China this week. In September, I joined our team at Apple 5th Avenue on launch day, and the energy and excitement were unbelievable. Every time we connect with a customer, we’re reminded why we do what we do, from simple joys of creating and sharing memories, to life-saving features like Emergency SOS Via Satellite, we’re enriching lives in ways large and small.
And whether we’re working to safeguard user privacy, ensure technology made by Apple is accessible for everyone, or build an even more inclusive workplace, we’re determined to lead with values. Our environmental efforts are a great example of the intersection of our work and our values. Across Apple, we act on a simple premise: The best products in the world should be the best products for the world. We’ve made our environmental work a central focus of our innovation because we feel a responsibility to leave the world better than we found it, and because we know that climate change cannot be stopped unless everyone steps up and does their part. Our first-ever carbon-neutral products represent a major milestone, and we’re going to go even further. We plan to make every product across our lineup carbon neutral by the end of the decade. And we’re not doing it alone: Over 300 of our suppliers have committed to using 100% clean energy for Apple production by 2030. We also continue to invest in entrepreneurs who are lighting the way for a greener, more equitable future. Through our third Impact Accelerator class, we’re proud to support a new class of diverse innovators on the cutting edge of green technology and clean energy.
Apple is always looking forward, driven in equal measure by a sense of possibility and a deep belief in our purpose. We’re motivated by the meaningful difference we can make for our customers, and keenly determined to push the limits of technology even further. And that’s why I’m so confident that Apple’s future is bright. With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s opening remarksThank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the September quarter was $89.5 billion, down less than 1% from last year. Foreign exchange had a negative impact of over 2 percentage points, and on a constant currency basis, our revenue grew year over year in total and in each geographic segment. We set a September quarter record in the Americas and saw strong performance across our emerging markets, where both iPhone and services grew double digits.
Products revenue was 67.2 billion, down 5% from last year, due to very challenging compares on both Mac and iPad, which I will discuss in more detail later on. At the same time, we reached a September quarter record on iPhone, driven by strength in emerging markets. Our total installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and all geographic segments, thanks to our high levels of customer satisfaction and many new customers joining our ecosystem.
Our services revenue set an all-time record of $22.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year, with growth accelerating sequentially from the June quarter. Our performance in services was broad-based, as we reached all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and rest of Asia-Pacific, and a September quarter record in Greater China. We also set new records in every services category.
Company gross margin set a September quarter record at 45.2%, up 70 basis points sequentially, driven by leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 36.6%, up 120 basis points sequentially, also driven by leverage and mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Services gross margin was 70.9%, up 40 basis points from last quarter, due to a different mix. Operating expenses of $13.5 billion were at the low end of the guidance range we provided, up 2% year-over-year. Net income was $23 billion, diluted earnings per share was $1.46, up 13% versus last year and a September quarter record, and operating cash flow was strong at $21.6 billion.
Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenue was $43.8 billion, up 3% year-over-year, and a new September quarter record. We had strong performance in several markets, including an all-time record in India and September quarter records in Canada, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. Our iPhone active install base grew to a new all-time high and fiscal 2023 was another record year for switchers. We continue to see extremely high levels of customer satisfaction, which 451 Research recently measured at 98% in the U.S.
Mac revenue was $7.6 billion, down 34% year-over-year, driven by challenging market conditions and compounded by a difficult compare in our own business, whereby last year we experienced supply disruptions from factory shutdowns in the June quarter, and were subsequently able to fulfill significant pent-up demand during the September quarter. We also had a difference in launch timing, with the MacBook Air launching earlier this year in the June quarter compared to the September quarter last year. We have great confidence in our Mac lineup and are excited about the recently announced iMac and MacBook Pro powered by our M3 chips. Our install base is at an all-time high, and half of Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product, driven by MacBook Air. Also, we saw reported customer satisfaction of 97% for Mac in the U.S.
iPad generated $6.4 billion in revenue, down 10% year over year. Similar to Mac, these results were a function of a difficult compare from the supply disruptions in the June quarter a year ago and the subsequent fulfillment of pent-up demand in the September quarter. iPad continues to attract a large number of new customers to the install base, with over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter be new to the product, and the latest reports from 451 Research indicate customer satisfaction of 98% in the U.S.
Wearables, home and accessories revenue was $9.3 billion, down 3% year-over-year. We had a September quarter record in Europe, and we saw strong performance in several emerging markets around the world. Apple Watch continues to expand its reach, with nearly two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product, and customer satisfaction for the watch was recently measured at 97% in the U.S.
Services had a great quarter. We reached a new all-time revenue record of $22.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year, and we’re happy to see growth coming from all categories and every geographic segment, which is a direct result of the strength of our ecosystem. Our installed base of over 2 billion active devices continues to grow at a nice pace and establishes a solid foundation for the future expansion of the ecosystem, and we continue to see increased customer engagement with our services. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each reaching a new all-time high. Also, our paid subscriptions showed strong growth. We have well over one billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, nearly double the number we had only three years ago. And finally, we continue to improve the breadth and quality of our current services, from exciting new content on Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade to additional storage tiers on iCloud. We believe our customers will love these new offerings.
Turning to enterprise, we are excited to see our business customers in both developed and emerging markets expand their deployment of Apple products and technologies to drive business innovation and employee satisfaction. Starbucks continues to invest in Apple technology to bring the best experience to their customers and employees, including tens of thousands of iPads across all retail stores to help their teams streamline order management, operations, and training. In addition, Starbucks recently refreshed over 10,000 Macs to the latest M2 powered MacBook Air for all store managers, enabling them to do their best work and improve productivity. And in Indonesia, popular technology company GOTO is offering Mac as a choice so that employees can have the best tools to be most productive. Today, more than half of its workforce are already choosing Mac for work.
Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with over $162 billion in cash and marketable securities. We increased commercial paper by $2 billion, leaving us with total debt of $111 billion. As a result, net cash was $51 billion at the end of the quarter, and our goal of becoming net cash neutral over time remains unchanged. During the quarter, we returned nearly $25 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents, and $15.5 billion through open market repurchases of 85 million Apple shares. We also began a $5 billion accelerated share repurchase program in August, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 22 million shares.
Taking a step back as we close our 2023 fiscal year, our annual revenue was $383 billion. While it was down 3% from the prior year, it grew on a constant currency basis despite a volatile and uneven macroeconomic environment. Our year-over-year revenue performance improved each quarter as we went through the year, and so did our earnings per share performance, as we reported double-digit EPS growth in the September quarter. We are particularly pleased with our performance in emerging markets, with revenue reaching an all-time record in fiscal 2023 and double-digit growth in constant currency. We are expanding our direct presence in these markets, from new Apple retail stores in India to online stores in Vietnam and Chile. And we continue to work with our partners to offer a wide range of affordability programs so that we can best serve our customers. We’re very excited about the momentum we have in these markets and the opportunity ahead of us.
As we move ahead into the December quarter I’d like to review our outlook which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasani referred to at the beginning of the call. The color we are providing today assumes that the macroeconomic outlook doesn’t worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. Also, on foreign exchange, we expect a negative year-over-year revenue impact of about one percentage point. As a reminder, the December quarter this year will last the usual 13 weeks, whereas the December quarter a year ago spanned 14 weeks. For clarity, revenue from the extra week last year added approximately 7 percentage points to the quarter’s total revenue. Despite having one less week this year, we expect our December quarter total company revenue to be similar to last year. We expect iPhone revenue to grow year-over-year on an absolute basis. We also expect to grow after normalizing for both last year’s supply disruptions and the one extra week. We expect Mac year-over-year performance to significantly accelerate from the September quarter. We expect the year-over-year revenue performance for both iPad and Wearables, Home and Accessories to decelerate significantly from the September quarter due to a different timing of product launches. On iPad, we launched a new iPad Pro and iPad 10th generation during the December quarter a year ago. For the wearables category, last year we had the full December quarter benefit from the launches of the AirPods Pro second generation, the Watch SE and the first Watch Ultra.
For our services business, we expect the average revenue per week to grow at a similar strong double-digit rate as it did during the September quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 45% and 46%. We expect OPEX to be between $14.4 billion and $14.6 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $200 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%.
Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 24 cents per share of common stock payable on November 16, 2023 to shareholders of record as of November 13, 2023.
With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Analyst questionsMike Ng, Goldman Sachs: I just have a question on iPhone storage and demand versus iCloud. As demand for storage grows, are you seeing a mix shift towards higher storage iPhone models or are consumers mostly opting for the same because of increased uptake of iCloud Plus? What are some of the strategic and financial considerations here, and trade-offs as you think about the mix shift towards higher storage models versus iCloud penetration.
Tim Cook: Michael, it’s Tim. As you probably know, we started the line with the iPhone Pro Max at 256, and so we are seeing a different mix, if you will, this year than last year. Outside of that, not significant changes.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: And as a separate follow-up, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the market conditions on notebooks and desktops. And any color that you can share regarding the timing of the M3 MacBook Pros this year versus the M2 earlier in the calendar year.
Tim Cook: Yeah, we’re thrilled to have announced the M3 lineup and get the new MacBook Pro and the new iMac out there. We couldn’t be more excited about it. We, as Luca said, with the lineup that we’ve got, and the compare issue that we don’t have during Q1, we anticipate a significant acceleration in the Mac space for Q1. To just repeat a little bit about the circumstances of the performance last quarter: In the year ago, June quarter, we had a factory disruption that lasted several weeks. The pent-up demand that resulted from that was filled in the September quarter, and that made the September quarter not only a record, but a substantial record. And obviously we’re now comparing against that for ’23, and so I wouldn’t look at the negative 34 as representative of the underlying business performance, is sort of the nut of it.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: Excellent. That’s very clear. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Cook: Yeah.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Thanks for taking the question and congratulations on the execution in the quarter. I’m curious, Tim, if you could help us characterize what the demand environment you’re seeing in China looks like. You know, how has the reception been to the iPhone 15, and kind of similar question to the prior one, how would you characterize the mix within China as you go through this current product cycle?
Tim Cook: Yeah, if you look at how we did in Greater China for the quarter, we came in on a revenue basis minus two, but one thing to keep in mind here is that the FX impact was nearly six points. So we grew in constant currency. And underneath that, if you look at the different categories, iPhone actually set a September quarter record in mainland China. What pulled down the performance was a combination largely of Mac and iPad. Services also grew during the quarter, and the Mac and iPad suffered from the same issues that the company did with the compare issues to factory disruptions in Q3 that were filled subsequently in Q4 of ’22. In addition to that, we had the top four selling phones in urban China for last year, and I just took a trip over there, and could not be more excited about the interactions I had with customers and employees and others.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: And then as a quick follow-up, I’m curious as we move towards more of an inflationary component-pricing environment, Luca, how do we think about that effect or how you’re thinking about the gross margin at the product level as maybe component pricing starts to turn what’s been clearly very favorable over the last several quarters to more of a inflationary environment.
Luca Maestri: Well, as you’ve seen from our results in Q4 and the guidance for Q1, we’re obviously experiencing very strong levels of gross margin. 45.2 was a record for the September quarter. And then, you know, the guidance for Q1 is obviously strong at 45% to 46%. Our gross margins are affected by multiple factors, obviously the commodity environment is one of them. As you mentioned, it’s been a good environment in recent quarters. But equally important is the mix of what we sell and obviously, growth in services for us is favorable and that has helped our company gross margin. Foreign exchange, on the other hand, has been a drag for several quarters given the strength of the dollar. You know, we don’t provide guidance past the December quarter, which is a very important one for us because it’s the beginning of the product cycle for many products, and so we feel very good, very confident about this coming year and I think the gross margin guidance reflects that.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Luca, I know that the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are constrained today, but I think some of your comments suggest you should be back to supply-demand balance before quarter end. So I guess my question is, does your December quarter revenue guidance account for any supply constraints? And if so, is there any way to kind of quantify how much supply would be limiting your December quarter revenue performance.
Luca Maestri: Yes, it’s correct. We are constrained today on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. We’re working very hard to get the product in the hands of all the customers that have ordered it. We expect as of today that we’re going to be in supply-demand balance by the end of the quarter, so the guidance reflects that.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Okay, very clear, thanks, and then maybe for you and Tim, you guys have been on the leading edge of innovation across hardware, software, silicon, services, and I’m sure there’s plenty of technologies and kind of longer-term projects that you’re investing in. How should we think about your capital intensity as we look to fiscal year ’24 just given over the last few years CapEx as a percentage of revenue had been relatively low compared to the eight years prior, so should we expect a step up or kind of similar capital intensity and what are the more notable moving pieces, if any that we should be thinking about? Thanks.
Luca Maestri: Well, the the big areas of investment for us are tooling and equipment for manufacturing plants, our investments in data centers, and our investments in our own facilities, both corporate facilities and retail stores, and so, both for the tooling in our plants and our data center investments, we tend to have a bit of a hybrid model where we share some of the investments with our partners and suppliers, and so maybe that’s why you see sometimes a bit of variability, but over the last few years we made all the investments that we needed to make and obviously, we’re planning to make all the investments that we believe are needed and appropriate in order to continue to innovate.
David Vogt, UBS: Thanks guys for taking my question. I know you covered China. I want to pivot to the U.S. for a second. You know, obviously iPhone and the business looks like it returned to growth in the quarter, but it’s still relatively softer than kind of where I thought it would be at this point in the cycle and some of the U.S. carriers obviously haven’t been that particularly aggressive in promoting upgrades. So I just wanted to kind of get a sense, first, what you’re seeing from your partners in the U.S. currently and going forward, and what do you expect? And then second, Luca, on the margins, is it fair to say that the mix in Q1 from a product versus services dynamic is kind of the key driver of the better gross margin guide as a whole relative to, let’s say, the December quarter? Or is there anything else, I know you mentioned there’s a lot of moving pieces, but is that the primary driver of the uplift in the margin?
Tim Cook: On the U.S. carriers and the U.S. business in general, it’s really too early to call the iPhone cycle, particularly with the constraint around the Pro and the Pro Max, and the U.S. tends to do quite well with those products. It’s really too early to tell what the upgrade rates will be, and what the switcher rates will be.
Luca Maestri: On the margin side, if I understood your question correctly, about the December quarter guidance. Keep in mind that actually December is the quarter where our products business tends to be very heavy because of the holiday season, and so the services gross margins that are accretive to total company have an impact, but not as meaningful as other quarters during the year. And so I think that the main drivers of the guidance that we provided are the fact that we are seeing improved costs and improved mix on the product side of the business, partially offset by foreign exchange, which continues to be a drag, both sequentially and on a year-over-year basis.
David Vogt, UBS: So the weakness in iPad and wearables are less of an impact on sort of the margin trajectory in the December quarter?
Luca Maestri: That’s correct.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I have two as well. You know, I guess first off, just the services growth rate. It was a tremendous acceleration I think in September quarter to 16% growth, and sounds like it’s going to hold there pretty well into December. Can you just talk about, what is driving this acceleration? Are there a couple of products that have just stepped up in a very meaningful way? Just maybe flesh out like what is driving this acceleration? Because it’s fairly notable compared to what you’ve been seeing in the last few quarters.
Luca Maestri: We had a really strong quarter across the board, because both geographically and from a product category standpoint we saw very significant growth. I mentioned the records on a geographic basis. And from a category standpoint, literally we set records in each one of the big categories. We had all-time record for App Store, for advertising, for cloud, video, AppleCare, payments, and a September quarter record for music. So it’s hard to pick one in particular because they all did well. And really then, we step back and we think about, why is it that our service business is doing well? And it’s because we have an installed base of customers that continues to grow at a very nice pace and the engagement in our ecosystem continues to grow. We have more transacting accounts, we have more paid accounts, we have more subscriptions on the platform, and we continue to add. We continue to add content and features, we’re adding a lot of content on TV+, new games on Apple Arcade, new features, new storage plans for iCloud. So it’s a combination of all these things and the fact that the engagement in the ecosystem is improving and therefore it benefits every service category.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Got it. That’s really helpful. And then, maybe if I could ask you about Vision Pro, which I believe is supposed to be launched more broadly sometime in 2024 in the early part of the year. I’m curious how different do you the launch and the consumer education of this product or a new category will be versus other things like AirPods or Apple Watch that you’ve done, and perhaps any feedback that stood out to you from the developers that have been able to use this in the developer labs, what feedback have you gotten from them?
Tim Cook: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a tremendous amount of excitement around the Vision Pro. And we’ve been very happy to share it with developers and we have developer labs set up in different parts of the world so that they can actually get their hands on it and are working on apps, and I’ve been fortunate enough to see a number of those, and there’s some real blow-away kinds of things that are coming out, and so that all looks good. To answer your question about, is it similar to AirPods or Apple Watch, I would say no. There’s never been a product like the Vision Pro, and so we’re purposely bringing it out in our stores only so we can really put a great deal of attention on the the last mile of it. We’ll be offering demos in the stores and it will be a very different process than a normal grab-and-go kind of process.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Hey, thanks for the question and congratulations on tremendous execution in a very tough macro. Actually, Tim, the last question’s a perfect segue here, given what you are doing with your Vision Pro. So lots of companies are experimenting with generative AI. I’m curious about what kind of efforts you have. I’m sure there are segues into Pro Vision that you have, but I was curious about if you can give us a glimpse on how you might be able to monetize some of these efforts with generative AI.
Tim Cook: If you kind of zoom out and look at what we’ve done on AI and machine learning and how we’ve used it, we view AI and machine learning as fundamental technologies and they’re integral to virtually every product that we ship. And so just recently, when we shipped iOS 17, it had features like personal voice and live voicemail. AI is at the heart of these features. And then you can go all the way to life-saving features on the watch and the phone, like fall detection, crash detection, ECG on the watch. These would not be possible without AI. And so we don’t label them as such, if you will. We label them as to what their consumer benefit is, but the fundamental technology behind it is AI and machine learning. In terms of generative AI, obviously, we have work going on. I’m not going to get into details about what it is, because as you know, we really don’t do that. But you can bet that we’re investing. We’re investing quite a bit. We’re going to do it responsibly, and it will… you will see product advancements over time where those technologies are at the heart of them.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Thanks, Tim. Very clear, and for my follow-up, I had a philosophical question. So, you guys always try to provide the best experience for consumers. To that end, I think over the last decade, you insourced a lot of important chips in phones and your Macs, iPads, so on and so forth. And that was, I think, a function that ARM wasn’t around in the industry from a merchant angle. But now we see these, the silicon guys, the chip guys moving to ARM architecture. So my question to you is, has the move to internal silicon been economically profitable proposition for Apple? Or is it a strategic one where you simply need to own this and it’s vital to your products for the consumer experience? Or maybe there’s a path back to chip vendors at some point in time.
Tim Cook: It’s really enabled us to build products that we could not build without doing it ourselves. And as you know, we like to own the primary technologies in the products that we ship. And arguably the silicon is at the heart of the primary technologies. And so, no, I don’t see going back. I am happier today than I was yesterday, than I was last week, that we made the transition that we’ve made, and I see the benefit every day of it.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Thank you very much. Tim, over the last decade pretty much you’ve gained a lot of share in China. As you look here some of the domestic players are starting to reemerge, especially in the high-end phone space. I know you touched China, but how would you see Apple’s positioning and opportunity for continued share gains particularly in China and how was the linearity in China from a demand perspective?
Tim Cook: In the September quarter we set an iPhone revenue record in China. We’re very proud of that. And we obviously grew. The market predictions that I’ve seen had the market contracting, and so, if those are correct, then we gained share last quarter, and so we’re very proud of that. I don’t know what every quarter will hold. Obviously we just give a bit of color on the current quarter. But over the long term, I view China as an incredibly important market, and I’m very optimistic about it.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Thanks Tim. As a follow-up, you obviously had a great services quarter and part of your services business has these licensing relationships with search partners where you serve a very important distribution function for them. Can you talk about how you think about these relationships and potentially some of the options maybe Apple has to mitigate some of the risk given some of the scrutiny on with some of these search partners. Thank you so much.
Tim Cook: They are important relationships, and, as you know, we don’t get into our commercial relationships in the call. I see them as important, and we make decisions that are in the best interest of our users, or what we feel is in the best interest of our users. And that’s kind of what we’ve done in the past and how we run the show in the future as well.
Krish Sankar, T.D. Cowen: Luca, Thanks for the color on gross margin. When I look at it over the last four quarters, even on a year over year basis revenue decline, the gross margins have improved, and I understand services definitely helps. I’m just kind of curious, when you look at on a go-forward basis, are most of the big step functions and cost reductions like the Mac silicon conversion, etc., done, or is there more room for margin expansion from here?
Luca Maestri: Well, on the product side, as you know, when we launch new products, the cost structures of those products tend to be higher than the products that they replace. It happens because we’re always adding new technologies, new features, and then we work through the cost curve over the over the life cycle of the product and we tend to get benefits as time goes by. The guidance that we provided for December reflects all that, and so, we’re starting from a better position than a year ago or in the past, in general. There are other factors that play a role. For example, the mix of products that we sell. Not every product has the same gross margin profile. So our guidance, our results are reflective of that, and also, within a specific product category, a lot depends on the kind of models that we sell because they have different margin profiles. I think one of the things that we’ve done well over the last few years is to offer more affordability solutions to our customers in the form of installment plans, trading options, and low-cost financing in general, and what that has accomplished is reduce the affordability threshold for our customers, and therefore, they can buy at the top of our product ranges. That has been a big factor in the reason for our margin expansion. You know, we don’t provide guidance or color past the current quarter because there’s so many different variables that affect gross margins, but we obviously feel very good about the trajectory that we’ve had in 2023, and now the guidance that we provide for the beginning of our fiscal ’24. And we need some of these things because obviously the foreign exchange environment has been difficult and has been a bit of a drag for us. But net net, we’re very pleased where we are.
Krish Sankar, T.D. Cowen: Thanks, Luca. And then a follow up for Tim. Now, obviously, we’re seeing amazing momentum in India. I’m just kind of curious, how do you look at, when you look at the India growth opportunity on these hardware units, how to think about ASP relative to that versus like the rest of the geography and is there a way compare or contrast India, you know, growth momentum versus China, maybe a decade ago or so at the same point of the rollout of the share gains in that geography.
Tim Cook: Yeah, it’s a great question. We had a all-time revenue record in India. We grew very strong, double digits. It’s an incredibly exciting market for us and a major focus of ours. We have low share in a large market, and so it would seem that there’s a lot of headroom there. The ASPs, I haven’t looked at them most recently, but I’m sure that they’re lower than the worldwide. But that doesn’t bother us at all. And in terms of the similarity, I would say each country has its own journey, and I wouldn’t want to play the comparison game, but we see an extraordinary market, a lot of people moving into the middle class, distribution is getting better. Lots of positives. We put two retail stores there as you know, they’re doing better than we anticipated. It’s still early going, but they’re off to a good start, and I couldn’t be happier with how things are going at the moment.
Ben Wrightsey, Mellius Research: Tim, I appreciate all your commentary around China. It was great to hear about the growth potential there, your optimism. I wanted to also ask about the supply chain and where is your priority? Do you have a priority to diversify your supply chain? How do you feel about Apple’s supply chain around the world? And in particular, what do you think about further investments in the U.S. as well.
Tim Cook: You know, our supply chain is truly global and so we’re investing all over the world, including in the United States. We were very focused on advanced manufacturing for the U.S. and have worked on a number of different projects in the U.S., whether it’s our venture with Corning on the glass, or the Face ID module, or semiconductors, and so all of these are advanced manufacturing and I think exactly the kinds of things that the U.S. would be and are very, very good at. We also invest in other regions of the world and we’re continually optimizing the chain, and the moment we learn something that didn’t work exactly right, we’re tweaking it. And so we’re going to continue to do that. But at the end of the day, it will still be global supply chain.
Ben Wrightsey, Mellius Research: Next one, for Luca. Just really quick on the extra week dynamic. There was also last year an issue with the iPhone production, where there was the COVID lockdowns in China. Is it possible to give some color around what that, I guess, having a normalized supply chain somewhat this year? What that benefit is this year and maybe contrast that with the seven point hit from the extra week.
Luca Maestri: Yeah, thanks for the question, Ben. I mentioned during the prepared remarks, the extra week is seven points of revenue. We did have supply disruptions last year on the phone, on the 14 Pro and Pro Max, in the December quarter a year ago, and when we normalize for those two factors, and I said it during the call, we still expect to grow on iPhone. So you take into account the loss of the extra week, you compare it with the supply disruptions that are not going to repeat, hopefully this year, and when you normalize for those two things, we still expect to grow on iPhone.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Tim, first off, if we look over the past two years, Apple sales are about $18 billion higher, and R&D is up by about 8 billion, or over a third higher. Can you give us a sense of some of the main components or drivers behind that increase in innovation spend? Is it Apple silicon? Is it new products like Vision Pro? Or is it content to support new services? I think that’s one of the top questions investors have.
Tim Cook: Sure. It’s a number of things, Richard. It’s some things I can’t talk about. It’s Vision Pro. It’s AI and ML. It’s the silicon investment that we’re making. The transition with the Mac, and other silicon. It’s sort of all of those things. But I think would find that the R&D
expenditure in the aggregate looks very competitive versus others.
Luca Maestri: And I would add, Richard, on this front, some of the investments that we are making in R&D are also one of the drivers for the gross margin expansion. So I think it’s important to think about it that way.
Richard Kramer, Arete Research: That’s great, and Luca, you mentioned, or Tim mentioned, college students choosing Macs, and you mentioned the record services revenue. What other metrics do you think you could provide to help investors understand how Apple measures and increases customer lifetime value, especially when we see a lot of users entering the ecosystem with relatively lower priced products or even refurbished devices. So you’re growing your ecosystem, but how do you think about growing customer lifetime value over the long run?
Luca Maestri: Well, some of the metrics that I’ve mentioned before, obviously, we look at the installed base of active devices. We want to make sure that, you know, the customers that we acquire remain with us and so we have good visibility over that and we pay a lot of attention to the behavior of the installed base both by product and by geography. And then we look at the daily engagement in the ecosystem, so that’s why we pay a lot of attention on things like transacting accounts, paid accounts. We want to see if, in fact, we are able to move our customers from a free model to a paid model over time, that’s obviously very, very important for us. So we keep track of all these things, and then what we do, because I think it’s really important, is that over time, we add new services. Like for example, the progress that we’ve made in payments in recent years — very, very important, because we’ve attracted more people that are actually now using additional features on our devices and we are able to monetize that, right? So we take all that into account. We understand what happens when a customer joins us. When they buy a primary device versus a used device, we understand their behavior in different markets and so on, so we have I think pretty good visibility. And I think the progress that we’re making in services, we did $85 billion in the last 12 months, that’s the size of a Fortune 50. It’s significantly bigger than it was just a couple of years ago.
On Thursday, Apple reported results for its financial fourth quarter of 2023, covering the months of July, August, and September. The company generated $89.5 billion in revenue, down 1% from the same quarter last year. Profit was $23 billion. Mac revenue was $7.6 billion, down 34%. iPad revenue was $6.4 billion, down 10%. iPhone revenue was $43.8 billion, up 3%.
We’ll be back later with a transcript of Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri’s traditional Q&A phone call with financial analysts, and some of our own analysis.
But until then, on with the charts!
Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack has long been an indispensable tool for Mac podcasters1: this Swiss Army knife of audio utilities lets you not just grab audio from your Mac’s mics, but also from any app running on the system. You can then apply effects, record in a variety of formats, and even broadcast audio live. Now, with the newly released version 4.3, Audio Hijack has added a new tool to its arsenal: audio transcription.
By taking advantage of OpenAI’s Whisper framework, Audio Hijack can now take any audio it’s recording and generate a text transcript. While this process was possible before—see Jason’s lengthy post about his workflow—it required a lot of fiddling and several different tools to accomplish; it’s certainly a lot easier to simply drop Audio Hijack’s block into your existing session. If you record multiple sources, it can even appropriately label each one—though if you record multiple people via one input, say the other end of a Zoom call, it can’t distinguish between the various participants.
If each person had Audio Hijack running on their own machine and transcribing, you could potentially assemble a transcript, though at present Audio Hijack only lets you tag transcript lines with Source and Timestamp, the latter of which is based on the amount of time elapsed in the session, which would make that process a little tricky. Hopefully, a future version will allow you to use the system clock as well.
The transcription of my new very unique solo podcast.AI-based transcription has been growing by leaps and bounds in the past couple years, and it’s been a particular boon to podcasters, who often want to create accessible and searchable archives of their show, without spending the lengthy amount of time to generate it by hand (or use a post-processing tool that requires tweaking and editing).
I ran the Transcribe block through a very quick test using just my MacBook Air’s built-in microphone. The results were, if not 100 percent accurate, extremely good, and I’m quite excited to try this out for several of my podcasts in the future.
Audio Hijack 4.3 is a free update for all owners of Audio Hijack 4; for new customers, it costs $64 or $29 if you’re updating from Audio Hijack 3. While the transcription feature will work on Intel-based Macs, Rogue Amoeba recommends Apple silicon Macs for the best experience.
- Full disclosure: Rogue Amoeba has sponsored Six Colors in the past, and CEO Paul Kafasis is a personal friend. ↩
Netflix adapts to selling ads, and your letters! [Downstream+ subscribers also got: Apple TV+ cancelling Jon Stewart and raising prices, YouTube’s news challenge and the value of YouTube culture, and Jason Kilar’s big idea.]
Go to the podcast page.
Frequent contributor Joe Rosensteel writing at his own blog about the fact that Apple’s “Scary Fast” event was shot on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and that some people have taken issue with the fact that Apple still used professional lighting, rigs, and crews to accomplish that:
This whole kerfuffle is similar to something from only a couple months ago, where people got all worked up about The Creator being shot on the Sony FX-3. The camera, in and of itself, didn’t shoot that movie. The workflows enabled by having a smaller camera, were complimented by the nimble, resourceful team shooting the project. If someone ran out and bought a FX-3 they wouldn’t have The Creator any more than running out and buying an iPhone 15 Pro means you’re going to make an Apple video presentation by yourself.
Unsurprisingly, Joe’s take on this is smart and on the money. The iPhone 15 has an amazing camera, and being able to swap it in to a professional setup is pretty incredible. It doesn’t mean you’ll immediately be able to duplicate the results at home, but think about all the things you could do.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple’s missing Macs, our last Lightning peripherals, our Touch Bar experiences, and whether we have ever used burner accounts.
Go to the podcast page.
We discuss Apple’s “Scary Fast” event and critique the company’s commitment to the bit.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s goal with its product events is manifold: it wants to introduce new devices to its customers on its own terms, while simultaneously putting a stake in the ground to both fire shots at its competitors and signal to investors that it’s continuing to come out with products that are in line with the Apple brand.
The Scary Fast event that Apple held on Monday night to introduce its new M3-based Macs was an unusually short and to the point for the company, whose iPhone and WWDC videos usually run an hour or more. There were just a few announcements of new Macs: 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros in a variety of flavors, as well as a slightly revamped iMac using the new processor.
While the event itself might have seemed largely pro forma, it wasn’t without significant some significant details—even if you did have to root around a bit to find them.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Jason got to spend some time with the new M3 iMac and MacBook Pro, and returns to spill the details! We delve into the differences between chips in the M3 family, the curious case of the new low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, and much more.
Go to the podcast page.
For the first time in the Apple silicon era, Apple isn’t using its lowest-end chip to usher in a new generation of processors. On Monday, Apple announced not just the M3 chip but its beefier siblings, the M3 Pro and M3 Max. The M3 chip powers a revised iMac, and all three models—yes, that’s right—power updates to the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Meet the M3 generationThree new M3 chips.While it’s exciting that there are new Macs (available to order today and shipping next week), the new M3 chip generation has ramifications that go beyond those who are in the market for a new MacBook Pro or iMac today. That’s because these are the chips that will presumably be arriving in updates to every Mac model over the next year. If we’ve learned anything in the Apple silicon era, it’s that Apple designs a few chips and then rolls them out to more or less every model in the line-up. And an M3 in an iMac more or less performs identically to an M3 in, say, a MacBook Air.
Apple is claiming some speed increases across the board with these new chips, which use a three-nanometer process for the first time. While I was able to get a sneak peek at the first wave of Macs using these new chips, there was no way to independently judge performance. In many contexts, Apple is using the M1 processor as a baseline to compare speeds, which somewhat obscures the generation-to-generation improvements. My back-of-the-envelope calculations of Apple’s claims suggest a 10 to 15 percent overall boost from M2 to M3, but that’s just a guess. The proof will come in the testing, not the press releases.
Apple says the M3 is a huge leap forward in its graphics architecture, with speed gains that go far beyond just making a GPU core execute a little bit faster. These additional graphics gains come in a few ways. First, mesh shading and ray tracing are now both hardware accelerated, allowing them to run dramatically faster than they would just in software. (If you’ve heard this before, it’s because Apple made the same claims about the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro, which is based on a similar architecture.)
There’s also a big new feature Apple is calling Dynamic Caching. Put very simply, Apple’s chip engineers were extremely motivated to eke out even more performance from their graphics subsystem—and found that the way memory was traditionally allocated was inefficient. Memory is usually allocated to different threads at compile time, meaning that some threads allocate a larger amount of memory in order to handle peak need, while other threads might choose a smaller amount of memory but risk a bottleneck.
The M3’s graphics system dynamically allocates the memory per thread in a way that’s completely transparent to software developers. Apps don’t need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new system, which Apple says makes some huge gains by wringing a lot of memory efficiency out of the system. Memory that was previously reserved for a specific thread can be given to a different thread instead. A thread that’s in a bottleneck can be given more space. It’s all to the goal of increasing overall throughput.
If you look at the three levels of chips, you’ll see some small changes to their specs here and there. The M3 processor’s core specs are unchanged: like the M2, it’s got an eight-core CPU with four performance and four efficiency cores, has a maximum of 10 GPU cores, and maxes out at 24GB of RAM. (And I’m sad to report that it still only supports two displays, so any M3-derived systems with a built-in monitor—like the iMac and laptops—will only support a single external monitor.)
The M3 Pro sees some curious architectural changes. It’s still a 12-core CPU, but the core balance has shifted. The M2 Pro had a maximum of eight performance cores and four efficiency cores, but the M3 Pro has six of each. It also maxes out at 18 GPUs, down one from the 19 offered in the M2 Pro. Maximum RAM goes up to 36GB from the 32GB in the M2 Pro. Apple’s efficiency cores are pretty beefy in their own right, but offering fewer performance cores is an interesting trade-off. I’m looking forward to seeing how CPU performance compares.
On the M3 Max, the brakes are off. The chip’s got a 16-core CPU with 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores, up from eight and four on the last generation’s top-of-the-line M2 Max chip. GPU core count is up to 40 from 38. The RAM ceiling has been lifted from 96GB to 128GB.
Keeping in mind that many (if not most?) users don’t buy models with maxed-out core counts and RAM, many of these differences might be academic. But I do wonder if Apple is subtly shifting the positioning of the Pro and the Max chip to make them more clearly differentiated. More on this later.
New MacBook Pros… so soon?If it seems like Apple just introduced new MacBook Pros, it’s because it did, back in January. With the announcement of new models on Tuesday, it’s the rare moment when Apple has revised the same model twice within a calendar year. (And it makes it feel even more like those M2 MacBook Pro models were late to the party.)
Still, here we are with some cutting-edge Mac laptops that take advantage of Apple’s latest chip advances. Apple has done essentially nothing to change the exterior of the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, which still look identical to the design introduced in 2021. But there are still interesting differences that go beyond just adding in new chips.
With these updates, Apple has finally simplified the MacBook Pro line. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which was presumably updated for both the M1 and M2 generations so that there was a sub-$2000 laptop in the MacBook Pro line, has been discontinued. It is an ex-laptop.
In its place is a new base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro that uses the M3 (not Pro, not Max) processor. At $1599, it’s $300 more expensive than the old 13-inch model, but it’s a real 14-inch MacBook Pro, meaning that it’s got the spectacularly good Liquid Retina XDR display (now showing SDR content 20% more brightly!), MagSafe charging, and the usual complement of USB-C ports. (Apple says it’s 40 percent faster than the old 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro.) Users who want more performance and functionality will want to spend more for higher-end models, but this seems like a pretty good trade-off to create a base model that feels like it was designed in the 2020s.
The $1599 M3 MacBook Pro comes in two color options, Silver and Space Gray. But the rest of the line-up—the models with M3 Pro and M3 Max processors—come in Silver and Space Black, a new color that features a new anodization seal process designed to reduce the visibility of fingerprints. I got my greasy monkey paws on a Space Black laptop and can report that Apple’s as good as its word in the sense that it seems generally more resistant to fingerprints and other smudges.
But I don’t want to exaggerate this feature: you can still see fingerprints. They just aren’t as prominent. This is a progressive improvement over something like the Midnight M2 MacBook Air, but it’s not a cure-all.
Similarly, I need to warn you not to get too excited about Apple finally making a black MacBook Pro. Space Black is not actually as black as space. It’s a dark gray. Yes, it’s appreciably darker than the Space Gray on the current MacBook Pros (and the new base model), but it’s still a shimmery metallic gray. Fans of Darth Vader stand down.
Of course, you can spec up the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros (which start at the same base prices as the last generation) as high as you want to go, including up to the ultimate configuration of the M3 Max chip. (You’ll just pay for the privilege.) Overall, Apple says that the M3 Max is twice as fast as the M2 Max, which is a pretty impressive claim.
These new laptops are available to order now, with the M3 and M3 Pro models shipping next week and the M3 Max models shipping later in November.
It’s the iMac, but… with M3The new iMac is familiar but now powered by M3. (The accessories, while still color-matched, are unchanged.)It’s been more than two years since the 24-inch M1 iMac arrived. It skipped the entire M2 generation, but it’s been revised here at the outset of the M3.
As far as I can tell, the new M3 iMac is essentially the same computer as the M1 model, which was a completely new design that’s got plenty of life left in it. Everything else, from color options to the base price, seems the same. The base model still has an 8-core CPU, with pricier models getting the 10-core model. It’s very familiar.
Of course, the really big change is the M3 processor itself, which should make this iMac about twice as fast as the previous model… and much, much faster than the last generation of Intel-based iMacs. (I get the impression that the iMac might be a computer that is replaced on very long cycles, meaning there are still plenty of Intel iMacs still in service. This new model makes a compelling case to replace them.)
For the record, Apple says the M3 iMac is capable of editing 12 simultaneous 4K video streams. That’s a lot. The M1 model only claimed four. The M1 feels like a long time ago now.
If you were hoping that Apple might use this update to the iMac to continue its slow eradication of the Lightning port from its accessory line, I have bad news. Despite it seeming like the perfect time for Apple to fix the charging port on the Magic Mouse and the arrow keys on the Magic Keyboard and add a Touch ID surface to the Magic Trackpad, none of those things happened. They all still charge via Lightning. Same as it ever was.
The M3 iMac also doesn’t come in an optional M3 Pro configuration, which I admit surprises me a little bit, given that the Mac mini supports it. Best I can figure, Apple thinks that the Mac mini is used in applications that require a little more processor power, but that iMacs aren’t—and that the Studio Display and a Mac mini can fill the needs of those who want something like a larger, faster iMac. (Apple has the right to change its mind and introduce an iMac Pro at any point, of course. It just hasn’t done so recently.)
The third generationSpace black is dark gray. But with fewer fingerprints!I get the sense from this announcement that now that the Apple silicon era is in full swing, the company is beginning to tweak things here and there to better fit its overall product strategy.
As the M series chips get even more powerful, it feels like Apple is more comfortable in bragging about the remarkable power of the base model chip. The M3 seems to be shaping up to be powerful enough to fulfill the needs of iMac users and low-end MacBook Pro users, and presumably at a relatively low price. It’s the chip for the masses.
The high-end M3 Max chip also seems to have a pretty clear remit: keep going faster. The M3 Max lives up to its name by offering more cores, more RAM, and more performance… at a high cost. It’s the chip for the most demanding pros—high-end 3D work, medical imaging, that sort of thing—who need everything they can get from their computer and are willing to pay to get it.
Then there’s the M3 Pro, which has rejiggered its CPU core configuration, reduced its max GPU cores, and slightly increased maximum RAM. Call it a hunch, but it feels like Apple’s recognizing that the M3 Pro is going to be the chip of choice for most pros—and is refining the mixture in order to combine power and (relative) affordability. It will keep getting faster, of course, but maybe the Pro chips will improve a little more incrementally going forward while the Max chips will be further out on the cutting edge.
I don’t know. We’ve only seen three iterations of the Apple silicon approach, and it’s possible that Apple will revert its approach next time or try something even wilder. But from some of the subtle changes this time, I feel like the M3 Pro chip is the most interesting one. When the new MacBook Pros ship next week, we’ll start to get a sense of what pro customers think.
The removal of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and its replacement with a low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro model is a fantastic move. I realize that it raises the base price to get in the MacBook Pro line, but let’s be honest: that old 13-inch model wasn’t really a MacBook Pro; it was a MacBook Air with a better name and worse design. The new model has the display and ports that make it a true MacBook Pro, and potential buyers who can’t justify the price are probably better off buying a MacBook Air, which remains a remarkably great value.
The iMac didn’t really need a redesign, so it didn’t get one, but it’s a relief to see that Apple’s all-in-one—the best-selling all-in-one in the world, apparently!—is more powerful than ever. I sure wish those accessories had been updated to support USB-C, though.
Overall, this was a pretty good day for the Mac. Apple has launched the next generation of Apple silicon chips, and it’s done the whole family (barring the Ultra, which in the past has just been two Max chips attached to one another) at once. If you’re thinking of buying a new MacBook Air or Mac mini next year, look to the M3 iMac to get an idea about how it will perform. If you’re hoping for a Mac Studio, the profile of the M3 Max MacBook Pro will be pretty close to what you’ll get.
That’s the great thing about Apple silicon: The chips really tell their own story. Earlier, I almost referred to the MacBook Pro as “The M3 Pro with MacBook Pro,” not the other way around. A silly but telling typo: In a way, these first models are also vessels to carry the message about Apple’s latest chip designs. If you’re in the market for a new iMac or MacBook Pro, this is a big announcement. But it’s really just as big for everyone else who is wondering what the Mac line-up will look like over the next year.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security.
On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed.
Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.
Let’s talk about the second problem first. Sure, you could simply schedule updates for all your users, and have them restart during non-work hours. But this inevitably leads to disruptions and lost work. This, in turn, leads to users (especially executives) who simply demand to be left out of your update policy. The bottom line is: any forced restarts without user approval will lead to data loss events, and that makes them so unpopular that they are functionally unusable.
There is another class of tools that claim to get users to install updates themselves, through “nudges.” These reminders pop up with increasing frequency until users relent or the timer runs out. This is an improvement, since it involves users in the process, but users still tend to delay updating as long as possible (which for some tools can be indefinitely).
At Kolide, OS updates are the single most common issue customers want us to solve. They come to us because we have a unique (and uniquely effective) approach to device compliance.
With Kolide, when a user’s device–be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile–is out of compliance, we reach out to them with instructions on how to fix it.
The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta. (At present, Kolide is exclusive to Okta customers, but we plan to integrate with more SSO providers soon.)
If your fleet is littered with devices that stubbornly refuse to update, then consider these two principles:
- You can’t have a successful patch management policy without involving users.
- You can’t get users to install patches unless you give them both clear instructions and real consequences.
Installing OS updates is a top priority for both security and IT, and when you make it part of conditional access, you can finally get it done without massive lists of exemptions or massive piles of support tickets.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors recently, this time for its essential Audio utility Loopback. I use Loopback multiple times a week, because it makes my Mac so much more capable when it comes to audio.
Loopback passes audio between Mac apps, so if you need to play a recording into Zoom or include music in a streamed event or stream the entire contents of a podcast to Discord, you can do it with just a few clicks. It creates virtual audio devices, which you can set to originate from different apps and input devices. They appear on your Mac just like a real, physical device, and can be selected as an input for any audio app on your Mac.
If you move audio around on your Mac—whether you’re podcasting, streaming, or even just enlivening a Zoom call—Loopback will solve your problems. You can try it for free and Six Colors readers can save 20% with coupon code 6C20LB through November 15.
My thanks to iMazing for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
iMazing is the answer to so many questions about how you can have more control over how to sync and back up iOS and iPadOS devices… and want to do it all from a Mac or Windows PC rather than relying on the cloud. The people behind iMazing, based in Switzerland, have spent 15 years delving deep within iOS to make useful software.
iMazing enables local device backup management with snapshot support, including to external drives or NAS; message extraction and archiving, including attachments and metadata, for SMS/MMS/iMessage and WhatsApp; quick drag-and-drop file copies from computer to iPhone or iPad, spyware checks, two-way music and photos transfer, and a whole lot more.
The newly available iMazing 3 beta will let you test drive the future of local iPhone management. It’s the biggest upgrade in the product’s history.
Whether you’re an individual or a business who wants more control over their mobile devices, you should check out iMazing.
Apple has announced a “scary fast” new product announcement, and so Myke and Jason have convened an emergency session to draft what they think will happen at next Monday’s mysterious event.
Go to the podcast page.
This message bubble has two stickers obscuring text, and a real Tapback that doesn’t.When Apple first announced iOS 17, one of the new features got me really excited. After years of wanting an expansion of iMessage Tapbacks, Apple was granting our wish—well, sort of.
Rather than letting users choose to tap back with any emoji, Apple was bringing a new “sticker reaction” to Messages, and since any emoji could now be a sticker, you can put two and two together and get pretty much any reaction you want to quickly tag to a blue bubble.
On Thursday Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 17.2, and after four months of anticipation we’ve finally gotten our first glimpse at Apple’s new sticker reactions.
I know this is just a developer beta, so there’s time for Apple to fix the problem… but as of right now, I am thoroughly disappointed.
There’s not even a shortcut for stickers in the Tapback menu.This new feature has no connection at all with the fun double-tap gesture that’s synonymous with Tapbacks. I didn’t expect stickers to be a peer to Apple’s classic1 collection of six Tapback icons, but I did sort of assume that at the very least, performing the Tapback gesture would also give you the option of choosing a sticker. (And the right thing for Apple to do would be to display recently used stickers alongside the Tapback icons.)
Instead, to send a sticker response you have to tap and hold on a message and then choose Add Sticker from the resulting contextual menu, then choose a sticker or emoji. It’s an extra step that really shouldn’t be necessary and makes stickers feel like an afterthought, which they apparently are.
It gets worse. When you add a sticker reaction, it’s placed on top of the message you’re reacting to, obscuring part of the text! Why in the world would Apple choose a placement that makes it impossible to read the text being responded to? The right placement for these reactions is… wait for it… the same place that Tapbacks appear, in a little bubble snuggled up against the message that’s being reacted to.
It was always clear that Apple was just modifying its existing sticker system to create this feature, but I expected a bit more care in how reactions were deployed. If you drag out a sticker, you can at least try to drop it somewhere that doesn’t obscure the message you’re comment on. But if you just tap to insert a sticker in iOS 17.2, the emoji just pops down on top of text. That’s it.
I don’t know if there’s any chance this feature can be improved before it’s unleashed on the general public later this year. There are lots of ways it could be improved, but just offering a shortcut from the Tapback menu and choosing a more appropriate default placement would be enough to upgrade it from “what were they thinking?” status to simply “needs improvement.”
I can’t believe I spent four months anticipating this feature.
- That’s sarcasm, because they haven’t ever changed them. ↩
Next week’s Apple event may not feature Tim Cook dressed as a mummy—more’s the pity—but Apple’s teaser video has all but confirmed what many had expected: this October event is all about the Mac.
The rumor mill continues to debate what exactly might be in store: will new iMacs been M2-based or usher in the era of the M3? Will there be new MacBook Pros with new high-end Apple silicon chips? Will that lonely 13-inch MacBook Pro be refreshed or banished into the night?
Amongst all those possible updates, I’m presonally looking for a dark horse announcement here, something that’s a bit…ancillary to the main event.
In 2023, Apple’s been on a mission to seek out and eliminate Lightning ports with extreme prejudice. We’ve already seen the introduction of USB-C iPhones, USB-C AirPods Pro, and even a USB-C Apple Pencil. But there remain a few stragglers in the line-up, and the ones that seem most ripe for replacement at this upcoming event are the Mac peripherals: the Magic Keyboard, the Magic Mouse, and the Magic Trackpad.
Now, Apple could just swap out the Lightning ports for USB-C and call it a day, and the smart money is on that being the case. After all, why mess with what seems to be basically a winning formula? But it’s also an opportunity to give each of these devices a more thorough refresh—and maybe it’s about time.
The Magic Keyboard has been revamped the most recently of the three, alongside the 2021 Apple silicon iMac’s introduction. At the time it gained a Touch ID sensor, rearranged function keys, and multiple colors to match the respective iMacs. But this update also made it an outlier in a couple ways: for one, rounded corners that give a bizarre shape to the keys there (the Escape, Function, Right Arrow, and Touch ID sensor) and, far more egregiously, the lack of an inverted-T layout for the arrow keys.1 The Magic Keyboard inexplicably stuck with the full-height left- and right-arrow keys and half-height up- and down-arrow keys in an era where Apple had abandoned that layout across the rest of its devices, including MacBook keyboards and the Magic Keyboard for iPad. This would be an ideal time for the company to return the layout, which many touch typists find much easier to navigate.
The Magic Mouse has remained unchanged since its introduction in 2015. Over the years, it’s achieved a certain degree of notoriety for the location of its Lightning port on the underside, which makes it impossible to use while it’s charging. While the charging is relatively fast, it’s still an awkward design that Apple could take the opportunity to update.
Finally, the Magic Trackpad, long my pointing device of choice, which also dates back to 2015. It’s hard for me to criticize it too much, since it does what it needs to do with aplomb, but it would be interesting to see Apple explore other options and capabilities, whether that means building in Touch ID or adding support for the Apple Pencil to turn it into a sort of mini graphics tablet.
I also want to call out two places where Apple could improve all of these devices: one aesthetic, one functional.
The first is color. While you can get very slick color-matched versions of any of these with an M1 iMac, those buying them on their own are relegated to just two options: white/silver and black/gray. And the compact Magic Keyboard only comes in the first of those. That’s a real shame, given that the iMac versions—complete with color-matched cables!—exist. I can understand Apple not wanting to manage all the various SKUs, but frankly, let people choose the color peripherals they want! It’s not too much to ask, especially when the rest of your products are woefully skimpy on colors.
On the functional side, Apple either needs to improve or replace its Bluetooth support. My Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad frequently disconnect from my Mac mini, which is all of about eighteen inches away, and the keyboard in particular is egregious in terms of the amount of time it takes for typed characters to show up on screen. This certainly seems like a place that Apple could use its vaunted engineering prowess to offer something that’s a little extra in much the same way that it does with AirPods. Not only would a custom wireless chip potentially allow for more robust and reliable connections, but it could also simplify switching peripherals between devices, a process that Bluetooth makes fairly painful.2
With eight years since the Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse have been revamped, it’s about time for Apple to take a closer look at its Mac accessories. To be honest, I’ll probably replace my Magic Keyboard and Trackpad even if Apple just switches them to USB-C, but if the company’s looking to liven up what might otherwise be a ho-hum event, this could bring just a little bit of treat to a spooky occasion.
- The exception being for the extended Magic Keyboard, which features full height arrow keys in an inverted-T layout. ↩
- Many third-party devices have improved on this by building in the ability to pair with multiple devices at once, though even there it often requires a disconnecting/reconnecting dance.) ↩
Finally we discuss Lex’s problems, just before the podcast goes off the rails.
Go to the podcast page.
Using an all-in-one messaging platform, using an all-in-one calendaring app, using — and telling others about — Passkeys, and what we hope to see at Apple’s “Scary Fast” October event.
Go to the podcast page.
What makes an iPhone accessible? Mostly, it’s the software: the operating system and apps that follow guidelines Apple has set for that purpose. If new hardware plays a role, it’s often in the opposite direction. For some with hearing or vision disabilities, the loss of the Home button has made hanging onto an iPhone SE feel worth the struggle.
But this year, there’s another hardware story (and I’m mighty surprised to be writing this): What’s inside Apple’s Pro iPhones is giving an important boost to usability for people with disabilities.
The number and breadth of accessibility features you can quickly enable with the action button are significant, as are the brief descriptions of each. The Action ButtonTurning the tactile, easy-to-use ring/silent switch into a multifunction button you can use to launch a shortcut, open the camera, or fire up Voice Memos is a fair way of giving back where something’s been taken away. There’s also a whole screen full of accessibility features you can choose to assign to the Action button: everything from turning on the VoiceOver screen reader or Live Captions to adding a color filter or starting AssistiveTouch.
Quick access to most of these options isn’t new: you can use Back Tap or Accessibility Shortcut (a triple-click of the Side button) to summon a lot of them. But particularly if you have a motor disability, the choice between invoking your preferred feature by tapping, triple-clicking, or a press and hold of the Action Button is just one more level of flexibility, not to mention the chance to program quick access to various tools at the same time.
Since you can launch a shortcut with the Action Button (also available via Back Tap), there’s no end to the ways you can customize your own accessibility by doing things more quickly. I have a blind friend who’s using the Action Button to quickly toggle the speed of podcast playback between two favorite settings. Using a shortcut means she need not open Overcast using VoiceOver and then swipe to the speed slider every time she wants to make a change. Sometimes, accessibility means saving steps.
The accessibility options available for the Action Button also come with brief descriptions that could introduce or explain these features to people who have never dived levels deep into Accessibility settings.
Wideband and Precision FindingPrecision finding is great for anyone who’s looking for their phone or for a friend in a crowd. But how great is it when one or more of the parties doing the looking is blind?
Find My was never precise enough to lead anyone to the exact restaurant table or funnel cake booth. But precision finding, powered by the second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, gives guidance with sound and VoiceOver speech.
Intelligent Portrait Mode and Other Photo MagicIf taking photos isn’t a big part of the way you use your phone, an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max could seem like overkill. For accessibility-related uses of the camera, like magnification, scanning text, and using AI or human assistants to describe or analyze a scene, an older camera system works just as well as this year’s best. But as cameras get better, so do the machine-learning tools these phones offer to improve your photos.
A visually impaired photographer can use any of the iPhone 15 cameras with more confidence, knowing that after-the-fact portrait mode (and other enhancements to an image he or she has already taken) are available. That’s a kind of accessibility of opportunity masquerading as a mainstream camera feature.
LIDARThe Magnifier app shows the various detection modes available, on the left. With Door Detection enabled, there’s visual and spoken access to information about what the camera and LIDAR sensor find.Pro phones have included a LIDAR sensor since the iPhone 12 range. It’s a camera system thing. But like the Ultra Wideband chip, LIDAR can help detect what’s in your environment.
In each generation of the Pro phones since the 12, LIDAR has given Pro users access to new detection features. First, you could have what the camera saw described to you: a red car on a dirt road, a wooden table with keys, and a pair of glasses. Then came People Detection, just in time for the mid-pandemic. LIDAR and the Magnifier app let you identify the presence of a person and how far that person is from you. Door Detection was next. Aim your phone at a building or down a hallway and find out not only where doors are located but whether they’re open or closed, wood or glass, have signage or not, and what that signage says.
This year, we got the unfortunately named Point and Speak. It’s not a child’s toy but a tool for reading text labels. Hold your phone up to a microwave, washing machine, or other gadget, and point to where you think a label is located. The phone helps you aim and reads text it finds over or under (you choose) your pointing finger. Great for a microwave, dishwasher, or any device with buttons to be pressed.
None of the detection features is perfect. Point and Speak, in particular, could use some seasoning. But these features give some insight into how Apple teams working on accessibility have been able to weave interesting features with relatively small potential user bases into the ways iPhone hardware uses develop over time.
Is it also proof of concept for greater things to come? You bet. But for at least a few people where accessibility is a main requirement, it’s also reason enough to splurge on an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max right now.
It takes money to make money: specifically, it takes your money to make money for large corporations. As online services around the world raise their prices, Apple is no exception; today, the company announced higher costs for several of its online services, including Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+ and its Apple One bundles. (Prices for Apple Music and Apple Fitness+ remain unchanged.)
New prices for Apple One bundle effective immediately.MacRumors reports on the details of the price changes, which see each service hiked between $2-3 per month, as well as $3-5 for the Apple One bundles. Those prices are effective today for new subscribers, and for existing customers in 30 days or their next renewal date.
This increase really shouldn’t come as a surprise: Disney+, Hulu, Netflix—almost every major streaming service has raised their prices over the last year. In some cases, this is to compensate for lost revenue from customers canceling cable packages where older more conventional networks and studios used to bring in money for selling their shows. But it’s also a matter of demand: people are hungry for content, and content isn’t cheap.
This is the second price hike for Apple TV+, which debuted at a $4.99 monthly price (free for several months in many cases)—with a rather paltry library of content—before subsequently rising to $6.99 a year ago. Apple’s built up its TV+ content substantially since launch, and the company seems to be making the argument that all of that new material is worth more money. Whether that’s true will, ultimately, be up to the consumer.
I do have to raise an eyebrow at the increased costs for both Apple Arcade and Apple News+. Neither of these services seem to have been blockbuster hits for the company, and perhaps Apple’s decided it’s not just going to make it up in volume. News+ did see some additions this year, including Puzzles and integration with subscriber-only podcasts. But I think both have mainly benefited from being included in the Apple One bundle: I know that if I had my way, I’d gladly trade them both for Apple Fitness+ and a lower overall price, but there’s a reason Apple’s not offering a “build your own bundle” plan.
Let’s also not forget that, of course, Services remains a sector that Apple has bet heavily on as iPhone sales mature and it looks to diversify its business. And given that the company’s deal with Google is under increased scrutiny, Apple would probably like to find a way to offset the possibility of losing that $18-20b, which represents around a quarter of the company’s Services revenue in 2022.
This might also just be the new world order for online services: expect the price raises to increase until morale improves. Or until the churning Thunderdome of competition starts eliminating streamers.
Apple’s got something for us on October 30, but will it be a trick or a treat? If you had asked me a couple of days ago, I would’ve guessed that we’d be seeing a fairly boring set of late-cycle Mac updates announced via press release. But when Apple mailed out announcements for a live video event with the phrase “Scary fast,” my expectations changed in a heartbeat.
It’s hard to interpret Apple’s words (both of them) as meaning anything but the introduction of an impressive new generation of Apple chips. This year’s treat is apparently the M3 processor.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Chalk this one up as something I’ve never seen before: an Apple event in the evening. The company on Tuesday announced a “Scary Fast” event coming Monday, October 30 at 5pm Pacific time.
It’s largely expected that this event will feature new Macs, as reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman this weekend: the money seems to be on a refreshed 24-inch iMac, though other announcements are possible.
Given the late hour, it’s likely this event will be entirely pre-recorded. We’re expecting treats over tricks, but the real question is whether we’ll get a glimpse at Tim Cook’s Halloween costume.1
- He’s going as the scariest thing he can think of: a Performa 6300CD. ↩
A single Apple Pencil announcement leads us to think existential thoughts about the iPad product line, and Jason had an idea about a new MacBook Pro in the shower.
Go to the podcast page.
Now available for macOS: Test drive the future of local iPhone management with the iMazing 3 beta! Beautifully redesigned from the ground-up, iMazing 3 marks the biggest upgrade in our history!
iMazing gives Mac and Windows users powerful features and options for managing iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, filling important gaps in Apple’s feature set. It’s especially well-suited for those who prefer to work with their data and backups locally instead of the cloud.
Here’s what you get when you start using iMazing with your iOS or iPadOS devices:
- Local backup management with snapshot support, including to external drives or NAS
- Message extraction and archiving, including attachments and metadata, for SMS/MMS/iMessage and WhatsApp
- Quick Transfer for drag-and-drop file copies from computer to iPhone or iPad (free!)
- Pegasus and other spyware checks (free!)
- Two-way music and photos transfer
- Dozens more features
Our solutions are also great in business and enterprise environments, learn more about how we can help you!
iMazing is engineered in Switzerland and built on 15 years of experience with the inner working of iOS.
Passkey adoption seems to be accelerating. The Verge reports Amazon has now joined the ranks of online services that allow you to generate the secure credentials to log in to its site, joining Apple, Google, and a slew of others. You can set up a passkey on the website under Your Account > Login & Security > Passkey, or via the updated version of the iOS app.
I set up a passkey at Amazon and it was a perfectly smooth experience: clicking the Set Up link prompted me to authenticate with Touch ID on my MacBook Air, and that was that. When I tested logging in, I was given the option to enter my password or choose to sign in with a passkey.1
Amazon’s adoption is particularly significant given its prominence in the online sphere. As more big companies of its size move towards passkey authentication, there will be more incentive across the industry to adopt the new security standard. And it certainly seems as though these moves are accelerating. Apple and Google both added support to their web services earlier this year, and of course Apple launched full passkey support in its platforms in 2022.
- Slightly oddly, I was still asked to provide my two-factor authentication code after signing in with the passkey, a step that shouldn’t technically be necessary. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
One of the interesting things about Apple’s big yearly platform updates is that the features that are big and flashy often aren’t the ones that make the biggest difference.
After several weeks of using the updates, you start to get into a bit of a rhythm, which means figuring out what actually changes the way you use your devices.
For me, one of the best new features of iOS/iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma is a small one, squirreled away in a contextual menu: AutoFill.
Of course, AutoFill has been around forever. In Safari, it’s what lets you fill out forms with saved information so you don’t end up typing your address or credit card information a billion times. It also works with your stored passwords, letting you pop those in as well.
But the web is imperfect, and sometimes AutoFill just doesn’t work quite right: fields aren’t correctly defined and the information doesn’t get put in. What to do?
Now you can autofill your passwords anywhere.In a very clever move, Apple has introduced essentially a manual mode for AutoFill. You’re no longer dependent on Safari recognizing that, yes, these are fields where you can put your address in. Instead, anywhere that you can enter text—and not just in Safari, but anywhere, in any app—bring up the contextual menu by right/two-finger/control clicking on the Mac or tapping and holding on iOS/iPadOS, and then go to the new AutoFill submenu. From there choose Contact or Passwords, depending on what info you want to bring up, and you can have it drop that info right into the form.
If you choose Passwords, you’ll get a window asking you to authenticate with biometrics or your password/passcode; once you do, you’ll have access to all your passwords in a searchable list. (And the system will offer up the one it thinks you want at the top.) Select any credential and it’ll be automatically filled into the text field for you. This works not just with your password, but with your username or two-factor code.1
This has been a lifesaver for me on sites (and in apps) where the password field isn’t correctly recognized. Instead of having to regularly go to the Passwords section of Settings/System Settings, find the password, copy it, switch back to the app and paste it, I can access that all from within the app.
Even better, because it works anywhere on the system, it means that in my secondary browser on the Mac (Chrome), where I don’t save my credentials, I can now easily access all my passwords.
The fact that this works on iOS and iPadOS is even better; at least on the Mac it’s only a minor pain to switch back and forth between apps; on iOS, it’s a far more laborious process.
What I appreciate most of all about this feature is the self-awareness behind it. It’s essentially Apple admitting that sometimes its technology doesn’t know best, and puts the power back in the hands of users—and in doing so, it makes a great feature even better. Frankly, that’s an approach I’d like to see the company take in more places.
- I don’t believe it works with passkeys, as they are not text that you can just fill in. ↩
Netflix (which is still top dog) reports results and makes price hikes. Also: Disney+’s value proposition, the complexity of selling ads for streaming, Marvel discovers TV, and your letters.
Go to the podcast page.
If the bricks of Apple’s business are its hardware and software products—iPhones, iPads, Macs, and the software that runs them—then the mortar that holds them together is composed of the company’s services, the chief ingredient of which is iCloud.
That mortar, however, has been eroding for some time—which is one reason you don’t typically hold bricks together with clouds; there are serious structural concerns. While the company has tried to up the value proposition of the service in recent years by introducing new paid features under the moniker of “iCloud+”, it’s the basic, free to all features that are desperately in need of some tender ministrations.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Myke Hurley drops some balloons (on purpose, this time).When Apple shipped iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, it introduced a slew of new video features, all based on intercepting video input and running it through a machine-learning pipeline that detects the subject and the background. The result is that apps on Apple’s platforms don’t need to be updated to take advantage of system-wide settings to blur the background and increase contrast between the subject and the background, both of which have the net effect of making your videoconference image look better. (Apple also uses those features to do some fun things with screen sharing.)
But when you’re analyzing every frame of every bit of video input on the system, you might as well have fun with it, right? So Apple decided to inject a little whimsy and use its machine-learning pipeline to detect some specific gestures and use them as triggers to render animations. The result: if you give two thumbs up in a video, by default your video will be altered to make it appear that you’re in the middle of a sudden fireworks show.
I get why this reaction feature is turned on by default. Features not turned on by default are… basically never turned on. If you want users to use a feature, turn it on. However, this is the result of that decision, as described by Matt Haughey on Mastodon:
A friend was in an online therapy session, describing his trauma so the therapist asked if he was alright and he did a thumbs up and then HUGE FIREWORKS BEHIND HIS HEAD.
It’s so bad that online therapy sessions now start with a warning dialog!
My podcast pal Myke Hurley reports that this happened in his online therapy session, too—except it wasn’t inappropriate fireworks, it was an inappropriate release of balloons.
The logical response to an inadvertent animation trigger is embarrassment—after all, you are on a live video call with someone when it happens! But after that, the second most logical response is to figure out how to turn it off. And here, we run into another challenge: any search of the interface of the app you’re using will turn up no trace of this feature, because it’s being done at a system level. Apple has decided to put all its camera controls under the blue camera icon that appears in the Menu Bar when a camera is active.
This is a tough question. If Apple has invested all this effort in building a new feature that it thinks is fun and that people will like, why turn it off by default? (Sad ironic fireworks in an online therapy session is why.)
Your operating system could trigger a more detailed warning about this new feature the first time you use a webcam on the new operating system. (I’m pretty sure it does—at least in macOS Sonoma?) The problem is, if you’re launching an app that’s using a webcam, in that moment you are probably trying to get to your meeting or therapy session or D&D game, and let’s face it, you’re probably running late. You will click OK or Continue on any window that gets in your way, probably without reading it. (Especially if you recently upgraded and are tired of all the alert windows.)
So what’s the alternative? Here’s the best thing I’ve come up with: The operating system should wait until after a session involving the webcam has ended, and then use one of its fancy new discoverability features to offer to walk the user through ways to improve their video systemwide, including the use of fun animated reactions. And if they aren’t willing to listen just then, come back and get them some other time when they’re in a better mood.
There’s no great answer here. For every Haughey or Hurley who is interrupted by inappropriate animations, there’s probably someone else who discovers the feature in a family call and thinks they’re delightful. But in a case like this, where embarrassment in front of other people is a strong possibility, I feel like our devices should probably ask permission rather than forgiveness.
Underrated Apple apps, our reading setups, feelings on the Apple Pencil, and our thoughts on onboarding processes.
Go to the podcast page.
My book about Apple’s Photos app has been updated for macOS Sonoma, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17.
Among the new items covered are photo stickers, the upgraded People & Pets albums, Apple Watch changes, custom iPad lock screen features, new Photos widgets, and the new features introduced in the iPhone 15 models.
This should be a free update for anyone who previously bought the third edition; for everyone else, it’s $14.99 for 208 pages!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s an entirely innocuous announcement that says so much.
Tuesday’s reveal of a new Apple Pencil that’s got a USB-C port and lacks numerous features of both the first- and second-generation Apple Pencils sure seems like minor stuff.
Think about it for a moment, though: This is a product that, at least in part, addresses one of the most baffling features of the 10th-generation iPad: support only for the first-generation Pencil via a rickety Lightning-to-USB dongle. This seems to be the Apple Pencil that should’ve been shipped a year ago for that iPad. Why did it have to wait a year?
After that, though, one might start interrogating the structure of the entire iPad product line, but don’t poke a stick in there—you might get a face full of bees. It feels like the iPad product line isn’t quite coherent, but the mess at the low end is the consequence of Apple’s Tim Cook-era strategy to keep old products around to hit specific price points.
There was a time when Apple didn’t let old products linger. Last year’s model was discontinued and replaced by this year’s. But Cook and his team have taken to heart the fact that the longer a product is in production, the cheaper it is to make—and therefore, keeping old products around is one way to lower prices and reach markets for whom Apple products are otherwise too pricey.
This strategy has a lot of advantages, but it does create clutter when you’re shopping for an Apple product. While you would think that Tuesday’s announcement of the USB-C Apple Pencil would mean that Apple can finally send the original Pencil to the cornfield, it doesn’t—because Apple still sells the ninth-generation iPad, which has Lightning and therefore can only use the first-generation Apple Pencil.
The ninth-generation iPad still exists not despite the 10th-generation model being superior in every way but because of it. The newer iPad has great specs, but as a result, Apple has priced it at $449 ($419 in education). The 9th-generation iPad starts at $329 ($309 in education). Apple has kept the old model around because it knows some (most?) schools would balk at the price of the newer model. (It’s probably also the case that schools that have invested in old iPad hardware would prefer to keep using a model that doesn’t break compatibility with their investments.)
It’s the same reason that the $1299 13-inch MacBook Pro exists. It’s a “new” product, but full of old tech, and it makes the MacBook Pro line confusing… but Apple knows that some corporate buyers just won’t buy a non-pro laptop, and yet the $1999 14-inch model is just too rich for their blood.
Tim Cook’s Apple has foregone simplicity in its product lines, when necessary, in order to ensure that it doesn’t lose sales. Now, I could argue that the right thing to do was release the 10th-generation iPad at a lower price and take the hit on profit margin in the short term, but there’s a reason Apple is one of the world’s most profitable companies, and it doesn’t involve taking hits on margin. I could also argue that if the 10th-generation iPad was meant for the low-end market but couldn’t be priced to reach it, then it wasn’t designed right.
But by keeping old products around, Apple is also free to release updated products more often. If Apple had determined that it couldn’t sell the 10th-generation iPad at a price its education customers would pay, it could’ve just… not released the product. Instead, we’ve got a messy product line with two low-end iPads in it, but at least people who want to buy a more modern iPad can do so. And when the new Apple Pencil ships in November, they can even use it without a janky adapter.
Still, it’s hard to look at the shenanigans in the iPad product line over the last few years and not get the sense that things are kind of a mess. This new Pencil should’ve shipped last year with the 10th-generation iPad. The new iPad has features that higher-end models don’t. There’s insufficient differentiation between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. (Leaving old models aside, it just feels like there are too many iPads, doesn’t it?)
It’s possible that we’re witnessing a reset, however. There hasn’t been a single new iPad announcement this year, and given Tuesday’s Apple Pencil announcement, it sure feels like there won’t be one. Perhaps 2024 will bring us a new wave of iPads that will finally make the product line make more sense. But don’t get your hopes up too much: Apple will probably still keep selling some old models, too. It’s what today’s Apple does.
There may not be new iPads, but if you’re in the market for an Apple Pencil, well, it’s your lucky day. Apple took the wraps off its new stylus, the most affordable model yet, which replaces the Lightning port with a USB-C option.
This pencil is clearly designed for use with the tenth-generation iPad: while it attaches magnetically to the long edge of the iPad for storage, it still charges via a physical port. Unlike the old Lightning model, which had a removable (and easily lost) cap hiding its charging and pairing connector, the new Apple Pencil features an innovative sliding design that reveals a USB-C port into which you can plug a cable (which, naturally, is not included). Its design is otherwise very similar to the second-generation Pencil.
At $79, this Pencil is cheaper than both the first-generation model at $99 and the second-generation model at $129. But that’s because it doesn’t have all the features of either of them: it lacks the pressure sensitivity of either of the previous models, as well as the double-tap controls, wireless pairing and charging, and free engraving of the second-generation. However, the new Pencil does support the “hover” feature on M2 iPad Pro models.
Apple’s very clear about not calling this the “third-generation” Apple Pencil, rather pitching it as part of a more complete Apple Pencil lineup. The new model works with any iPad equipped with a USB-C port. It also appears that though rumors suggested a new Apple Pencil might use a magnetic system for attaching replacement tips, that this version uses the same tips as previous models.
Education customers can get the new Pencil at a mild discount of $69. Apple’s also offering a $9 USB-C to Apple Pencil Adapter for owners of the first-generation model who want to keep using it.
The new Apple Pencil will be available starting in early November.
Will Apple introduce new iPads this month? A new Apple Pencil? Nothing at all? We grapple with some conflicting rumors. Also, Jason gives up on the iPad-only lifestyle and reviews a supremely weird E-Ink device (that he actually kind of likes).
Go to the podcast page.
With Loopback, moving audio between applications goes from impossible to trivial. Loopback can combine audio from any software application and any hardware device, to make a virtual source usable anywhere.
Enhance the sound of your mic on Zoom calls, or pipe in music and sound effects. Podcasters can combine a mic with audio sources like Music.app or our own soundboard app Farrago, so remote guests all hear the same thing. Gamers can record gameplay videos with both game audio and commentary. With an easy-to-understand wire-based interface, Loopback gives you all the power of a high-end studio mixing board, right inside your computer!
Download the free trial of Loopback to take a test drive! Through the end of October, Six Colors readers can save 20% with coupon code 6C20LB.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to also block video ads.
With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
iCloud problems are all the rage now! Friend, colleague, and occasional Six Colors contributor Glenn Fleishman has an extensive article about trying to figure out problems with iCloud Drive syncing:
Thus was the beginning of my pain. While I had suffered from iCloud Drive synchronization problems in the past, I’d never had such a sustained and resistant issue as over the last five months. That’s right—five months. Worst of all? The problem is now solved, but I don’t know what caused it nor how to avoid it in the future. Apple’s engineering elves fixed it without sending information back through the super senior Apple technical support person I dealt with across many emails, calls, and hours of troubleshooting.
Yes, the old iCloud black box strikes again. Since posting my story, I’ve gotten a ton of emails and social media messages about people with iCloud problems, and while I’d expect any service with as many users as Apple’s offering to have a fair number of edge cases, it does at times feel like the whole thing is made out of edge.
Technology issues aside, Apple does need to do a much better job about communicating with its users, especially in regards to services. These are customers contributing to one of the company’s most important (and profitable) segments, and it’s a fundamentally different proposition than Apple’s usual transactional business of having somebody buy a product and walk away. If the company wants to retain these customers for the long run—not to mention bring in additional customers—then support needs to be job one.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Boox Palma (center) surrounded by more traditional Kindle and Kobo e-readers.As a big fan of e-readers, I’ve been experimenting with Android-based alternatives to the dedicated Kindle and Kobo hardware for a few years now. The advantage of an Android E-Ink reader is that it can run any app—Kindle and Kobo, but also Libby and third-party ebook readers and newspaper apps and RSS readers. An Android-based E-Ink reader offers the promise of a single device for E-Ink reading from disparate sources.
E-readers from Boox have offered appealing hardware, but keep letting me down with inferior software. But now, at last, I’ve gotten perilously close to finding an alternative to dedicated E-Readers.
And it’s shaped like a phone?
One handed E-InkThe $280 Boox Palma is slightly smaller than an iPhone 15 Pro Max, with a 6.13-inch E-Ink screen. It doesn’t have cellular connectivity, but otherwise it feels like a generic Android (version 11) phone, with four different side buttons, a USB-C charging port, and a camera on the back that Boox says is for “document scanning,” though it feels more like it was part of a reference phone design that had to come along for the ride.
I’ll admit that I didn’t expect to like a phone-shaped e-reader. I’ve really come to love the design style shared by the Kindle Oasis and Kobo Libra 2, both of which feature seven-inch displays with physical page turn buttons you can rest your fingers on. And to be fair, I was less comfortable while reading on the Palma, since I needed to grip the device more tightly with my whole hand and stretch my grip to reach the volume buttons (repurposed as page-turn buttons) on the device’s side. But on the other hand, this was a supremely portable reader, like a beat-up paperback you can take just about anywhere.
It’s on the software side that I feel like Boox has taken a big leap forward. Part of that is that Boox’s own software game appears to have elevated. In the past, using Boox products was like wading through mud. On early models, I had to use workarounds to even enable the Play Store, and the Boox add-ons to manage the unique needs of E-Ink devices felt clunky.
Boox lets you optimize Android apps for E-Ink reading.All that’s pretty much gone. While I don’t love a lot of the Boox-written software that’s preinstalled on the device, I was able to log into the Play Store with ease and download other apps. And Boox’s system utilities worked wonderfully to let me map the device’s volume buttons to support page turns and its side button to force a refresh of the E-Ink screen when things would occasionally get dingy. Boox offers per-app overrides to modify Android apps to be more E-Ink friendly, and they almost always did the job. (Boox also seems to have made some strides in regulating battery life. Some of its early devices felt like they’d die after a few hours, on or off, but with Wi-Fi off the Palma can last for weeks while asleep and offer dozens of hours of illuminated reading.)
I do think that in the case of the Palma, the strengths of Android itself are also coming to the fore. Previous Boox devices I’ve used have tablet-sized screens, and many Android apps still don’t run well at those sizes. But they’re all optimized for phones! As a result, the third-party app experience felt a lot better on the Palma.
Disappointingly, the biggest app failures on Android are the apps for the big e-reader companies. I found reading in the Kobo apps, as well as the Libby app for library e-books, to pale in comparison to using a more generic e-reading app such as Moon+ Reader. The Kindle app for Android was fine, once I configured it properly.
One of the challenges of E-Ink screens is that they don’t refresh as fast as the LCD or OLED screens that most devices use. This means that scrolling on the Palma is manageable, but imprecise—and leaves the display looking a bit smeared. Ideally, Boox could override every app to support page turns on the press of a button and to reduce contrast so that text will pop on the E-Ink screen. Some apps were better at this than others.
Crossing a thresholdPalma on top of larger e-readers.But after testing numerous Boox readers before ultimately putting them back in their boxes and concluding they just didn’t do it for me, I find myself feeling different about the Boox Palma. Maybe some of that is its solid support for Moon+, which is a very good ebook reader. I was able to plug the Palma into my Mac and sync it with Calibre, loading it up with books and short fiction, and then read all of it in Moon+. (I also sideloaded Georgia, my preferred e-reading font, which Moon+ was happy to display.)
No, not all of the Android apps I used were perfect fits for the E-Ink screen, but all of them were at least functional enough to use. I’m most disappointed in Kobo and Libby, since those ecosystems are my top sources of books. Perhaps unsurprisingly, decent Android apps supporting open standards like ePub and RSS adapted better to the Palma.
Though I didn’t write a review of it, I also have spent some time with Boox’s Tab Mini C, which is a 7.8-inch color E-Ink reader. Color E-Ink is extremely strange, but the refresh rate was good in color and spectacular in black and white. Unfortunately, the Tab Mini C is a lot heavier than a Kindle or Kobo reader, and lacks page-turn buttons. But its software is solid, just as it is on the Boox Palma.
In the end, I think Boox is nudging closer to making a good Android replacement for a Kindle or Kobo, one that would let me add RSS and newspapers to my dedicated reader. The Palma’s size may be perfect for some users, but I’d prefer a larger screen. The Tab Mini C is more like it, but it lacks those physical buttons. If Boox were to create a new version of its Leaf reader (which is the right size and has page-turn buttons) with the software that runs the Palma, it might be right in my sweet spot.
But that shouldn’t take anything away from the Boox Palma, which is a simply wild idea for a product… that pretty much delivers on its promise. E-reader fans who can be comfortable with Android and wish they could read on a compact device that doesn’t have a phone screen, it may be time to slip the Boox Palma into your palm.
Using Passkeys, how Apple could replace Google default search revenue, macOS Screen Sharing, and whether we take photos and capture video at concerts.
Go to the podcast page.
Dan’s iCloud problems continue, Lex makes a startling lifestyle change and Moltz wishes he didn’t get email.
Go to the podcast page.
Due to an extremely weird series of troubleshooting maneuvers, I recently found myself having to set my Mac up from scratch without migrating any of my preferences for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit. Think decades, not years.
This meant that I had to experience every single Apple software default, enter license numbers into software not bought in the Mac App Store, and generally need to re-make every decision that I had taken over the last few years in order to get back where I wanted to be.
More than anything else, though, the experience reminded me that Apple has a lot of work to do when it comes to making the experience of upgrading or migrating to a new Mac more pleasant—and that its Security and Privacy team clearly has too much say in the overall macOS experience.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Ever since I discovered screen sharing many many years ago, I’ve been an avid user of the technology. I’ve remotely accessed my machines while away from home, sometimes across the country or even from a different part of the world. And while the widespread availability of cloud services makes it somewhat less critical than it once was, I still rely on the feature.
For years, I’ve used Edovia’s excellent Screens on both macOS and iOS, but with Sonoma’s recent update to the built-in Screen Sharing app—including its new high-performance mode—I’ve decided to give Apple’s own solution a whirl.
However, one thing that I’ve gotten used to with Screens is the ability to quickly access my remote Macs via a handy little menu bar icon. Surely, I figured, there had to be an equivalent for macOS’s Screen Sharing feature.
After casting about for recommendations, a few people mentioned just what I was looking for: Stefan Klieme’s ScreenSharingMenulet. It’s a little no-frills menu bar app that just provides you with quick screen sharing access to other machines via macOS’s built-in Screen Sharing app. By default it detects Bonjour connections on your local network, but it also supports adding manual remote connections if you have other machines you want to log into.
(I will, of course, continue to use Screens on my iPhone and iPad, since Apple doesn’t by default offer screen sharing to or from iOS / iPadOS, an oversight I hope it corrects in the future. )
ScreenSharingMenulet is incredibly simple, which is fine by me because it just does what I want. I appreciate that you can even streamline the interface down to its bare essentials by hiding the About / Preferences menu. If I’ve got one nit to pick it’s that I don’t love the icon: it includes a little version of the cursor and every once in a while when I’m looking for the cursor1 I seize upon that one instead.
But other than that, for $1.99, ScreenSharingMenulet perfectly fulfills its purpose, and that’s a rare thing for software these days.
- I’ve recently encountered a bug that makes the cursor disappear, which makes this extra annoying. ↩
I really enjoyed this post by Nick Heer about the complex topic of whether photographs represent reality or not, whether Google is pushing things further than it should, or if this is all just the latest chapter in a story that started long before Photoshop:
The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8… feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability. That has risen in tandem with a planet full of people carrying a camera everywhere. If you believe the estimates, we take more photos every two minutes than existed for the first hundred-and-fifty years after photography’s invention. In one sense, we are now fully immersed in an environment where we cannot be certain of the authenticity of anything.
Then again, Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings are on a real decline.
I am uneasy in how easy Google is making synthesized photography. But those who suggest that photography has been, up to this point, a trustworthy depiction of reality also need to think a bit deeper.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
At TidBITS, Glenn Fleishman takes a deep dive into one of iOS 17’s best (and most carefully implemented) features, Check In. It’s a feature that could lead to enormous improvements in security for lots of people, so long as they know it exists and how to use it:
Life can be dangerous but, for most people, most of the time, only in sporadic, unanticipated situations. No one expects to be in a car crash, mugged while walking home, or caught in a wildfire. Nevertheless, there are occasions when harm is more likely, such as when you’re in a neighborhood in which criminals expect they can waylay people late at night or are driving a long distance alone. Check In is designed to help in exactly these situations, alerting your safety partner if you don’t respond to your timer or arrive as planned. It could be especially beneficial for children traveling without adults present.
Send Glenn’s story to people you know and love so that they can use Check In to stay safe.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 280,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
Download today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
The WGA strike is over, so what does it mean? Also, your letters! [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Don’t blame the writers for the end of Peak TV, Max gets interesting, Amazon adds ads, and Disney ♥️ Charter.]
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.
Browser extensions that offer AI features, but steal user data, are everywhere. That’s why many companies—including Apple—have banned their employees from using large-language models. And that’s just one potential attack surface.
Kolide lets IT and security teams write checks that detect device compliance issues, and have started creating checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Here’s a video about how Kolide can help companies enforce device compliance.
iPhone designs change at a glacial pace. It’s rare that a new iPhone looks completely unlike the previous model. They’ve all looked more or less the same since the iPhone X ditched the home button back in 2017. Careful observation indicates that the iPhone 15 Pro design is different from the iPhone 14 Pro, which is different from the iPhone 13 Pro—but the external differences are extremely subtle.
This is okay. The iPhone is clearly on a multi-decade trajectory toward becoming a thin, featureless slab of glass. In the meantime, Apple keeps varying materials and colors and upgrading the processors and cameras in order to ensure that people buying a new iPhone will find it at least somewhat different from the ones in their pockets.
It may not be logical, but it’s absolutely true that after spending around $1000 on a new phone, I don’t want it to be exactly like the one it’s replacing. What’s the fun in that?
Variations pro and conNatural Titanium is the best “color” among a monochrome set.The iPhone 15 Pro offers very nice variations in materials and utterly boring variations in color. The replacement of heavy, shiny stainless steel with light, textured titanium is a winning move. (Truth be told, I think the iPhone 12-13-14 Pro design was a mistake, from the heavy fingerprint-laden frame to the subdued rear color palette. The non-pro iPhone 12-13-14 models were lighter and more colorful.)
By objective measurement, the iPhone 15 Pro isn’t much lighter than previous models, but it sure feels lighter. Maybe that’s because the big weight reduction is on the outside edges, but when I first picked one up, I expected the difference in feel to be imperceptible—and it was absolutely noticeable from the first moment. Anyone upgrading from the last three iPhone models should notice, too.
There are a few ways to add color to titanium. You could just paint it, but Apple already tried that, and it didn’t work out. You could use anodization, which is the process Apple uses to color aluminum, and my understanding is that anodized titanium can similarly hold colors pretty well. But for whatever reason, Apple chose a PVD coating.
I’m not going to pretend to be a materials scientist, so I can’t tell you about the tradeoffs involved in choosing a process in terms of ruggedness or in terms of color range. All I know is that my pal Dan’s iPhone 15 coating has already scuffed and that the colors on these phones are thoroughly boring. Bad on all fronts.
Apple offers four colors in the iPhone 15 Pro, which I’d describe as black, bluish gray, medium gray, and light gray. I don’t dispute that some people don’t want a colorful phone, and many people put cases on their iPhones so they never really see the color. But what about people who do enjoy color, who do use their iPhone without a case? It would be nice if Apple offered an iPhone Pro for them, and it steadfastly refuses to do anything more than toss in a single dim shade that’s almost indistinguishable from the rest of the monochrome parade. It’s such a dull set of colors that the best of the bunch is probably Natural Titanium, an unabashedly metallic medium gray.
Moving away from the tragedy of the world’s most exciting technology product being wrapped in the world’s dullest colors, let me applaud Apple’s choices in rearchitecting the glass front and back of the iPhone 15 Pro. Following its changes in the regular iPhone 14, Apple has redesigned the iPhone 15 Pro to make the device much more repairable. It’s also slimmed down the size of the bezels around the display, making the device slightly easier to hold than its predecessors.
Perhaps the best tiny adjustment is that the edges of the phone that transition between the bezels and the sides are no longer sharp angles. It’s like sanding off the edges of a piece of wood: the whole thing just feels smoother and nicer to hold in your hand. Combine that with the weight changes, narrower bezels, and overall size reduction, and you get a bunch of positive steps forward in iPhone ergonomics.
So where does iPhone design go from here? Leaving aside the possibility of folding models, it feels to me like the biggest opportunity lies in addressing the cameras on the back. Whether that’s reducing the distance they stick out, arranging them across the width of the phone rather than in one corner, or something else, I have to believe there’s a better approach than the current one. (Spreading out the camera terrace would also allow Apple to give more parallax separation to cameras capturing spatial video for the Vision Pro, too. Just sayin’.)
Take actionThe Action Button settings are something extra.Apple likes to keep things simple. When you see the company adding a physical button to a device, it’s a big deal. In this case, it’s removed the ring/silent switch that’s been on the iPhone since the start and replaced it with a new Action Button.
Let’s get this out of the way first: If you’re one of those people who could always remember which position of the ring/silent switch meant silent and which meant ring and could feel that in your pocket, this is a regression. You will now have to pull out your phone to look at the status or use the Action Button as a ring/silent button and feel for the proper haptic to indicate the status. I understand why that would stink.
As for literally everyone else—the people who couldn’t remember which position meant which, the people (I’m one) who always left their phone in silent mode, and the monsters who never silenced their phones… that switch was a waste of space. And now the Action Button lets us choose to use that space for something more useful.
The Action Button is a ring/silent toggle by default, but it’s easily changed in the Settings app. Apple offers a bunch of options, including a flashlight toggle, Do Not Disturb toggle, Voice Memo, Camera, and Magnifier. And if none of those speak to you, you can assign it to a shortcut—including both complex, user-built shortcuts and simpler Apple Shortcuts provided by the people who make the apps you use.
It’s hard to express just how great this is. The Action Button will be relevant to far more users than the ring/silent switch ever was. The Action Button section of the Settings app is big and clear and animated and almost fun to use, and makes it very easy to change your settings. Apple has taken the most obvious alternate uses people would want and baked them right in—I imagine that Camera and Flashlight will be big winners. And with Shortcuts, almost anything is possible.
More to the point, it shows how good physical buttons can be. As revolutionary as the iPhone’s all-touchscreen design was, sometimes I think Apple has taken the lesson a little too far. iPhones are still physical devices existing in reality, held in meaty human hands. Swiping and tapping on a Retina-quality touchscreen is usually delightful, it’s true, but if you’re just trying to find your way in the dark or quickly get a shot of your kids playing, it’s not.
There is something to be said for the fact that, if you set the Action Button to Camera, you know with certainty that in one gesture you can pull your phone out of your pocket, smashing one meaty finger on the Action Button as you do so—and by the time you can see the screen it’s ready to take a picture. (And on top of that, you can leave your finger right where it was—in Camera mode, the Action Button will also take a picture.) Muscle memory takes over.
Apple nailed this feature, but it’s also left some room to grow. While its defaults should always remain simple and difficult to trigger accidentally (you must hold the Action Button purposefully to trigger it), it sure would be nice if it could optionally be made a little more complex. Perhaps it could register double-presses or offer additional interactions in the specific app it launched (as it already does in the Camera app).
As for me, I’ve turned my Action Button into a trigger that launches a simple Shortcut that listens for dictation and places the result (as transcribed text) into my main Reminders list. Maybe it’ll stick, or maybe I’ll find some other feature I use more often. The sky’s the limit.
RIP LightningThe iPhone 15 Pro now has a USB-C port instead of Lightning. It’s a good change, though (as all port changes are) it’ll be disruptive to people who have invested in a bunch of Lightning-specific accessories. Still, in most cases, this is a matter of swapping cables—and Apple includes a very nice braided USB-C to USB-C cable in the box. It’s been more than five years that Apple has been moving its products over to USB-C, and with a few minor outliers, the job is now done.
Did Apple do it because the EU is about to mandate USB-C for all phones? Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Cupertino. I’d argue that this change actually feels a year or two late, and I look forward to slowly filtering all my Lightning cables out and placing them in a bag somewhere.
All port changes suck, of course, because there’s confusion and forgotten cables and the like. But there are advantages: in the case of the iPhone 15 Pro, the USB-C port also supplies USB 3.0 speeds. This is the fastest you’ve ever been able to pull data off of an iPhone. Within the first four days I was using an iPhone 15 Pro, I had to pull off a two-hour-long 4K HDR video file so I could send it to a video editor. That file was huge, but I was able to transfer it to my Mac so much faster than I would ever have been able to do in the past. This is a big win for people with big files. (You can also now shoot ProRes video directly to an external USB drive, another win.)
Even better than the real thingFour years ago Apple introduced the U1 chip, which added Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology to the iPhone for the first time. Proving that it still hasn’t found what it’s looking for, it’s introduced a second-generation UWB chip in the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro.
Thus far, Apple’s attempts to light the UWB fire have been a bit forgettable. But the technology is no lemon—it has true promise, and the more Apple devices that incorporate it, the more potential it has. UWB’s magic trick is that it can provide absolute positioning in three-dimensional space, unlike technologies such as Bluetooth that try to tease out the distance between two devices by measuring how strong or weak a radio signal is.
Right now it feels like this technology is running to stand still, but UWB will eventually support smart car doors and door locks, and of course, it allows clever tricks like offering to move your music to a nearby HomePod based entirely on your proximity to it. Eventually, your smart home devices should be able to react to your physical presence as you desire. (That’s when you create a Shortcut that plays a fanfare every time you enter the room1, which you’ll use exactly once before being shamed into deactivating it.)
I recently went to a football game (it was a beautiful day in Berkeley, California) and was trying to figure out where my wife had gone—we were separately looking for concessions amid the rattle and hum of a busy stadium walkway. Then I remembered we both had new iPhone 15 models, and I opened Find My—the app that lets you find all that you can’t leave behind—and enabled the remarkable new UWB-powered feature that lets you find nearby friends. Not only did I almost immediately discover that she was to my right (so I began heading that way), but she was also notified that I was looking for her. We found each other and had fun doing it!
Anyway, it’s a little weird that this new second-generation UWB chip doesn’t have a name.
Impressive camera changesFour steps of iPhone 15 Pro Max camera: 0.5x wide, 1x main, 2x main, and 5x telephoto.The iPhone 14 Pro added a 48-megapixel sensor to its main camera, but Apple’s software support for the sensor felt a little halfhearted. The images were an upgrade, for sure, but most people were just shooting 12MP images, with each pixel comprised of four pixels on the sensor. You had to turn on RAW format to snap a detailed 48MP image.
With the iPhone 15, the software (and presumably the processor; otherwise, it’s mystifying why the iPhone 14 Pro is not also covered by what I’m about to describe) finally seems to have been tailored to make the most of that main camera sensor. By default, the Camera app captures multiple 12MP images that take advantage of the pixel binning feature that gathers more light, but also captures a full-resolution 48MP image and then combines them all into a 24MP image, twice the size of last year’s main-camera images, mixing the best features of the binned and non-binned sensor data.
In fact, the camera system goes beyond that: it’s really tuned to provide excellent results anywhere from 1x (in which it’s using the entire 48MP sensor) to 2x (in which it’s zoomed into the center area of the sensor). Apple’s so confident in its various capture and fusion algorithms that it’s placed various presets between 1x and 2x, corresponding to the equivalents of common focal lengths.
In a very Apple move, the iPhone 15 now has enough intelligence to detect if a photo is eligible for Portrait Mode and automatically capture depth information. This means that you can retroactively add portrait blur to photos you’ve taken that qualify—generally, ones containing people, cats, or dogs. Taking a feature that most people will forget to turn on and then regret later, and making it automatic, is a quintessential Apple move and I’m here for it.
The new 5x zoom camera on the iPhone 15 Pro Max is quite impressive. I used to bring an SLR camera and a long lens to football games and shoot action shots; while the 5x lens can’t quite get me that close, it was able to approximate those shots in ways that no other iPhone camera has ever been able to.
I shot this from 20 rows back. (Cropped to show actual pixels; the real image has a much wider field of view.)I’m also impressed with how good digitally zoomed images a bit beyond 5x look. They’re processed, sure, but it’s really good processing—at least to a point. Apple’s clearly using some machine-learning tricks to make zoomed-in pictures look better, and if you look closely at extreme zoom-ins, you’ll find some bizarre effects. I recommend not looking too closely, and not zooming all the way in.
When you zoom in a lot, the image system does a lot of processing—and it can have weird results. On the left, the helmet logo is distorted and the name of the back of the jersey is scrambled. On the right, grass from the background encroaches on the band member’s face.The iPhone 15 Pro Max’s image stabilization is remarkable, counteracting shaky human hands, and (on both phones) when you zoom in a lot, a pop-up of the full frame appears to give you guidance about exactly where you’re aiming. Well done.
If you’re someone who takes a lot of zoomed-in phone photos, especially if you find yourself frequently going beyond the optical zoom into digital territory, the iPhone 15 Pro Max will be an excellent upgrade. But you’ll need to be comfortable taking on the extra size of the device. After years of gradually creeping iPhone size increases, the iPhone 15 Pro Max doesn’t appear laughably huge—but I still can’t stretch my fingers and thumb across it to use it one-handed, and I’m not willing to sacrifice that in order to use that 5x camera. But if you are, you will get access to an excellent zoom camera.
Processor progress on paceWith the iPhone 15 Pro comes the new A17 Pro chip, a new Apple-designed processor that’s using TSMC’s new 3nm process. Bragging rights aside, what the A17 Pro brings are CPU and GPU performance boosts more or less in line with previous generational updates.
The iPhone 15 Pro ends up with a big jump in graphics performance mostly because Apple has added one GPU core to the mix, but on a per-core basis, it’s a pretty standard update.
I do wonder about Apple’s emphasis on gaming when it announced the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple’s history with gaming is long and tortured, but the iPhone is by far the most successful device it has ever made for people to play games on. Still, bringing console games to the iPhone feels a little… weird? (I’ve used a Backbone controller with an earlier-generation iPhone, and it’s pretty cool… but how many people are yearning to turn their iPhones into a Nintendo Switch in their pocket?)
Sometimes, Apple just uses game performance as a proxy for graphics prowess. It knows most people won’t be playing Resident Evil Village on an iPhone 15, but the fact that they could shows how awesome Apple’s chips are. Fair enough. I do wonder if Apple might also be trying to apply a platform-wide strategy here that leads to more games arriving on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Will the M3, presumably the Mac chip based on the A17 Pro, also offer more impressive graphics performance that will make it a better gaming device? We’ll have to see.
As it is, most of the games I play on my iPhone don’t remotely tap the power of the device. I suspect that’s true for most people. I’m not sure if there’s anything Apple can do to change that.
An upgrade diagnosisWe product reviewers spend a lot of time focusing on those incremental updates between last year’s model and this year’s. There are a lot of reasons why that makes sense, but it does ignore the fact that most people will be upgrading from an older model. If you’re upgrading from the iPhone 14 Pro, look above! Otherwise, read on.
If you’re updating from an iPhone 11 Pro model or earlier, you’ll get a taller phone with a larger screen, and access to fast 5G cellular networks for the first time, plus all the upgrades below.
If you’re upgrading from the iPhone 12 Pro after three years, you’ll get a ProMotion display with a faster refresh rate, making scrolling buttery smooth. And the 3x zoom will be a nice step up from the 2x zoom on your current telephoto lens. You’ll also have access to Cinematic Mode, which lets you create videos with selective focus, like blurred backgrounds. And you’ll pick up Photographic Styles, a feature that lets you tweak the settings of Apple’s image pipeline to make all the photos you take more in line with your own taste. And you’ll get every upgrade I describe below.
If you’re upgrading from an iPhone 13 Pro after two years, you’ll get an always-on display, including support for always-on StandBy mode. The screen’s also quite a bit brighter.
You’ll also get the Dynamic Island, which replaces the useless display notch with a floating black oval that morphs and changes to indicate things that are currently happening in the background on your iPhone.
Upgraders also get access to the new 48MP main camera sensor and Action Mode, which lets you shoot extra-stabilized video in situations where you might otherwise create ugly shaky-cam videos.
Finally, upgraders will get access to Apple’s newest safety features: Satellite SOS lets you send text messages requesting assistance when you’re unable to get a cellular signal from any carrier, as long as you’ve got a view of the sky. And Crash Detection will detect when you’ve been in a car crash and automatically call emergency services for help.
- Thanks to Relay FM member Matt C for the inspiration. ↩
One of the biggest points of anticipation around this year’s iPhone models was the transition from Apple’s proprietary Lightning port to the USB-C standard. Some were worried about the transition requiring them to replace all their accessories, while others—yours truly included—looked forward to a future of being able to use a single cable for their iPad, MacBook, and iPhone.
Now that the new models are out in the wild, however, the USB-C transition has proved to be a rose bearing some thorns. It’s not as simple as having one port to rule them all; and, in some cases, the move away from Apple’s controlled ecosystem has introduced some challenges that its users haven’t had to deal with in the past. These bumps in the road may get ironed out in time, but it’s worth being aware before you just blithely start connecting all your USB-C gadgets.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
iCloud is, when you think about it, kind of a thankless service. At its best you don’t notice it—everything, in the unofficial mantra of Apple dating back decades, just works. Your data is in sync across all your devices, changes update immediately, and you never get a single error message.
The thing is, like a lot of Apple tech, it’s a black box. Data goes in, data goes out. What happens in the middle…well, shrug. You just put your faith in the fact that what’s working will keep working.
But as anybody who’s ever tried to troubleshoot iCloud problems can tell you, when it goes wrong, trying to fix it is an exercise in frustration—as I learned recently, in a particularly spectacular fashion.
Intermittently cloudyThis is a bad news error message.At about 9am Eastern this past Monday, my connection to iCloud went kaput. I first noticed the issue on my MacBook Air: my iCloud mail wasn’t being fetched, messages that I read or deleted were popping up again, and I couldn’t access files in my iCloud Drive.
At first blush, my other devices seemed to be fine, leading me to conclude that there was some specific issue with iCloud on the MacBook. I chalked it up to some weirdness with having reinstalled the final version of Sonoma atop the beta, and started off on the usual troubleshooting steps: quitting apps, restarting, and then the big guns—logging out of iCloud.
That’s the point where things went truly amiss. While I was nominally able to log back into iCloud, most of my data wasn’t actually syncing back. A dialog box told me that I needed to verify my account in order to re-establish end-to-end encryption for sensitive information like my keychain and health data, but clicking the prompted button did…absolutely nothing.
At this point, I delved even further, restarting my Air into recovery mode and running Disk Utility to see if there was an issue there.
But at some point during this process, I noticed my other devices were likewise having issues with retrieving mail—the top message in my inbox remained steadfastly from just before 7am. Other services, like Find My, were totally dead, refusing to show me any information. Even third-party apps that rely on iCloud to provide syncing—Ivory, for instance—had issues. Attempts to log in to iCloud.com via multiple browsers and devices all came back with a connection error.
So I visited Apple’s System Status page, which purports to show the state of all of the company’s network services, reasoning that I couldn’t be the only person experiencing such strange behavior. But the indicators there were all green, and casting about on social media didn’t yield the cascade of reports I’d expect to see if iCloud were down (nor had anything surfaced on the Apple sites I frequent).
As someone who spends a lot of time working with technology and did his stint in tech support, I have a certain natural recalcitrance to turning to the company itself for help. I presumed that I would be made to run through a litany of time-wasting tests to establish what I had already concluded. But without much in the way of recourse, I resolved to give it a shot and fired up a chat session.
To the credit of my support agent, they did ask me if I’d tried a few things, but generally accepted the answer that I had, and eventually escalated the case and scheduled a phone call with another support agent.
That second agent proved quite capable, not only agreeing that the situation was strange, but also looking into issues on Apple’s side. Which led to the somewhat bizarre conclusion of this story: after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of “that explains it” and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said—and I’m not exactly quoting, but close enough: “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.”
Now, in my initial forays on social media, I had gotten a reply from someone on Mastodon mentioning that Apple’s iCloud servers were sometimes put in maintenance mode for 12 hours—but upon going back and looking for that specific reply, it was nowhere to be found.
It did, however, support the theory that something had gone wrong with the particular iCloud server on which my account was located.
There was, according to this support agent, nothing to do but sit back and wait, then call back if service hadn’t returned by the 12-hour mark and reference my case number. He was again apologetic for not being able to give me any more information, but reiterated his confidence that everything would be resolved.
So I waited the rest of the day. At this point, I had received no email since the early morning, and a number of my other apps—though not all—were non-functional. It made me realize just how much of my life was dependent on Apple’s online services—a somewhat sobering proposition.
I spent the next few hours largely offline, but kept an eye on the clock. And, sure enough, at 9pm on the dot, everything flipped back on: all my Find My friends showed up, my email started slowly trickling in,1 and I was able to finally fully log back into my iCloud account on my MacBook Air—just in time to go to bed.
We interrupt this program…Overall, the experience was confusing and irritating. If this was a server maintenance, upgrade, or migration situation, why not simply tell me? Would it shatter the illusion of iCloud as a monolith of silently functional services? (Breaking news: that illusion was thoroughly punctured anyway.)
Moreover, if this was some kind of scheduled procedure, why not warn affected users ahead of time? The idea that my email—which I rely upon for work—and a slew of other services might be interrupted for essentially an entire workday with no notice whatsoever is technological malpractice. My cable company tells me when it’s doing work in my area and there might be service hiccups, and you can bet that the hosting provider I use for my website communicates whenever there might be something that affects my service.
The most plausible suggestion, as suggested by my co-hosts on The Rebound, was that some sort of legal compliance (such as a subpoena or national security letter, for example) might require temporarily freezing the server and not divulging that information to other users. Which does seem to tick most of the boxes, but certainly doesn’t make me feel any better. Even in that case, surely there must be a way to avoid inexplicably disrupting the critical services of many people.2
But such is the nature of black boxes. iCloud’s always been particularly bad in this regard, which is one reason I, like most tech-savvy folks of my acquaintance, would rather do something really unpleasant like cram my mouth full of radicchio before logging out of my iCloud account.3
I heard from many a person on Mastodon while I was going through this about similar issues where iCloud was disrupted for one reason or another, with little or no communication from Apple, but let me be clear: this isn’t just about the catastrophic level of interruption that I fell prey to. Low-level iCloud woes are a frequent and ongoing frustration for almost everybody who uses the service, whether it’s tiny files that refuse to finish uploading to iCloud Drive, or collaborative notes that don’t update in a timely fashion, or multiple Messages conversations that spring up with the same people—and to be clear, I’ve seen all of these. People have been wishing for a manual “sync” button for iCloud for as long as I can remember.
Even as my iCloud service has slowly returned to normal, I’ve seen some lingering issues. For example, when my MacBook Air was disconnected, it had one folder from iCloud Drive archived locally and removed from the cloud. That folder didn’t even contain all the documents it was supposed to, but I was thankfully able to go back through Time Machine and retrieve them. Elsewhere, my reminders on one device took a while to actually sync my data back. Who knows what other surprises may be lurking?
Boxed inAll of this black box ethos goes back a long time. Ten years ago, I wrote an article for Macworld about iCloud’s silent email filtering, a server-side system that’s intended to filter out spam but has occasional false positives—and more to the point, is not documented anywhere, which could mean that legitimate emails simply never arrive and you’d never know.
I was reminded of this a few months back when I got an email referencing that piece:
I ran across an article you wrote 10 years ago while searching for an issue I have today. I can’t believe that even today this is still an issue with Apple. Do they not listen? Not care? They recently opened up iCloud to use custom domains, which is how I ended up there. They seem to want to sell “email as a service”. But they don’t seem to want to operate it as a legitimate business. Sad…guess I will end up moving back to something else. 🙁
Apple talks a good game about services, elevating them to equal standing with its hardware and software. It’s put a lot of emphasis on growing the revenue of its Services division, and as with its default apps, it gets a ton of mindshare by being both integrated at a low level and free.
The thing is Apple fundamentally doesn’t want you to think they’re like “other” service companies. They’re not going to send you emails about upcoming outages, or a digest of all the spam that silently got blocked from your account so you can find the ones that should have gotten through, because it flies in the face of the image that Apple wants to put forth, that their magical system “just works.” But the problem with a black box is that once you’re inside, you have no idea what’s going on—and it’s even harder to get out.
- Albeit timestamped with the time when the messages actually showed up, suggesting that they were in some way held for delivery? ↩
- I assume more people beyond me were affected by this. The scale of Apple’s business is such that it must maintain tons of servers for all of its iCloud accounts, each one responsible for a small slice of users. So either I just got unlucky or I should be expecting a subpoena imminently… 😅 ↩
- I cannot convey how much I hate radicchio. ↩
How much we rely on iCloud, new muscle memory on Apple Watch, how we’ve enhanced our browser experience, and CarPlay tips & tricks.
Go to the podcast page.
Dan’s tech problems, more iPhone 15 Pro reactions and how to wire your coffin for sound.
Go to the podcast page.
As a very busy September turns over into October, we’ve got an episode packed with follow-up: Tim Cook takes another European vacation, the Vision Pro product roadmap recedes, Apple considers its search-engine strategy, and we review macOS Sonoma.
Go to the podcast page.
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.
In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools.
AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.
- Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al‘s APIs.
- Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
- Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records.
Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore.
At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.
- Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
- Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.
Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
Apple updated almost every system app in watchOS 10. Unfortunately, the redesign of the Timer app is a serious regression, according to Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry:
The new visual appearance and functionality of watchOS 10 is a welcome change. There was clearly a lot of design and engineering effort put into this new interface and the improvements are tangible for most apps.
Unfortunately, the app that I use the most on the Apple Watch has lost much of its usability, both in functionality and accessibility.
Using plenty of examples and use cases, Hockenberry masterfully chronicles all the ways the new app fails him and, presumably, many other users. The details matter.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
One of the biggest imprints Steve Jobs and Jony Ive left on Apple’s design process is a certain kind of product idealism. At its best, Apple is striving to take ridiculously complex products, fusions of cutting-edge computer hardware design and eye-wateringly enormous software code bases, and make them simple.
It’s a philosophy that has led Apple to build wildly successful products that its customers love. And there’s one new iPhone 15 feature that perfectly illustrates why Apple’s idealism can take it to very interesting places.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Our favorite (or least-favorite) features in macOS Sonoma, our harrowing AppleCare stories, the cases we do or don’t have on our phones, and whether we upgraded to an iPhone 15.
Go to the podcast page.
macOS Sonoma is an update that feels small—but in all the best ways. Upgrading it won’t change how you look at your Mac, at least not at first. This means that if you’re desperate for change to longstanding features of macOS, you will not find what you’re looking for in macOS Sonoma. I suspect, however, that most Mac users just want incremental improvements without disruptive changes. Slow and steady wins the race.
To be sure, Apple is tinkering quite a bit around the edges, but mostly in the sense of minor features getting a facelift or new quality-of-life features that span across its platforms. If all the effort expended getting visionOS ready to ship has meant that things are quieter than usual around these parts, so be it. macOS Sonoma will make portions of your Mac experience better (with some really nice detail work on Apple’s part!) without breaking the stuff you count on. That’s my kind of update.
Free the widgetsiOS 14 introduced a new form of attractive informational widget to the iPhone, and iOS 15 extended it to the iPad. macOS Big Sur introduced widgets to the Mac, but in the least visible way, trapped in the Notification Center sidebar.
With Sonoma (and iOS and iPadOS), widgets can now be interactive, but more importantly for the Mac, they can now go where no Apple widget—not even Dashboard widgets, back in the day1—has gone before. In macOS Sonoma, widgets can live in Notification Center or on the Desktop.
Widgets live on the Desktop, stuck to it like a bunch of stickers, rather than floating in some sort of weird interstitial layer. As a result, Widgets can never float above your windows. If your windows are covering up the Desktop, the only way to see widgets is to move, close, or hide those windows. (I’ve been giving the Reveal Desktop command—accessible via function key or by spreading your fingers out on a trackpad—a real workout.) To make it a little easier, Apple has also imported a convention from Stage Manager, in which clicking on the Desktop hides everything but the Desktop. It makes sense, I suppose, but I hate it—my years of bringing Finder forward by clicking on the Desktop make it a nonstarter—and thankfully, Apple has given users the option to turn that gesture off when they’re not in Stage Manager.
The “stuck to the Desktop” approach is simple, and I think that’s why Apple chose it, but I’m a little disappointed that there’s no way to float a widget or the entire widget layer above Mac windows, even temporarily. If you want to work with a widget (they’re interactive now, after all) while looking at content in a standard window, you’ll need to rearrange or hide windows, which is probably more work than it’s worth.
Widgets can dynamically shift between color and monochrome—or you can choose to keep them in either style all the time.Apple has also chosen by default to have widgets become desaturated of color—and therefore be a bit less obnoxious—when the Desktop/Finder isn’t selected. It definitely reduces the distraction, though widgets are also a lot less pretty when they’re desaturated. Fortunately, if you don’t mind the distraction, you can set widgets to display in full color all of the time. I chose this setting and got used to color widgets pretty quickly. (If you prefer the monochromatic look, you can also choose for widgets to remain monochromatic all the time.)
You can even choose settings for iPhone widgets.Of course, one of the other big limitations of widgets on macOS has been that they require a corresponding macOS app—and some iPhone and iPad apps with cool widgets never make their way to macOS. To counteract this problem, Apple has added a feature that lets iPhone widgets run on the Mac. If your iPhone is on the same network as your Mac or within AirDrop distance, its apps will be available on the Mac. (They obviously won’t work if the iPhone leaves the house.)
It’s a pretty cool idea, and when it works, it feels like magic. I added a widget I built for my iPhone using Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app, which isn’t available on the Mac, and it worked, miraculously.
Unfortunately, iOS 17’s entire widget architecture feels a little bit shaky right now. Occasionally, widgets just stop updating or go completely blank, especially if there’s been an update in the App Store (or, for beta users, via TestFlight). I’ve restarted my iPhone more in the last few months than I had in the previous few years, all because it was the only way to get my widgets to start updating again. And when an iPhone widget turned into a zombie on iOS, it vanished entirely from my Mac’s Desktop. It’s frustrating, and Apple needs to get this issue fixed.
Apple provides widget guides, but you can put them anywhere you want.I’m impressed with the work Apple has put into how you arrange widgets on the Desktop. It’s essentially free-form; you can put widgets anywhere. But when the widget you’re dragging gets close to other widgets, it will snap into alignment with those widgets.
At first, I thought the entire Desktop was a grid, but that’s not what’s happening—Apple’s just making it easy for adjacent widgets to look properly aligned. (Items that live on the Desktop can’t be lost under widgets, either—as you drag a widget around, all the other items on your Desktop get out of the way.)
These touches say a lot about Apple’s priorities. The company wants widgets on the Mac desktop to not look messy, and it’s done a lot of extra work to make that so.
While it’s nice to have widgets on the Mac, the fact is that they’re imports from iOS and iPadOS and, as a result, don’t quite fit right. All widgets feel a bit too large, especially if you’re trying to use them on a laptop display—the appropriate scale for iOS just seems a bit wrong for macOS.
Then there’s the entire concept of the “interactive widget,” which is a real winner on iOS 17 but mostly a nonsequitur on macOS. Yes, your to-do list app now comes with a widget that displays items you can check off… but on the Mac, why not just have your to-do app open to do that task? The Mac is such an able multitasker, and its multi-window interface is so powerful that this feature is blunted quite a bit. This is not to say that there aren’t use cases for interactive widgets on the Mac… it’s just that they’re a lot less exciting.
Widgets are great when it comes to glanceability. It’s nice to lay that weather widget on my Desktop and know that I can just peek over in the corner of my screen to see the current temperature and forecast. But even here, the Mac’s flexibility blunts the value somewhat: most Macs are laptops, and laptops have limited screen space. Is a big widget from iOS sitting on your Desktop (and requiring window management to reveal it) a better glanceable experience than putting items in the Mac’s original glanceable space, the menu bar? Sometimes, the answer will be yes, but it all feels less necessary than on iOS.
Are you getting it yet?macOS Sonoma brings Apple’s high-resolution video screen savers of the earth from space, flyovers of cities and nature, and underwater worlds to the Mac for the first time2. It also spruces up desktop wallpaper with those images. And it’s given the Lock Screen a bit of an update, too.
These aren’t three separate features. They’re one interlinked feature. The Lock Screen now picks up your desktop wallpaper, so you don’t have to suffer with the default. The high-resolution screen savers can optionally be displayed as wallpaper. The result is that your lock screen, screen saver, and desktop wallpaper can all be the same.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/screensaver-desktop-sonoma-6c.mp4Screen savers can slow down and come to a rest as wallpapers.I love it. I’m incredibly impressed with the fit and finish Apple has put into the transition from screen saver to Desktop. The screen saver doesn’t flicker off to be replaced by a different image from the same video, nor does it suddenly grind to a halt the moment it’s disengaged. Instead, when you come back from the screen saver, the video briefly continues to play on the Desktop, decelerating to a stop. It’s completely unnecessary but really delightful. That extra level of attention to detail is Apple at its best.
Video controls get smartsFinally, detailed control over your camera.The pandemic forced all of us, even Apple, to reconsider the importance of videoconferencing. And macOS Sonoma adds a few new video features—some useful, some more whimsical.
On the practical side, Mac users will finally be able to take more control over their video settings without the need for extra software. Video Effects controls, previously buried inside Control Center, have been moved to a Menu Bar item that appears when any app is using a camera. And the controls have been upgraded.
In a huge boost, you can adjust the zoom and pan of some high-resolution cameras (including the Apple Studio Display and iPhones via Continuity Camera). For example, with Center Stage turned off, I find that the Studio Display’s camera is framed too high—but now I can adjust that framing so that my face is dead center, with a little tighter zoom. (There’s also a nifty new Recenter button that applies a Center Stage-style calculation to put you in the center of the frame—but it only does it the one time. Very nice for those who don’t want Center Stage zooming and panning but do like the idea of being properly framed.)
Apple has also seriously upgraded sharing a window from your Mac in a presentation. To choose a window to share, you click and hold on the green stoplight button in the window, and then choose Share Window with… (Videoconferencing apps will need to be updated to take advantage of this feature, but it works out of the box with FaceTime.)
The small presenter window has a circular backdrop, but you can extend outside of it.Even more cleverly, Apple can combine that shared screen with video input from a camera. You can either pipe your video into a small circle that’s superimposed on the shared window, or you can display your regular webcam video with the shared screen layered behind you but in front of your background.
It feels like Apple’s showing off a bit with these features, but they’re all built out of the same layer-detection algorithm that allows Portrait Mode, Studio Light, and the layered reaction effects featuring flying confetti or exploding fireworks. So not only does your face go in a small circle superimposed on the shared window, but the top of your head can whimsically pop right out of the top of the circle. (A virtual background is cut off at the circle, but your head isn’t.) It’s extra in the best way.
The layered large presentation style is similarly smart. If you reach over to point at something on the window you’re sharing, your hand appears above the window. And Center Stage frames the shot so that you’re properly positioned next to the shared window, not in front or behind it. It’s very impressive. It almost makes me wish I was in more video conferences.
Screen sharing goes bigOne of the the most useful utilities on macOS is Screen Sharing, because it lets you take control of another Mac from the Mac you’re currently using. I use this all the time with my home server, and during the production of this review, I also found myself using it to connect to my MacBook Air running macOS Ventura (while it was sleeping, with its lid closed!) to compare it to my Mac Studio running Sonoma.
This unsung hero of macOS has gotten a major update. For starters, there’s an actual interface—instead of a simple Connect To start, there’s a proper window listing nearby computers and devices you’ve previously controlled.
And there’s also a stunning new High-Performance mode, which lets two Apple Silicon Macs running macOS Sonoma over a fast network connection to connect with low latency, high quality, and even support for two displays. I was able to edit some video in Final Cut Pro using this feature, and while it wasn’t perfect, I was impressed that it worked at all! The audio sent from the remote computer had pretty low latency, though it was distorted.
Still, as someone who is constantly connecting to a Mac mini server on my home network, I’m unreasonably excited about these upgrades. This feature alone will get me to upgrade my server to macOS Sonoma.
But wait, there’s moreOf course, many macOS improvements in Sonoma are also new features in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, among them password sharing, upgrades to Messages, PDF autofill, new Notes features, and a big upgrade to autocorrect and dictation.
Since those features aren’t unique to macOS, we’ve separated them out and covered them in a separate article about new 2023 Apple platform features.
And even the quietest macOS updates end up having dozens, if not hundreds, of improvements—some huge, some small. Here are a couple of the other features that are changing in macOS Sonoma.
Safari site-specific apps. You can now save sites as apps so they appear in the Dock (and in your user Applications folder) and can work independently from Safari itself. Single-site browsers have been a popular concept for a while now, but this is Apple’s first time taking this approach on the Mac. When I visited Gmail on the web, I was prompted to open it in a web app, at which point Safari saved a Gmail “app” in my user’s Applications folder. If you rely on a bunch of web-based apps every day, getting them out of Safari and into separate instances will be a big upgrade.
Game Mode. At long last, if you accidentally launch a Mac game in full-screen mode while a bunch of other apps are still running, macOS is smart enough to recognize what’s happening and give priority to the game and not your email app running in the background. This is good. I kept all my work apps open and then launched No Man’s Sky, and it played without a hitch.
Small can be bigmacOS Sonoma isn’t a game changer—nor is it meant to be. But in an era where so many of Apple’s banner features are shared across its many platforms, Sonoma adds a surprising number of Mac-specific features and offers Mac-specific touches to others.
I’m most impressed with the features that feel Apple has gone above and beyond what was required to bring a little delight to the proceedings. That screen saver-to-wallpaper transition? Those multiple, multi-layered screen-sharing modes alongside actual webcam settings? Chef’s kiss.
I sort of miss the days when every macOS version would bring massive changes to the entire concept of the operating system, but I also kind of don’t. Two decades in, stability should be a hallmark of the modern macOS—but Apple should never stop striving to make the experience better. That’s what macOS Sonoma manages to accomplish.
- There was a bug that let you move Dashboard widgets out of the Dashboard layer and into your regular interface, but it was temporary and unsupported. ↩
- If you don’t count Aerial. ↩
Live from Memphis in the aftermath of the Relay FM Podcastathon, Myke and Jason take delivery of new iPhones and Apple Watches. Also, General Motors continues its drive for Apple-like services revenue.
Go to the podcast page.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security.
On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed.
Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.
Let’s talk about the second problem first. Sure, you could simply schedule updates for all your users, and have them restart during non-work hours. But this inevitably leads to disruptions and lost work. This, in turn, leads to users (especially executives) who simply demand to be left out of your update policy. The bottom line is: any forced restarts without user approval will lead to data loss events, and that makes them so unpopular that they are functionally unusable.
There is another class of tools that claim to get users to install updates themselves, through “nudges.” These reminders pop up with increasing frequency until users relent or the timer runs out. This is an improvement, since it involves users in the process, but users still tend to delay updating as long as possible (which for some tools can be indefinitely).
At Kolide, OS updates are the single most common issue customers want us to solve. They come to us because we have a unique (and uniquely effective) approach to device compliance.
With Kolide, when a user’s device–be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile–is out of compliance, we reach out to them with instructions on how to fix it.
The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta. (At present, Kolide is exclusive to Okta customers, but we plan to integrate with more SSO providers soon.)
If your fleet is littered with devices that stubbornly refuse to update, then consider these two principles:
- You can’t have a successful patch management policy without involving users.
- You can’t get users to install patches unless you give them both clear instructions and real consequences.
Installing OS updates is a top priority for both security and IT, and when you make it part of conditional access, you can finally get it done without massive lists of exemptions or massive piles of support tickets.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
As I write this I’m sitting at St. Jude, about three hours into our 12-hour podcast telethon in support of St. Jude’s goal of stopping childhood cancer. I’m one of four hosts along with Stephen Hackett, Myke Hurley, and Kathy Campbell.
Tune in if you see this in time. Regardless, please consider giving to Relay’s campaign.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to BZG Apps, maker of Unite 5, for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Unite 5 for macOS takes your web experience to the next level, transforming websites into feature-rich Mac apps. Powered by a completely redesigned WebKit browser, Unite 5 offers a more immersive and customizable browsing experience.
Unite’s new intricate link-forwarding rules give users unparalleled control over web interactions, making web apps smarter and more integrated than ever before. Create a Gmail client with seamless macOS integration, a resource-efficient Slack or Discord app, or even a dedicated app for ChatGPT or Claude.AI.
Six Colors readers get an exclusive 20% off this week. Use the promo code SixColors at checkout or visit bzgapps.com/unitesixcolors. Experience Unite 5 for yourself with a 14-day free trial, or access it as part of the Setapp subscription.
We break down the arrival of Mark Thompson as CNN’s new boss. Also, there’s a mega letters segment! [This episode was recorded September 7. See you in two weeks!]
Go to the podcast page.
Our one, must-have streaming service; our favorite not-at-home, not-at-the-office place to work; our webcam setups; and our favorite or most-used iPhone accessories.
Go to the podcast page.
Ah, September: the time of years when hot summer days turn to crisp autumn ones, leaves are burnished in shades of red and gold, and pumpkin spice begins its inexorable creep back into all our lives. But if you breathe deep you can just smell something else on the air: fresh Apple software updates.
Yes, Apple this week dropped a slew of revisions to almost all of its major platforms (sorry, macOS, you have to wait until next week). You’ve no doubt already read of contact posters, new widget interfaces, and FaceTime on the Apple TV, but I wanted to take a few moments to wax rhapsodic about a few of my favorite overlooked features—and, specifically, features that help you not overlook things.
Because this year’s updates all provide better ways to navigate the world around us, and even without a second-generation ultra wideband chip, you can still find exactly what you’re looking for.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
GQ’s Robert Leedham talks to the teams at Apple and Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates about bringing Snoopy to life on watchOS 10. Most interesting to me was how the watch decides what animations to show:
That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he’ll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the attention to detail that wins out here. I love the decisions about what activities are particularly Snoopy-like and what kind of nose to use for the beagle, which has evolved over the years.
Personally, I’ve been using the Snoopy watchface pretty much full time since installing watchOS 10 back in June and I continue to see new animations. They are, to a one, delightful, and greatly improve my day—I also appreciate that even though the watch face doesn’t have any complications, watchOS 10’s new widget stack makes me feel okay about foregoing them. As I mentioned in my first look at watchOS 10, my mom had a Snoopy watch when I was growing up, and continues to give me a solid nostalgia hit.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Unite 5 for macOS takes your web experience to the next level, transforming websites into feature-rich Mac apps. Powered by a completely redesigned WebKit browser, Unite 5 offers a more immersive and customizable browsing experience.
What sets Unite 5 apart? We’ve gone beyond just app conversion. Our new intricate link-forwarding rules give you unparalleled control over web interactions, making your web apps smarter and more integrated than ever before.
Some highlights of Unite 5:
Advanced Link-Forwarding: Navigate your web apps like a pro.
Revamped Browser Engine: Faster, more reliable, and tailored for macOS.
Enhanced Customization: More ways to make your web apps truly yours.
Create powerful web apps in seconds, such as:
- A Gmail client that integrates seamlessly with macOS.
- A resource-efficient Slack or Discord app with full notification support.
- A dedicated AI app for ChatGPT or Claude.AI
- A Robinhood or Figma app that feels native on your desktop.
SixColors readers get an exclusive 20% off this week. Use the promo code ‘SixColors’ at checkout or visit http://bzgapps.com/unitesixcolors.
Experience Unite 5 for yourself with a 14-day free trial, or access it as part of the Setapp subscription.
This week we’re wading into follow-up from last week’s Apple event. Then we say goodbye to beta season and list our favorite features of the newly shipped iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10.
Go to the podcast page.
Sometimes I see that number following the latest release of iOS and do a double-take: really? It’s been around that long? Seventeen iterations into the iPhone’s software and you wouldn’t think there’d be much left to do, but with this latest annual update to its flagship platform, Apple’s packed in a surprising amount of features—and cleaned up some shortcomings of prior versions.
Perhaps the most significant indication of the iPhone’s maturity is that it’s now largely in sync with releases from its siblings: many features this time around are coming to all of Apple’s devices, so we’ve broken out some of the common features in another piece.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of iPhone-specific innovations in iOS 17. On the contrary, not only has Apple spent a lot of time with a core piece of functionality that most people don’t think about—yes, we’re looking at you, Phone app—but it’s also introduced a brand new way to use your smartphone.1
I used iOS 17 throughout the beta period, and now that it’s out in the big wide world, it’s time to take a more thorough look at what the latest improvement to Apple’s software offers. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
Live, in front of a studio audience (of one)I don’t know who had “updates to the Phone app” on their Faustian bargain bingo card, but 2023 delivered. Apple’s added not just one but two major new features to the iPhone’s semi-eponymous app.
Despite it being a core feature of the original iPhone, the device’s phone functionality has increasingly been seen as a necessary evil. Like email (and even now texts), it’s a medium rife with spam, and Apple has been trying to do its part to combat that problem for some time. Back in iOS 13, it introduced the Silence Unknown Callers feature as one weapon in the arsenal, but I—and many people like me—never turned it on because there was too much risk of missing an important call that wasn’t from a number in my contacts.
iOS 17’s Live Voicemail lets you read a transcript of a message as it’s being left—and even decide to pick up the phone.iOS 17’s Live Voicemail feature takes an old idea—call screening—and makes it new again. Rather than listening to someone leave a message, you can instead read it in real-time as it scrolls across your lock screen, letting you decide right then and there whether you want to pick up. The transcription, while not perfect, is on par with the rest of Apple’s speech-to-text features, and though it might not get everything just right, it’s generally close enough to help you get the gist of the message.
Live Voicemail has prompted me to turn on Silence Unknown Callers at last. Most of the time, Live Voicemail doesn’t even come up for me because most spam calls give up when they don’t get a live person—plus Apple’s already filtering for known spam or telemarketer numbers identified by your carrier; they don’t even ring through. As a result, my phone almost never rings unless it’s a call I’m expecting, and honestly, that’s kind of an ideal situation.
The biggest challenge with Live Voicemail, from my experience with it, is going to be retraining people to the idea that a voicemail can be interrupted. While I haven’t yet had occasion to put this into practice, I’ve definitely heard stories from fellow iOS 17 users who have found callers befuddled when the recipient starts talking in the middle of the message. I’ve also run into issues during the beta process where callers were not well prompted and ended up leaving empty messages as they sat and waited for a cue, but this seems to have worked out in the final release, from what I can tell.
Standby to StandByI was an early adopter of smart speakers, and in recent years, I’ve transitioned our house to an all-HomePod setup. But one thing lacking from that experience has been a screen, which has been one reason we’ve heard multiple rumors that Apple is working on a HomePod with an integrated display.
While we didn’t see a device of that ilk announced at this year’s WWDC, Apple raised more than a few eyebrows by adding a new interface to the iPhone that provides many of the same features: StandBy. StandBy requires your iPhone to be connected to power and in landscape orientation, at which point you can swipe between three fullscreen views: a clock (in variable styles), your photos, or a widget view.
I’m not going to lie: I rarely moved off the widget view because it’s so darn useful. You get two side-by-side stacks of widgets that you can cycle through by swiping up and down. Both let you choose from a wide selection of widgets—since this uses Apple’s WidgetKit framework, developers can easily make their existing widgets work with StandBy, though they might require some optimization to look their best. You can also opt to enable the Smart Rotate feature, which will try to use machine learning to pop up the right widget at the right time.
It’s worth noting that StandBy mode really shines when paired with the always-on display of the iPhone 14 Pro (and forthcoming iPhone 15 Pro). It’s still useful without it, but requires more direct interaction, losing out on the glanceability afforded by a display that never sleeps. But though it may be cold comfort, Siri’s fullscreen interface in StandBy mode does at least make it a viable substitute.
In StandBy mode, Siri’s interface is more readable from a distance. And more useful.I do wish there was a way to edit StandBy widgets while not in StandBy mode, though. I don’t always have a charger on hand, and often when I do have it charging and in landscape, I’m in the middle of doing something else, making it not necessarily an apropos time to start tweaking widgets.
One place StandBy really shines is in its other interactions. For one thing, when you play audio, you get a big full-screen interface reminiscent of CarPlay. No more fumbling around trying to hit a tiny pause button or having to wake up your phone to see what’s playing. For another, Apple has finally improved the timer interface, not only letting you set multiple named timers (hallelujah!) but also providing a nice visualization of the countdown with a big, easy-to-read full-screen progress bar. In fact, the whole experience is tuned to be visible from a distance, from the widgets down to Siri’s onscreen responses, and it’s a big help.
There are still some tricky aspects to StandBy. For one, since this is basically a different view of the lock screen, interacting with widgets requires you to authenticate with Face ID. While it’s admirable from a security point of view, that can be awkward if, for example, you have a MagSafe stand that’s not at the right level or angle. I frequently found myself crouching down by the Belkin kickstand in my kitchen or having to quickly pull my phone off the MagSafe stand on my nightstand in the hopes that I could authenticate before the StandBy interface went away.2 And viewing some features that work as Live Activities, such as audio playback or timers, can still require a tap on a small dynamic island target—not ideal if, say, you’re washing dishes.
Hitting that little timer icon is still kind of a pain.I also struggled a bit with using a phone on standby next to the HomePod mini in my kitchen. While Siri does a fine job of avoiding audio coming out of the device from which it’s responding, it’s more of a challenge when audio is being output to another speaker. So often, I found that, while listening to a podcast via AirPlay on my HomePod mini, Siri requests on the iPhone would start to pick up the playback audio, leading to a spiral of confusion and delay.
This is one place where Apple’s strategy of enticing you to buy multiple devices would work a lot better if those devices knew more about each other. For example, Siri on my phone still seems to be clueless about timers on my HomePod, and vice versa.
Though StandBy doesn’t require you to charge via MagSafe, it’s pretty clear that Apple thinks that’s the best experience—if you use MagSafe chargers3, your phone will remember your interface choices for each place you put it. So, if you want the weather and a shopping list in the kitchen and the alarm clock in your bedroom, you can do that. However, it doesn’t seem to remember specific widget views between locations, rather just showing the last set you had. (Unless you have the Smart Stack enabled, in which case it tries to guess which widgets you want.)
Despite the ups and downs, after a few weeks of using StandBy, I still want a HomePod with a screen—possibly even more than before. StandBy is definitely good, but I have the distinct feeling that the company’s going to learn a lot from how people actually end up using the feature, and I fully hope (and expect) to see it get even better.
3…2…1…Contact postersIf choosing the picture that shows up when a friend calls you is tired, then wired is having a custom screen that you can make for yourself that shows up on your friends’ phones when you call them.
One of the…many Contact Posters I’ve created in iOS 17. I hope this is my good side.In iOS 17, Apple has taken the lock screen customization features of iOS 16 and married them to Messages’s contact photo feature from iOS 13 to create contact posters. Much like the lock screen, you can choose your photo—or a simple monogram or a Memoji—apply a handful of effects and tweak the font face, weight, and color. You can even have multiple different contact posters to switch between, though whichever one is active will show up for everybody. Like Messages’s contact photos, you can choose to have this screen automatically displayed when you call someone in your contacts or to ask you if you want to allow it each time.4
In my experience, the contact posters I have made and seen look pretty good, if not quite up to the flawless examples that Apple has shown off (we can’t all have a multimillion-dollar marketing budget and be extremely photogenic models, after all). It’s a nice way to add a little pizzazz to a screen that’s otherwise focused on function, and I particularly appreciate this as a way to distribute the work of adding pictures to all of my contacts.
You can, however, also use this feature to create contact posters for people in your contacts, though it’s unclear to me which will win out if they’ve also made their own.
If there’s one somewhat odd choice, it’s that the control for creating your contacts is a bit buried, as it’s accessible via the Edit button in the Phone app’s Recents tab. I’m not sure a lot of people will find it there, but fortunately, you can also get to the interface via the much more logical location on your card in the Contacts tab.
Overall, I like the idea of contact posters; they definitely look more attractive than the default calling screen, and they add a nice bit of pizzazz. It’ll be interesting to see whether they manage to make their way to wide-scale adoption, but most of the features that the company has rolled out in the past few years that let people make phones more theirs—like widgets and lock screens—have generally been a hit.
AirPlay by playDespite much of the talk about Apple not getting AI, the company continues to leverage its machine learning skills in a number of places across the OS, including—surprisingly—AirPlay. In addition to slightly tweaking the default interface for the wireless media playback system—the menu should now arrange your list of speakers in order of relevance—it has also added an extra layer on top to hopefully mean you won’t need to use that interface as much.
In iOS 17, AirPlay is now smarter about learning where you play certain types of content, and can prompt you proactively.AirPlay now learns what, when, and where you tend to play on certain speakers. So, for example, if you listen to a podcast in the evening while cooking dinner, starting to play from the Podcasts app will put a notification in the dynamic island prompting you to use the kitchen speaker; just give it a tap, and it’ll move the audio there. After it detects such a routine enough times, it’ll just route the audio to that speaker by default.
In my admittedly brief experience, this system actually works pretty well. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the suggested speakers pop up at the right times and contexts, and being able to just tap the control once to have audio sent to the correct place is a big improvement over wrestling with the AirPlay menu. (Sadly, that user interface hasn’t been more thoroughly redesigned or banished to the appropriate circle of hell.) It demonstrates Apple’s machine learning capabilities at its best: making things easier for users.
However, I still find myself frustrated by the difference between outputting audio to another device, like an AirPlay-compatible speaker, and controlling a separate device with its own audio queue, like a HomePod. Many’s the time I’ve started playing a podcast on my phone, thinking it was AirPlaying to a HomePod, and then gone back to the same episode later on my phone only to have it not remember where I left off. I don’t know what the better solution is here—aside from more robust syncing—but it needs some work.
It takes twohttps://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/phildrop.mp4There are a handful of other big new features in iOS 17 that all involve sharing with other people around you. NameDrop lets you quickly share your contact details with someone else by holding your phone near theirs. (There’s also a new Share Contact interface that lets you decide precisely which information you want to share with someone, which is great, though I wish you could set up a default to start from instead of having to select the data each time.)
AirDrop and SharePlay likewise allow you to initiate the respective features via proximity. This is very clever, though when my pals Jason and Phil tried it, they saw different behaviors based on whether both phones were unlocked or just one. There’s a little bit of a learning curve here, but using the physical act of bringing phones together in order to transfer data is clever and satisfying—and it’s all amplified by the animation of a big bubble percolating to the top of the phone as the transfer initiates! This is especially going to be useful in exchanging data with someone who isn’t currently in your Contacts list since they won’t (by default) show up in a list of available AirDrop devices.
I’ve only had limited ability to try out these proximity features during the beta period, but they are very cool ideas that should hopefully simplify some exchanges. It also supports the change for AirDrop’s “Everyone” feature that limits it to ten minutes before it switches back to Contacts Only. This prevents AirDrop spam or trolling in public places and should make it a better experience overall.
Unfortunately, there were some features that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test. There’s a new SharePlay experience in CarPlay that allows someone else in your vehicle to control music playback remotely from their phone via a prompt or by scanning a QR code onscreen—even if they’re not an Apple Music subscriber. (As long as the device connected via CarPlay is.) My big question for this is whether it supports anything outside the Music app. In an ideal world, I’d like it available for Apple’s Podcasts app, too, as well as providing options for third-party apps. Sometimes I like to listen to lots of different types of audio on a long car trip!
There are also more than a few features that aren’t available until a subsequent update: iOS’s new Journal app for one, but also Collaborative Playlists, AirDrop transfers continuing over the internet, and stickers and emoji as tapbacks. I’m looking forward to giving these a whirl when they eventually arrive in iOS updates.
Maintaining continuityAlong with wanting a HomePod with a screen, the idea of turning the Apple TV into a video conferencing device is one that has great appeal to me. I have a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game where both my wife and I are on camera, and right now, I extend my MacBook screen via AirPlay to my Apple TV. But then we’re looking at the TV, not the camera, and figuring out the right framing and mic distance is all a pain.
When you fire up Continuity Camera on your Apple TV, you’ll be asked to approve on your iPhone.Apple has, of course, approached this problem in a very Apple-like fashion: rather than building a whole new device, how can we solve this with ingredients we already have on hand? Enter Continuity Camera! The feature that debuted last year, which lets you use your iPhone as your Mac’s webcam, now works on your Apple TV as well5. Right now, it works with Apple’s new FaceTime app on the Apple TV, but the company says third-party apps like Zoom and WebEx are expected for later this year.
I’ve been impressed, in my tests, with how well this works. I stole the Belkin camera mount from my iMac and popped it on top of my TV, and from that angle, the camera was able to capture a pretty big chunk of my living room. (I presume it is primarily using the Ultrawide lens on my iPhone 14 Pro.) It also supports Apple camera features like Center Stage (which, to my mind, looks much better than the default crop) and Portrait mode, as well as the new Reactions feature.
I’m holding out full judgment until the third-party conferencing apps arrive, but I do feel like this will be a big improvement for my living room Zooms. The one downside, of course, is that you lose access to whichever iPhone you use as a camera, but given the multitude of other devices I have at my fingertips, this isn’t a huge blow to me.
Grab bagAs always, there are a slew of new smaller enhancements and tweaks throughout iOS 17—enough that I’m still discovering them months in. There simply isn’t room to detail them all comprehensively here6, but there are a few I wanted to call out.
Maps now offers the ability to save areas offline, great if you’re going some place with little to no connectivity.Phone: Apple has tweaked the interface for the active call screen in iOS 17, in part to accommodate the new contact posters but also supposedly to make it friendlier. Controls have now been shifted towards the bottom of the screen and slightly rearranged, with the End Call button in the middle of the bottom row instead of on its own. The Contacts button has also been removed, which, frankly, is just as well since I don’t think I ever used that button on purpose. And if you get a call while you’re already on one, the notification for that no longer takes over the whole screen but shows up in the Dynamic Island (on compatible phones, naturally).
Offline Maps: If you’ve ever ventured off the beaten path (or really, anywhere without cell service), you’ve probably gotten frustrated that your handy smartphone’s mapping software is now nothing more than a pretty picture. That all changes now that iOS 17 has added offline maps to the mix. Even better, when you set a region to work offline, Maps will automatically keep it updated with the latest changes, so you don’t have to worry about when you last remembered to. As someone whose in-laws live out in the sticks, that’s a huge weight off my mind.
Maps also checks a big wish list item off for me as it seems to now integrate with Find My, in that if you get directions to a contact’s location, that location updates as you go. (This is a big help if you’re trying to meet somebody at a crowded location with multiple entrances and exits, like, say, an airport.)
Spotlight: Apple’s spent a lot of time tweaking its search feature in iOS 17, and I’ve found it mostly to the better. Not only does Spotlight seem to surface more relevant results, but it also proactively pops up more items that are often surprisingly useful. There’s also been a redesign of the “top hit” item, with a colorful background that makes it stand out more, and there’s even an interactive element that lets you quickly carry out a specific action: for example, type “set timer,” and you’ll get a Shortcuts-like interface that will let you start it right there, without opening the Clock app. Notes lets you create a new note directly from Spotlight, while Photos lets you quickly jump to a specific album.
CarPlay: I do appreciate that Apple has tweaked the CarPlay interface to be a little friendlier when using Siri. The buttons to send or change messages are much bigger, with better cues about what the default action will be. I rely increasingly on CarPlay when I’m driving, and I’m glad to see Apple spend some time on it—even if it’s not the big CarPlay 2 overhaul that we’re still waiting to see more details on.
To upgrade or not upgrade? (Spoiler alert: You’re upgrading.)Once upon a time, the purpose of a review like this was more about whether it was worth it to take the plunge for an update, but that’s no longer really a question. Since big updates generally include improvements to security as well as refinements of earlier features, the simple truth is that most users update their iPhones if they support running the latest version. Apple’s own numbers bear this out: As of June, 81 percent of all iOS devices were running iOS 16, and that rose to 90 percent when just considering devices released in the last four years. It’s a given: sooner or later, you’re going to upgrade.
What I hope this can at least provide you is an idea of what to expect in such an upgrade, as well as a sense of whether the changes Apple is making are worthwhile ones.
Overall, I’ve been impressed with iOS 17’s attention to smaller details throughout the operating system. Features like Live Voicemail and StandBy might be big and splashy, but it’s the little “quality of life” improvements that I’m actually here for. I want the quality of my life to be improved! More to the point, I want technology to work for me instead of it being something I have to battle with day in and day out. In that, I think iOS 17 generally delivers: in addition to specific iOS features, the platform improvements we’ve detailed elsewhere—things like Messages improvements, upgraded autocorrect, password sharing, and interactive widgets—stand to make our devices even more powerful and useful. A big iOS update is always a bit like getting a brand new phone for free, so it’s hard to turn down, but at least it seems to be earning its keep.
- Which, dare we hope, may even presage the existence of a new device for Apple. ↩
- In one annoying piece of design, the dynamic island icon for Face ID covers the leftmost keys on the keyboard while in landscape orientation, preventing me from entering my passcode. 😐 ↩
- And from what I can tell, you need a real, Apple-approved MagSafe charger, not just a Qi charger with a magnet. ↩
- I look forward to being deluged by notifications that so-and-so has updated their contact picture over the next several months. ↩
- Provided you have a second-generation Apple TV 4K or later, anyway. Yes, I did buy a new one just for this. ↩
- A task I will gladly cede to my pal Federico Viticci. ↩
These days, many new iPadOS features have spent a year incubating on the iPhone. (Or, to put it less charitably, Apple builds for the iPhone first and makes iPads wait to get the good stuff.) This year is no different, as iPadOS 17 integrates the customized Lock Screen introduced last year on the iPhone but doesn’t get access to the customized contact cards introduced for iOS 17.
Still, iPad users will find several major improvements in this version, including the arrival of an app that has long been absent on the iPad. And perhaps the best news of all is that one of the banner features of iPadOS 16 has been dramatically improved this time around.
(And, of course, many of this year’s OS features are available not just on the iPad but also on the iPhone and Mac, so we’ve broken out some of the common features in another piece.)
A new Lock Screenhttps://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ipad-lockscreen.mp4Live Photos animate when you pick up your iPad.The new iPad Lock Screen takes its cues from iOS 16 but offers some iPad twists. The fundamental interface is the same as on the iPhone—you can tap and hold on the Lock Screen to enter a customization interface that lets you switch between Lock Screens and create new screens. (You can also set different Lock Screens to appear when you’re in specific Focus modes.)
You can set the fonts and colors used on the clock display, and the background image can be something you pick from your photo library, live weather and astronomy images, kaleidoscopes, emoji, and more. Photo Shuffles let you dynamically shuffle through images of a specific type, like landscapes or even pictures of specific people. My favorite is the ability to pick a Live Photo as a Lock Screen image, with the Live Photo animated when you wake up your iPad. I chose a picture I took on a boat in Milford Sound in New Zealand, and every time I open my iPad, the water splashes up toward the camera. (I got very, very wet.)
iOS 16 let iPhones add a new class of widgets to the Lock Screen, but they were limited to a single row. iPadOS 17 uses the extra screen space of the iPad and lets you add a load of lock-screen widgets down the left side. I’ve already stuck a few in there, and I’m looking forward to shopping for even more because there’s just so much space.
Another iOS 16 feature picked up in iPadOS 17 is support for Live Activities. These dynamically updated notification boxes can now live on the iPad Lock Screen as well, so you can keep track of a flight in Flighty or a baseball game via the MLB app or running timers from the Clock app.
Perhaps you are thinking, as I was, that it’s a shame all this information is set out on the Lock Screen when, most of the time, the Lock Screen only appears briefly as Face ID unlocks your iPad. That’s true, but the good news is that if you swipe down from the top of the screen, you’re not just bringing down Notification Center—you’re bringing down your entire Lock Screen. So that single swipe-down gesture gets you access to your notifications, widgets, Live Activities, and a pretty picture. Nice.
Still, it might be a good idea if the iPad had an area where you could look at any time for a quick status update about stuff currently going on. It would need to be dynamic and set off from the rest of the interface in some sort of island…? Oh well, I’m sure the idea will occur to someone eventually.
The Health app, at lastI’ll admit it: I use my iPad far more than I use my iPhone. I sleep with the iPad next to my bed, not the iPhone. It’s always frustrated me that my health data is not available to view on the device I prefer and in a big, expansive interface that can better display the graphs from the Health app.
That all changes in iPadOS 17, which allows your iPad to sync health data from your iPhone and display it in the new, iPad-expanded Health app. Now, I can have quick access on my preferred device to my health trends, which I never think to look at when I’m on my iPhone. I’ve found it valuable (and motivating!) to browse my health data on my iPad. There’s more room for all those charts and graphs, and a new sidebar makes it easy to dig into every subcategory.
Even better, Apple has brought HealthKit to iPadOS 17, meaning that a bunch of health-oriented devices now can connect to an iPad. I bought a sleep tracker that I never really got the hang of, in part because I had to keep my iPhone nearby when I slept, which I just don’t do. Similarly, I’ve got a smart Blood Pressure monitor that I don’t use as often as I should because it requires me to go get my iPhone rather than using the iPad that’s right there. As of iPadOS 17, those devices should be able to connect and work with my iPad—but it will require some developers to update their apps. (The maker of my smart blood-pressure cuff, Omron, doesn’t yet support syncing with Health from the iPad. Alas.)
Stage Manager actually managesA window in the center and one on the left! Typical Mac stuff, but impossible on Stage Manager before iPadOS 17.The biggest iPad feature of last year, Stage Manager, gave iPads the optional ability to manage individual app windows like a Mac user would. You could resize them and drag them around, positioning them where you wanted them to be. Sort of.
That “sort of” was the problem, you see. Stage Manager was trying to bring a Mac-like windowing interface to iPadOS but missed one of the most important reasons why windowing interfaces are useful: namely, that the user chooses where to put the windows. Stage Manager offered the illusion of choice, but if you tried to place a window somewhere it didn’t want you to, it would override your choice and slide the window somewhere else.
I frequently work with a single window in the center of my screen (where I’m writing) with a window positioned behind and to the left (with a document I’m consulting.) I’m doing it right now, in fact. But in iPadOS 16, Stage Manager would see two open windows and force them to be side by side. It was so frustrating—so close, and yet so far.
I have good news: in iPadOS 17, Stage Manager lets you put windows wherever you want. I can do all that stuff I was forbidden from doing before—a text editor dead center, a couple of reference windows hanging off the left side—and it just works. The obsessive, nitpicky computer adversary that refused to let me put windows wherever I want is gone.
Yes, there are areas where the system will pick up your window and move it slightly up or down or side to side. It mostly happens when the system is trying to line things up properly—for example, you can move a window up a few pixels, and it’ll stay there, but if it gets too close to the top or side of another window, it’ll try to align your window to match. So your window might slide up to be at the same height as the other window, or it might slide right so that the two windows are next to each other rather than being ever-so-slightly overlapping. I don’t mind this behavior, generally, but it does make me wonder if the next frontier for Stage Manager (and for the Mac, too) is a better set of built-in window tiling and resizing features.
It’s also easier to add items to a stage. You can now shift-click from the Dock, Spotlight, and the App Library to add that app to the current stage. Previously, that behavior only worked in the strip on the left side of the screen. Those additions make it a lot easier to store the muscle memory of “shift-click to add” without worrying about shift-clicking in the wrong context and messing things up.
In any event, these subtle changes to window placement have completely transformed how I feel when I’m using Stage Manager. Before, I felt like I was constantly fighting the system. Now, we work in harmony. Stage Manager is something I can actually use to get my job done.
I always suspected that one reason Apple tried to micromanage window placement in Stage Manager was that it’s just too easy to “lose” windows behind other windows in classic windowed interfaces like macOS. In iPadOS 17, Apple has solved this problem in a clever way: If you’ve got a window that will be obscured by another one, the window will move so that its edge is sticking out just behind the obscuring window. If you tap that window to bring it forward, it returns to its previous location. It’s an inspired accommodation that means it’s unlikely that you’ll ever lose a window in Stage Manager while allowing you to put windows where you want.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stage-mgr-17-hb.mp4Stage Manager won’t let you lose windows.Unfortunately, one of my most hoped-for features for Stage Manager didn’t make it into iPadOS 17: you can’t run the iPad on an external display with its internal screen shut off, as you can when a MacBook runs in lid-closed mode. I suspect that Apple wants to offer this feature but that there are a bunch of features that need to be updated to work on the external display, and they haven’t all made it over yet.
One of those features did make it over, though: iPadOS 17 supports external webcams and microphones. Now, if you want to attach to an Apple Studio Display and a fancy USB microphone and have a FaceTime or Zoom session, you’ll be able to use the display’s camera and your own USB microphone rather than having to go back to your iPad.
It’s a good start, but I really want to see iPadOS completely embrace the idea that when you’re docked at a big external display, you can close the iPad’s cover and forget that the small screen is even part of the process. We’re not there yet, but combined with the window-management improvements of iPadOS 17, we’re closer than we have ever been.
I’ve got one final criticism of iPadOS’s external display support: It doesn’t seem to know what to do with the wallpaper or what we call the Desktop on the Mac. It sure feels like it might be a good place to put a widget or two, especially now that they’re interactive.
In recent years, Apple has taken to making more of its new features available across all of its major operating systems. As a result, it’s made less sense for us to cover the same feature in multiple preview articles. Instead, we’ve rolled some of the key improvements you’ll see across macOS Sonoma, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17 into a single article—this one.
The widgets! They move!Apple introduced its next-generation widgets three years ago in iOS 14. They were beautiful and interesting and helpful, but what they weren’t was interactive. The previous generation of widgets could have buttons that you could click or tap, and then things would happen!
Fortunately, Apple’s modern widgets have now gotten all touchy-feely. Not only can widgets have buttons, but they can change dynamically based on what buttons you’ve pressed. Imagine a photo widget that lets you cycle through different images or a dice-rolling widget that rolls the dice and gives you the result right in the widget! Yes, all this and more is possible as of the fall of 2023.
Now that you can place widgets in Notification Center and on the Desktop/Home Screen on all three of Apple’s major platforms, it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes. There’s an argument to be made that widgets are the simplest form of an app, and depending on what you want to do, you may find yourself using the widgets more than the apps themselves. (Of course, the widget is an extension of an app, so you really are using the app, sort of.)
But without getting too philosophical, interactive widgets could really be game changers. Having basic information available at a glance was great, but being able to perform tasks—whether it’s playing music, turning off lights, or checking off items on a to-do list—without launching apps is a big deal. Think more widgets on home screens, for starters.
While Apple has generated some interactive widgets on its own (though fewer than I had hoped, to be honest), I’ve seen many third-party app developers embrace this new format over the summer while the operating systems were in beta testing. It makes me optimistic that developers will take advantage of this new functionality to make some fantastic little mini-apps inside a widget frame. I can’t wait for this fall’s big app updates, though it will probably be painful to decide which widgets win the battle for my limited screen space.—Jason Snell
Videoconferencing fireworks—literallyEver since the days of pandemic lockdowns, Apple has focused on upgrading its webcam video functionality. This year’s updates give users way more control over the video they’re sending to everyone else on the call. (On the Mac, you access video controls from a green camera icon that appears when any app is using a camera. On the iPhone and iPad, you tap on the Video Effects icon in Control Center.)
While you could previously toggle video effects like Portrait Mode and Studio Light on and off, you can now also adjust their intensity. If you never used Studio Light because it was just a bit too much… well, now you can dial it back and actually put it to use. I’m really happy that Apple decided to put some of this control in the hands of Mac users. The same goes for the Portrait effect, where you can dial in just the right level of softness in the background of your shot.
https://sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/thumbsup.mp4On macOS, you can control the zoom and crop of the camera as well as trigger animated effects.And Apple has added a bunch of reaction animations that appear when you trigger them. On macOS, you can click on icons in the Video Effects submenu. On all platforms, you can trigger the animations by making physical gestures in the video frame. If you make a thumbs-up gesture, an animated thought bubble containing a thumbs-up icon appears near your head. If you do two thumbs up, there’s a confetti drop. (Yes, you can turn this feature off in the same place where you control Portrait, Studio Light, and Center Stage—Control Center on the iPhone and iPad, and the video camera Menu Bar item on the Mac.)
All that virtual confetti and fireworks are quite technically impressive, and it works in any app, all because Apple’s intercepting the video camera input, analyzing it, modifying it, and then sending it on to whatever app wants it. It’s also using the same foreground and background segmentation that generates Portrait mode to create effects with depth, so the animated balloon release and confetti drop will include objects passing both in front of and behind the subject.
These effects won’t be for everyone, and yes, they’ll also be overused. But at the same time, they’re fun. I’ve been known to send someone an iMessage or two with the Lasers effect, possibly ironically. Making video more playful is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and for those who might disagree, I’ll point out that Apple also added a bunch of practical features in this category. There’s something for everyone here.
Oh, and one other new great video-related feature: You can now leave a voicemail when you’re calling someone via FaceTime video and they don’t answer. Finally, a solution for the moments when I’ve gotten everyone together and crowded them around my phone so we can sing “Happy Birthday” to a loved one, only to be left hanging. Just record that song as a voicemail and take off those scratchy party hats!—JS
Report for duty, Private SafariSafari Profiles can be color-coded and even use a different set of Favorites.For one of Apple’s most popular apps, Safari gets fairly little to crow about in this year’s update. What it does get is an even bigger focus on privacy. That’s no surprise in and of itself; Apple has, of course, been banging on the privacy drum1 for many years now, and it’s one of the ways it wages a soft-power war against rivals like Amazon, Meta, and even close frenemy Google.
Most of this year’s updates revolve around Private Browsing mode. Apple’s added a number of handy enhancements, including the ability to protect it with a passcode, biometrics, or (on the Mac) your Apple Watch. Now, when you leave Safari (on iOS or iPad) or lock or put to sleep your Mac, your return will be greeted with a note that Private Browsing is Locked, and you’ll be asked to authenticate. Private things are, after all, private, so this adds a layer of protection, not unlike the additions Apple made to the Hidden and Recently Deleted albums in Photos last year.
Private Browsing also gets two other enhancements: the first is the ability to select a different default search engine than the one you normally use, which you can choose in Settings > Safari on iOS/iPadOS or in Preferences > Search on macOS. Apple has instituted even more aggressive removal of link trackers in Private Browsing mode, removing trackers from URLs by default, as well as protecting you from fingerprinting and other trackers. Why would you not always want the latter on? Good question! Fortunately, you can enable that advanced protection for all browsing modes in Settings > Safari > Advanced > Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection in iOS/iPadOS and Preferences > Advanced on macOS. Given that people rarely want more tracking, this seems like a winner.
Finally, Apple has also instituted Profiles in Safari, a boon to those who might use their computer for both personal and work use or for, say, web developers who want to test how a site looks when they’re not logged in (instead of having to fall back to Private Browsing).
Think of Profiles like a separate instance of Safari that runs inside Safari: you can choose which extensions are installed, maintain a separate web history, different tab groups and bookmarks, and even distinct cookies/website data. So if you, for example, use different Google accounts for personal and business usage, you can create Personal and Work profiles that are each logged in to the correct account, with no bleed-over. Then, just toggle back and forth using the new dropdown menu on the Mac and iPad or the Profile menu in the tab view on the iPhone. Conveniently, profiles sync between your devices, so you only need to create them once. While this isn’t a feature I necessarily think I’ll use, there’s a certain slice of users for whom this will probably be a godsend.2 I’d like to see Apple institute a similar feature systemwide for those who really want the ability to consolidate their work and personal phones into a single device while keeping their data separate.—Dan Moren
Hey is for horses, SiriAs a frequent user of Siri, I’m always eager to try out Apple’s latest enhancements to the virtual assistant, and in 2023’s software updates, there are definitely a few. Unlike previous years, where improvements have largely focused on the breadth of what Siri can do, this year’s focus is more on how Siri does things.
Let’s take the biggest one first: you can now drop the “Hey” when you want to start a query; Siri will respond to its name alone. Was the “hey” particularly onerous? Maybe not, but it does feel a little less convoluted now—not to mention less rude. My biggest concern is false positives, and while I did notice a few, I can’t say it was that much more frequent than previously.3 During the testing period, it’s certainly been useful to be able to specifically talk to Siri on my devices running the new software by using the new simplified cue. It’s also worth noting that if you’d rather stick to the interjection-preceded phrase, that’s still an option in Settings > Siri & Search > Listen for on iOS/iPadOS and in System Settings > Siri & Spotlight > Listen for on macOS. That could be handy if you’d like to be able to address specific devices.
Apple has also now instituted back-to-back queries, meaning you don’t have to use the wake phrase/word for each subsequent request you want to make. You can even interrupt Siri giving you an answer if you want a different query. In general, this works well, but it does suffer a little bit from the overeager assistant problem: because Siri is still listening, there’s more of a chance that it’ll start picking up your conversation with someone else (or, say, audio from another source) and try to interpret it as a request. However, I’ve also found you can make Siri stop listening with either a “Never mind” or a “Thank you.” Finally, a way to encourage politeness to our robot friends!
Siri can also interpret requests during a call, and the person on the other end won’t be able to hear the responses. (Apple notes this doesn’t work in CarPlay.) I haven’t had a chance to test this out yet—I’m not sure there’s a good reason why I’d interact with Siri while on a call instead of simply typing out my request, but sure.
When it comes to new capabilities, the intelligent agent does get a few. For one, if you open a page in Reader mode in Safari, you can tell Siri to read it aloud by saying, “Siri, read this” (a feature which can also be triggered from the extensions menu in Safari). Doing this in the past was possible but a little trickier; it’s good that Apple surfaced it more easily. And Siri can remember which messaging apps you use to talk to specific contacts—though only for apps that have built-in support for it, so sorry to Slack and Discord users.
Of course, no conversation about Siri is complete without mentioning the 800 lb. gorilla that is ChatGPT. No, Siri isn’t going to give conversational AI a run for its money when it comes to generating answers on the fly, and yes, you’re still going to get kicked to search results for a lot of queries. Siri continues to inch along in improvements, and honestly, I find it to usually be…fine. Not great, but fine. That legacy continues in this year’s updates. —DM
AirPods Pro listen more closelyAlong with the new Mac, iPhone, and iPad operating systems comes an upgrade to the firmware in second-generation AirPods Pro. There’s a new listening mode, Adaptive Audio, that sort of sits in between Noise Cancellation and Transparency modes. (There’s even a new sound effect when you enter this mode, distinct from the chimes for the other modes.) According to Apple, when you’re in this mode, noise cancellation is emphasized in noisier environments and Transparency in quieter conditions.
I’ve spent the entire summer walking and running around my neighborhood and taking plane trips using a beta version of this new firmware. It’s basically replaced Transparency mode for me—in fact, I’ve set my AirPods Pro to toggle exclusively between Noise Cancellation and Adaptive Audio. When I’m walking or running with Adaptive Audio turned on, things are quieter than they were with Transparency, but still audible so I don’t feel like I’m cut off from the world. If I’m sitting on an airplane or working outside, I’ll toggle over to Noise Cancellation and push out the world.
Another new feature is Personalized Volume, which supposedly adjusts playback volume as your environment changes as well as based on learning your preferences in various contexts. I’ve kept this feature on all summer, but it never felt like it worked right. Perhaps it was doing some amazing adjustments and I just never noticed, but what it mostly seemed to do was turn down the volume on my podcasts just as I was about to head out the door for a run. I would invariably turn the volume back up, but it never seemed to learn its lesson.
The new Conversational Awareness feature is meant to allow your AirPods to adjust when you’re talking to someone—dipping down the audio and increasing the volume of the person you’re talking to. I love the vision of my AirPods being so smart that they can contextually adjust without my intervention. When I was on an airplane, having conversations with my seatmates and the flight attendants, it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, in other contexts, it failed me. When I’m walking my dog4, I have to give her verbal commands every so often, and every time I did, the audio I was listening to would dip. In an ideal world, the AirPods would realize that I wasn’t talking to anyone—that literally, there was no voice on the other end of the line. In the meantime, though, I just had to turn Conversational Awareness off entirely.
If you frequently take phone calls on your AirPods, this fall’s firmware updates will make your life slightly easier. For all AirPods Pro, the most recent generation of AirPods, and the AirPods Max, when you’re on a call you can click once to mute or unmute your microphone. A double click hangs up the call.—JS
Shopping with RemindersGrocery Lists section ingredients into different subcategories.When Reminders launched it was pretty bare-bones, but in recent years, it’s gained a surprising amount of functionality, to the point that it’s no longer a sacrifice to use it instead of some big, powerful to-do app. I rely on Reminders to keep track of all sorts of things, and this year’s platform updates may chip away at one of my last remaining holdouts: the old grocery list. I’d previously relied on AnyList, but its advantages (or, at least, the ones we’ve used it for) have gotten narrower as time has gone by; now Reminders has picked off another with the ability to automatically categorize items added to a grocery list, sorting them into categories like Dairy or Meat, or Pasta, Rice & Beans. It even remembers if you manually change something to another category and put it there in the future. (How does it know if something is a grocery list? Go to the list details screen and choose “Grocery” from List Type).
These culinary improvements go hand in hand with another Reminders addition: sections. You can now add specific categories to your to-do lists if you need a little bit of extra organization. For example, I’ve made sections of my Personal list called Short Term, Medium Term, and Long Term. Not only does this help prioritize the tasks I need to do now, but it also means I can collapse the Long Term list and not have the items there staring at me accusingly.
Which, in turn, works along with another Reminders improvement: columns view. I, personally, find this much more useful on a wider screen device like an iPad or a Mac, but once you’ve added different sections, you can view them as vertical columns and scroll through them horizontally, which is especially handy if you have a lot of items in a category.
If I have a nit to pick here, it’s that I don’t especially love the aesthetics of sections because each one gets a blank to-do item at the bottom—I get it, it’s to make it easier to add something to a specific category. But it’s a bit cluttered and leads to me feeling like I have more items than I really do. It’s a tricky problem to solve, but I hope Apple takes another crack at it.
Two other new features make the process of adding reminders more powerful: suggestions and early reminders. The former remembers reminders you’ve previously added and offers an autocomplete-like feature, though it only fills in the name, not the other details, as far as I can tell. (You can disable this feature if you prefer.)
The second is Early Reminders: when you create a reminder with a date or time attached to it, you’ll also have the ability to set a second reminder in advance, just as in a calendar event. You can choose minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months beforehand.
One feature I am still lacking in Reminders is the ability to add shared lists created by someone else to a group. I like the idea of taming my myriad lists, and I have many of the ones I share with my wife in a single group—but I can’t put the lists she shares with me in the same place. It’s a curious omission that makes my reminders feel more disorganized than it really is.
Overall, while none of this year’s improvements may shake the Earth in and of themselves, they all go towards making Reminders an even more comprehensive and capable application, one that I’ve got no regrets about relying on.—DM
Photos knows your petsPeople and pets come together in Photos.The Photos app has gotten a nice upgrade this year across all of Apple’s platforms. People with furry friends will be delighted to discover that face detection of people has been upgraded to also include pet detection. The old People album is now called People and Pets for this very reason. (Apple says that its recognition engine for people has also been upgraded to identify photos when people’s faces are turned away from the camera.)
A new widget setting allows you to choose specific albums to shuffle through in a Photos widget. Before, users were more or less at the mercy of the Photos app’s suggestion engine. But now you can pick an album (or multiple widgets, each showing different albums!) and the widget will shuffle through just those photos. I set a Photos widget shuffling through my album of photos from my trip to New Zealand earlier this year, and it has been a complete delight.
For a few years now, the best way to share a large number of photos with a friend was to do it on iOS or iPadOS, where the Photos app could generate an iCloud link that provided access to all those photos. Mac users now have access to that same feature, at last.—JS
Passing around passwordsA password sharing group in macOS SonomaApple has been improving its password manager a lot over the last few years. Yes, it’s an alternative to third-party password managers like 1Password, but it’s probably more important as an alternative to writing a bunch of passwords down in a notebook or—much worse—using terrible passwords everywhere.
Adding a password to a sharing group in iOS 17.Most users will encounter the password manager inside Safari, but the interface for managing it is located in the Passwords section of the Settings app (System Settings on Mac). And this year, there’s a major new feature to be found there: password sharing. If you happen to share password information with someone else—whether it’s bank information with a partner, the password to a streaming service with one of your kids, or the login to a web tool with a collaborator—you can create a sharing group and share that information with them via the password manager.
Apple has wisely decided that you don’t share individual passwords with arbitrary collections of contacts. Instead, you create a sharing group, give it a name, and add people to it—then you add individual passwords to a particular group. This makes a lot of sense, as you’re likely to be sharing passwords with the same person or collection of people. So, for example, a Six Colors group lets us share logins relevant to this website. After you create a group, you can see a list of all the passwords in that group, manage who is a member of that group, and add passwords or move them in from outside the group. All passwords are synced via iCloud, so if someone changes the password, that change will sync to everyone else in the group.
This feature is a major step forward for Apple because it’s hard to imagine a full-featured password manager without the ability to share and sync passwords among a group. Sure, passkeys are the future (and they’ll be synced among users, too!), but right now, the easier Apple makes cloud-based password sharing, the better.—JS
Fill out the PDF form, pleaseApple’s platforms are much better at letting you fill out PDF forms.Even if you had given me 500 chances, I could never have guessed that one of the banner features of Apple’s 2023 software releases would be related to PDFs. But as boring as PDFs are, they’ve fulfilled Adobe’s dream of being the de facto standard for digital paper. PDFs are everywhere, and they matter. And yet Apple’s operating systems have never supported PDF forms as well as they could have.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to fill out a PDF form and either the form fields are either not visible without downloading an app or simply aren’t there. And how many times I’ve used Apple’s markup feature to float text on top of the page, then export the final file in order to “burn in” my entries so that people can see my text when I send it back. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
Someone at Apple noticed. Apple’s platforms just got a lot smarter about PDFs, using machine-learning algorithms to detect form fields and turn them into fields you can enter yourself—or even have Apple’s autofill technology do it for you. (The autofill feature, which did appear in some beta versions this summer, is forthcoming later this year.)
This summer, a very large corporation (but not the one you’re thinking of) emailed me a multi-page form to fill out. I immediately used it to put Apple’s new functionality to the test—with pretty decent results. Though it recognized most of the fields on the form, a few at the top were uneditable, and a few fields were a bit taller than intended. However, I was able to fill out the important parts of the form, and when an answer of mine was longer than the space provided, Apple’s system shrunk the font size of my answer so that it fit. (Unfortunately, a second PDF form sent by my local humane society didn’t get parsed at all on the Mac and only partially on iOS.)
To top it all off, form entries are automatically saved back to the originating file, so you can quickly fill out a form in Quick Look (or Preview on Mac) and then send the result right back. I know doing paperwork is boring, but any feature that makes it a little less tedious is a winner in my book.—JS
(PDFs are also much better now when inserted into a note in the Notes app. For more about that, read on.)
Messages gets the messageMessages is one of Apple’s most used apps across all its platforms, and it’s upgraded the experience in several ways with these new updates.
Let’s start with the biggest interface change: Apple has ditched the confusing and cluttered Messages App interface for a simple one: there’s a big plus button next to the message-composition field, and if you tap it, you’re prompted with a big, easy to tap list of six common functions, followed by a More button. You can tap and hold any item to drag it between the top list and the “More” drawer so you can choose the functions that work best for you. Camera and Photos are right there at the top, as they should be. (On the Mac, you still need to click an Applications icon to bring up a list.)
The new Live Stickers feature uses Live Photos and subject-detection technology to let you “peel off” an animated image from a Live Photo and use it as a sticker. (I tried it with a picture of my dog.) You create a Live Sticker by tapping on Stickers and then tapping the plus button, then choosing an eligible Live Photo from your photo library. When you tap on that photo, you’ll see a preview of what the sticker will look like, and you can choose to add it to your sticker gallery. It works pretty well! I was able to find a picture of a flapping AirDancer tube Santa Claus (on my roof—yes, I bought the blower and everything) and turn it into a sticker with a few taps.
Even the most tidy Messages list can get cluttered up with one-time passcodes sent via text message. I hate them—they’re momentarily convenient but then clutter up Messages for days or weeks. Apple is on the case—when you autofill a login with that number, you can choose to have Messages delete that message so you don’t have to ever see it again. During the beta period, I was sometimes repeatedly asked if I wanted to start deleting those messages, but it seems to have settled down now. I auto-fill the code in Safari and boom, the message vanishes from my Messages list. Lovely.
Apple also added this feature to autofill codes sent in email, but it’s a bit more hit-and-miss. The feature only works if you’re using Apple’s Mail app and is only useful if you set your email account to Push. (Apple Mail won’t enable Push for my Gmail account, unfortunately.) Apple also doesn’t provide any sort of API for third-party email apps to recognize that they’ve received an authentication code and provide it to the system.
The new swipe-to-reply feature makes it easier than ever to reply to a particular message in a conversation thread. Just swipe left to right on any message, and Messages will jump you into reply mode. I think this will make replying to Messages a lot easier because once you learn the gesture, it can easily become second nature to you. (Though I find myself swiping accidentally and needing to tap to get out of the reply interface!)
I like the feature conceptually—the problem is how Messages displays those replies. It’s messy. Replies appear with the message they’re attached to, which clutters up the main message thread even more. I know there are no “right” answers to a feature like this—just look at Slack and Discord to see wildly different approaches to creating threads in message chains—but I don’t think Apple’s approach works very well. If people don’t use replies in Messages, it won’t be because the quick swipe-to-reply gesture didn’t take off. It’ll be because they don’t like how replies make their conversations look.
Once you check in via Messages, you’ll see the status on the lock screen (top), and people will be notified when you arrive at your destination (bottom).I love the idea behind Apple’s new Check In feature, though I’m not sure how much I’ll end up using it. It’s very easy to use: just access it via the apps menu in Messages, and you’re off and running. I do appreciate that it lets you choose whether to only share a limited amount of information with the person or an extensive list of details. Though Apple specifically detailed Check In as something you might want to use when you’re headed to a particular location, it’s worth noting that it can also be simply set to a timer if you’re, for example, at home alone and want somebody else to be in the loop.—JS & DM
Notes takes noteOver the past seventeen years, Notes has gone from being an underpowered skeuomorphic joke (remember lined yellow paper and being stuck in Marker Felt?) to being a powerhouse of an app, and this year’s updates take it even further, with two major new features: embedding PDFs and links between notes.
Multiple people can mark up a PDF in Notes in something approaching real-time.The former feels very much like the kind of thing that Apple was aiming for but didn’t quite deliver in last year’s Freeform app. Not only can you drop a PDF right into any note and scroll through its pages horizontally, but you can annotate and mark up that PDF as you go. And if it’s a shared note, your collaborators will be able to see your additions as you put them in. In my testing, this works best with the Apple Pencil on an iPad, but it does work on other devices as well—you just need to activate the Markup plugin. (On iPadOS, you can use the Pencil to draw right on the thumbnail images instead of expanding into Quick View.) This is huge for collaboration.
Finally, you can link to other Notes!Linking between notes is a feature that I’ve wanted for some time. While Apple’s implementation isn’t likely to deal a severe blow to more complex apps like Obsidian, its utility is undeniable. Say you’re working on a review of operating-system software and want to link, as a reference, to some notes you took. Yes, you can control-click or tap-and-hold and select Add Link, or even use the command-K shortcut if you’ve got a keyboard, but best of all, you can type >>, and Notes will offer a pop-up menu of notes you’ve recently edited. You can search that list by typing the first few letters of the note you want or even create a new note right from there.
Notes also adds a handful of smaller features that you might find useful, including formats for Monospaced and Blockquote, as well as an ability to open a note in Pages if it happens to have outgrown Notes. Not that that even seems like a possibility these days, what with everything the app can do.—DM
Textual healingLike it or not, we’re not going to get away from typing as the main way we interact with our devices anytime soon (heck, even the Vision Pro has an “onscreen” keyboard for text entry). This year, Apple’s made several tweaks to its text entry features across the board, though some will definitely be more useful on specific devices.
First up is a new transformer model for autocorrect. This leverages machine learning to improve accuracy for text entry across English, French, and Spanish; however, improved on-device models should help other languages as well. Among the specific improvements touted by Apple during its WWDC keynote is that a certain expletive will no longer be corrected to “ducking” and in my experience, that’s true. Autocorrect also better understands sentences and can correct words to fit an appropriate context (think “we’ll” versus “will”). But one of the best improvements in this year’s updates is an improved autocorrect interface: corrected words are now underlined briefly, letting you tap or control-click on them in order to revert to whatever you originally typed.
Apple’s also really talked up its improvements to predictive text this year. They now appear inline as you type, showing up as grayed-out letters or words after the cursor. You can hit the spacebar to accept the predictions, and in some cases, it’ll even suggest multiple words to finish the sentence. It’s wild and a little surreal, and while I find it very useful on iOS, retraining myself on the Mac—where I type much faster than with iOS’s onscreen keyboard—has proved to be a more difficult task (and ultimately perhaps less useful). And according to Apple, text predictions will learn from you the more you type, providing suggestions that are tuned to the way you write; in my experience, that’s proved true to an impressive degree. I’ve seen it routinely suggest phrases that feel like something I was about to say…which definitely is a little bit eerie as well.
Even the venerable cursor has gotten an upgrade this year: it can now show a tooltip icon to indicate certain types of state, including when Caps Lock is on, when you switch input languages, and when dictation is active. It’s a little weird after so long, but I quickly got to appreciate this handy little icon—especially the Caps Lock indicator.
Speaking of Dictation, that’s gotten improvements across the board as well. That includes more on-device models for translating speech into text and better accuracy overall, and the Mac gets a feature already on iOS: fluidly switching between dictation and typing. There’s even a cursor upgrade for Dictation as well: a subtle glow in the background that indicates when the feature is active.—DM
- It’s a very quiet drum. ↩
- (I set up a YouTube profile specifically to keep my own YouTube use separate from the account I use to post content for Six Colors, The Incomparable, and Upgrade. Useful!—JS) ↩
- Parents of kids named Sierra may differ. ↩
- Her name is Maisy, which has the first two vowel sounds of “Hey Siri,” which has led to some bad activations. Fortunately, now that you can trigger without the “hey,” those activations seem to have gone away. ↩
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 280,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
It’s a shame they don’t show movies in the Steve Jobs Theater, or at least not ones that I’ve ever been invited to. It’s a fantastic venue with a staggeringly bright digital projection system, but the star of the show might be the sound system. Tuesday’s Apple presentation didn’t just look good from my seat a dozen rows back in the SJT; the bass in the music breaks rumbled my seat spectacularly.
Anyway, sound systems aside, here are my reactions to Tuesday’s big event:
Apple’s slow roll continues
It’s been 13 years since I published a John Gruber column in Macworld about Apple’s iterative approach to product design, but it holds true to this day. Everyone (understandably?) wants Apple to constantly blow minds with revelatory product introductions that will change our lives and the world as we know it. But the truth is, the revelations are few and far between.
Most of the time, Apple just iterates, pushing everything forward. Most people don’t buy every single new model of every Apple product, so they experience that iteration multiplied by two or three or four, many years of improvement dropped into a new phone all at once. (My wife is getting an iPhone 15 next week; she’s been using an iPhone XS for years, and it’ll be an enormous upgrade for her.)
When did the iPhone leap forward? The early years were heady, as early years in just about any product category can be, but after the groundbreaking release of the iPhone 6 in 2014, the only real quantum leap in iPhone tech was the iPhone X in 2017. It’s a slow roll. But roll it does, and today, the amazing cutting-edge iPhone X is so outmoded that it’s not eligible to be updated to iOS 17.
As I watched Apple roll out the iPhone 15, knowing that it was keeping most of its powder dry for the iPhone 15 Pro, I was struck by what a good deal the basic, standard, boring base-model iPhone is. Not only is it perhaps the most affordable iPhone in years, but it’s managed to accumulate a whole lot of great features that debuted in the high-end Pro phones, like the Dynamic Island and a 48MP camera sensor.
Almost every Apple event is greeted with raspberries from a portion of the audience that expects nothing less than revelation. But it’s not Apple’s job to excite that crowd. Its job is to keep pushing the iPhone forward so that everyone who’s finally ready to upgrade has several years of improvements to get excited about.
What’s in a chip name?On podcasts for the last few weeks, I’ve been grousing about the word Bionic sticking around in Apple chip names. It’s a strange bit of branding in that it basically doesn’t mean anything, and yet Apple insisted on using it to dress up its march of A-something-teen processors. As a kid, I loved “The Bionic Woman” and “The Six Million Dollar Man,” but surely it was time to move on.
This year, Apple has done so—but with a twist. The new iPhone Pro chip is called, well, A17 Pro. Pro like the phone, but also Pro like M2 Pro, Apple’s higher-end Mac chip.
It’s given me all sorts of thoughts that another appearance of Bionic never would. Is this a case of Apple’s marketing just re-using a word it uses for devices and chips in order to simplify things?
I suppose it could be, but what happens next year? Will the base-model iPhone 16 be powered by an A17 Pro chip? (Apple’s marketing of the iPhone 15—”No wonder it started as a Pro chip”—suggests that’s a possibility.) But still, does it mean that every A-series chip into infinity will be “Pro”? Or does the existence of the A17 Pro chip imply that there will also be an A17 or A18 non-pro chip, maybe someday?
I don’t know what Apple will do, but surely it would be a cleaner approach going forward to have the iPhone 16 be powered by an A18 chip and the iPhone 16 Pro to be powered by the A18 Pro chip. Does Apple want to make two separate Phone-class chips, or is that a waste? Would the non-Pro chip power low-end iPhones and HomePods and Apple TVs and the like, while the Pro chip would power the iPhone Pro and some selection of iPads, maybe?
It’s a mystery. This all could have been avoided if Apple had opted for a different name, but this one is going to make me ponder the future spread of the Apple silicon product line for the next year.
What does the A17 Pro mean for the M3?All signs point to the A17 Pro being the foundation of Apple’s M3 series of chips for the Mac, which may begin arriving this fall or early next year. All the chips in generations of Apple silicon have the same CPU, GPU, and other component designs, but the Mac versions are scaled up, and some other features are added in.
Based on Apple’s claims, the A17’s CPU is up to 10% faster, and the GPU is up to 20% faster—though the A17 Pro has one more GPU core than the A16 Bionic did. Apple also claims the Neural Engine is twice as fast.
It’s hard not to imagine how Apple’s next-generation GPU cores (including hardware-accelerated ray tracing) might manifest themselves in the next wave of Mac releases. Apple’s announcement of some console games coming to the iPhone for the first time with the iPhone 15 Pro makes me wonder about those games also coming to the iPad and Mac.
Did Apple build a better set of GPU cores so that the iPhone 15 Pro could run console games, or does the iPhone 15 Pro run console games because Apple built a better set of GPU cores? It may be that Apple’s focus on creating more graphics power for the Mac has ended up rubbing off on the iPhone a bit, too. Sure, there have always been game demos at iPhone events, but that’s because they’re a great way for Apple to brag about how fast their chips are. Is this more of the same, or is something more going on here? I don’t know.
What to do with 48 megapixelsLast year’s rollout of the 48-megapixel sensor in the iPhone 14 Pro was… restrained. The new sensor was impressive, but 48MP captures were limited to RAW format. Otherwise, the sensor was being used to provide better sampling and generated 12MP output. The only supported camera presets were the full-frame 1x mode and the 2x mode, which used the center of the sensor to generate a picture.
What a difference a year makes! Now Apple’s targeting 24MP for its regular output and has provided a bunch of presets between the 1x and 2x zooms that match equivalent focal lengths. And, of course, you can now opt to shoot a 48MP HEIF image, which is smaller than the enormous RAW file and perfectly suitable for a lot of uses.
But the photo story doesn’t end there. I was struck by how far Portrait Mode has come. When it was introduced, it was a very special feature that involved using two cameras to estimate depth information so that the camera software could digitally blur backgrounds to create a pleasing depth effect.
Today, not only is the iPhone Pro equipped with a LIDAR scanner and three cameras, but it’s also got so much horsepower that it can run a sophisticated machine-learning model designed to detect subjects and backgrounds. The result is the creation of depth maps for images with such confidence and speed that Apple’s now capturing depth data whenever it thinks it’s appropriate—meaning that if you shoot a picture but aren’t in Portrait Mode, well, you can just edit that photo later and blur the background anyway. (And on top of that, you will be able to change the focus point from one subject to another after the fact.)
It goes to show you that it’s not just about the sensor but the software and hardware built around it.
You’re my satelliteLast year, Apple (somewhat surprisingly) announced satellite-based communication features for the iPhone 14 series. The announcement included a carefully worded statement that the features were “free for two years” with the purchase of an iPhone, which set a ticking countdown clock that is—let me just check my watch—about halfway through.
This year, I wondered if we might get some clarity about what Apple’s long-term intentions are for satellite features. And… nope! The space can has been kicked down the space road. New iPhones will still come with two years of free satellite connectivity, which now includes a roadside assistance feature.
I wonder if this feature was always planned or if it’s the result of an influx of “my car broke down” messages to emergency providers who really don’t want to be dispatching tow trucks. Either way, Apple seems to have decided to route that information to a separate dispatcher. In the U.S., where the feature is rolling out first, it’s the American Automobile Association.
So what’s next? Surely, next year, Apple will need to explain what happens to iPhone 14 buyers who are coming to the end of their free two years. I’d imagine that they’ll be offered a monthly or annual service to continue unlimited access or, alternatively, a per-incident charge to their Apple-linked credit card. (The last thing you want to do if you’re Apple is tell someone, “We’d like to save your life, but you didn’t subscribe to iCloud Plus.”)
There’s a bandwidth issue here, too, as Apple’s satellite partner, Globalstar, needs to expand its capacity. It just signed a $64M deal with SpaceX to launch 17 more satellites in 2025, with Apple footing 95% of the bill and getting access to 85% of the capacity.
As Globalstar’s network expands its reach and breadth, I have to imagine that Apple will eventually open up the satellite feature for arbitrary text messaging, so you can send a status report to a loved one from a remote location that’s a bit more than the current pin drop in Find My. But that expansion might require waiting for the expanded network to arrive.
Also, keep in mind that since most iPhones are sold to people who have sat out an upgrade for more than a year, the number of phones with access to the Globalstar network will increase by quite a lot over the next few months. I assume they’re carefully managing the bandwidth, but that might be reason enough to keep the satellite features of the iPhone pretty strictly limited for now.
Easter basketFinally, a few remaining short takes:
Reinforcement of Vision Pro. I think Apple felt it was important to keep Vision Pro in the public consciousness (or perhaps return it there?) at its most-watched media showcase of the year. Rather than just touching base, though, it went ahead and introduced a new feature that allows iPhones to capture stereo video through the two parallel cameras on the back of an iPhone held in horizontal orientation.
I imagine the stereo effect will be subtle since those lenses are a lot closer together than human eyes are, but I like the idea that Apple can use the popularity of the iPhone to boost the amount of content available for the Vision Pro.
I imagine any recent iPhone with those horizontal lenses will be able to capture stereo video, not just the iPhone 15. And I assume if you’re on a non-stereo device, you’ll be able to view those videos normally as a single capture.
A restrained Apple Watch Ultra update. There are no sales figures, obviously, but from what I can tell, the Apple Watch Ultra seems to have been received quite well. And yet this year’s Ultra 2 announcement was less than a lot of observers expected, most notably in the fact that it’s still only available in the one shade of titanium.
Let’s acknowledge that Apple’s titanium metallurgy department was kept pretty busy with the iPhone 15 Pro this cycle, so the Apple Watch Ultra was not a priority. Still, I might have been tempted by a black variation, and it wasn’t there. (Boo hoo, I know.)
I have another theory, though: Apple famously plans its hardware designs years in advance, way too early to materially react to success or failure in a single model year. So perhaps the plan for the Apple Watch Ultra was always restrained. Obviously, the arrival of a new System-in-Package for the Series 9 would require a commensurate update on the Ultra side, but leaving the exterior design and finish untouched was probably a prudent move.
Apple had other fish to fry this year, but I would expect the Apple Watch Ultra to spread its wings a bit more in terms of design and color in the coming years. In the meantime, I’m holding on to my black titanium Series 7.
Someone check on Apple’s Color Czar. I understand Apple leaning into the titanium finish of the iPhone 15 Pro and creating a series of subtle color variations using a vapor-deposition technique. The phones look great, and it’s not like pro-level iPhones have ever come in bright colors.
But I don’t know what Apple’s doing on the iPhone 15 side. The colors are incredibly pale. Anyone seeking a vibrant option is really out of luck. I do think the new ion-infusion technique they’re using in the glass looks great on the camera bump, and I admit that the camera bump is usually the only part of the phone that peeks through someone’s case. But still… I don’t think it’s too much to ask for at least one iPhone to have a brighter, more forward color.
Not this year. This year, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s either black or found in an easter basket.
What surprised us at Apple’s “Wonderlust” keynote, our thoughts on the new iPhone Action Button, what we wanted Apple to announce at its September event, and the retro Apple design elements we’d like to see again.…
The Internet’s very own Dr. Drang tries to figure out how it is that Apple’s titanium phones feel significantly lighter than the steel ones, despite a small difference.…
Jason’s back from Cupertino and it’s time to break down everything he saw at the September 2023 Apple media event: The new titanium-framed iPhone 15 Pro, the pastel iPhone 15, the DoubleTap-enabled Apple Watch, and… green leaves for some but not others?…
I attended the “Wonderlust” iPhone and Apple Watch event on Tuesday, and was able to spend some time with the new products in a demo area set up in the Steve Jobs Theater.…
It was an odd fall keynote for Apple. As expected, revisions of the iPhone and Apple Watch took the spotlight, but there were relatively few surprises overall, many of the details having leaked ahead of time, and a large amount of time spent on the company’s environmental initiatives and innovative materials.…
Just a few hours ahead of Apple’s impending iPhone event, Intel has taken the wraps off the latest version of the Thunderbolt spec:
Thunderbolt 5 will deliver 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bi-directional bandwidth, and with Bandwidth Boost it will provide up to 120 Gbps for the best display experience.
…
Ian King and Mark Gurman of Bloomberg report that Apple is extending its deal with Qualcomm for cellular chips for three more years:
Though the new contract extends until 2026, Apple could still start using its own modem before then. The company has been planning to gradually roll out the component.
In fact, Qualcomm is only projecting that it will have a 20% share of the business when the 2026 iPhone launches. Still, the company used similar wording with the original agreement, suggesting that it could be a conservative forecast.
Apple’s been working to replace Qualcomm’s modems in its devices since 2018, and purchased Intel’s chip division to aid in the effort in 2019. Originally Apple expected to phase out Qualcomm’s modems in favor of ones designed at Apple by, well, now or early next year. But now that window has been moved outward.
Anything could happen, but Qualcomm’s disclosure that 2026 iPhones would only be fractionally covered by Qualcomm suggests that Apple’s expecting to ship some devices with its own chips before the term ends. I would expect it to be a careful ramp up, perhaps over multiple years, since the iPhone’s cellular connection is one that Apple can’t afford to screw up. I’d expect we’ll see Apple cellular modems in iPads and perhaps the iPhone SE (and dare I suggest MacBooks?) before they appear in mainline iPhones.
In the meantime, Qualcomm gets several more years of high profile business, as well as a bit of a glow from being the leader in a high-tech sphere that even Apple hasn’t managed to crack—at least, not yet.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker. With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
So, join over 280,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Who wants cheap MacBooks and USB-C iPhones?! Everyone. Apple sets things on the spin cycle and the UK government seems stuck on a roundabout.
Wish fulfillment This week saw a rumor about a low-cost MacBook make the rounds.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I’ve been planning to set up a second workspace in my house, and the biggest stumbling block has been figuring out what display to place on the desk. I’ve got an Apple Studio Display on my primary desk, and since it was preceded by an iMac Pro and a 5K iMac, I’ve really gotten used to having a 27-inch screen with 5K resolution.
But that Apple Studio Display costs $1599, which is a lot. The LG UltraFine lists at $1299, and I can find it for under $1000 on Amazon, but I’ve also heard from many friends and readers that it’s got mediocre build quality and some reliability issues.
Samsung decided to take its own crack at the Apple-friendly 27-inch 5K monitor format with its new ViewFinity S9 display, which lists at the same $1599 price as Apple’s display but offers a bunch of different features that potentially make it a better buy. So I bought one and took it for a spin.
Depending on what your needs are, the ViewFinity S9 might be a much better option than the Apple display. It’s certainly a legitimate competitor to Apple’s display in a market that’s thin on the ground. But Samsung’s display is also saddled with a bunch of quirks that leave me unconvinced that most Apple-using buyers would choose it over Apple’s display at the same price.
Design decisionsThe ViewFinity S9’s physical design is clearly influenced by Apple’s minimalist approach. It’s rectangular with very small bezels, clad in silver (some metal, some plastic), with the only Samsung branding on the back of the display where you don’t have to look at it. It’s using the same familiar 27-inch IPS 5120-by-2880-pixel panel I’ve had on my desk for years. If you put one of these on your desk, it would not stick out like a sore thumb compared to all the Apple hardware that surrounds it. (Well… except for the sensor housing that sticks out of the bottom of the display, but more on that in a moment.)
The Samsung display comes with a Thunderbolt 4 port, three USB-C (2.0) ports, and a mini DisplayPort input, which is also on par with Apple’s display. But the ViewFinity S9 hardware lags behind Apple’s display in quite a few areas. First off, it doesn’t plug into a wall—instead, it plugs into a large, heavy black power brick. And while I’ve grown a little jaded about Apple’s boasting about the multi-speaker audio arrays in its laptops and displays, I was not prepared for the lousy, tinny sound that came out of the ViewFinity S9’s speakers. (I guess that’s why it’s not called HearFinity…)
Samsung’s magnet-attach webcam (top) can’t tilt over the edge far enough to frame me properly at my desk (bottom).One of the knocks on the Apple display is that the company chose a wide-screen camera with Center Stage for its webcam, resulting in a lower-quality picture than many people expected. Samsung does this differently, including a 4K webcam that attaches magnetically to the back of the display, where there’s a set of pins that carry USB via an included adapter. It’s a perfectly fine webcam, but because it’s mounted on the back of the display, it barely peeks above the top of the display. While the camera can extend upward slightly and tilt down, my head was still at the very bottom of the frame—and there’s no real way to adjust it beyond that. With third-party software, I was able to zoom in and make it look a little better, but at that point, it looked worse than the Studio Display’s webcam. (Turns out this stuff is harder than it looks.)
While the two displays have the same base price, the fact is that the $1599 Samsung display is more ergonomically versatile than the Apple display at the same price. Samsung’s default base is both tilt and height adjustable—it even lets you rotate the display 90 degrees. If you want a tilt and height adjustable Studio Display, Apple will charge you $1999.
There’s more. The ViewFinity comes with a glare-resistant coating by default; if you want Apple’s glare-reduced model, that’ll be $1899 (without the adjustable stand) or $2299 (with it). These days, I don’t sit with my back to a window, so I don’t really need that glare reduction, but back in my corporate days, I frequently had a window right behind me, and having an anti-glare screen was a necessity.
This gets to the core of the decision-making process when weighing the ViewFinity S9 versus the Studio Display. If you’re content with a non-adjustable stand (or using a VESA mount, since Apple doesn’t charge extra to not include a stand), and if you don’t need an anti-glare screen, the Samsung display will cost appreciably less than Apple’s model. The question is, do the weird quirks of owning a Samsung display outweigh that price difference?
Smart TV features: bonus or burden?
Here’s the thing about the ViewFinity S9: It’s not just a standalone display—it’s a Samsung Smart TV with all the features and quirks that come along with that status. If you think it’s weird that the Apple Studio Display runs iOS under the covers, think about the idea of your display running Samsung’s Tizen OS and requiring software updates via a menu interface driven by the included infrared remote control. If you are seeking a simple, dumb display, run away.
I’m not going to review the Smart TV features on the ViewFinity S9, though I will say that I found the remote’s button layout confusing. Out of the box, it didn’t work quite right, so I had to dive into the menus to properly set it to use the right settings as a Mac display.
When you put your Mac to sleep or shut it down, a bright blue screen appears, warning you that the display will enter standby mode in 45 seconds. It’s jarring, and if there’s a way to turn that feature off, I couldn’t find it. When the display’s in standby mode, it will spring back into action the moment you start up or wake up your Mac. (If you choose to turn the display off, however, you’ll need to turn it back on when you wake or boot your Mac.)
The moment I connected to my home Wi-Fi, things got weirder. The TV suddenly popped up a live TV guide, apparently fed from Samsung-mediated streaming stations. I could install various apps. I also had to agree to a bunch of Samsung privacy policies, and when I tried to find out where to turn off or opt out of all tracking features, I couldn’t do it from the device. Instead, Samsung referred me to a website that didn’t really make any sense.
The entire process was unpleasant and made me uneasy about what the display was actually going to be able to monitor and send back to Samsung. As a result, after I updated the display’s firmware, I just turned off the Wi-Fi.
That’s unfortunate, since the display does support AirPlay—and without Wi-Fi, there’s no AirPlay. However, when the Wi-Fi was on, I did test the AirPlay functionality. My movie looked like a soap opera because motion smoothing was turned on by default. I tried to turn it off, but every remote press disconnected the AirPlay. I finally managed to turn off that setting using the physical power button on the back of the display, right above the back of the infrared receiver housing. (Yes, the Samsung display does have a power button—putting it one up on Apple—though it’s more of a multi-function rocker switch that navigates menu items.)
If you aren’t concerned about Samsung’s privacy policies and want a 27-inch computer display that can double as a smart TV, here it is! There are probably better options out there, but if you’ve got severely limited space (like a college dorm room), the ViewFinity S9 can pull double duty.
Back to the drawing boardIf I were only in the market for a base-model Apple Studio Display, I wouldn’t opt for the Samsung display at the same price. Since I don’t want the Smart TV features, they just get in the way, and (surprise, surprise) Apple does a better job of integrating its own display into the Mac interface.
Samsung really missed an opportunity to price this display closer to LG’s model than to Apple’s. The ViewFinity S9 only becomes a serious competitor to Apple’s display if you want an adjustable stand, need your display to be resistant to glare, or both. Frankly, I don’t like the idea of spending even $1599 on a display, but I certainly wouldn’t want to spend $1899 or $1999 or $2299 on one.
As for the ViewFinity S9 and my second workspace? Nope. I’m going to keep looking. I’m returning the Samsung.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.
Browser extensions that offer AI features, but steal user data, are everywhere. That’s why many companies—including Apple—have banned their employees from using large-language models. And that’s just one potential attack surface.
Kolide lets IT and security teams write checks that detect device compliance issues, and have started creating checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Here’s a video about how Kolide can help companies enforce device compliance.
Does the battle between Disney and Charter augur the end of the cable business model as we know it? Is the entertainment industry going bankrupt slowly, then all at once? It’s time for an all-Sports Corner episode of Downstream!
Go to the podcast page.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to day to bid goodbye to a titan of technology, a revolutionary amongst rebels, a connoisseur of connections, taken from us too—well, perhaps not too soon. I speak, of course, of our friend and colleague: the Lightning cable.
There are those who will say that such a send-off is premature, but the writing is on the wall. When Apple unveils its latest iPhone next week, the expectation is that the venerable Lightning port will be supplanted by one of its eternal rivals: USB-C.
But let us not simply mourn what is being taken from us: let us instead remember and celebrate what Lightning did with its life, the joy and happiness it brought to an entire ecosystem. Its presence will not soon be forgotten.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Google’s legacy as it turns 25, the websites we still visit manually, our preferred text editors, and what we’d miss most switching our smartphone platforms.…
A big disagreement over the Apple Watch 9! Will the podcast go on?! Oh, it goes on.
Go to the podcast page.
On Tuesday Aaron Lee and Eifeh Strom of Digitimes reported that Apple is “reportedly developing a low-cost MacBook series to compete with Chromebook models in the education sector that could be released as early as the second half of 2024, according to industry sources.”
The story goes on:
Sources said Apple will likely launch a new product line for its low-cost MacBooks to differentiate it from the existing MacBook Air and Pro lines. The outer appearance will still use a metal casing but made of different materials. The unit price of the mechanical components will be lower, allowing for a more affordable price aimed at the education market, similar to the positioning of Chromebooks.
If I had a dime for every “Apple’s going to release a low-end product to compete with other low-end devices” rumor, I’d have a hefty bank account by now. And you can find plenty of stories debunking this report as “sketchy.” At the risk of giving this report more credulity than it deserves, let me try to understand what this report might actually mean.
It seems to me that this is based on a rumor in the supply chain, in which Apple is investigating the development of a cheaper laptop. The whole angle about education and Chromebooks strikes me as speculation heaped on the bare rumor in order to make a clearer narrative for the report.
Let me supply an alternative one. The modern Apple strategy is to re-use older technologies to create more affordable products: the iPhone SE and the low-end iPad are just two of those examples. The M1 MacBook Air still being sold alongside the M2 model is perhaps the best example on the Mac side.
Why does the M1 MacBook Air exist? Because Apple wants to have a product available at a (relatively) low price point: currently it’s $899 for education and $999 for everyone else. That’s not a price the M2 model could hit and keep Apple’s traditionally high profit margins.
Now let’s imagine a world with a M3 MacBook Air in it. Does Apple discontinue the M2 model, or push it down into the $999 range? Does Apple discontinue the M1 Air at that point? In the Intel era I’d have answered yes, but the Apple silicon era is something different. The truth is, even now, the M1 is more than enough for most potential Mac users.
Just as a thought experiment, consider what Apple might do if it was planning to import the iPhone SE strategy to the Mac. It would take some older, but still quite capable technologies—say, everything that makes up an M1 Mac. The device’s parts are carefully scrutinized with an eye toward eliminating cost wherever possible, without sacrificing a basic Apple level of quality.
The product I’m describing might just be the M1 MacBook Air, discounted further and further. But it’s not impossible that Apple might instead choose to design a new M1 laptop that’s not saddled with some of the more pricey parts chosen for the MacBook Air back in 2020.
That’s not a Chromebook competitor, necessarily, but it would be a way for Apple to build a “new” MacBook that could compete with Windows laptops in the sub-$800 range. I’m not saying that it’s likely, but it seems like the most reasonable explanation if the Digitimes report is at all correct.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Jason and Myke preview what will happen at next week’s Apple event. What new features will the new iPhones have? How will the Apple Watch transform? And which one of us will harness the heart of a champion, Lionel Messi style, and score the winning goal?
Go to the podcast page.
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.
In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools.
AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.
- Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al‘s APIs.
- Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
- Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records.
Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore.
At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.
- Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
- Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.
Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.
To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.
The iPhone 15 Pro colors challenge the definition of a spectrum. Just as well, as you probably won’t be able to get one. And Apple pulls the plug on a storied app.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Since 2019, the Relay FM Community has raised over $2.2M for St. Jude. With your support this year, we’ll be one step closer to that day when no child dies from cancer. One cure closer. One child closer. This month and every month: Let’s cure childhood cancer. Together.
Fascinating piece from Scharon Harding at Ars Technica about the latest organization objecting to right to repair legislation—a movement that Apple just last month changed its stance on, and has now come out in support of:
Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc.
…
Who’s ready for some collective outrage? I’ve asked Ernesto, my incomparable penguin valet1, to fire up the Semi-Perpetual Rage Machine that we keep in the basement for just such an eventuality.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The key to automation is figuring out what problems it can solve to make your life easier. For example: the problem where one of your podcast co-hosts1 has to regularly text you because you’ve forgotten to put your audio file in the shared Dropbox folder. Regularly enough that he has literally created a meme to remind you. To wit:
We’ve all been there.
In my defense: I spent many years editing this particular podcast, during which I didn’t ever need to upload my file because I was the one who collected them. To add to that, I also have a few other podcast-related tasks that I need to take care of post-recording which often end up distracted me from this particular need.
Still, seems like something automation could easily fix, right?
Thanks to Audio Hijack‘s automation features, yes! Here’s how I did it.
First, I added a new automation that runs on Session Stop called Copy File to Dropbox. This is a one-line script—app.runShortcut('Recording Copy')—that in turn calls a Shortcut I’ve created.
In Shortcuts, this particular workflow is just four actions.
First up, get the contents of the folder for this podcast (which is organized using another Shortcut that I’ve previously written about), then filter those contents for the most recently modified file (which should be the folder created for the latest episode). Then get the contents of that folder, and filter it for a file whose name contains ‘Dan’ (as all my local mic recordings do). There should be only one.2 Then simply use the Save Files action to copy that file to my shared Dropbox folder. Done!
Now, whenever we finish recording the show and I naturally hit Stop, my file is automatically uploaded to the appropriate folder, and I don’t have to do a thing. And best of all, my co-host doesn’t have to bug me anymore.
Though I do kind of miss the memes.
- I’m not going to name names, but let’s say it rhymes with Shaun Shmoltz. ↩
- Obligatory Highlander reference. ↩
Adrian Schönig has released Longplay 2.0, a new version of his excellent iOS app for exploring and playing entire albums:
Longplay 1.0 was released in August 2020.
…
The iPhone XR led the way for the iPhone 11. For the first few years of the iPhone’s existence, Apple introduced a single new model every year.…
Great, inexpensive gadgets; worthy subscriptions and those we’ve canceled; Apple’s September event; and our future USB-C charging prospects.…
Tyler Vigen was curious:
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there?
…
Apple’s iPhone event is on the calendar. We continue to discuss our beta impressions and also tackle which comedians we’d be.…
John Gruber, writing about how the anticipated switch to USB-C on the iPhone 15 will be received:
I think there’s going to be a backlash that most USB-C proponents don’t see coming, premised on accusations that this switch is a money grab from Apple to get people to replace all their Lightning cables with new $30 USB-C cables from the Apple Store….
…
“I would never want to be in the iPhone case business,” a friend of mine said the other day, and I couldn’t help but agree. Designing accessories for Apple products means you’re in fierce competition for largely low margins, you have to gamble on early design leaks to get started with your own creations, and you are utterly at the whim of Apple’s own design decisions.…
Jason Snell, come on down. You’re the next contestent on The Talk Show. Special topics: John Warnock and Adobe, Disney and Apple, the iMac’s 25th anniversary, and more.…
With a busy fall looming, Mac analyst Stephen Hackett joins the show to give Jason’s computing setup a check-up. And some iPhone rumors suggest the Color Czar may be leaving a lump of Space Black coal in Myke’s stocking this year.…
Rumors this week indicate that not only will the cables that come with the iPhone 15s have different connectors, they’ll be different in between, too! We’re also hearing from totally reliable sources that the Vision Pro is way cool, and Apple is supporting a bill that could let you crack your iPhone open like a Penn Cove oyster.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Every time any of us packs a bag, we are making some very specific tech-focused decisions. It starts with what devices we need (or can live without) and cascades into charging bricks and cords and anything else that will keep us powered up and not feeling regret about having left an essential device behind.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t.…
The CNN streaming era re-begins—and we’re still trying to figure out how TV news adapts to the streaming era. Also: Netflix makes a franchise bet on Zach Snyder, but is it shooting itself in the foot?…
Following up on Dan’s Macworld column, Stephen Hackett weighs the pros and cons of making a new, larger iMac alongside the 24-inch model introduced with the M1 iMac:
I, for one, would like to see a larger iMac make it out into the world, complete with a Pro-level SoC, like the Mac mini has received.
…
Apple’s iconic all-in-one computer recently hit a milestone: 25 years. Over that time it’s morphed from a Bondi blue gumdrop to a pastel slab, in between entertaining brief flirtations with white plastic and articulated arms.…
Interesting feature on the Apple Developer site(!) talking to developers who have been through Apple’s developer labs for the Vision Pro. Developers interviewed include Michael Simmons of Flexibits, Ben Guerrette of Pixite, and friend of the site “Underscore” David Smith:
Smith began working on a version of his app Widgetsmith for spatial computing almost immediately after the release of the visionOS SDK.
…
Our hardware upgrade cycles, what an Apple foldable would bring, UI decisions that bother us, and what piece of tech we would use our magic wands on.…
People are reminiscing about 25 years of the iMac, which is fine and all, but I’m doing to do something a little different. I’m reminiscing about 21 years of Apple’s Shake.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Stripping silent passages in Adobe Audition leaves blank areas between the spoken clips on each track. Jason has used a feature in Logic Pro and Ferrite Recording Studio to remove silence from podcast recording tracks for years now.…
The iMac turns 25, Relay turns 10 (next year in London), print magazines apparently still exist, and listeners have questions about why Apple would ever want to buy Disney.…
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. …
Change is coming and you will like it whether you like it or not. The iMac has a big anniversary and Apple dons a big rubber suit and crushes Tokyo.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
What was PowerPoint before PowerPoint? Slide presentations. Big, fancy, multi-projector, multi-media slide presentations. As Claire L. Evans of the MIT Technology Review reports:
Before PowerPoint, and long before digital projectors, 35-millimeter film slides were king.
…
One of the great things about having a Mac with built-in biometric authentication is not having to constantly type in your password. It’s particularly nice for those of us that work in Terminal, where you can set up Touch ID to authenticate the sudo command that bestows administrative powers.…
Whether we speed up audio and video media, how we’d want Apple to change Disney Parks, our thoughts on new Apple Watch bands, and what we’re hoping to see from Apple’s Shortcuts.…
The close corporate ties between Disney and Apple have created all sorts of speculation over the years that the two companies might end up being one company.…
The original iMac entered a computing world that was in desperate need of a shake-up.
After the wild early days of the personal computer revolution, things had become stagnant by the mid-1990s.…
For years, rumors about Apple and Disney combining seemed ridiculous—but in light of Apple’s transformation and Disney’s difficulties, suddenly it seems a lot more possible. Myke and Jason examine Disney’s business and try to imagine what portions of it Apple would actually want.…
A really great and nuanced piece by the New York Times‘s David Streitfeld on the legal case over the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library, which it launched during the early days of the pandemic:
Libraries have traditionally been sanctuaries for culture that could not afford to pay its own way, or that was lost or buried or didn’t fit current tastes.
…
Nothing like mixing a Mac feature from 2002 with one from 2021.In my quest to improve my Apple analyst-call transcripts by using OpenAI’s Whisper technology, I’ve ended up in a position where I need to create an automation on my Mac that runs when an item is placed in a folder.…
Apple scores a victory against Epic. Does it want to celebrate by going to Disneyland? And buying it? Also, keep this under your hat, but Apple is rumored to be shipping new phones next month.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.…
Disney alters the deal—pray they don’t alter it further. But is Disney suffering from franchise fatigue, and is aggressively bunding Hulu with Disney+ the solution? Also: Jason’s sad about Apple’s failed college football deal.…
On a Safari page where Reader is available (right), tell Siri to “read this.” Within Accessibility settings (left, center), you can enable Speak Screen or Speak Selection, choose from a expanded number of voices, and adjust their speed and pitch.…
It’s time for everyone’s favorite development in the world of Apple tech: a port change. Yep, that’s right. After what will have been about 11 years, the iPhone is once again changing its charging port, this time from Lightning to the increasingly ubiquitous USB-C.…
Apple’s new music discovery station, how we take notes when problem solving, our use of voice assistants, and whether Apple’s support is as good as it used to be.…
Speaking of Disney, Zombies, Run! developer Adrian Hon went to the immersive Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel/roleplaying game in advance of it closing next month and wrote a detailed description of the experience.…
Kim Masters and Alex Weprin, writing in The Hollywood Reporter:
A few weeks before Bob Iger sat down for that CNBC interview in which he said Disney’s linear TV networks, like ABC and FX, “may not be core” to the company’s business, a veteran Hollywood executive mused to The Hollywood Reporter on the possibility of a deal that would rock the industry: Apple buying Disney.
…
What do a classic Charles Laughton film and ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ have in common?I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t mention that my pal Casey Liss has launched his new app, Callsheet.…
A few years back, I recommended an app called NightOwl, which allows you to toggle your Mac between dark and light mode on a schedule. While I used it for a while, it eventually got supplanted by built-in macOS features.…
After recent reports that Apple was close to striking its first TV deal for American Colletge Football, the whole deal collapsed like a house of cards last week.…
Jason has the painful details about Apple’s comeback bid for college football TV rights that fell just short of the goal line. We also discuss what Apple’s rich-but-middling quarterly results say about the importance of this fall’s iPhone launch.…
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle.…
The rumor mill giveth again, as more updated devices are on the horizon—some in zeitgeisty colors. Apple’s down quarter, meanwhile, won’t stop the company from being the best dang technology company it can be.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple’s business has done so well for so long that it’s been a little unusal to watch the company produce financial results that aren’t setting all-time records.…
Every three months after releasing its corporate earnings, Apple’s CEO and CFO get on the phone and chat with financial analysts. By which we mean, they read from prepared statements and then take a couple questions each from a group of handpicked analysts.…
Apple announced its results for its fiscal third quarter on Thursday. As expected, it was a down quarter—though at a 1% drop over the year-ago quarter, it’s a better result than the previous quarter, which was down 3% year-over-year.…
The last time we had an AR experience, our thoughts on social media services paying for news links in Canada, the current state of smartphone innovation, and whether we think AI “hallucinations” are a deal-breaker for the future of generative AI.…
The view from the top.Recently, the podcasters of The Incomparable got together in person and one of the things we did was exactly what you’d expect podcasters to do—we made podcasts.…
ESPN’s Pete Thamel reports that Apple may be about to jump into College Football:
Sources: The primary deal presented to Pac-12 executives/ADs today was an primarily Apple streaming deal.
…
Every year I start my annual ritual of installing the tvOS beta on the secondary Apple TV. Not the one in the living room—I’m not crazy—but the one in my office.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
There’s no shortage of news in the technology arena this week. Elon Musk changed the name of Twitter to a single letter.1 Samsung announced some new foldable phones.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
This week we wonder if Apple will profess further mastery of the Periodic Table with this fall’s iPhone Pro release, and if Lionel Messi will conquer the world with Apple’s help.…
Apple continues its ongoing war with unsightly blank spaces, and that may end up costing us all a little more. The App Store follies continue as Apple is caught in its own game of tower defense.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Screen Sharing is my friend.I love beta season. New software brings new features to discover and explore. It’s like living in the future.
The one thing I don’t like, however, is incompatibility.…
I just updated my perennial “The right Mac laptop to buy for a student” story today.
It’s funny how that story has evolved since I first posted it.…
Anže Tomić’s article makes us consider Apple’s focus on trackpads and lack of language localization. Also: Apple platform software advantages, and trying to outsmart ourselves with user automations.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.…
Did Netflix lure the rest of the streaming industry into quicksand? We explore the difference between being an entertainment retailer and wholesaler. Then it’s time to talk about the man, the legend, the human topic: Disney’s Bob Iger.…
Software—good software, anyway—is in a continual state of evolution. It’s one of the most impressive things about the current state of affairs in technology, even if it’s something most of us take for granted.…
The current state of our social media presences, tech tips for navigating medical situations, spatial apps we’d like to see for Apple Vision Pro, and how we deal with mis-delivered packages.…
I bought my first Mac ever this year.
I was born in 1983 in Slovenia1. My first contact with computers was at about 10 years old with the ZX Spectrum my mom’s cousin had.…
Myke’s summer is a lot less fun due to his concerns about a bill advancing in the UK Parliament that could potentially drive some Apple services out of the country.…
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.…
Two sketchy reports were heaved over the transom this week, one about Apple Maps and the other about AI. But what’s even more sketchy is the British government’s excuses for making communications apps less secure.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t.…
For years, I’ve written articles warning people away from installing prerelease versions of Apple operating systems. Sure, beta season is exciting, what with Apple unleashing brand-new features that promise to transform your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.…
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reports that Apple is working on large-language model AI technology:
Apple Inc. is quietly working on artificial intelligence tools… but the company has yet to devise a clear strategy for releasing the technology to consumers.
…
The sites, apps, and services we use for research; how our university tech setups influenced our lives; the navigation apps we use; and our favorite features from Apple’s OS betas.…
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. …
Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Ann-Marie Alcántara reports that the tide is turning on Apple Maps (Apple News link):
The biggest competitive advantage Apple Maps has over Google is its deeper integration in the iPhone.
…
Following up on its appearance in the WWDC keynote, 3D authoring platform Unity announced on Wednesday that it is launching a beta program for visionOS development.…
As the Public Betas arrive, there’s breaking bad news for Mac Pro fans, Jason has an invitation for Tim Cook, and we explore our favorite Emoji.…
This week we wish a happy birthday to the App Store, dip a toe in the the warm waters of the beta pool, and try to remember what those shows our friends have recommended but we never go around to watching.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I haven’t written much about the Vision Pro in the month since Apple took the wraps off its headset—excuse me, spatial computer. That’s in part because I still haven’t gotten to try it out for myself, but also because I’ve been slowly digesting the staggering amount of technology that the company showed off with its latest device.…
In a tale as old as time, we try and fail to understand the Emmy Awards. Also: Breaking down Netflix’s new ratings math.…
Every year the big betas roll around—iOS, macOS, iPadOS—but only in recent years has Apple started offering public betas for some of its smaller platforms.
But I’m glad it does, because this year, the action is on watchOS.…
Our first iOS apps, what we look for deals on, whether we pay attention to the fine print, and our preferences in laptop sizes.…
The new Lock Screen lets you view Live Activities and WidgetsThese days, many new iPadOS features have spent a year incubating on the iPhone. (Or, to put it less charitably, Apple builds for the iPhone first and makes iPads wait to get the good stuff.)…
Sometimes I see that number following the latest release of iOS and do a double take: really? It’s been around that long? Seventeen iterations into the iPhone’s software and you wouldn’t think there’d be much left to do, but with this latest annual update to its flagship platform, now available as a public beta ahead of its fall release, Apple’s packed in a surprising amount of features—and cleaned up some shortcomings of prior versions.…
macOS Sonoma, out in public beta now and due to be released this fall, is an update that feels small in all the best ways. Even in early development, I’ve managed to use it on my main Mac without any serious compatibility issues or major bugs.…
It’s Apple public beta season. This is the time of year where Apple lets members of the public try out the next generation of its operating systems in advance of them being pushed out to everyone this fall.…
We struggle to balance empathy with reality as we try to explain why the Mac Pro is the way that it is, and why that’s unlikely to change.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.…
Pity poor Goldman Sachs, as it fails to turn a profit in the credit card racket. Also, pity yourself next year when you can’t get an Apple Vision Pro.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The “Twitter replacements” we’re using, our hopeful finds for Prime Day, how Apple will or won’t comply with the Digital Markets Act, and our toxic relationship with streaming services.…
When I buy a new iPhone, I tend not to spring for the top of the line where storage is concerned. Generally I’m okay going for a smaller capacity phone, because I don’t have a ton of data, but it can get tight at times1, because as someone who writes a lot about iOS, I do download a lot of apps.…
For a product that isn’t debuting until 2024, Apple has said a lot about the Vision Pro. It spent nearly an hour in the WWDC keynote discussing it.…
This week we get to the bottom of the secrets of the mysterious Puzzle Society, Goldman Sachs can’t make money on credit cards, Apple might be getting into college football, and there’s a lot of weird follow-up.…
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle.…
Kick back, relax, and grab a drink with a little umbrella in it because the summer of betas has arrived. iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, there’s a beta for you, a beta for you, a beta for everyone!…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Phil Schiller is ruining everything! And a tale of two Mac: one real that maybe shouldn’t be, the other not yet real that really should be.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I’m a Pac-12 football fan and Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News is one of the best reporters on the subject, along with Oregon-based indie writer John Canzano.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.…
CNN rises to the top of the conversation again, Netflix gets the ball back, Paramount sells some crown jewels, Sports Corner travels to Utah, and we answer four listener letters!…
MAMP runs at the center of my new Mac mini server.I upgraded my Mac mini server last weekend, swapping an M2 model in for a 2018 model running macOS Mojave that was the last in-service Intel Mac in my house.…
Extended warranties, our first jobs, whether we read online reviews, and how to deal with window management on the Mac.…
Even for what is reputedly a somewhat smaller than usual annual update, iOS 17 still brings with it a host of new features. As the beta process begins, there’s plenty to investigate and try out ahead of the software’s full release this fall.…
Jason Marr, developer of the excellent AnyList app I’ve used for shopping lists for years:
Google is shutting down the Google Assistant Notes & Lists integration for non-Google apps on June 20, 2023.
…
Craig Grannell at Stuff argues that Apple’s approach to Fitness streaks ultimately does us a disservice:
The problem is the thin line between encouragement and assuming everyone is a robot.
…
The Apple Vision Pro announcement was not focused on accessibility, but the product will definitely be accessible to people with disabilities. Existing technologies like VoiceOver and Dwell Control will be integral to the way people with disabilities use the product.…
Developers are getting their hands on (simulated) visionOS for the first time, and we speculate about how spatial apps might work. And for the Summer of Fun, we gauge our excitement level for various Apple-related product rumors.…
Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.…
(Apple)No matter what you think of the Vision Pro headset or 3D movies, it’s become apparent over the last few weeks that a lot of people need a primer on 3D, stereoscopic movies.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple and Reddit’s relationship with those who deal with their users continues to be a rocky road. Meanwhile, visionOS hits the streets.
Toward a more perfect union They say both that no news is good news and that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but if Apple’s relationship with its labor force is any example, the former is more accurate than the latter.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.…
I have spent the last couple of decades writing about new features in Apple’s operating systems. Tens of thousands of words about new items, large and small, that enhance the experience of using a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices.…
Some software features have a delayed impact, like the clap of thunder reaching you seconds after a lightning strike. They may not be useful right away, but at some point something comes along that makes you realize that they’re just what you needed.…
How we save links for later, the app we’d make for Apple Vision Pro, how we listen to music and podcasts, and tips for tech to use when moving across the country.…
Dan Kois, writing at Slate, bemoans one of my biggest annoyances with the iPhone keyboard:
No, no, I’m not searching for “luxury poisons for the rich.”
…
As our resident passkey beat editor, I was glad to see that Apple has now added the ability to log in to your Apple ID or iCloud.com…
Myke and Jason answer your questions about Vision Pro, catch up with some new beta details, saddle up for a new Rumor Roundup, process the Reddit debacle, and detail our summer plans.…
Right now, “Zero Trust” is in serious danger of becoming an empty buzzword. The problem isn’t just that marketers have slapped the Zero Trust label on everything short of breakfast cereal–it’s that for all the hype, we don’t seem to be getting any safer.…
Usually WWDC week is for new OS features. But this year, WWDC was stuffed full of new Macs and an entirely new Apple platform, so I’m slowly digging out of that and starting to dig into the new OS features announced last week.…
Get our your notebooks because we’re about to learn a valuable lesson in the relationship between output and cost. It will be on the final. Speaking of textbook cases, Reddit provides another while Apple continues to struggle with greasing the wheels of the game business.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
I love Audio Hijack. I use it almost every day. I use it for podcasts, yes, but it’s far more than a recording tool.…
The head of CNN is out, but the larger issue is: what’s the future of TV news in the age of streaming?…
Christina Warren, writing at Inverse, has a good overview of Apple’s impressive Game Porting Toolkit:
It turns out that Apple added DirectX 12 support via something it is calling the Game Porting Toolkit, a tool Apple is offering to developers to see how their existing x86 DirectX 12 games work on Macs powered by Apple silicon.
…
Whether we’re installing Apple betas, Tim Cook offers us a free product, how the Reddit blockout have affected us, and what we were disappointed not to see at WWDC.…
Hardware was by no means in short supply at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference—not only did Apple launch three new Mac model, but there was also that little matter of a revolutionary spatial computer.…
Some first-hand experiences with Apple Vision Pro that are worth your time:
Federico Viticci at MacStories:
I’m going to be direct with this story. My 30-minute demo with Vision Pro last week was the most mind-blowing moment of my 14-year career covering Apple and technology.
…
Of course, Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels has the details about Apple’s re-use of the “Apple Vision” name:
Apple has had other products with “vision” in their names over the years.
…
Jason and Myke discuss their experiences using the Apple Vision Pro and what they’re thinking about the product now that they’ve used it. Also there’s a lot of WWDC follow-up, and Jason reviewed new Macs!…
The M1 Mac Studio arrived last year with a shock, an entirely new class of Mac that debuted as the fastest Mac around. But with the Mac Pro presumably coming down the road, what role (if any) would the Mac Studio fill in the long-term future of high-performance Mac desktops?…
With Audio Hijack, you can record any audio on your Mac. Save audio from individual applications such as Safari or Zoom, record from hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, or even capture the audio output of the entire system.…
The 15-inch MacBook Air (bottom) is larger than its 13-inch sibling, but otherwise almost entirely identical.One of the lessons to be taken from the Apple silicon era is that the chips are what they are.…
The Apple Vision Pro is here! Well, not yet. And you can’t afford one. So is it really here? No. But the new Macs are! And soon the feature we’ve all been waiting for.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to BZG Apps for sponsoring Six Colors this week. BZG makes Unite 4, which allows you to turn any Website into a Mac app.…
Apollo Developer Christian Selig, who has been trying to find a way to keep his app alive despite an enormous new charge for connecting to Reddit, has given up:
June 30th will be Apollo’s last day.
…
I get it. You’re excited and/or angry about the $3500 headset Apple might sell you next year if you’re in the right country. It’s worth getting excited about.…
Apple announced plenty of new features at WWDC this week, but it’s bundled up a few services-related announcements in a new press release, some of which have been hitherto unknown.…
Though all of Apple’s operating systems got attention during this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, watchOS 10 got perhaps the biggest overhaul, not only changing fundamental ways that users interact with the device, but also how information is presented on the wearable.…
Yes, I’ve worn it.
One of the advantages of being present at Apple Park for WWDC 2023 was that I got to experience—after having my face measured and my eyeglasses scanned—the Apple Vision Pro in a controlled environment, guided by two Apple employees.…
WWDC 2023 has arrived and Jason and Myke react to the keynote announcements, live from a secluded location at Apple Park! Topics are just what you’d guess: Apple Vision Pro, new Mac hardware (!),…
Live from the Apple Podcasts studio at WWDC!
We discuss how we would use Vision Pro in our everyday lives, the announcement(s) that made us clap, the Home & Audio features we were excited about, and the iOS and/or iPadOS features we can’t wait to use.…
Processing the keynote is like taking in a big meal: sometimes you have to just sit back and digest. So much information flies by that it can be hard to pick out the details that are important to you, but as I compiled the list of features that didn’t make the keynote cut, I found myself thinking about all the new capabilities that would make the biggest difference to me right now.1
A link to the pastNot mentioned in the keynote itself, but something that I’ve been looking for ever since Apple started really doubling down on the features it’s adding to Notes: the ability to link notes together.
Currently I’ve dabbled with Obsidian as a place to keep information about my novel writing, in part because the ability to interconnect my documents in a wiki-like format is absolutely critical to being able to keep track of what is basically a huge database of information.
I’m very curious to see how linking notes actually works, and whether it’s as straightforward as, say, Notes’s ability to add tags.
Hard passAs the Six Colors Resident Passkey Enthusiast, I’m interested in any implementation details connected to the next evolution of security. And this year Apple delivered on my top feature request: the ability to share passkeys with others. Even better, it’s backwards compatible to passwords as well.
I share social media accounts for several podcast with my co-hosts, and while 1Password does make it easy to share credentials with them, not all of them use the app. But with this feature built into Apple’s platforms, it’s a much easier sell. Plus, it keeps the passwords in sync if one of us changes it.
This is also a big deal for my household, where most of the passwords to shared accounts like my streaming services are shared with my wife (and occasionally with my parents as well). Being able to easily keep that information synced between the two of us will ensure that she can log into the Apple TV if it suddenly starts asking for a password to be entered again.
Zoom zoomThere were more than a few criticisms of the Apple Studio Display’s webcam, but the company’s now addressed what might be the biggest: the previous inability to control the crop of your image. This could lead to some weird looking images, especially when using the Center Stage feature.
A shortcoming that has now been addressed! Both Apple Studio Display and Continuity Camera now offer controls to pan and zoom the image, letting you present exactly the face you want to show to the world. And users the world over have heaved a sigh of relief.
A FaceTime for televisionI play in a regular Dungeons & Dragons game via Zoom, and my current setup is to extend my MacBook Air’s display to my Apple TV, and put a Split Screen of Zoom and our game board, in Chrome.
But this is annoying, because in order to get both my wife and I on camera, I have to put the Air on a footstool and drag it into place. And then we always end up with our eyes on the TV, and not looking at the camera. I’d actually tried to use my iPhone in Continuity Camera mode at one point, but it turned out that you couldn’t use both that feature and AirPlay at the same time.
So the announcement that FaceTime will now come to the Apple TV—and, more to the point, third-party apps like Zoom—will be a big improvement. I’m curious to see whether or not there will be a way to do a Split Screen so I can still put up my Chrome screen, though.
Oughta correctMy complaints about typing on my iPhone are well documented, and at long last, it seems Apple has heard the plaintive cries.
Apple promised a bunch of new improvements to typing on the iPhone, including improved predictive typing and better autocorrect. The latter is potentially a big deal, since I’ve found myself often struggling to type a coherent sentence on my iPhone, all too often ending up with words changed into other words I didn’t want, even while other seemingly obvious errors went unfixed.
This is one of those changes that, if it indeed pans out, is going to be a huge quality of life improvement. Especially if it means I can enter a web search phrase in Safari without typing ducking periods between each word.
- No, I am not going to install the betas on my devices while traveling, I am not a madman. ↩
Apple’s Monday keynote at WWDC was jam-packed as usual, but even at two hours there’s never enough time to cover everything that the company is rolling out in its latest platform updates—especially when you’re updating five major platforms and rolling out a brand new headset.
So, as usual, I’ve perused the product pages for Apple’s latest updates to pull out the details about all the new features coming later this year.
I’ve broken these features down by platform, though as always, many of Apple’s features are available across all its devices. As ever, there may be more to come, but this is the most current list I can find as of this writing.
iOS 17 and iPadOS 17* iOS 17 drops support for the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, as well as the iPhone X. * iPadOS 17 drops support for the first-generation iPad Pro and the fifth-generation iPad. * AirDrop’s “finish transfer over the Internet” feature doesn’t arrive until later this year, and requires you both to be logged into iCloud. * Journal arrives “later this year”. * Search in Safari has been revamped to be faster rand show more relevant results. * Autofill verification codes via email. * Passwords and passkeys can be shared with specific groups of people. * You can now collaborate with playlists in Apple Music, though the feature is listed as coming later this year. * Apple Maps now lets you pick your preferred EV charging network and see real-time availability. * Spotlight now offers “app shortcuts” in search results that can, for example, jump you to a specific part of an app. (For example, your Favorites album in Photos.) * Visual Look Up can now identify recipes of similar dishes in a picture. * There’s now a popover to look up information about a subject that you’ve pulled out of a photo. * Visual Look Up now works on a paused video frame as well. * Communication Safety features now encompasses images and videos transmitted via means beyond Messages, including AirDrop, the systemwide photo picker, FaceTime messages, Contact Posters, and third-party apps. * Similarly, all users now have an option to blur sensitive images in the above apps before viewing them. As with Communication Safety, this analysis is all done on device. * Improved privacy protections allow apps to add calendar invites with your seeing your calendar, and only allow apps access to select photos from within * Lockdown Mode has been expanded and now includes the Apple Watch. * Apple has added three new Memoji stickers: Halo, Smirk, and Peekaboo. * Reminders now has a Grocery List feature that automatically sorts items into categories—and remembers if you change the groupings manually. * Notes now has the ability to link to a connected note. * Fitness’s Sharing tab has been redesigned to provide highlights. * You can create a workout or meditation plan in Apple Fitness+. * Find My now allows you to share AirTag or Find My-enabled accessories with up to five others. * Apple News+ now includes crossword puzzles, though it’s unclear on from which providers. * Apple News+ Audio Stories can now be listened to in the Podcasts app. * Home now offers an Activity History that allows you to see the last 30 days of activity from your security devices, smart locks, contact sensors, and garage doors, including who locked and unlocked a door and when. * Tap to unlock and PIN codes are now available for Matter-compatible smart locks. * You can now sign in to your iPhone via any email address or phone number that’s in your account detail, as well as using a nearby device. * Reminders on the iPad now includes a Column View mode, breaking sections into different columns.
macOS Sonoma* macOS Sonoma drops support for iMacs before 2019, MacBook Pros before 2018, and all MacBooks. * A new item in the “full screen” window control allows you to share that window on a video call (including third-party apps like Zoom). * There are now zoom and pan controls for Studio Display or iPhone cameras via Continuity Camera. * You can now use the Share button to send a note in Notes into Pages. * Screen Sharing now includes a high-performance mode that uses the Apple silicon media engine to make remote connections even more responsive. * Mail now puts travel-related messages at the top of search results when closer to the dates of travel. * Mail now allows you to add larger emoji to messages. * You can now move back and forth between typing and dictating without stopping Dictation.
watchOS 10* Control Center can be accessed from any app by pressing the side button. * Offline maps can work on Apple Watch within range of its companion iPhone. * Group FaceTime audio calls now support the Apple Watch. * The Medications app has an option to send a reminder if a medication hasn’t been logged within 30 minutes; they can be denoted as critical alerts. * A notification can alert you when you pass a certain altitude. * FaceTime video messages can be played back on Apple Watch. * Apple Fitness+ offers Stacks, which let you do several workouts and meditations back to back, and an Audio Focus features that let you choose to emphasize the music or trainers’ voices. * New Enterprise features allow hands-free communication, the ability to implement mobile device management, VPN configurations, and internal-use apps.
tvOS 17* A new Enhance Dialogue feature on Apple TV 4K paired with a second-generation HomePod can separate dialogue from background noise and put it on the center channel. * Apple TVK 4K now supports Dolby Vision 8.1. * Third-party developers can now create VPN apps for Apple TV. * Using the Apple TV remote on iPhone to turn on an Apple TV will now automatically set it to that user’s profile. * User profiles can now save additional settings, including system language and paired AirPods.
Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:
- A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
- A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
- An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
- A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
- A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
- A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when you use the promo code ‘SixColors’ at checkout.
You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!
In the waning days of the Apple headset as a rumor, please remember to tip your local rumormonger. Remember, they survive on tips. If you’re worried about Apple’s keynote being too long, don’t.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
It’s almost time. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just days away. Come Monday morning, both Dan Moren and I will be somewhere on the Apple Campus, watching Apple unveil whatever it chooses to put in front of the world.…
My thanks to my old pal Glenn Fleishman for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Glenn has created a letterpress book called Six Centuries of Type & Printing, a 64-page romp through the history of printing and type told through technological innovations from Gutenberg through the present day.…
The Max launch and prioritizing tech stacks; Netflix’s ad viewers and the future of ad-free streaming; and in Sports Corner the regional sports network collapse has begun. Also, we announce our own plus—Downstream+!
Go to the podcast page.
Our current device-charging setups, how we manage our windows, our weather apps of choice, and the travel items that have saved our bacon.
Go to the podcast page.
Every now and then I type something into Spotlight on the iPad and I see that Twitterrific is still installed. I can’t bear to uninstall it, but since Twitter killed third-party client apps, I don’t use Twitter very often. Maybe I check one of my lists once a day. That’s it. And I used Twitter a lot—with my third-party client of choice.
The geniuses who own Reddit have apparently decided to walk the same path as Twitter. Here’s the report from Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, a leading (and beloved) Reddit app:
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter’s pricing, and Apollo would have to pay Reddit $20 million per year to keep running as-is.
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.
Not only is the price ridiculous, but (as Selig shows with some back-of-the-envelope math) it’s far beyond what Reddit itself makes on its users. As with Twitter, there is a path for Reddit to walk that allows Selig to build a sustainable app business and for Reddit to be compensated for its service. But this isn’t it.
If Reddit continues on this path, it may discover that some of its most devoted users are devoted because they love Apollo. And if it vanishes, many of those users will too.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We’re delighted you’ve chosen to embark upon Apple Reality. Today is the first day of a whole new world for you, and we hope that you enjoy living in it as much as we did creating it.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I’ve updated another eight-year-old article of mine, bringing my discussion of my podcast editing technique a bit more up to date.
Interestingly, my methodology hasn’t really changed much. I still use the Remove Silence command in Logic to separate sounds into visible blocks, and then edit left to right, looking for collisions and interruptions.
The big changes since 2015: I’ve abandoned Skype for Zoom, and Skype Call Recorder for Audio Hijack. And Ferrite Recording Studio on iPad is now in the mix. But my article also covers editing in GarageBand, since it’s free. It’s been literally a decade since I pointed out that GarageBand would be fantastic for podcast editing with a few very small feature additions that already exist in its big brother, Logic. Unfortunately, Apple has never bothered to add them.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
After the failure of bankrupt Diamond Sports to pay licensing fees, Major League Baseball will take over all San Diego Padres broadcasting starting Wednesday:
As a result of the new arrangement, Padres fans can now obtain a new direct-to-consumer streaming subscription for $19.99 per month or $74.99 for the rest of the season by registering at MLB.TV. This offer is only for Padres fans in the Club’s Home Television Territory and is a separate service than the MLB.TV out of market package. By offering a direct-to-consumer streaming option on MLB.TV in the Club’s territory for the first time, MLB is able to lift the blackout for Padres games previously distributed on Bally Sports San Diego. Fans can also find more information about the availability of Padres games at Padres.com/tunein.
The oncoming failure of regional sports networks in the face of cord cutting is one of the more interesting media stories of our times. While some local cable channels have begun to sell games to cord cutters—Red Sox broadcaster NESN was the first—this is the first time that Major League Baseball itself has taken over all production for a team’s games, and is streaming them directly in the MLB app. (For continuity’s sake, the games will also be on local cable, satellite, and Internet TV providers in the Padres’ geographic territory.)
It sure feels like a milestone moment in the future of sports broadcasting—and the unwinding of the exclusivity of cable TV for sports broadcasting.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
After months of rumors and speculation, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is imminent. In just a few short days, all that rumor and speculation will finally be answered, and we can make way for…new rumor and speculation.…
Zac Hall at 9to5Mac:
Prioritizing Apple Music Classical for Android over Apple’s other platforms does make sense, though. The separate app is based on Apple’s acquisition of Primephonic, which was a standalone classical music subscription service, and the Android app went away with Apple’s purchase. That’s similar to how Apple Music for Android has served as a replacement for Beats Music for Android.
Well, yes and no. I’m sure the Apple Classical app leverages a lot of Primephonic’s work, but just looking at the app also makes it clear that it’s drawing heavily from Apple Music; it seems unlikely that it’s more technically challenging to bring Apple Classical to the Mac and iPad than it is for Android.
That said, Apple could very well have metrics from both Apple Music and Primephonic showing which devices people use to listen to classical music, and it decided to prioritize where there were more users. I also wonder if developers of Android apps at Apple might have somewhat more availability than engineers working on apps for its own platforms—especially right now.
Despite all that, the lack of support for macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and CarPlay definitely feels a bit awkward. Here’s hoping a subsequent release will not only improve the Classical app for iOS (which hasn’t been substantively updated since launch) but also bring users of the rest of Apple’s platforms into the fold.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s time for our eighth annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! Jason and Myke will be there in person—but what will be announced? Is the Apple mixed-reality headset really going to happen? Will there be room for new Mac hardware? And what do we anticipate for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS?
Go to the podcast page.
Why would a letterpress book called Six Centuries of Type & Printing be the “sponsor” of Six Colors? For two reasons: First, author and tech journalist Glenn Fleishman (that’s me!) is a long-time fan and friend of Jason, Dan, and Six Colors. Second, this letterpress book both involves and is about technology—it’s a neat fit if you’re an avid reader of this site or you are looking for a gift for someone with a hankering for industrial history or a typographically inclined person. (The Six in both titles is purely coincidental.)
Six Centuries of Type & Printing is a 64-page romp through the history of printing and type told through technological innovations. You’ll learn what Gutenberg likely invented and why it took until around 1450 CE for printing using individual pieces of type, each one a character, to really take off worldwide—even though such printing types were used in China and Korea at least centuries before.
The book encompasses all the major inventions in printing, from Gutenberg through the present day. You’ll meet all the significant people—Ottmar Mergenthaler! David Bruce! James Clephane!—and elements of progress that got us to where we are, with a lot of fun words like quoin, chase, swift, pantograph, and flong along the way. Find out why hand typesetting was a spectator sport in the 1880s!
The book was printed in 2020 by letterpress in London from type set in hot metal in North Yorkshire, England, in an edition of just over 400. It was bound in Germany, with a hardcover luxuriously wrapped in a foil-stamped green cloth. The book comes in a slipcase of the same material.
Readers of this blog take $10 off the $160 price when ordering by using the code SIXSIX. That price includes the letterpress book and its ebook counterpart, which contains a full bibliography. (Price includes shipping within the U.S.)
Hey, it’s our antepenultimate week talking about the Apple headset speculatively! New apps are a-shipping and generative AI asks “How many fingers am I holding up?”…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
Twice as much baseball, if you want it.Sometimes you want to watch more than one thing on your TV.
This impulse was initially satisfied by the introduction of TVs with picture-in-picture functionality, but as access to TV began to come from various decoder boxes, picture-in-picture became less practical.
In recent years, set-top-box software has become more sophisticated, home Internet bandwidth has gotten faster, and multi-view TV has returned as an option. Apple introduced picture-in-picture to tvOS, and some apps like ESPN and Fubo have built their own features to allow you to tile multiple live video streams at one time.
Three MLS games at once on Apple TV.With tvOS 16.5, Apple has added multi-view functionality to the TV app for its live sports broadcasts. This past weekend I was able to try it out with both Friday Night Baseball and Saturday MLS games.
I use Fubo’s multi-view feature all the time; Apple’s is similar but with some uniquely Apple touches. (For example, every box has rounded corners.) To enter multi-view while watching a live event, bring up the player controls and choose the new multi-view option (it looks like a four-square grid; the classic picture-in-picture feature is also still available).
When you enter multi-view, a row of available live events will slide up from the bottom of the screen. The event you’re currently watching will be selected, and you can click on other events to add them to the stack. You can watch two, three, or four events at once and even select which layout you’d prefer. (For example, you can have four events displayed in four tiles taking up quadrants of your TV—at 4K resolution, it’s like you’ve got four 1080 HD TVs!—or you can opt to display one feed at a large size with three others as thumbnails stacked up to the right.)
You can switch audio between feeds by moving around using the Apple TV remote. Clicking on the selected feed will slide it forward into full-screen; tapping the back button will return the interface to multi-view. It’s all pretty straightforward and easy to figure out.
Unfortunately, this excellent implementation is currently limited to the TV app itself. That’s great for Apple’s sports ambitions, but Apple is also the owner of the entire tvOS platform—and this feature should really be a part of tvOS itself. I watch live sports on the Fubo, MLB, ESPN, Peacock, and Paramount+ apps, sometimes at the same time.
The TV app’s multi-view feature is good. So good that I want it everywhere, and I’ll be crossing my fingers that Apple might offer such support in the next version of tvOS.
Whether we’d be comfortable in a driverless taxi, our thoughts on the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory regarding kids and social media, using Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on the iPad, and the last time technology blew us away.
Go to the podcast page.
Everyone wants to talk about AI. Most of them don’t know what it is, but they still want to talk about it. Who’s got it, and who doesn’t. What industries it’s ripe to disrupt. And the one company that’s not in the middle of that conversation is Apple.
Viral images generated by Stable Diffusion and pathological chatbots from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are the story of the day. Apple, meanwhile, has nothing. Or perhaps, considering the current state of Siri, less than nothing.
Apple’s nowhere when it comes to AI. That’s the narrative. The thing is, it’s not true. At least, not yet.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Special guest: Jason Snell. Topics: Headset, headseat, headset. And no baseball talk other than how games might look in VR. Also: Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad, and GM’s dumb decision to drop CarPlay.
Go to the podcast page.
Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are finally available for the iPad. I’ve had a week to use beta versions of the apps, each of which arrives in the App Store on Tuesday for $5/month or $50/year. And while it’s far too soon to issue final judgments, I’ve definitely got some initial impressions about both of these apps.
Logic Pro: Logical for musicians?It just wasn’t meant to be.It’s not you, Logic Pro—it’s me.
I’m not a musician. While Logic Pro on the Mac is one of the apps I’ve used the most over the last decade, I am using it decidedly wrong. I use Logic to edit podcasts, and while it’s perfectly good as a podcast editor, I know I’m not Logic’s target market, nor are its features tuned for me. And that’s only right!
When Apple chose to build Logic for the iPad, it logically focused on music creation and production. The result is an app that I feel like I just can’t judge fairly. I attempted to edit a podcast on Logic on iPad, but the commands I use the most just aren’t there. Splitting clips requires toggling to the separate Split mode, selecting a clip, and swiping down—or alternately, tapping and holding on a clip to bring up a contextual menu, then selecting Split Clip from the Split submenu. Strip Silence, a tool to automatically break long clips into component parts, doesn’t appear at all.
Unlike Final Cut, Logic offers roundtrip support for Logic projects between iPad and Mac. That’s great, but be warned: your Mac project must have saved as a package (if it’s not, you’ll need to use the Save As command to make a project version) and must use the musical grid, not the standard time format. (That’s a very strong hint to anyone who is not a musician—this is not the tool for you.)
Perhaps some of those features will come in time. Perhaps they won’t. That’s okay—Logic is not a podcast editing tool but a tool for musicians. If you are a podcast editor who wants to use the iPad, consider the $30 app Ferrite Recording Studio, which also works on the iPhone and does just about everything a podcast editor would want.
Final Cut Pro: A work in progressI use Logic a lot on my Mac, but I also use Final Cut Pro all the time. Lately, I’ve been editing short video clips from the Upgrade podcast into videos to share on social media. So I was excited to take Final Cut for iPad for a spin and used it to build video clips from last week’s and this week’s episodes of Upgrade.
Final Cut Pro for iPad doesn’t contain the entire Final Cut feature set and isn’t round-trippable between platforms, though iPad projects are importable to the Mac. I quickly ran into a feature that I use—image stabilization—that just isn’t available on the iPad at this point. You may find some of your favorites missing, too.
While the iPad app’s interface isn’t quite the same as the Mac app, it’s close enough to feel familiar. Performance was never an issue on the M2 iPad Pro I used to test the app—even file exports were snappy. Once I got the hang of it, I was able to edit and export projects pretty quickly, and nobody would ever know that I used my fingers rather than a keyboard and mouse to do it.
However, there’s a lot of room for improvement, even when it comes to Final Cut’s basic touch interface. All the basic editing tools are there, and Apple has come up with some very clever ways to provide touch interfaces for many of them. There are quick-access buttons to turn on multiple selections or to quickly split or trim a clip to the play head. You can choose from multiple selection modes, such as range or clip or edge. Though I was working without any documentation (owing to the apps not being out yet!), I was able to figure out almost everything I wanted to do.
But just because something’s usable doesn’t mean it’s efficient, and that’s where this 1.0 version of Final Cut for iPad falls down. To use Apple’s preferred method of selecting a bunch of clips and then splitting them all at the play head—something I do all the time—required tapping on the selection mode, tapping on each clip in turn, then tapping Done, then tapping the Split at Playhead icon. For a four-clip stack, that meant seven taps every single time I wanted to split those clips.
Dragging items around in the timeline could be frustrating, even when waveforms weren’t turning upside-down and crashing.The good news is, there’s a bit of a workaround—you have to start dragging with your finger when it’s in an empty area of the timeline and then keep dragging out the resulting selection box until it selects all the clips—at which point you can tap Split at Playhead and get what you want.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find solutions for other common editing behaviors of mine. Every clip splitting requires a tap in the middle of the screen to select and a tap on the bottom right of the screen to split the clip. Every time I need to toggle between play and pause, I have to tap the play button at the middle left of the screen, which necessitates me holding the iPad in a specific way so that my thumb can hover over the play-pause button most of the time.
These might seem like small things, but every extra gesture, every extra five inches covered, slows down the editing experience. My experience using Ferrite Recording Studio to edit podcasts on the iPad might be instructive: Ferrite lets me split clips by tapping on them and swiping down on the clip with my finger. Two simple gestures, a tap and a swipe, in a single location—much more efficient. Ferrite lets you toggle play and pause by tapping two fingers down on the screen. I don’t want to think about how much time I’ve saved—let alone the creative cost of breaking my concentration!—by tapping with two fingers rather than having to move my hand elsewhere on the iPad screen to hunt for a small play/pause icon.
The app also doesn’t work right when moving tracks within the timeline. I found it exceedingly difficult to slide a clip forward or back without my touch being ignored or triggering an unwanted contextual menu. The only workaround that seemed somewhat reliable was to tap a clip and drag it upward as if I was going to relocate it to a different layer in the stack and then drag it left or right (as a transparent ghost clip) before dropping it back down. Editing by touch was easy—but sliding clips around was excruciating.
I did appreciate the introduction of the jog wheel, a floating interface element that lets you move through the timeline or trip or move clips with precision. I struggled with it conceptually for a few minutes, but after I saw how it worked, I was able to integrate it into my workflow. It certainly helped ease the pain when I was unable to slide clips around by dragging them with my fingers!
A few minutes of editing on an iPad, including use of the jog wheel.I was similarly disappointed by the app’s seeming indifference to the Apple Pencil. I have come to rely on the Apple Pencil when I’m editing audio on the iPad with Ferrite. It allows a level of precision—both of selection and of gesture—that makes me much faster than I am with my meaty fingers alone. It feels like Final Cut could really fly if the Pencil could quickly split clips and move things around, but right now, it’s almost irrelevant.
I did pick up quite a bit of speed when I snapped the iPad Pro into a Magic Keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts sure can speed things up, and Apple has provided a bunch. Not only was play/pause toggled by the space bar, but I was able to perform familiar Final Cut tasks like splitting clips by typing Command-B while hovering over the proper edit point.
The prerelease version of the app I used could occasionally be quite buggy. At one point, my project crashed something like six times in a row after I attempted to drag an audio clip about five seconds back in the timeline. Sometimes the waveform on the audio clip would display inverted (a bad sign!) just before the inevitable death. Other times, the app would hum along with no trouble for long stretches of time.
Setting a resolution requires tapping a numpad on the screen, even if you have a keyboard.I also found a bunch of sections of the app that felt very much half-baked. Entering in a custom resolution for a timeline required tapping on a custom number-entry element on the screen, even if I had a keyboard attached. The act of duplicating or editing timelines in a project takes place in the app’s project viewer when I’d expect it to be done in the open project itself. The floating picture-in-picture video preview doesn’t resize to support vertical video.
I couldn’t export a selection, but once I made a new timeline I was able to export my videos quickly and easily.I was also disappointed by the app’s inability to export the contents of a selection. The only way I was able to export small clips was to duplicate my timeline, delete everything but the short clip, and then export that.
Getting media onto the iPad was also a bit challenging. The video assets for my weekly Upgrade social videos total about 32GB, and while I could probably preprocess the videos to make them a bit smaller, that’s still a lot of data to transfer over Wi-Fi or AirDrop. I ended up connecting my iPad Pro to my Mac and dragging them over using Finder’s file-transfer integration. It was still slow, but less so than all the other methods I tried, short of plugging in an Ethernet adapter.
After quite a few hours in Final Cut Pro iPad, my impressions are mixed. There were moments where I really did get into a groove and felt great about the app—generally when I was using the Magic Keyboard since it gave me access to shortcuts that haven’t been properly translated into the touch interface.
But I also felt a lot of familiar frustration at an app that’s packed with features but hasn’t quite realized that multi-touch gestures and the Apple Pencil can make the process go smoother even without an attached keyboard. The pieces are all in place for Final Cut Pro to become a great iPad app, but it’s still got a lot of growing up to do.
While I’m linking to subscription Substacks, I thought I’d link to Will Carroll’s piece about Apple, sports, and VR:
I’m not sure if people are ready for VR (or “XR” as Apple appears to be calling it), but one of the strongly rumored apps is a virtual IMAX screen. Yes, it will be great for movies, but also for sports. I’ve talked about the NBA’s courtside videos on Meta’s Oculus and with a 4K screen instead of the not-HD that even the new Oculus’s (Oculi?) have, it will be even better. I expect the sound will be too, or we’ll just use the AirPods we all have now.
But Apple doesn’t have NBA content… What Apple does have is the MLS, including the rights to do “new and innovative” things, and they have a weekly MLB game….
It’s that one game that I’m focused on. It’s going to need to be more, which means more like MLB.tv than a Friday night game of the week. MLB had one of the first apps on the iPhone and I fully expect that not only will there be a game of the week on the new headset, but also an app that does what the phone app does, except in big, IMAX-sized doses….
The confluence of Apple’s societal dominance, the collapse of RSN’s, and the opening of the VR era – no, really this time – is a potential inflection point inside sports. Not just MLB, but at every level, including the fans.
Needless to say, I’m very interested to see how Apple’s interest in live sports connects to the launch of its new mixed-reality platform.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Last week Joe Posnanski wrote an excellent story about PitchCom (subscription required), the technology that’s now used by Major League Baseball to relay pitch calls between catcher and pitcher. After a century of catchers sticking down one finger for fastball and two finger for curve, two magicians adapted technology used for mind-reading acts to work in baseball.
It’s a fun story, but there’s one technology-related line that made me laugh out loud:
How about using a Bluetooth device so the pitcher and catcher could just talk with each other? Well, in the words of Craig Filicetti, one of the world’s great builders of magic devices, “Bluetooth sucks. It’s completely unreliable and nobody can figure out how to connect and disconnect. It will never be Bluetooth.”
Good ol’ Bluetooth. But General Motors thinks it’s good enough for iPhone users.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
With WWDC and our annual draft right around the corner, it’s time to survey the final rumors about Apple’s AR/VR headset, while also taking stock of some real accessibility developments due this fall. Also: Jason has gazed into the many faces of the Apple TV Quadbox, and Mimestream 1.0 has arrived.
Go to the podcast page.
Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, shines a light on an area of security that is often ignored, but is nevertheless a massive hole in many companies’ Zero Trust fortress.
These findings are particularly alarming given the overall state of device security. IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing your most sensitive data–things like customer records, confidential IP, and plain-text access credentials–on devices that are vulnerable to attack.
This problem has gone unaddressed because until now there hasn’t been a good solution for it. MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument for dealing with sensitive data, and DLP tools are too extreme and invasive for most companies. After all, you’re not trying to ban downloads together, nor regard every download as suspicious. You’re just trying to make sure employees aren’t keeping data for longer than they need or keeping it on an unmanaged or unsecure device.
Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.
Our unique approach makes device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. But instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
A couple of years ago, my favorite Mac email app—the Gmail web wrapper app Mailplane—was discontinued. After an appropriate period of mourning (which included using Apple Mail regularly for the first time in years), I was desperate for an email app that worked the way I wanted it to.
And the solution presented itself! Neil Jhaveri, who previously worked on the engineering team for Apple Mail itself, founded a company to build a new email app: Mimestream. After a few years in open beta development, on Monday Mimestream 1.0 was officially released.
If you don’t use Gmail as your mail service or need to use the same app across Mac and iOS, Mimestream isn’t for you—yet. I asked Jhaveri what he meant when he said the company will be “turning its attention a bit broader” in the future, and he told me that while the company needed to focus in order to launch a compelling new app, “our mission is to just be the best general-purpose prosumer email client on the market.” That will take time, and the next step is probably an iOS version.
As for support for IMAP email services, it’s also on Mimestream’s to-do list, but right now the app shines because it is a Gmail client through and through, so adding support for the very different IMAP metaphor will need to be done with a lot of care. I do think the app should definitely expand its remit, because it’s very good. But as someone whose top priority was a better Gmail app on macOS, Mimestream was a perfect fit for me on day one—or, technically, two years before day one.
If you’re a Gmail user, Mimestream will be a revelation. Since it was built from the ground up to understand Google’s approach to email, it doesn’t suffer from the weird workarounds required to map an IMAP protocol metaphor onto Gmail’s particular quirks. Instead, it behaves… like Gmail. But in a pure, Swift-driven Mac app.
Most importantly, it uses Gmail’s API to efficiently search my entire Gmail repository. Searching Gmail in Apple Mail frustrates me with its inconsistent and slow behavior, but Mimestream just works. Labels, Inbox categories, server-side filters… it’s got them all.
The app will look completely familiar to anyone who has used Apple Mail. It’s got a multi-column design with mailboxes on the left, a message list in the center, and message content on the right. (And yes, you can close off the message preview if you prefer to open messages in their own windows.)
With version 1.0, Jhaveri and the rest of his team have imported a few features that haven’t appeared before during the app’s lengthy beta, including better multi-account support via a “profiles” system that lets you place multiple accounts into different buckets. Profiles can be toggled on and off using Apple’s Focus Filters feature. Google’s Vacation Responder system is now available directly in the app’s interface.
Don’t let the version 1.0 label scare you. I’ve been relying on Mimestream as my Mac email app for two years, and it hasn’t ever let me down. This is probably the most mature version 1.0 release I’ve ever seen.
The biggest change in going to version 1.0 is that, after two years of using an in-progress email app for free, it’s time for Mimestream to become a real app—with real money changing hands. The app is available as a $5 monthly subscription or a $50 annual subscription. (There’s a 40% discount offer for year one available for the next few weeks.)
As with any productivity app, you’ll need to decide if the price matches your needs. (Mimestream has a page explaining their pricing decision.) Apple Mail is free. Gmail in a browser window is free. But after two years with Mimestream, I couldn’t put down my credit card fast enough.
The headset goes on a real expectations rollercoaster ride this week as Apple clears the deck for WWDC.
The Apple headset is awesomeIf you were worried about Apple’s chances in the AR/VR space you can relax because it looks like they’ve got this headset business all sorted.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to iMazing for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
iMazing is the answer to so many questions about how you can have more control over how to sync and back up iOS and iPadOS devices… and want to do it all from a Mac or Windows PC rather than relying on the cloud. The people behind iMazing, based in Switzerland, have spent 15 years delving deep within iOS to make useful software.
iMazing enables local device backup management with snapshot support, including to external drives or NAS; message extraction and archiving, including attachments and metadata, for SMS/MMS/iMessage and WhatsApp; quick drag-and-drop file copies from computer to iPhone or iPad, spyware checks, two-way music and photos transfer, and a whole lot more.
Whether you’re an individual or a business who wants more control over their mobile devices, you should check out iMazing.
Julia’s back at last, so we blast through discussing HBO Max becoming Max, Hulu going inside the Disney+ app, the WGA’s “streaming strike”, the NFL’s Peacock playoff game, and ESPN plotting its inevitable over-the-top service.
Go to the podcast page.
I am reminded by Reader Donni that I haven’t updated my “How I Podcast: Recording” article since the days of Skype. I don’t use Skype now. I use Zoom. So I made a quick update to bring it up to date.
In short: Zoom is the thing we use now, mostly because Zoom is pretty much universally cross-platform and lets you record every participant’s voice on a separate track. That makes editing a podcast vastly easier—but you should still record your own microphone file locally, because that file will sound better than whatever Zoom sends over the Internet.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Fast Company’s Harry McCracken talked to some of the team behind Apple’s new Personal Voice accessibility feature about its development as well as some more fine details:
When it came to enabling third-party apps to speak via Personal Voice, Apple put privacy measures in place similar to those it imposes for photos, location, and other bits of personal data in its care. Such apps can only hook into Personal Voice with the user’s permission, must be running in the foreground, and receive only enough access to read text in the voice, not to get at the data used to generate it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the privacy implications, but the implementation of this feature certainly seems that it will be harder to abuse than something like ElevenLabs’s voice cloning tech. For example, just having to spend fifteen minutes training the model with a random set of words is going to make it a lot harder to create a model of someone else’s voice without their knowledge, even if it does give me shades of training the ViaVoice dictation software circa 2000 by reading Treasure Island to it.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple’s new accessibility features, buttons vs. touchscreens, a free ad-supported television set, and whether we’re contributors or lurkers on social media.
Go to the podcast page.
More than a decade ago, on the heels of the iPad’s announcement, I took to the pages of this very magazine—then still available as a physical object shipped to your home—to describe it as not just a third device, but a third revolution.
And at the time it was: Apple’s attempt to once again remake the idea of personal computing, a thesis it would return to several times in the subsequent years, perhaps most cogently expressed in the “what’s a computer?” ad from 2017.
But in recent years, that future has seemed in jeopardy, as the iPad has entered a kind of holding pattern, like the understudy waiting in the wings that’s never asked to step into the main role. The Mac, which seemed poised on the brink of retirement, not only kept trucking along, but even garnered a late-career resurgence with the transition to Apple Silicon. The iPad’s big break suddenly evaporated.
This past week, Apple once again took a step towards the idea of the iPad as the modern-day computer replacement with its long-awaited announcement of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the platform—but is it too little, too late?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
iMazing gives Mac and Windows users powerful features and options for managing iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, filling important gaps in Apple’s feature set.
iMazing is especially well-suited for those who prefer to work with their data and backups locally instead of the cloud.
iMazing is engineered in Switzerland and built on 15 years of experience with the inner working of iOS.
Here’s what you get when you start using iMazing with your iOS or iPadOS devices:
• Local backup management with snapshot support, including to external drives or NAS
• Message extraction and archiving, including attachments and metadata, for SMS/MMS/iMessage and WhatsApp
• Quick Transfer for drag-and-drop file copies from computer to iPhone or iPad (free!)
• Pegasus and other spyware checks (free!)
• Two-way music and photos transfer
• Dozens more features
Our solutions are also great in business and enterprise environments, learn more about how we can help you!
For the third year running, Apple has offered a preview of accessibility features coming to its platforms later this year. The announcements were timed to mark global accessibility awareness day on May 18. The preview featured several completely new offerings aimed at people with cognitive and speech disabilities, plus updates to existing macOS and iOS features.
These preview announcements don’t come with beta software or release dates, but it’s understood that the new features will appear in forthcoming releases of macOS and iOS. In past years, accessibility updates for watchOS and tvOS have been previewed, but this time the focus was on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. It should be pointed out that these early announcements are often not the only accessibility updates in a given release cycle.
Assistive accessFor those with cognitive disabilities, navigating the complex iOS interface a challenge. Assistive Access is a simplified, customized UI for the Home screen and some essential apps, including Phone, Messages, Photos, Camera, Music, and TV. Under Assistive Access, the Home Screen is limited to extra-large app icons for supported apps. The app interfaces are simplified, too, with larger text and bolder icons. A user or a caregiver can further set an Assistive Access app to display just the desired information, such as a select group of contacts.
Calls is an Assistive Access app that combines Phone and FaceTime. Messages can work with text, inline video, or an emoji-only keyboard that gives users who are not readers, or who can better communicate with symbols, an alternative to standard typing.
Photos and Music each display their contents in a grid that’s “flatter” in structure than the hierarchical interfaces the standard versions of those apps offer.
Assistive Access is the closest Apple has come to an interface designed specifically for people with disabilities or elders—an option that Android has offered via its support for alternative launchers. It will be interesting to see if it’s full-featured enough to not only support users with cognitive disabilities, but also offer a “grandparent-friendly” experience for those trying to choose between and iPhone and an Android phone.
Speech accessibilityApple organizes its accessibility features and settings by functional categories: Vision, Hearing, Physical and Motor. Now there’s Speech, too. New features under the Speech heading support those who are partially or fully nonverbal. Personal Voice is an intriguing feature that might seem familiar to anyone who has experienced AI-based text-to-speech that’s been trained on an actual human voice.
Those diagnosed with ALS are at great risk for losing their ability to speak, but often have advance warning. Using Personal Voice, an individual will be able to use an Apple Silicon-equipped Mac, iPhone or iPad to create a voice that resembles their own. If the ability to speak is lost, text the user generates on the device can then be converted to voice, for use in a variety of ways. It will work with augmented communication apps that are often used to make it easier for people with limited speech to be understood. And no, you can’t create a new Siri voice this way. All Personal Voice training is done on-device.
Live Speech can use an existing Siri voice to give people with speech disabilities a quick way to use voice to express common phrases or sentences. Type and save a statement, like a food order or a greeting, then tap the text to have it spoken aloud. It works inside Phone and FaceTime, or in-person, and users can save common phrases.
More detectionThe latest detection feature added to the Magnifier app–joining People Detection and Door Detection–is called Point and Speak. It’s designed to identify and read incidental text, like button labels you’d find on a vending machine or a kitchen appliance display. Like the other detectors, Point and Speak is aimed at blind and low-vision users, and requires a LIDAR-equipped device.
Based on the preview announcement, useing Point and Speak will feel similar to using Live text when combined with VoiceOver. What’s new here is that you can drag a finger around a display with multiple text labels and have each read aloud as you encounter it. That makes it a lot easier to correctly choose Coke, rather than accidentally pushing the Sprite button.
Hearing aids on MacLast year’s accessibility preview featured a handful of enhancements for hearing aid owners who use an iPhone. This year, Apple says support for Made for iPhone Hearing Aids is coming to the Mac. That’s been a long time coming. You’ll need an M1 or better Mac to make the connection, though.
Clever and targetedThis year’s preview also includes a grab bag of nice updates to existing accessibility features, including updated text size adjustments in macOS and tweaks to Siri voices for VoiceOver users who want to listen at extremely high speaking rates. Voice Control will add phonetic suggestions when editing text.
Several of the preview features clearly benefit from machine learning, and Personal Voice might be touted as an AI-based tool if it came from another company. It feels like an application of the technology that’s both entirely positive for the community it’s meant to serve, and reflective of a pretty nuanced understanding of what that community might want.
Apple has finally announced Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad. What does this mean for the platform, what took so long, and is this the end of the story—or just the beginning? Also, the Wall Street Journal gets into the Apple Headset rumor business.
Go to the podcast page.
Twitter (left), Mastodon (center), and Bluesky (right).Last week, I joined Bluesky, the new hotness in social platforms. It’s the latest refuge for those who have beef with the way Elon Musk runs Twitter.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
This week Apple gets around to making its own dog food and eating it too, iPhones take over the U.S. market, and it may soon be time for that “Cheers” re-watch you’ve been thinking about for years.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
Completing precision tasks on iPad with Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, our thoughts on AI in retail (in light of the Wendy’s news), Google joining the foldable phone market, and predictions for Apple’s WWDC and the mention of artificial intelligence.
Go to the podcast page.
If you thought we were above obvious microphone puns then I’m not sure what podcast you’ve been listening to but it wasn’t this one.
Go to the podcast page.
As Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference approaches, so too does the rumored announcement of the company’s much ballyhooed mixed reality headset. Expectations for the device are high—as is the reported price tag—and much of the tech community is waiting with bated breath to see if Apple can deliver a game-changing device where other competitors have foundered.
If Apple does manage to pull a rabbit out of its hat, the company will surely attribute that success to its signature ability to combine hardware and software into one seamless package, delivering a product in the way that only Apple can.
But there’s another element of Apple’s business that will play a big part in whether or not Apple’s headset is a hit, and you don’t have to go very far down the company’s balance sheet to find it: services.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Back in November 2015, Apple released the first iPad Pro, and I was hooked. But in the intervening seven and a half years, it’s felt that the iPad’s hardware has constantly been let down by its software—and Apple’s failure to support its own pro iPad hardware with its pro-level apps was a perfect example of the problem.
“At least Adobe is investing in the future of the iPad Pro—something we’ve yet to see from Apple’s own pro software team, which still hasn’t offered versions of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro for the iPad,” I wrote back in 2018, still lamenting the situation, as I did once again in 2021. When Apple released the M2 iPad Pro last fall, it was able to boast about video performance—but only by trumpeting the third-party app DaVinci Resolve, since Apple’s own video editing software still wasn’t available on the platform.
That all changes this month. Apple announced on Tuesday that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are coming to the iPad starting May 23. And beyond the obvious “what took them so long,” I had a lot of questions about both of these apps. Fortunately, I’ve got answers to some—but definitely not all—of them. (For the rest, May 23 is two short weeks away.)
What took them so long?
I said beyond the obvious one! I honestly don’t know, though it’s clear from what I’ve seen that Apple has put an enormous amount of effort into both of these apps. I really wonder what finally made Apple decide to build and ship iPad versions of these apps. (Surely it’s not a project seven years in the making!)
How different are these apps from their Mac counterparts?
Really different in a lot of ways—while also being strangely familiar. Apple clearly intends them both to be touch-first apps, just as the iPad itself is a touch-first device. You can swipe up and down in the center of the Final Cut Pro window to make the timeline larger (and the preview window smaller) or the reverse. A swipe from the left side in Logic makes the channel strip labels and controls wider, and there’s a loop navigator that can slide in from that side, too.
Apple seems to have done just what you might expect: these are apps that are familiarly Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro but modified to support touch gestures. I was especially impressed with the new jog wheel interface in Final Cut Pro, which lets you place a circular interface element on either the left or right edge of the screen and use it to move quickly (or slowly!) through the timeline.
But just as what makes the iPad special is that it’s not just a touch tablet but can take other forms, these apps also seem to embrace those other forms. There’s full support for Apple Pencil, and when you put the iPad Pro in a Magic Keyboard case or attach a keyboard, the app will use familiar keyboard shortcuts and responds to the trackpad-driven pointer as you might expect.
Due to the limited size of the iPad’s display, some items have been relocated—the Logic Pro mixer is its own window, for example—but everything seemed usable, even on a smaller iPad Pro. (I use Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on a 13-inch MacBook Air without any trouble, so this shouldn’t be an issue—and it isn’t.) That said, the moment I saw Final Cut Pro running on an iPad, I immediately saw the potential of Apple making an iPad Pro with a larger display.
After seven years of editing podcasts on the iPad using Ferrite Recording Studio, I’ve come to appreciate the productivity enhancement that comes from using multi-touch features as the touch equivalent of keyboard shortcuts. The moment I configured Ferrite to toggle playback on and off by using a two-finger tap gesture, my productivity soared. At an initial glance at video demonstrating these apps, I didn’t see any hint of such gestures. But if users have to reach up to the top left corner of one of these apps every time they want to pause or play a video, it will get old really fast. I hope Apple has embraced multi-touch gestures—and if they haven’t, I hope they get with the program soon.
Are these apps compatible with their Mac equivalents?
Logic Pro appears to be more or less directly compatible. According to Apple’s press release, you can roundtrip projects back and forth between Logic on Mac and Logic on iPad without trouble.
Except… there’s just one thing. Many Logic users also use third-party audio plug-ins. You may not know it, but iPadOS supports Apple’s Audio Unit plug-in format and has for a while now. I’ve been using plug-ins inside Ferrite Recording Studio for years now. (And while the early days were pretty shaky, plug-ins are much more reliable today.)
The only catch is that the maker of the plug-ins you rely on must make iPad versions available, or your “roundtrip” Logic project really won’t be. Some pro filter makers, like FabFilter, support the iPad. Others, like iZotope, seem to not have even heard of the iPad. Your mileage may vary.
The compatibility story with Final Cut Pro is less good. You can import Final Cut Pro projects into Final Cut on the Mac in order to take advantage of object tracking and other pro features. That last sentence contained numerous red flags—I hope you caught them.
Final Cut Pro for iPad seems to be a subset of the Mac version. You can start on iPad and move to Mac, but the migration won’t work the other way, and a bunch of features from the Mac just aren’t there on the iPad.
This is disappointing. Yes, the lack of feature parity is unfortunate—but perhaps a bit understandable? But as someone who rarely uses those pro-level features, it’s also frustrating to realize that even my simple projects won’t be portable in case I need to leave home and run off somewhere with an iPad.
Still, there are a lot of cool features that did make it to Final Cut Pro for iPad, including multi-cam support (up to four cameras) and a bunch of “fast cut” features, including a nifty scene-removal mask. There’s also a machine-learning-driven “auto crop” feature that analyzes your video and chooses the best crop to preserve the content across different aspect ratios, like when you’re pulling 16:9 video into a vertical project.
Do these apps mean iPadOS’s sound subsystem has been improved?
iPadOS’s sound subsystem is remarkably rudimentary, as anyone who has tried to play audio from more than one app or record video while also playing back audio has discovered. There are some rumors out there that iPadOS 17 might give the iPad a serious audio upgrade, and I hope they’re true.
I doubt any major sound improvements will surface in iPadOS this month, but it is worth noting that Apple’s press release specifically says that these apps require iPadOS 16.4. That suggests to me that at least something in one or both of these apps requires a little bit of a modification to the operating system in order for them to run smoothly. (Third-party app developers wait for years for Apple to address roadblocks in its operating systems. Apple’s apps release alongside an OS update. That’s the ultimate advantage of being a first-party app.)
What will they cost?
These apps mark what I assume is a long-term policy shift with Apple’s pro media apps, joining tech giants such as Adobe in offering them only via subscription. Apple says each of them will cost $5 a month or $49 a year, and as always, there’s a free one-month trial. There’s no bundle discount, nor are they available in a bundle with their Mac counterparts.
Insert your own debate about subscription software here. Some hate it; some love it. I think, in many ways, it makes sense for apps that are on a pretty constant update schedule (as the Mac versions of these apps are), and I like the idea that you can buy a few months of Final Cut Pro for a project and then stop paying when you’re not using it. Then again, it also commits you to $49 a year — or $98 for both — for as long as you use the apps.
Whether that’s worth it is up to you. But I have to believe that this is the future of the Mac version of these apps, too.
Do these releases validate the iPad Pro as a product?
I love the iPad, but it’s true that in recent months I’ve begun to wonder if Apple truly believes that the iPad is the future of computing. I do think that Apple believes in the iPad Pro as a versatile, productive computing device—and that these apps help fulfill the promise inherent in the sheer power of the top-of-the-line iPad. (Logic Pro will also run on iPads powered by the A12 Bionic or later, but Final Cut Pro requires an M1 or M2 model.)
So, a promise has potentially been fulfilled. I want to praise Apple for (presumably) shipping these apps while also pointing out that it’s taken seven-plus years from the original iPad Pro announcement to get them out the door. There are still some serious questions about what Apple sees as the future of the iPad Pro. But as of this announcement, one big question mark has—finally!—been resolved.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today unveiled Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad. Video and music creators can now unleash their creativity in new ways that are only possible on iPad. Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad bring all-new touch interfaces that allow users to enhance their workflows with the immediacy and intuitiveness of Multi-Touch.
Over the past several years, Apple has brought more “pro” features to the iPad, including support for trackpads and external displays, but one thing that’s been missing in action is Apple’s own in-house pro apps. Bringing over Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro removes yet another limitation on the platform that may open up the device to new markets.
But adapting these apps has always been a tall order: they’re not only exceptionally powerful, but they’ve never been made with touch interfaces in mind. Apple says it has created a brand new touch interface for Final Cut Pro, including the ability to use the Apple Pencil’s new hover feature on M2 iPad Pros to preview footage. Logic Pro also adds a few new features, such as a new sound browser and a new time and pitch-morphing plugin called Beat Breaker.
It’s not clear whether these apps provide full feature parity with their Mac counterparts, though Logic Pro supports full roundtrip compatibility for projects; Apple says Final Cut Pro, on the other hand, can export its projects to the Mac, though it’s less clear whether that runs in the other direction.
In terms of what devices you’ll be able to run these on, Final Cut Pro has the steeper requirements, needing an M1 chip or later, while Logic Pro just requires an A12 Bionic processor.
These also mark Apple’s first major subscription software venture: each of the pro apps will be available on May 23, running $4.99 per month or $49 per year; they’ll both offer a month-long free trial.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s time to analyze Apple’s financial results, including a focus on India and some substantial declines for the Mac and iPad. Myke reveals the existence of the Secret Myke Hurley Tip Line. And we dive deep into a conversation about how Apple’s embrace of keeping things “on device” isn’t necessarily enough to differentiate it from the likes of Google and Meta.
Go to the podcast page.
Right now, “Zero Trust” is in serious danger of becoming an empty buzzword. The problem isn’t just that marketers have slapped the Zero Trust label on everything short of breakfast cereal–it’s that for all the hype, we don’t seem to be getting any safer.
At the heart of Zero Trust is a good idea, but the way most companies execute that idea is incomplete. Specifically, most security practitioners forget that device compliance is a crucial element of Zero Trust.
Think about it: your identity provider can ensure that only known devices access your company’s apps, but just because you recognize a device, doesn’t mean it’s in a secure state. A malware-infected laptop running an outdated OS can’t exactly be “trusted.” And you can’t count on MDMs to achieve total compliance. Things like unencrypted access credentials are out of their reach, not to mention Linux devices writ large.
Kolide solves the device compliance element of Zero Trust for companies that use Okta.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide’s unique approach works with Okta to make device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
Kolide works across your Mac, Windows, and even Linux devices, with mobile support coming soon. Our lightweight agent complements your existing tools, brings a lot of compliance issues into scope and under control, and can complete your Zero Trust picture.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
It’s AirTags to the rescue as the little devices could get a standard and are endorsed by law enforcement. Meanwhile, Apple employees are making some wild demands and the company manages to pull off an OK quarter.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Sometimes, it’s all about expectations. Apple’s second financial quarter of 2023, whose results were announced Thursday, was a bit like a movie with bad word of mouth—but then you see it, and it wasn’t that bad. In fact, maybe it was… good? Sort of?
Or, to put it another way, when the economy looks shaky, it’s awfully nice when one of the most valuable companies in the world generates $94.8 billion in revenue and a $24.2 billion profit—even if it’s down slightly from the same quarter a year ago. After ringing a lot of warning bells three months ago, Apple’s business still seems pretty solid. If this is what a weak quarter looks like, Apple’s as blue-chippy as a blue-chip company could be.
As always, amid the numbers and Apple’s traditional phone call with financial analysts, there are a few nuggets to be gleaned about what Apple’s doing and what Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri are thinking. I’m just here to chew gum and mine nuggets, and I’m all out of gum.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
In 2023, Apple is sitting on top of the world. At times ranked as the most valuable company around, its influence in technology and media—and even some realms beyond—exceeds almost any other single corporation. But it wasn’t always that way, and much of where the company is today can be attributed to a product released 25 years ago: the original iMac.
I vividly remember the first time I saw a picture of that machine: sitting in my high school library, just a few days shy of graduation, I was leafing through my copy of this very publication (in classic dead-tree format), devouring the cover story on this weird new computer that, unbeknownst to any at the time, would set the course for Apple for years to come.
As an avid Apple fan in the darkest period of the 1990s, it was hard to deny that the iMac sparked excitement. Here was something new, something distinct from everything else on the market, something that perfectly exemplified the company’s then-only recently adopted slogan, which, though only in use for a few years, became its most iconic motto: Think different.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac has a really well-reported article about the fall of accessory maker Brydge:
Brydge, a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products, is ceasing operations. According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions.
Miller’s article details the troubles the company faced, both in terms of competition and in terms of corporate dynamics. In the days before Apple introduced the Magic Keyboard for iPad, Brydge’s Bluetooth keyboards were the best choice for people who wanted to use their iPads in a laptop-like configuration.
But then the Magic Keyboard arrived. And while Apple’s addition of pointer support to iPadOS should have helped Brydge compete, the truth is that Apple’s trackpad firmware was far more sophisticated than anything Brydge could offer. I used Brydge products a lot until the day I got my first Magic Keyboard; after I got the Magic Keyboard, I never really used a Brydge product again.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
What’s better than charts? A video about charts. Dan and Jason look over the latest Apple results on YouTube:
Every three months after releasing their corporate earnings, Apple’s CEO and CFO get on the phone and chat with financial analysts. By which we mean, they read from prepared statements and then take a couple questions each from a group of handpicked analysts. There are a lot of words—but sometimes there are interesting things to be gleaned!
This is the traditional Six Colors transcript of that call.
Suhasini Chandramouli: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Speaking first today is Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he’ll be followed by CFO Luca Maestri. After that, we’ll open the call to questions from analysts. Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook, including the risks and uncertainties of the SEC’s macroeconomic forecast.
These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Apple’s most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, along with the associated press release. Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of their respective dates. I’d now like to turn the call over to Tim for introductory remarks.
Tim Cook’s opening statementTim Cook: Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today we’re reporting revenue of $94.8 billion for the March quarter, which was better than our expectations. We set an all-time record for services. and a March quarter record for iPhone. We were particularly pleased with the performance we saw in emerging markets and achieved all time records in Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE, as well as a number of March quarter records, including in Brazil, Malaysia and India. This result is a testament, first and foremost, to our teams around the world who are engaged every day in the work of bringing new innovations to life. It speaks to the incredible power of Apple products and services to enrich people’s lives in indispensable ways. And whether it’s in the design lab in Cupertino or in one of the brand new retail stores in India, I am constantly inspired by the way our people come together to make a real difference in the world.
During the March quarter, we continued to face foreign exchange headwinds which had an impact of more than 500 basis points, as well as ongoing challenges related to the macroeconomic environment. Revenue was down 3% year over year as a result, while on a constant currency basis, we grew in total and in the vast majority of the markets we track.
Despite these challenges, we continue to manage for the long term and to push the limits of what’s possible, always on behalf of the customers who depend on our products, whether it’s students exploring new frontiers, developers dreaming up their next big idea, or artists taking their creativity to a whole new level. Let me share how these results showed up across our lineup of products and services.
Let’s start with iPhone, which set a new March quarter record with revenue of $51.3 billion. The iPhone 14 and 14 Plus continue to delight users with their long-lasting battery and advanced camera, and our pro users continue to rave about the most powerful camera system ever in an iPhone. This March, we were excited to expand Emergency SOS via satellite to six new countries, bringing this important safety feature to even more users. We now offer this vital service in 12 countries, and I’m grateful for every note I’ve received from around the world about the life-saving impact of our safety features.
Now let’s turn to Mac, which recorded $7.2 billion in revenue for the March quarter, in line with our expectations. As we noted during our last call, Mac faced a very difficult compare because of the incredibly successful rollout of our M1 chips throughout the Mac lineup last year. And like our other product lines, Mac is facing some macroeconomic and foreign exchange headwinds as well.
That said, the advancements we’ve made in power efficient performance continue to amaze our users. Our M2 Mac Mini customers are raving about the pro-level powerhouse packed into an ultra-compact design. And users are marveling at the power and speed at the heart of every M2-powered MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which allow them to sustain even the most demanding workloads.
iPad revenue was $6.7 billion, which was also in line with our expectations. Similar to Mac, iPad revenue performance was impacted by macroeconomic challenges, foreign exchange headwinds, and a difficult compare with last year when we launched the M1-powered iPad Air. iPad’s versatility continues to be its greatest strength, as we’re helping students learn on the same family of devices artists use to create their next masterpiece.
Across wearables home and accessories, revenue was $8.8 billion. With its exceptional range of game-changing health and safety features, Apple Watch becomes more and more indispensable every day. Apple Watch Ultra is attracting adventurers, athletes, and everyday users with its breakthrough features built for endurance and exploration. And with summer travel season soon heating up, there’s no better companion in the air or on the road than AirPods, the best and most popular headphones in the world.
Meanwhile, services set an all-time record with $20.9 billion in revenue for the March quarter. We achieved all-time revenue records across App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, and Payment Services. And now with more than 975 million paid subscriptions, we’re reaching even more people with our lineup of services.
Apple TV+ continues to draw praise from customers and reviewers alike. During the past quarter, fans tuned in to incredible new series like “Shrinking” and “The Big Door Prize” and got to welcome “Ted Lasso” back into their homes for a third season. Movies like “Tetris” are captivating viewers with many more to come, including Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” later this year.
Three years since its launch, Apple TV+ programming has been celebrated across the globe with over 1,450 nominations and more than 350 wins. Recently, we were thrilled to cheer on “The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse,” which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
This season of our historic 10-year partnership with Major League Soccer is well underway. With MLS Season Pass, we’ve created the ultimate destination for soccer fans, offering subscribers the ability to watch every match with no blackouts. And with baseball season in full swing, Apple TV+ subscribers can watch their favorite teams with a return of Friday Night Baseball.
This quarter, we launched Apple Music Classical, a stand-alone app that gives something special to classical music lovers. Apple Music Classical packs the largest library of classical music on earth into a thoughtful and intuitive design that strikes all the right notes. Whether you’re listening with AirPods or HomePod, the premium sound experience of Apple Music Classical will leave you with a feeling of being front row at the symphony, just behind the conductor.
In March, we also launched Apple Pay Later. Designed with users’ privacy and financial health in mind, Apple Pay Later allows users to split purchases into multiple payments with no interest or fees. And last month, we introduced Apple Cart Savings accounts to give users even more value out of their daily cash Apple Card benefit.
At Apple, our customers are at the center of everything we do. Nowhere is that more evident than retail, where our teams are dedicated to sharing the best of Apple with our customers. And we’re constantly innovating to deliver exceptional experiences and meet our customers where they are. In the U.S., we launched Shop with a Specialist over video, a new way for customers to learn about iPhone and find the one that’s just right for them. And as I noted earlier, in a milestone for Apple, we just opened our first two Apple stores in India, in Mumbai and Delhi. I was there to see it for myself, and I couldn’t have been more delighted by the excitement and enthusiasm of the customers, developers, creatives, and team members I got to spend time with.
I’ve had the chance to connect with customers and teams all around the world in recent months. So many people shared with me that they were fans of Apple not just because of the innovations we create, but because of the values that guide us. And that means a great deal to us. We’re constantly striving to make a positive difference in people’s lives and be a force for progress. We’re investing in education to give students the skills they need to shape the future. We’re helping to create pathways of opportunity for communities of color through our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. And every day, we’re building an even more inclusive and diverse Apple rooted in our culture of belonging.
To better understand how our work intersects with our values, look no further than what we’re doing for the environment. We just celebrated Earth Day in April, and during that month, Apple announced that its global manufacturing partners now support over 13 gigawatts of renewable energy, a nearly 30% increase in just the last year. This translates to 17.4 million metric tons of avoided carbon emissions, the equivalent of removing nearly 3.8 million cars from the road. We’re also investing up to an additional $200 million in our Restore Fund, which is designed to support innovative, scalable, nature-based carbon removal projects with the goal of removing 1 million metric tons of carbon every year. These are just the latest steps on our journey toward our 2030 goal to be carbon neutral across our supply chain and life cycle of our devices.
At the same time we’re advancing renewable energy across our supply chain, we’re also sourcing more recycled materials in our products. Last month, we announced our plans to have all Apple-designed batteries include 100% certified recycled cobalt by 2025. And we remain committed to one day using only recycled and renewable materials in our products.
We have a deep sense of mission here at Apple. We believe in the power of innovation to build a better world. We are determined to do our best work on behalf of our customers and to give them the tools that can enrich lives. So we will manage for the long term, just as we always have, with our eyes to the horizon, with limitless creativity, and with a deep belief that we can achieve anything we put our minds to. With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s opening statementLuca Maestri: Thank you, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the March quarter was $94.8 billion, down 3% from last year, and better than our expectations. Foreign exchange had a negative impact of over 5 percentage points on our results, in line with what we had expected.
On a constant currency basis, our revenue grew year over year in total and in the majority of the markets we track. In addition to the records in emerging markets that Tim mentioned, we also set March quarter records in Australia, Canada, Spain, and Switzerland, among others.
Products revenue was $73.9 billion, down 5% from last year, due to challenging compares on Mac and iPad. iPhone, however, reached a March quarter revenue record, thanks to very strong performance in emerging markets, from South Asia and India to Latin America and the Middle East.
During the quarter, our installed base of active devices continued to grow at a nice pace, thanks to extremely high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, and reached an all-time high for all major product categories and geographic segments. Our services set an all-time revenue record of $20.9 billion, up 5% year over year, on top of growing 17% in the March quarter a year ago. We reached an all-time services revenue record in Greater China and March quarter records in Americas, Europe, and rest of Asia Pacific. Company gross margin was 44.3%, up 130 basis points from last quarter, driven by cost savings and favorable mix shift towards services, partially offset by leverage. Products gross margin was 36.7%, decreasing 30 basis points sequentially, due to seasonal loss of leverage and mix, partially offset by favorable costs.
Services gross margin was 71 percent, up 20 basis points sequentially. Operating expenses of $13.7 billion were at the low end of the guidance range we provided at the beginning of the quarter and continued to decelerate from the December quarter. We are closely managing our spend, but remain focused on long-term growth with continued investment in innovation and product development. Net income was $24.2 billion, diluted earnings per share were $1.52, unchanged versus last year, and we generated a very strong operating cash flow of $28.6 billion.
Let me now provide more detail for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue set a March quarter record of $51.3 billion, up 2 percent year-over-year, despite significant foreign exchange headwinds and a challenging macroeconomic environment. We set March quarter records in several developed and emerging markets, with India, Indonesia, Turkey, and the UAE doubling on a year-over-year basis. Our active installed base of iPhone grew to a new all-time high and was up in all our geographic segments. We are very pleased by the results of the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research which measured customer satisfaction at 99 percent for the iPhone 14 family.
Mac revenue was $7.2 billion, down 31 percent year-over-year and in line with our expectations. These results were driven by the challenging macroeconomic environment, coupled with a difficult compare against last year’s launch of the completely reimagined M1 MacBook Pros. Despite this, the installed base of active Macs reached an all-time high across all geographic segments and we continue to see strong, upgraded activity to Apple Silicon. Also the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research reported customer satisfaction at 96 percent for Mac.
iPad generated $6.7 billion in revenue, down 13 percent year-over-year and in line with our expectations. This performance was due to two key factors: A tough compare against the launch of iPad Air, powered by the M1 chip in the year-ago quarter, and headwinds from the macroeconomic environment. The iPad installed base reached a new all-time high in all geographic segments thanks to exceptional customer loyalty and a high number of new customers. In fact, over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product.
Wearables, home and accessories revenue was $8.8 billion, down 1 percent year-over-year, as the category experienced the impact from the macroeconomic environment. However, we did set March quarter records both in the U.S. and Greater China. We continue to see strength in our watch installed base, which set a new all-time record thanks to very high customer loyalty and new-to rates. Nearly two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product.
Moving to services, we reached a new all-time revenue record of $20.9 billion. And in addition to the all-time records Tim mentioned earlier, we set March quarter records for advertising, AppleCare and video. Despite these records, as we saw in recent quarters, certain services offerings, such as digital advertising and mobile gaming, continue to be affected by the current macroeconomic environment.
Stepping back, however, the continued growth in services is a reflection of our ecosystem strength and the positive momentum we are seeing across several key metrics.
First, our growing installed base of over 2 billion active devices represents a great foundation for future expansion of our ecosystem. We continue to grow across every major product category and geographic segment thanks to very high levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Second, we saw increased customer engagement with our services during the quarter. Both our transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each setting a new all-time record.
Third, paid subscriptions showed strong growth. We now have more than 975 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up 150 million during the last 12 months, and nearly double the number of paid subscriptions we had only three years ago.
And finally, we continue to improve the breadth and the quality of our current services offerings, from new content on Apple TV+, to great new features available in Apple Pay and Apple Music, which we believe our customers will love.
Turning to the enterprise market, we see business customers continuing to invest in the Apple platform to drive higher employee productivity and satisfaction. In Brazil, Boticario Group, the world’s largest cosmetics franchisor, originally started with iPhone to help employees manage operations across a network of retail stores, franchisees, and resellers. As it continues to digitize its business, Botacario has chosen to move all software development in-house, and adopted Mac as the standard device for all of their developer teams across the world.
In small business, we see an increasing number of customers relying on Apple hardware, software, and services to power their businesses forward, from accepting payments on iPhone, to tracking inventory on Mac or iPad, to managing employee devices with Apple Business Essentials. As we celebrate National Small Business Week here in the U.S., we are proud to continue supporting the small business community.
Let me now turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with over $166 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid $2.3 billion in maturing debt and increased commercial paper by about $300 million, leaving us with total debt of $110 billion. As a result, net cash was $57 billion at the end of the quarter. During the March quarter, we returned over $23 billion to shareholders, including $3.7 billion in dividends and equivalents, and $19.1 billion through open market repurchases of 129 million Apple shares.
Given the continued confidence we have in our business now and into the future, today our Board has authorized an additional $90 billion for share repurchases as we maintain our goal of getting to net cash neutral over time. We are also raising our dividend by 4% to $0.24 a share, and we continue to plan for annual increases in the dividend going forward.
As we move ahead into the June quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to at the beginning of the call.
We expect our June quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the March quarter, assuming that the macroeconomic outlook does not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. Foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind, and we expect a negative year-over-year impact of nearly 4 percentage points. For services, we expect our June quarter year-over-year revenue growth to be similar to the March quarter, while continuing to face macroeconomic headwinds in areas such as digital advertising and mobile gaming.
We expect gross margin to be between 44% and 44.5%. We expect OPEX to be between $13.6 and $13.8 billion. We expect OINE to be around negative $250 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%.
Finally, reflecting the dividend increase I mentioned earlier, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 24 cents per share of common stock, payable on May 18, 2023, to shareholders of record as on May 15, 2023.
With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Analyst Q&AEric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: If we go back to the December quarter and the shutdowns, the production shutdowns around the time, I think the question a lot of us were asking was, how should we think about the deferral of demand versus destruction of demand? You know, March quarter was quite strong, 2% year-over-year iPhone growth. And so, as we sit here in May, how have you seen customers that weren’t able to purchase during the December quarter behave? Meaning, are you seeing that they deferred purchases to March and June? Could they be deferring purchases to later in hopes of buying a new iPhone? Just, how should maybe we think about the cadence of that?
Tim Cook: Hi, Eric. It’s hard to quantify this, but we do believe we did recapture some amount of sales in the March quarter, as we did see the iPhone performance accelerate relative to the December quarter. The production levels for the whole quarter were where we wanted them to be. So supply was not an issue during Q2.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Okay. Perfect. Thank you for that color. And then, Tim, maybe to follow up, you know, it’s been three or four quarters now that you’ve mentioned emerging markets like India and others. And I imagine having just opened two new stores in the country, it’s clearly an important market for you. So maybe can you just talk about why you see India as such an important market, and others, how you think about monetization trends in the country, and specifically what you have to do within the country to really ensure that India becomes maybe a more material mix of your business?
Tim Cook: Yeah, sure. Looking at the business in India, we did set a quarterly record and grew very strong double digits year over year. So it was quite a good quarter for us. Taking a step back, India is an incredibly exciting market. It’s a major focus for us. I was just there. And the dynamism in the market, the vibrancy is unbelievable. Over time, we’ve been expanding our operations there to serve more customers. And three years ago, we launched the Apple Store Online. And then, as you just mentioned, we launched two stores just a few weeks ago, and they’re off to a great start, one in Mumbai and one in Delhi. We’ve got a number of channel partners in the country as well that we’re partnering with, and we’re very happy with how that’s going. Overall, I couldn’t be more delighted and excited by the enthusiasm I’m seeing for the brand there. There are a lot of people coming into the middle class, and I really feel that India is at a tipping point, and it’s great to be there.
On other emerging markets, we had a stellar quarter in emerging markets overall, as I’ve mentioned, with records set in a number of different places, including Indonesia and Mexico, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, and then quarterly records in Brazil, India and Malaysia. And so it was a great quarter for emerging markets in general, despite the headwinds of the currency that Luca mentioned. And so we’re putting efforts in a number of these markets and really see, particularly given our low share and the dynamics of the demographics, etc., a great opportunity for us in those markets.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: It was encouraging to hear about the record install base across iPhone and across all devices. It’s been, I think, double digit growth over the last few years across the active devices. I was just wondering, is that a good way to think about the install base growth going forward? And then for the iPhone install base specifically, I was just wondering if you could provide a little bit of texture around how you think about the growth there, whether regionally or by first smartphones versus switchers.
Tim Cook: Yeah, if you look at the install base of active devices now, overall, it’s more than two billion. As you know, we announced in January that we surpassed that. And this quarter, our Q2, rather, we set new records across each of the geographic segments in each of the major product categories. And that’s despite declines in current quarter sales in particular in Mac and iPad. This is a huge asset for us. And it’s a testament to the overall customer satisfaction and engagement and loyalty of our customers. And so we we view this as a major asset for us. The iPhone base is well over a billion active devices. We see this as, you know, upgrade rates and these sorts of things may change quarter to quarter depending upon macroeconomic. But if you back up and look at the install base, we feel great about the the size of it and the rate that it’s growing.
Mike Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great, excellent. And then it was also encouraging to see the number of devices per iPhone user continue to grow. I was just wondering if you could talk about the opportunity to continue to increase that number of Apple devices per iPhone user and if you have any color around, you know, how the monetization per user may differ from, you know, those, for lack of better words, super users, versus those that may not be as deep into the ecosystem.
Tim Cook: We try really hard to design our products in such a way that they work seamlessly together. And so whether that’s the the watch or the Mac and so that you can start working on one device and finish it on the other. And so there are a good deal of people out there that have multiple Apple devices. And I think this is a testament to the customer satisfaction and loyalty that we’ve been able to get from the incredible design that our engineering teams do on our products.
Shannon Cross, Credit Suisse: Tim, can you talk a bit about AI? You know, obviously that’s more than the topic of the day, it seems like the topic of the year. Just how do you think about it through your products and services? I know you use it in different ways. But also if you can just give us any thoughts you have on generative AI and, and I don’t know where you see it going. Not sure what you want to say on it, but I’m, I’m really curious as to your take. Thank you.
Tim Cook: Yeah. Thanks for the question, Shannon. You know, as you know, we don’t comment on product roadmaps. I do think it’s very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things. And there’s a number of issues that need to be sorted, as is being talked about in a number of different places. But the potential is certainly very interesting. And we’ve obviously made enormous progress integrating AI and machine learning throughout our ecosystem, and we’ve weaved it into products and features for many years, as you probably know. You can see that in things like fall detection and crash detection and ECG. These things are not only great features, they’re saving people’s lives out there. And so it’s absolutely remarkable. And so we view AI as huge and we’ll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis.
Shannon Cross, Credit Suisse: Okay, thank you. And then can you talk a bit about your shift of manufacturing and diversification of manufacturing footprint? I’m curious, obviously you have a very tight network in China. So how is it going to move to some of these other regions? Are you seeing any impact from a margin perspective or just any thoughts you have on what you’ve seen as you started to shift more and more outside of China, whether it’s growth or actual production?
Tim Cook: You know, our supply chain is truly global and we’re investing all over the world. We’re investing in the U.S., we’re investing in a number of other countries as well. And so we make products everywhere, we’ll continue to invest everywhere and we’ll continue to look for ways to optimize the supply chain based on what we learn each and every day and week and so forth, to ensure that we can deliver the best products and services for our customers.
If you sort of step back and look at how we’ve performed over the last three years on the supply chain, despite this parade of horribles, if you will, between the pandemic and the chip shortages and macroeconomic kind of factors, the supply chain has been incredibly resilient and we feel good about what we are and what our plans are.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, you had called out on December quarter earnings that pro models were significantly constrained. Do you see a catch up on the pro models specifically in the March quarter and was the mix better than typical? And do you see that mix renormalizing here in the June quarter? And maybe you can comment on the channel inventory levels as well for iPhones.
Tim Cook: Sure. It’s hard to quantify, Wamsi, but we do believe we did recapture some amount of sales in the March quarter. And obviously we had to set the channel at the right levels and we’re very comfortable with the channel inventory that we have on a forward basis. So we do think there were some, but it’s difficult to quantify it.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Okay, thanks, Tim. And, Tim, as a follow up, you launched so many services around Apple Pay. Most recently you mentioned Buy Now Pay Later, a high yield savings account. Where do you see the expansion and the payments ecosystem over time? And do you look at the payments ecosystem as a standalone revenue opportunity or is it more about making the devices even more inseparable from us?
Tim Cook: What we’re trying to do with our payments work is that sort of like we’ve done on the watch where we’re focused on helping people live a healthier day, on our financial products, we’re helping people have a better financial health. And so things like the Apple Card and the fact that it has no fees, like the savings account, which has, as you mentioned, its very attractive yield. So we’re trying to help our users and these things have to stand on their own, obviously. But we’re very user focused and so we’re listening to them at what things provide them pinch points and orchestrate our roadmaps around that. Buy Now Pay Later is another one that we’ve just gotten out of the chute. But on the savings account specifically, we are very pleased with the initial response on it. It’s been incredible.
David Vaught, UBS: Tim, I just wanted to go back to maybe dig into the restocking of inventory in the channel versus what we’re hearing from a demand perspective that appears to be a little bit softer in the March quarter from some of your larger carriers that exhibited relatively weak upgrade rates. So I just want to get a sense for where you’re seeing demand signals today vis-a-vis how you were thinking about it maybe a month ago or even three months ago. And is there an acceleration in demand or any sort of signals that you might want to share with us at this point?
Tim Cook: I don’t want to go into what we’re seeing in Q3 other than the guidance that Luca has given. But for Q2, I think you’re probably referencing primarily U.S. carriers. And if you look at our geographic distribution of our performance, it was lower in the Americas, which is primarily predominantly the United States. And a part of that is, I believe, is macroeconomic. A part is that there were more promotional activity in the year-ago quarter. And so I think that’s what you’re seeing there. Where our results were really stellar during this quarter was really in emerging markets. And we couldn’t be prouder of the results that we had there.
David Vaught, UBS: Great. That’s helpful. And then just quickly on services, are you seeing anything in terms of consumers’ behavior other than the macro that you mentioned and tough comps on digital advertising and mobile gaming? Are you seeing users of all the disparate services change in what they’re using and how they’re using it and time spent with an Apple service now that we’re technically, hopefully, fully past COVID with China almost fully reopened? I’m just trying to get a sense for how user or consumer behavior has changed over the last three to six months.
Luca Maestri: It’s Luca. As you said, of course, we got the issue around the macroeconomic environment, particularly in advertising and in mobile gaming. But outside of those areas, the behavior of customers continues to be pretty consistent. We are doing particularly well, obviously, in some of the services that we’ve launched more recently, like payments, where our growth rates are very strong as the adoption of Apple Pay and Apple Card and now the new services that Tim mentioned, and the adoption continues to increase. Cloud is an area that continues to grow very consistently. Users want to store more photos and videos and more content on their devices. so they adopt our cloud services and in general the model in the App Store around paid subscriptions continues to grow very strongly. I mentioned we now have more than 975 million paid subscriptions on the platform and that’s almost twice as much what we had only three years ago, so obviously the growth in subscriptions is very strong.
Samik Chatterjee, JP Morgan: I guess maybe I can follow up on David’s question here on services and in the past pre-pandemic the growth rate there was more about sort of mid teens. The growth rates today where you stand, even if I back out FX impact, is more about low double digits. So one of the questions that we get often from investors and want to get your thoughts on is, even as the installed base growth seems to have accelerated, are these more cyclical drivers that are depressing growth at this point from returning to that level or do you see more of a roll out on the monetization that you need to do to get back to those growth levels?
Luca Maestri: Samik, the areas where we are seeing the impact of the macro environment, as I mentioned, is digital advertising. As you know, obviously the macro environment is not helping on that front. And mobile gaming where we’ve seen a bit of a slowdown, partly due to the macro environment, partly due to the fact that we had very elevated usage during the COVID years. But outside of those areas, we continue to see very healthy growth rates.
Samik Chatterjee, JP Morgan: And maybe if I can just follow up on this is more of a macro question. I don’t know if Luca, you or Tim want to take this, but obviously the macro is not sort of helpful at this point. But what you’re sort of implying in terms of your guide is momentum for your products remains pretty stable. You’re actually guiding to a modest uptake ex-FX for the overall business. I mean, what are you seeing in terms of customer spending trends, and overall does the consumer sort of continue to deteriorate in terms of spending patterns, and is your sort of momentum here just a function of share gains? How should we think about sort of where the consumer is versus what your products are doing independent of that?
Luca Maestri: Part of it, Samik, is what Tim was talking about. We’re having great momentum in emerging markets and those are markets where our share is low, gives us a great opportunity to grow over time. It also helps us with the growth of the install base because you can imagine any places where our market share is low, we tend to add a lot of switchers, people that are new to the Apple ecosystem that increases the install base and over the longer term, it obviously improves our ability to monetize on services as well.
Amit Dariyanani, Evercore: I guess first off on gross margins for the June quarter, they seem to be holding up fairly well, especially given the fact that sales are going down on a sequential basis. So, Luca, I’m wondering if you can just touch on what’s driving the strength in gross margin sequence that’s offsetting the lack of leverage, if you may, and then I also noticed that the range of your gross margin guide is 50 basis points. It’s typically 100. What does that entail? What does that mean?
Luca Maestri: You’re right. I mean, we are guiding to a fairly stable level of gross margins at a very high level. We’re very happy with the gross margins that we’re having this cycle. For the first time in several quarters, we expect foreign exchange to be flat on a sequential basis at the gross margin level. Unfortunately, it’s still a headwind at the revenue level, but at gross margin level, sequentially, we expect foreign exchange not to be a factor. And so the seasonal loss of leverage that you’re referring to, we expect to be offset by cost savings. And so that should give us that level of margins. As you know, you were asking about the 50 basis points. We have guided to 50 basis points over range before as well. This year in particular, because of the 14th week during the December quarter, we’re a bit late in the calendar year, right? And so we have a bit more visibility around margins for the June quarter.
Amit Dariyanani, Evercore: Got it. That’s helpful. And then I guess, Tim, if I just go back to the India discussion a bit, perhaps you would just contrast what you’re seeing in India today versus what you saw in China maybe a decade or so ago. Is that a reasonable ramp to think India would have or could it be different from the lessons you’ve seen in China?
Tim Cook: I think each country is different and has their own journey. And so I hesitate to compare too much. But what I do see in India is a lot of people entering the middle class. And I’m hopeful that we can convince some number of them to buy an iPhone. And we’ll see how that works out. But right now it’s working out well.
Krish Sankar, PD Cohen: Tim, you’ve primarily been a consumer-centric company, but it seems like the line is blurring with the iPhone, iPad, the hardware products being used for corporate applications. So is there a way to segment how much of your revenues today are coming from enterprise versus consumer? And does the slower corporate IT spend impact your outlook for iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.?
Tim Cook: Internally, we have our estimates for how much is enterprise versus consumer. And the enterprise business is growing. We have been focusing a lot on BYOD programs. And we’ve seen more and more companies that are leaning into those and giving employees the ability to select, which is placed to our benefit, I believe, because I think a lot of people want to use a Mac at work or an iPad at work. And so, but we’re certainly primarily a consumer company in terms of our revenues, obviously.
Krish Sankar, PD Cohen: Got it, Tim. Thanks for that. And then just as a follow-up, you know, obviously a lot of questions on the India retail opening. I’m just kind of curious, you also mentioned that you hope to convert a lot of folks into iPhone there. Where do you think the biggest opportunity is? Is it like primarily a hardware business like the iPhone, iPad, wearables, etc.? Or do you think there is a service opportunity in India longer term too?
Tim Cook: I think there’s an opportunity across the board, including in services. Obviously, the ARPUs are lower in India whether you’re talking about TV and movie streaming or music. The ARPUs are much lower than other regions. But if you look at it over a long arc of time, I think there’s a good opportunity across the board.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: I’m going to go back to kind of the geographical dynamics. I’m curious, you know, as we all think about the reopening attributes of China, just how you would characterize the shaping of demand you saw through the course of this last quarter and kind of how you’re thinking about the impact of that reopening playing out over the next couple of quarters.
Tim Cook: If you look at China, our revenue came in at negative three for the quarter year over year, but we actually grew on a constant currency basis. And we also accelerated as compared to the December quarter, which, as you know, had 14 weeks in it and was a negative seven on a reported basis. And so we were pleased with how we did and with the acceleration that we saw with the reopening. And we’ll see how we do this quarter. But if you look at the top selling smartphones in urban China, based on a survey from Kantar, we have four out of the top five. And I think in all of the third-party data I’ve seen on the market itself in the smartphone space, we believe we gained share during Q2. So we feel good about it. Also, China has a lot of very good metrics in terms of new buyers. For example, on the Mac, about six out of 10 customers are buying the Mac for the first time. Same thing on iPad. If you look over at the watch, it’s more than three out of four customers are buying the watch for the first time. And so the buyer metrics, if you will, are very, very good. And our services business hit an all time record in China during the quarter.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Very helpful, Tim. As a quick follow up, I want to go back to Amit’s question on gross margin. You talked about FX, the lessening impact there. I’m just curious, when you look at your gross margin, obviously you’ve got mixed attributes kind of potentially continuing to drive that higher. But I’m curious on the current environment, how you would characterize the component pricing dynamics and what you’re thinking about in this current quarters guidance.
Luca Maestri: The environment on the component side is favorable. We’ve seen component prices decline during the March quarter and we expect the same during the June quarter.
Sidney Ho, Deutsche Bank: I was hoping we can talk about the linearity of the March quarter and perhaps the first four and a half weeks of the current quarter. It looks like things are slowing down quite a bit elsewhere, but if my math is right, your fiscal third quarter guidance and implied product revenue will be a little bit lower than seasonal average on a sequential basis. Any color would be helpful. Thanks.
Luca Maestri: We said that we expect our performance during the June quarter at the revenue level to be similar to the one that we just reported for the March quarter. Keep in mind, we always have differences in the launch timing across our products and also that, especially over the last few years, we’ve seen a certain amount of supply disruptions. Sometimes it was COVID related, sometimes it was related to specific component shortages. Just to remind you, in the June quarter a year ago, we had the full quarter impact of the launch for both of the iPhone SE and the iPad Air, which leads to a more difficult compare. So I think it’s important to keep those things in mind.
Sidney Ho, Deutsche Bank: Maybe a quick follow up. You talk about Apple Pay Later. How has the feedback been so far and how do you expect the adoption of that service over the next few quarters?
Tim Cook: The feedback for both Apple Pay Later and the savings product have both been really good and we think both of them help customers live a healthier financial life. So we’re very excited about the first days of both of them.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Tim, you’re one of the largest chip companies. You’re not a component maker, you actually use your own products, but we almost never hear in any context of Apple being a beneficiary for either the CHIPS Act money or the R&D tax credit that’s being proposed. I was just curious if you’re eligible for any of those.
Tim Cook: I don’t see Apple participating in the CHIPS act directly, but we would be a beneficiary indirectly because some of our partners would hopefully be recipients of it and therefore put in additional capacity. And so on that sort of indirect basis, we would have a benefit.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Luca, I wanted to clarify your comments about June. When you’re saying June performance will be similar to March, I assume on a year-on-year basis, which would be June, should be down about two-something odd percent. Is that a fair way? And then my question that I wanted to ask, maybe another one for Tim, was what do you think is the largest opportunity in your services offering? You’re doing a great job, you just set a record, but surely there must be areas where you think you can do better.
Luca Maestri: Yes, so to your question around the June performance, yes, on a year-over-year basis, so comparable to the March quarter on a year-over-year basis.
Tim Cook: Harsh, I think we can do better on everything. And so I wouldn’t just point to one of them. If you look at the number of active devices and the growth of active devices, I think our services are under-penetrated in a number of different ways. And so the way that I look at it is there’s opportunity in many of them.
Apple announced its latest quarterly results on Thursday. The company posted $94.8 billion in revenue, down slightly from the year-ago quarter but—at least to my eyes—not down as much as we might have expected.
Mac revenue was, as expected, down 31 percent to $7.2 billion—the lowest quarter of Mac revenue since 2020. iPad was down 13 percent to $6.7 billion, the lowest iPad revenue quarter since 2020. iPhone was up 2 percent to $51.3 billion, which given the downward trend elsewhere was pretty impressive—it was a Q2 record for iPhone revenue.
Services revenue soared to an all-time record of $20.9 billion, up 5 percent. Wearables was down by one percent, to $8.8 billion.
The charts are below. We’ve also got a transcript of Apple’s call with analysts, and our YouTube chart party will discuss it all and show off the charts.
I realize this is a bit esoteric, but if you ever find yourself needing to migrate messages from Slack to Discord, I can highly recommend slack-to-discord, a Python-based project on GitHub that I used yesterday to migrate some messages from Incomparable’s members-only Slack group to a new version of the community on Discord.
Free Slack instances only show 90 days of messages, but if you download your Slack archive—which is required to use this tool—you get everything. I was able to rescue a popular, long-running thread that originated five years ago. The utility replicates threads, displays the name and icon of each poster, and even displays emoji reactions and date- and time-stamps.
Messages and reactions from a thread created years ago? Yep.There are a few drawbacks. It’ll take a very long time to completely import a large Slack group, even at a rate of dozens of messages a minute. To mitigate this, you can limit imports to specific channels and date ranges. (With the exception of the 1000-post thread created five years ago, I mostly imported the last 14 days of messages into a bunch of channels, just to prime the conversational pump and make people feel at home.)
When I heard about this tool I was skeptical, but it vastly exceeded my expectations.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple and Google collaborate on a standard for device trackers, our thoughts on Bluesky, Google implements passkeys, and whether we’re hopeful or fearful of AI.
Go to the podcast page.
Jess Weatherbed at The Verge:
Google’s next step into a passwordless future is here with the announcement that passkeys — a new cryptographic keys solution that requires a preauthenticated device — are coming to Google accounts on all major platforms. Starting today, Google users can switch to passkeys and ditch their passwords and two-step verification codes entirely when signing in.
I set this up immediately, and it works pretty well, although when I tried logging into my Google account via a private browser tab, it still made me go through the standard password and two-factor verification step. But logging out in my main browser and logging back in with a passkey was a breeze.
There’s no doubt for me that the entire technology industry will be shifting to passkeys over the next few years—the advantages are huge for both users and services—but it’s still likely to be a very slow transition, and there will no doubt be holdouts and laggards.
My biggest question remains how to deal with shared accounts. Unlike passwords, passkeys can’t easily be shard with others, which is more secure but also way less convenient. Third-party apps might offer a way to fill in this gap, but it definitely feels like a first-party problem; you can’t just fall back to copying and pasting, so there needs to be an easy way to share these universally.
Still, I’m primed and ready for our passkey future. Death to the password!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple and Google posted a rare joint press release Tuesday regarding a new initiative to stop using devices like AirTags from being used for unwanted tracking:
Today Apple and Google jointly submitted a proposed industry specification to help combat the misuse of Bluetooth location-tracking devices for unwanted tracking. The first-of-its-kind specification will allow Bluetooth location-tracking devices to be compatible with unauthorized tracking detection and alerts across iOS and Android platforms. Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee have expressed support for the draft specification, which offers best practices and instructions for manufacturers, should they choose to build these capabilities into their products.
The posted IETF draft specifies that devices that discover an unwanted tracker should be able to physically locate it via sound, that such devices make a sound if they’re in motion, and more. While the proposal is from Apple and Google, the press release says that the makers of similar products—Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy, and Pebblebee—have “expressed support” for the proposal.
The goal, ultimately, is to make it so that all iPhones and Android phones can detect all trackers and alert you to their presence. The release includes supportive quotes from the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Center for Democracy & Technology. According to Apple and Google, the goal is to release the “production implementation” of the specification by the end of the year.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Jason’s former co-host from another TV podcast, Tim Goodman, drops by to discuss his decision to be a TV writer at the very end of the Peak TV era, the challenges of TV criticism, and his return to writing about TV on his own terms via Substack.
Go to the podcast page.
This week we react to rumors of future Apple health services and try to understand the difference between a service and a feature. Also, is Apple right to keep advanced AI out of Siri until it’s trustworthy? And we celebrate the suggestion that watchOS might be getting a fresh new Widget-centric interface.
Go to the podcast page.
For a smart watch, the Apple Watch can sometimes be…less than intelligent. Case in point: more than a few times in the past weeks, I’ve found myself bitten by one relatively minor missing feature.
There I am, out for my daily walk—with the outdoor walk workout running on my watch—when I pause to pop into a store on an errand or to grab a snack. Being the honest person that I am, I manually pause my workout. But ten or twenty minutes later, as I’m on my way home, I realize I’ve forgotten to resume it.
Walk, interrupted.So, I ask: why can’t the Apple Watch detect that I’ve started my walk again and offer to un-pause—my workout?
If you find yourself thinking that this feature sounds familiar, that’s because the Apple Watch already auto-pauses and auto-resumes outdoor running and cycling workouts. Moreover, it can detect when you’ve forgotten to start a walking workout, prompt you to start it, and retroactively apply that workout back to the beginning. And it can automatically figure out when you’ve stopped your workout and forgotten to turn it off or pause it.
So there’s really only one missing piece of the puzzle, and yet it’s one that drives me bananas. I’m not quite sure why watchOS can handle part of the equation but not the exact opposite.
There are reportedly a lot of big changes expected for watchOS 10 when it’s unveiled in June, and I’m glad to hear the Apple Watch is getting some love, but while the company’s at it, maybe they could throw in a few little features too.
Are Technica’s Dan Goodin throws cold water on recent warnings about “juice jacking” (i.e. devices being compromised by being plugged into public USB charging ports):
The problem with the warnings coming out of the FCC and FBI is that they divert attention away from bigger security threats, such as weak passwords and the failure to install security updates. They create unneeded anxiety and inconvenience that run the risk of people simply giving up trying to be secure.
I admit, I’ve been wary of public charging stations for the last several years, but Goodin’s thorough breakdown explains why this kind of exploit—though technically feasible—is extremely difficult to pull off. Most importantly, he points out that there have been zero documented cases of juice jacking ever having happened outside of proof of concepts demonstrated by security researchers.
There are a lot of these kind of exploits that get shown off by researchers, and that’s good, because it encourages device makers to continually improve their security. But they also tend to be stories that are ripe for scaremongering because they garner a lot of attention and get shared and amplified without actual understanding.
In short: your public USB charging port is probably fine. But it’s never a bad idea to carry your own charger and cable, for convenience if nothing else.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Goooooood mornnnnnning!We here at Six Colors don’t get a lot of scoops—simply put, it’s not what we do. Sure, we hear rumors from time to time, and sometimes even a little birdie or two crosses our path with an interesting tidbit, but they generally don’t rise to the level of an entire story.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The headset cometh, if reports are to be believed (would it kill you to clap for the headset?), and Apple has a slew of operating system updates in store with some wild and wacky features.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My Mac mini server, as seen remotely through Screens.Last year, while listening to the Connected podcast, I was struck by something Stephen Hackett said:
The opportunities are endless with an always-on Mac.
Yes, this. This exactly. I’ve had a Mac running as a server in my house for more than 20 years now, and I have zero regrets. As I detailed five years ago, the specific uses for my always-on Mac have changed numerous times over the decades, but the various Macs that have served the purpose have always made themselves useful.
I have friends who run network-attached storage devices in their houses, but they’ve never really been my style. You can attach storage to a Mac just as easily. Also, those storage keep getting smarter, but they’re using their own (usually unix-based) operating systems.
I’d rather just keep using a Mac, for a few reasons: It’s the operating system I’m the most familiar with. The Mac’s unix heritage means it will run most of the same software that’s available for those network-attached devices. And it lets me put Mac apps in the mix, most of which will never run on a random storage device.
After the tragic death of my Drobo in 2020, I bought an OWC Thunderbolt RAID and the replacement has been flawless. I’ve got 24TB of available storage hanging off a 2018 Intel Mac mini.
Here’s what that Mac mini currently does:
- File server for all my archived work files, including large podcast and video files.
- Time Machine server for all my local Macs.
- Backing up everything to Backblaze.
- Running WeatherCat weather-station server.
- Running a bunch of recurring python scripts to query Apple’s WeatherKit, parse WeatherCat’s data files, and generate a bunch of charts for my home weather station page.
- Running a web server to serve that page and a few other random pages.
- Running Hazel to clean up, compress, and archive files that I’ve dropped on the server.
- Running Plex, which is serving all sorts of video files I’ve bought or pulled off of old DVDs and Blu-Rays.
- Running Channels, recording TV stations and acting as a home DVR.
- Running Homebridge to add incompatible home devices to the Home app.
- Being constantly available as a Mac I can connect to and use via Screens. This is especially useful when I’m on an iPad and don’t have a Mac handy.
The applications change as my needs change, but the flexibility of having an always-on Mac has always served me well. And just knowing that the Mac is there is helpful when I’m considering solutions to various technical problems—because I know that if I can get something running on my Mac, I can keep it running all the time to solve the problem. (I’ve started upgrading some of my automations on my server to use Shortcuts rather than AppleScript or shell scripts. It begins…)
One of these days I’ll probably upgrade my Mac mini to an Apple silicon model, which will certainly reduce the amount of power it consumes. I dream of replacing my spinning hard drives with fast, silent SSDs, but SSD storage large enough to cover my entire archive is still out of reach, for now.
But I think it’s very unlikely I’ll ever stop having a Mac server in my house. The possibilities remain endless.
For my own mental health, I haven’t read the comments on most websites in years (and don’t offer them here). Various Safari extensions, including dedicated ones like Shut Up as well as ad blockers like 1Blocker, will give you the option to also hide comments.
Alas, a few sites I read have begun injecting “top comments” into their story text lately. I hate it.
Fortunately, there are several ways to suppress specific kinds of content via Safari extensions these days.
First, to diagnose the problem, I control-clicked on the header of the “top comment” and choose Inspect Element, bringing up Safari’s inspector interface. There is apparently a div in the webpage called top-comment. That’s what I want to kill.
In 1Blocker, I can just use the Hide Elements section in the Custom tab to block .top-comment. (I’ve also got a seasonal 1Blocker rule to hide the Daring Fireball banner when the Yankees are in the playoffs.)
My rules in 1Blocker.Another good utility for controlling your Safari browsing experience is StopTheMadness, which in addition to many other features, offers CSS-based content blocking. In StopTheMadness, I have to craft a CSS rule that attacks specific CSS styles, in this case .top-comment as well as .crowdsignal-poll-wrapper, because while I’m at it I might as well also block this network’s collection of in-story polls.
My rules in StopTheMadness.You have to wrap the whole thing in proper CSS syntax — the key thing to remember is display: none — but it also does the job.)
Alternately, you could use a Safari extension like PageExtender, which lets you apply custom JavaScript and CSS to individual websites. It’ll do the job, but it’s a more manual interface—you have to create CSS files and save them in a special folder on disk.
My larger point is, if there’s something on the Web that annoys you—and maybe only you!—you can probably find a way to turn it off with a Safari extension. And these days, Safari extensions generally work across Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so if you can block something in one place you can probably block it everywhere.
On this, our 500th episode, we start by complaining about the apps we begrudgingly use regularly. Then we predict the future of phones, reveal our history with dual-booting PCs, and share what it would take to get us to buy a mixed-reality headset.
Go to the podcast page.
If you haven’t been closely following the world of streaming media, you may have missed the major changes in the past year. Following a particularly bad financial quarter at Netflix, the entertainment industry collectively decided they were done spending huge sums of money to establish new streaming services.
The gold rush is over, and the rules have changed. One of the biggest changes is that Netflix, which for years refused to even consider offering advertising on its platform, instead announced it would add a discounted version of its service… with commercials. And the results are in: already, Netflix makes more money from a subscriber viewing its ad-laden version than it does from a subscriber who’s signed up for a more expensive ad-free tier.
If you don’t like ads on your Internet video, this is bad news because it means you’ll be paying even more to keep the ads at bay. But for Apple, it’s an opportunity—and a data point that might make the company question its video strategy.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
As rumor season kicks into high gear, we discuss Apple’s potential new app, more reports about its VR headset, and some updates about forthcoming Mac hardware.
Go to the podcast page.
Since the advent of Apple Pay back in 2014, Apple has slowly but surely rolled out a number of other financial-related products: Apple Cash (née Apple Pay Cash) in 2017, the Apple Card in 2019, the recent Apple Pay Later service, and just this past week, the new Apple Card savings account.
It’s a lot of interest—if you’ll pardon the expression—in the financial realm for a company that tends to be focused on cutting edge technology, especially given that, in the U.S. at least, the banking system is anything but.
Nevertheless, with all of these various offerings, Apple seems well poised to become something a bit like a bank in its own right. Why would Apple want to be a bank? Well, in the apocryphal words of famous bank robber Willie Sutton: “that’s where the money is.” But to zoom out and take the 35,000 foot view, there may be even more of a long game playing out here.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
This week Tim takes a trip, Apple has another convenient, easy-to-use way for it to hang on to your money, and will iOS 17 have a startling new feature?!…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
Adjusting text size via Control Center.The Athletic just updated its iOS app to support iOS’s dynamic text setting. This is a good thing, because that text is now adjustable at a system level and allows people who need larger type to get it, systemwide.
The problem is that the default type in The Athletic’s app on my iPad is much smaller than it was before this change. And yet, if I simply crank up the size of the text using iOS’s text settings, everything else on my iPad gets much larger than I would prefer. (The Athletic’s app is, weirdly, the outlier.)
The solution to this problem can be found in an article we posted here in January by Shelly Brisbin:
To enable per-app settings, you add the app to the list in Settings > Accessibility > Per-App Settings, then configure the iOS options you need for this app. Options here include text size, but you don’t actually need to configure per-app settings to tweak the text size you see in a specific app. That’s because Control Center offers an express train to text size adjustment.
First, add the text size control to Control Center, if it’s not already there. Now open an app whose text size you want to change, and keep changed. I’ll use Mail. Open Control Center and then Text Size. Flip the toggle below the vertical slider to Mail Only. If you haven’t changed text sizes before, the slider probably shows 100% (default). I’ll raise mine to 160%, which is within the range of accessibility text sizes. When I return to Mail, list text and individual message text will reflect the change.
Try this with any app that would benefit from larger (or smaller, for that matter) text than usual. If you do this on the Home screen, notification text will change. as will some text in Today view. You can’t enlarge lock screen widget text, unfortunately, or even media player text on the lock screen. And if an app doesn’t support dynamic type, none of this will work.
It’s that simple. Either add a per-app text size in Settings, or add the Text Size item to Control Center and customize the text size of any app you like. Thank you, Shelly!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Look, there’s no interesting Apple news. We’re all waiting on tenterhooks for the big hardware announcement so we can find out the only thing anyone cares about: Will the 15″ MacBook Air come in a chip configuration that supports two external displays?…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Our watchOS 10 wish list, the apps we want on our Apple headsets, HomePods listening, and our dream vacations and the tech we’d bring.
Go to the podcast page.
Tim goes to India, we’re confused about what a new MacBook Air will bring, and Apple might allow side-loading?!
Go to the podcast page.
As I read the latest report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about the apps Apple is building for Apple’s forthcoming AR/VR headset, I was again reminded about how unique Apple’s place in the tech ecosystem is.
We talk a lot about Apple’s competitors, and to be sure, it has them—in every single market in which it competes. But while Apple has competitors, none of them are playing the same game Apple is. For decades I’ve observed that many of the people who dislike Apple as a business do so because they don’t understand it—because they try to fruitlessly compare it to other companies in the tech sector.
The fact that we’re even able to discuss Apple’s forthcoming headset, headset operating system, headset app platform, and headset apps says everything about how Apple has a strategy that lets it execute in ways no other company can.
Continue reading on ↦
Sitcoms are one of the most popular genres of television, yet streaming services tend to do better repurposing someone else’s catalog rather than creating their own. What’s behind this trend, and what will the future hold?
Go to the podcast page.
What’s happening at WWDC? The rumors are… confusing. Also, Jason gets excited about watching four things at once, Myke tries to bring iOS 17 into focus, and we’ve got a book review of ‘Make Something Wonderful’ from the Steve Jobs Archive.
Go to the podcast page.
Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, shines a light on an area of security that is often ignored, but is nevertheless a massive hole in many companies’ Zero Trust fortress.
These findings are particularly alarming given the overall state of device security. IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing your most sensitive data–things like customer records, confidential IP, and plain-text access credentials–on devices that are vulnerable to attack.
This problem has gone unaddressed because until now there hasn’t been a good solution for it. MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument for dealing with sensitive data, and DLP tools are too extreme and invasive for most companies. After all, you’re not trying to ban downloads together, nor regard every download as suspicious. You’re just trying to make sure employees aren’t keeping data for longer than they need or keeping it on an unmanaged or unsecure device.
Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.
Our unique approach makes device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. But instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac took Apple TV’s new multi-view feature for a spin:
With tvOS 16.5 beta, Apple is testing a new feature for the Apple TV app on the Apple TV 4K set-top box: the ability to watch more than one game at a time.
Multiview allows users to watch up to four simultaneous streams at once. The feature is available for live sports streamed through the TV app, like MLB Friday Night Baseball and MLS Season Pass …
The “quad box” is the killer feature on Fubo, my TV provider of choice, and it’s coming to YouTube TV just in time for its integration of the NFL Sunday Ticket package. Given Apple’s investment in MLS, it makes sense there. Sports is the perfect application for watching more than one live channel at a time.
In the long run, though, this needs to be a tvOS-wide feature. Right now if there’s a game on Fubo and another on ESPN+ and a third on MLB and a fourth on the TV app… I can watch one at a time or, if I am very lucky and it’s the right combination of apps, two at a time—one in a tiny picture-in-picture view. The OS should put it all together. Maybe this is a step in that direction… or maybe it’s just something Apple had to build for MLS. I hope it’s the first one.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple Newsroom:
Starting today, Apple Card users can choose to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent — a rate that’s more than 10 times the national average. With no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements, users can easily set up and manage their Savings account directly from Apple Card in Wallet.
Essentially, Apple is turning the limbo state of Apple Pay Cash (which is where all the money earned from Apple Card rewards) into an actual savings account with a high interest rate, at least for Apple Card customers. (The account, like the card, is from Goldman Sachs.)
I am not a financial-industry analyst, so I’m curious about what the motivation for this product might be. My first thought is that by offering a good interest rate, it will encourage Apple Card users to keep their money in Apple’s accounts rather than transfer them back to their home banks. And I assume there’s a long game here involving Apple encouraging people to be comfortable leaving their money with Apple, to be extended with future financial products.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
If you’re an avid follower of Apple rumors, you’d be excused for wondering exactly what the heck is going on in Cupertino these days. The last couple weeks have seen stories retracting several previously suggested features, shipping time frames, or even entire products.
But, if you’ll pardon me unlimbering my bat for a game of inside baseball, all this only illustrates the many and varied reasons that such rumors should be taken with entire chunks of salt. It’s not simply because they’re rumors, but rather because of the nature of how many of those who report such rumors acquire the details in the first place.
Rumors, like sausage and politics, are a little less magical when you see exactly how they’re made, so join me on this journey inside the rumor mill. You may never look at them the same way again.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
My old PC World counterpart, Harry McCracken, calls the time of death:
The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only.
But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.
My personal computer magazine journey ended nearly nine years ago, but the final curtain has now fallen.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week on behalf of its app SoundSource. SoundSource is a remarkable app that lives in your menu bar and gives you complete control over all your audio. You can change the volume of any app relative to others, set different apps to play on different audio devices, enhance audio with built-in effects, and change all those settings instantly.
And of course, SoundSource has Shortcuts support too. I’ve used SoundSource to change my music playback from my AirPlay speakers to some direct-wired headphones and back, via a single button press that runs a Shortcut. If you’ve ever wished you could automate the controls found in MacOS’s Sound System Preferences and Audio MIDI Setup app, the new Shortcuts support in SoundSource is for you.
Through the end of April, Six Colors readers can save $10 with coupon code 6CSSTEN. Visit this link to get SoundSource.
The Steve Jobs Archive has released a book, edited by Leslie Berlin, with a small selection of Steve Jobs’s interviews, speeches, and emails—many of them to himself. There’s a limited print run being given to Apple, Pixar, and Disney employees, but anyone can download a copy for free from Apple Books or from the Steve Jobs Archive website in ePub format, or you can read it on the web in its entirety.
I have to admit that the existence of the Steve Jobs Archive generates mixed feelings in me. It’s dedicated to curating the work of an important historical figure, but also feels a bit like it’s designed to be a hagiographic tool for influencing how Jobs is remembered by history. (Given how history tends to flatten people’s life stories and accomplishments into caricature or outright falsehood, I entirely understand the impulse.)
In any event, “Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words” is a good, short read. It’s neither a dry business-school tome nor some sort of detailed historical analysis of his email trail. Instead, it’s a carefully curated collection that ranges from the familiar to the obscure.
I found the first two sections of the book, covering his early days through his return to Apple, to be the most compelling. Once Jobs returns to Apple and Pixar is riding high, the text tends to become a bit more familiar set of keynote addresses and memos from the CEO.
The highlight of the book, however, is his Stanford commencement address from 2005. It’s a remarkable speech to begin with, one that will likely be quoted for years to come. But the book also provides Jobs’s notes to himself as he began planning what to say in the speech! (He just kept sending himself emails whenever he thought of something, and because of that quirk, we get to peek inside his thought process.)
“Make Something Wonderful” is worth your time, even if it’s just to marvel at the beautifully executed web version.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Collecting and removing mobile apps, how we begin and end every smartphone session, our new computer migration process, and how we balance our digital and physical lives.
Go to the podcast page.
I love speaking at user group meetings. There aren’t as many Apple user groups out there as there used to be, and these days the meetings are mostly over Zoom, but as someone who mostly speaks with developers, PR people, and media types, it’s refreshing to speak to people who are much more purely enthusiastic about Apple and its platforms.
User groups also tend to do a good job of exposing the concerns and pain points of Apple customers who aren’t doing this for a living. It’s a great perspective shift. Last month, I spoke to a group that made it pretty clear about what Apple is doing that is making them unhappy. The particular complaints that floated to the top were, I think, instructive about where Apple needs to make changes and up its game. Let’s take them in turn.
Continue reading on ↦
This week we’re pondering future directions for watchOS complications and iOS Control Center, reacting to extremely early reports about future iPhone displays, and digesting Apple’s slow build of alternative manufacturing capacities outside of China.
Go to the podcast page.
If you use audio on your Mac in any way at all, SoundSource is for you. SoundSource lives in your menu bar and gives you superior control over all your audio.
Per-application control: Change the volume of any app relative to others, and play individual apps to different audio devices.
Audio effects, anywhere: SoundSource has great built-in effects, like Magic Boost and Volume Overdrive features, as well as a built-in 10-band equalizer to sweeten sound. Advanced users will love the ability to apply Audio Units to any audio.
Fast device access: Adust settings for your Mac’s Output, Input, and Sound Effects audio devices, instantly. Change levels, tweak the balance, and even switch sample rates, right from the menu bar. You may never need to open the Sound System Preference again!
And oh, that’s right, SoundSource has Shortcuts support too. Automate your usage of not just SoundSource, but many of your Mac’s audio device settings. If you’ve ever wished you could automate the controls found in MacOS’s Sound System Preferences and Audio MIDI Setup app, the new Shortcut support in SoundSource is for you.
Through the end of April, Six Colors readers can save $10 with coupon code 6CSSTEN. Visit https://rogueamoeba.com/sentBy.php?6C-2302 to get SoundSource.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
Like me, Andy Baio is colorblind. People don’t get how many design elements rely on color:
For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t differentiate colors in critical instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously impacts their day-to-day ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at skin conditions, or electricians looking for colored wires.
But for me, it’s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions, demonstrating that the world wasn’t designed for people like me.
Accessibility comes in lots of forms. I have flabbergasted people by explaining that the little charging light that turns from amber to green when a device is completely charged is utterly indecipherable to me. And my colorblindness is apparently far less severe than Andy’s.
If you are a web designer or app designer, you should always keep colorblind people in mind.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The big news this week is Tim Cook and lots of him! Also big news are things that already happened, like the Mac’s bad holiday quarter and Apple putting all its metaphorical eggs in China’s metaphorical basket.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
As I write this, Apple has just debuted its Friday Night Baseball broadcasts for this season—in the afternoon, thanks to coverage of a Cubs day game. And I’m happy to report that the local radio overlay feature works well. Accessible from the More (three dots) button on iPhone and iPad and the sound icon on Mac and Apple TV, I was able to switch from Apple’s announcers to sound from the Cubs’ home radio broadcast. (Alas, audio from Rangers road games are strangely not available this season.)
The integration is flawless. Radio announcer audio is synced up perfectly with the video. When the radio broadcast isn’t providing audio, the broadcast plays stadium background audio. (In fact, it sounds to me like perhaps Apple is grabbing an announcer-only feed from the radio broadcast and then mixing in its own background audio—either that or it’s perfectly synced.)
Also I’m happy to report that Apple’s advanced probability forecasts are rounded to the nearest percentage, so a player is listed as having a 14% hit probability instead of 14.2% or 14.18%—a level of precision that’s unnecessary and probably unreal.
Three outs in an inning, three dots in the scorebug.Finally, Apple’s scorebox still features three dots to represent the number of outs in an inning, which is as it should be, since there are three outs in an inning. (Many broadcasters make the mistake of only displaying two dots, which is criminal.)
Jason still can’t even with General Motors. We waste some cycles drawing trendy 3D junk while pondering (timely!) Easter eggs we have known. And is the forthcoming Apple VR headset like the Lisa, or like the Apple Watch?…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
As first reported by Reuters, General Motors has decided that the company’s future electric cars will drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto, preferring the company’s own infotainment system based on the lower-level Android Automotive operating system. Essentially, all of GM’s EVs will run Android and offer access to certain Android apps, but any hope of connecting your phone to the cars via any means beyond Bluetooth will be gone.
I ranted about this topic for a while on this week’s Upgrade and Patrick George did an excellent job of summarizing this move at The Verge:
Ultimately, however, this is about control. Whether drivers want it or not — and I suspect a great many do not — this next generation of cars will be about consumer data and subscription features as much as they’ll be about instant electric torque and eliminating carbon emissions. The auto industry is banking on data and subscriptions being massively lucrative revenue streams. GM alone hopes to grow its subscription revenue more than tenfold to $25 billion per year by 2030. Why would any automaker want to cut Apple in on that or be forced to play ball with its software? And neither Apple nor Google charges car companies to use these features; owners don’t have to subscribe to them monthly, either.
“From a business perspective, having more control over what happens within your vehicles is extremely valuable for both vehicle development as well as the opportunities presented by capturing and repackaging data for analysis and marketing,” Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ director of insights, told The Verge.
I have a lot of strong feelings about this, because it’s a clear case of a corporation prioritizing its own business and technical interests over the needs of its users. While GM’s statements on the matter constantly emphasize that this is an improvement or evolution of the in-car experience, it’s all spin and lies.
The truth is, instead of allowing your smartphone—the single most important information appliance we all have—to be a key part of the driving experience, GM has decided that it will place itself at the center of that experience. This fundamentally means that it will be a second-class experience, because almost nobody will consider their car computer as their primary device.
Relying on a secondary device has huge drawbacks. First, consider compatibility: If users rely on apps and services that aren’t available on GM’s platform, they will be forced to change, fall back to Bluetooth, or go without. The arrogance in believing that GM should force people to bend their digital lives in order to fit into their cars is breathtaking. Are users going to be forced to change their podcast app of choice, or streaming music service of choice, or audiobook player of choice, all because General Motors wants to enhance its revenue?
But it’s worse than that. Even if you happen to use a supported service or app, you have to rely on syncing between devices. Now you’ve got to hope that whatever connectivity the car offers will be able to keep your music playlists and the current playing location of your podcast or audiobooks synced and up to date. Cloud syncing is tricky—do I really trust General Motors to keep all my stuff in line?
And of course, there’s the Android app experience itself. It has never been the platform’s strength. If the app you want to use is available on the Play Store, and has been flagged for Automotive use, and presumably has been approved by some invisible GM gatekeeper… will it be any good? Or it will be a mediocre-at-best-but-at-least-it-works experience?
GM wants your data. It wants to control your in-car experience. Yes, I have sympathy for a company that is trying to integrate a lot of advanced in-car navigation and safety features with its own hardware stack—in fact, I think it’s not at all unreasonable for GM to declare that if you want to use those features, you must use GM’s built-in navigation apps. But, of course, that’s not what they are actually doing. They’re trying to hide their power grab behind their need to tie auto-drive features to their own navigation system.
This move is infuriating enough simply by dint of it being a giant corporation deciding that its customers were too satisfied with making their own choices. But let’s be honest, the software track record of auto companies is poor.
Even when they do a good job—let’s give them the benefit of the doubt—their priorities are never aligned with the users. If you buy a new iPhone, or upgrade to the new version of iOS, you get new features and better hardware. The computer on a GM car will never get a hardware upgrade, and I would wager that the software will remain fairly static—with key new features and updates only arriving on newer model cars. Even if GM begins this process in a competitive position versus CarPlay and Android Auto, that advantage will begin to depreciate the second you drive the car off the lot.
Tangentially, two EV companies have already gone down this path: Tesla and Rivian. And yes, both of them are just as arrogant as GM in preferring their own stock software to the smartphones in everyone’s pockets. At least GM will have access to Android apps—Tesla finally added support for Apple Music earlier this year! (It took just eight years!) A guy in Poland has spent countless hours trying to hack CarPlay into the Tesla web browser.
I get the impulse to want to control everything that happens in your car, if you’re an automaker. But given the fact that the smartphone is everyone’s real ride-or-die, the best choice is to integrate tightly with the supercomputer we all keep in our pockets, not to say “let them eat Bluetooth” and be happy degrading the customer experience in the interest of control and incremental revenue.
The real question is, what happens next? Of course, the smart move would be for GM to backtrack and offer basic CarPlay support on future models, but I don’t think anyone is actually expecting that. What is worth watching is what other automakers do next. According to some numbers revealed by Apple last year, 79 percent of new car buyers in the U.S. say that CarPlay is a must-have feature. (Obviously, GM doesn’t believe those stated preferences are particularly strong.)
Will GM’s competitors follow its lead, relieved that the world is finally starting to trend away bring-your-own-device support in cars? Or will they consider CarPlay a competitive advantage that will allow it to market their own vehicles against GM’s? I sure hope it’s the latter, because we’re never going to give up our smartphones, and if our cars don’t talk to them properly, our in-car experiences will always be second-tier.
Andy Baio has made quite a find:
While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.
I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.
My guess is that this is probably sample media for a driver for some scanners or multi-function peripherals, but it is sure weird. (Now that Andy has made us all aware of this, I assume this PDF will vanish in a future software update.)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Our thoughts on GM abandoning CarPlay and Android Auto, our most relaxing phone activities, how we control our TVs, and what we’ve used AI for.
Go to the podcast page.
Back in January, I wrote about building an automation for my pal Lex that would generate a list of open meeting times for him to send to potential clients.
Lex and I both use the Fantastical calendar app, but at the time the app’s support for Shortcuts actions was pretty poor. To get our automation to work, we had to set up Apple’s default Calendar app and log it in to our Google calendars. For such a full-featured app, Fantastical’s lack of Shortcuts actions was really surprising.
Things have gotten better! Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.
There’s still some more work to do here—I don’t think Fantastical can quite match the level of filtering that Apple’s Calendar actions offer—but I already see the benefit of using Fantastical for this work. Fantastical’s Calendar Sets, which are user-configurable groups of calendars, make it a lot easier to target a search for events depending on the context.
For example, I might search in a set that only contains my work events, or one that also contains broader family obligations. With Apple’s Calendar actions, I have to search one calendar at a time and concatenate the results. With Fantastical, I just target one of my Calendar Sets and it finds what I want across all the calendars in that set.
I’m happy that Flexibits recognized that its app was a bit behind on the user automation front and took steps to address the issue. Apple has said that Shortcuts is the future of automation on its platforms; I hope more app developers spend time considering how the functionality of their apps can also be used in concert with other apps.
Maybe they could take some time to consider it this month, for starters. It is Automation April, after all.
Marvel hits the brakes, Apple embraces theatrical releases, Netflix can make anything a hit, two combat sports combine forces, and Major League Baseball keeps fans confused about when you’re allowed to watch a ballgame.
Go to the podcast page.
WWDC has been announced, but when will the Apple VR headset be ready to ship? Also, CarPlay gets the cold shoulder from General Motors, watchOS might be in for some major changes, and the iPhone could be getting its own action button.
Go to the podcast page.
Right now, “Zero Trust” is in serious danger of becoming an empty buzzword. The problem isn’t just that marketers have slapped the Zero Trust label on everything short of breakfast cereal–it’s that for all the hype, we don’t seem to be getting any safer.
At the heart of Zero Trust is a good idea, but the way most companies execute that idea is incomplete. Specifically, most security practitioners forget that device compliance is a crucial element of Zero Trust.
Think about it: your identity provider can ensure that only known devices access your company’s apps, but just because you recognize a device, doesn’t mean it’s in a secure state. A malware-infected laptop running an outdated OS can’t exactly be “trusted.” And you can’t count on MDMs to achieve total compliance. Things like unencrypted access credentials are out of their reach, not to mention Linux devices writ large.
Kolide solves the device compliance element of Zero Trust for companies that use Okta.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide’s unique approach works with Okta to make device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
Kolide works across your Mac, Windows, and even Linux devices, with mobile support coming soon. Our lightweight agent complements your existing tools, brings a lot of compliance issues into scope and under control, and can complete your Zero Trust picture.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
With the official announcement of the dates for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, all eyes have turned to June for the next barrage of Apple updates. Chief among those, of course, is the much-rumored Apple headset—despite recent reports that it may have been delayed.
But even if the headset sucks up most of the oxygen in the Steve Jobs Theater (or wherever Apple is showing this year’s keynote), WWDC is traditionally a time for the company to show off the latest versions of all of its platforms, and it’s not as though it can let iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS simply lie fallow for a year.
While earlier reports suggested that this year’s updates might be more like “bug fix” releases, more recently it’s been suggested that we’ll see some “nice to have” features, if not the kind of big marquee enhancements that we’ve come to expect year over year.
And that’s not a bad thing. There are plenty of rough edges in Apple’s operating systems, and places that could use some minor tweaks and improvements. So let’s look ahead at what the company might do to improve its platforms in small ways.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
- INT. APPLE PARK - DAY
- TIM COOK (60s, ruggedly handsome) sits at his desk, eyes closed and hands folded on his lap, as though he is an android who is in sleep mode.
… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Another seven days, three more fantastic tales of Apple! The headset isn’t even out yet and it’s already DOA, the company’s classical music app is out with the fowlest of themes, and are you prepared for…the Mystery Button?!…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kandji for sponsoring Six Colors this week, and for commissioning the Enterprise Report Card!
Kandji is the Apple device management and security platform that empowers secure and productive global work. With Kandji, Apple devices transform themselves into enterprise-ready endpoints, with all the right apps, settings, and security systems in place. Through advanced automation and thoughtful experiences, it brings much-needed harmony to the way IT, InfoSec, and Apple device users work.
Of all the standalone devices that I couldn’t imagine I’d need in the year 2023, I would have put a digital picture frame near the top. To me, they’re a device that seems to belong in that mid-2000s era where people switched to digital cameras, one of those weird bits of translation that supposes that every analog device needs an exact digital counterpart, rather than acknowledging that we simply treat our photos differently now.
But then I had a kid.
Suddenly I found that, despite the thousands of photos I’ve already taken of this child in the first eight months of their life, I had no easy way to display them around the house. I could, of course, always have some digital photos printed out and hung in various places, but that would only allow for a subset of all the great pictures I’d taken.
Suddenly a digital photo frame didn’t seem like such a wild idea, so when the opportunity arose for me to check one out, I didn’t hesitate. What I discovered is that there is definitely a niche for this digital spin on an old favorite, but that even a good entry falls short in a few ways.
Framed!The photo frame I is made by Aura, a company that specializes in smart digital photo frames. They offer a variety of models in several different sizes and finishes, some of which also offer different capabilities. A few of their models are top picks in The Wirecutter’s digital photo frame review, including the model I received, the $249 Aura Mason Luxe. The Mason Luxe has the highest resolution display amongst Aura’s lineup: a 9.7-inch “2K” screen with a resolution of 2048-by-1536 pixels and a dark gray speckled plastic frame that Aura describes as “Pebble”; it’s also available in a lighter gray called “Sandstone”.
The Aura Mason Luxe from the side. You can see the smooth “touch bar” strip.One thing that may not be immediately apparent about Aura’s frames, however, is their thickness. I was surprised to find when I pulled it out of the box that it extends back around two inches, though that is largely so that it can rest solidly on the bottom edge—in either landscape or portrait orientation—with no fear that it’ll tip over.
Aside from the power plug (it uses an included 5V DC adapter with a nice braided fabric cord), and a small speaker on the back, there are no other obvious ports or controls. But two edges of the frame, which are the tops in portrait and landscape respectively, do have a smooth “touch bar”, which is the only hardware interface for interacting with the device. Most of the management of the frame is done via the Aura iOS app, which lets you choose which photos to add and manage the rest of the device’s features.
Pretty as a pictureAppropriately, the best feature of the Aura Mason Luxe is the screen. It’s big, bright, and sufficiently high resolution that, while you won’t mistake it for an analog photo frame, it does a fantastic job of showcasing your photos.
I also appreciate that, like the Google Nest Hub I’ve been using as a makeshift digital photo frame, the Aura features ambient light detection, so when I turn the lights in my office out for the night, the Aura’s screen automatically turns off as well. That’s a big plus, because not only do I not want to have a bright light shining in my office all night, I also don’t want to waste the energy when nobody’s around to look at the pictures. (The app also allows you to manually schedule on/off times, which is nice, and you can manually turn it on and off using the touch bar.)
On the software side, the Aura frame nails my particular use case for showing photos. What I didn’t want was a high overhead system where I had to constantly manage which photos show up on the frame; knowing me, it would just languish with the same pictures I loaded onto it at the start. But this is a digital photo frame, after all: it should be smart enough to do the heavy lifting for me.
Aura gets this. It allows you to choose from among a few sources for your photos, including Google Photos or an iCloud Shared Album. The latter was perfect for me, as it let me sync with the shared album of pictures of my kid, having new photos automatically added to the frame as they appear in the album. You can also add photos via a web interface, or even via email. The slideshow can be cycled through at a variety of intervals, from 15 seconds to 24 hours. I also appreciate that the scrolling through the collection of photos in the app and selecting one gives you an option to show that photo on the frame immediately.
There’s also a collaborative angle that allows you to invite multiple people to submit photos, as well as some rudimentary social features like comments and reactions; I didn’t get a chance to test this out, as it’s something we already use our Shared Album for, but I can see how it might be useful for families.
Another plus of the Aura photo frame is that the company realizes it’s the kind of product for whom the target audience might be less tech-savvy: say, grandparents who want to see photos of their grandkids, but probably wouldn’t buy a digital photo frame for themselves. So Aura allows you to set up the device for someone else as a gift, preparing it in advance so that all the recipient needs to do is plug it in and get it on Wi-Fi. That’s a savvy move, and while I didn’t get a chance to put that process through its paces, it’s a much appreciated option.
Finally, one advantage of a digital photo frame is that it can handle more than just still pictures. The Aura can play both Live Photos and videos—by default, it autoplays the latter silently, though you can use the touch bar to tell it to replay with sound. (In my tests, I couldn’t get it to play audio from Live Photos, just videos.) It’s a nice feature that perks up the frame, but I’m glad that the option exists to disable autoplay if you prefer just static photos.
Not quite picture perfectAll of that said, there are a few things about the Aura frame that I don’t love.
For one, I found the setup process to be a bit on the fussy side. At first I struggled to get it configured the way I wanted it: uploads would stall out, new photos added to my Shared Album wouldn’t appear, and so on. However, after talking with the support team at Aura, it turned out that there was a bug with this process. It was subsequently resolved in a software update for the Aura app and, since then, has worked just fine.
But my biggest gripe with the Aura is the way it displays photos—or, more appropriately, the way it doesn’t display them. While you can choose to put the Aura in either portrait or landscape orientation, the photos that aren’t in the matching orientation show up letterboxed (either with black bars or, if you prefer, a blurred version of the photo behind it). While you can re-crop photos via the Remote Control feature in the app, it has to be done on a photo-by-photo basis—time-consuming if you have hundreds of pictures. For whatever reason, I much prefer having the photo frame in landscape orientation, though given that the vast majority of my iPhone pictures are taken in portrait probably means that I should put the frame that way. There also doesn’t seem to be any way that I could find to limit it to showing only photos in the matching orientation.
What I’d love is an option for the Aura to handle this the way the Google Nest Hub does, by using a 2-up display that puts two narrower photos side-by-side while in landscape mode (or two landscape photos one above the other in portrait). That seems to be available on some Aura frames (specifically the Carver, Buddy, and Gallerie), in a feature called Photo Match, but isn’t available on the Mason Luxe model I was testing, for reasons I’m not entirely clear about.
Similarly, the Aura offers only a single transition between photos, a swipe from left to right. An option for another animation, like a crossfade or a Ken Burns effect or, really, anything—or, heck, no transition at all—would be welcome. I don’t need super flashy transitions, and honestly I even find the swiping a little ostentatious.
Finally, I’m glad you don’t end up having to use the Aura’s hardware interface that much because it is very weird. The Aura’s screen is not a touchscreen, so while you can swipe between photos manually, you have to either use the remote control section of the app, or rely on the touch bar, which brings up a menu of options that you can select by swiping back and forth on the strip and then tapping to select it. It’s extremely unintuitive and almost every time I used it—even for something as simple as shutting the frame down—I found myself triggering the wrong action by accident. While adding a touchscreen to the frames is probably more expensive and not an easy upgrade, it would probably benefit Aura in the long run, since that’s how most of us are used to interacting with technology these days.
The kid stays in the picture frameDespite those nitpicks, I have to concede that the Aura frame is pretty nice. In an age of multipurpose technology devices, a device that exists for just one reason can feel like a luxury, and the Aura Frame model that I was testing isn’t cheap at $249 (other models with lower screen quality and an inability to swap from portrait to landscape can be had for as little as $149).
You could, of course, buy a device like the Google Nest Hub, which can do a lot of things in addition to showing off your digital photos, but that may be overkill—plus, I’ve yet to find a really good way to have it get photos from my iCloud Shared Album.1
But if your priority is to have a way to show off your digital photos someplace beyond just the lock screen of your smartphone and to have them look great—or to share photos with family members who aren’t as technically inclined—the Aura frames definitely fit that bill, and do it well.
Updated on 3/31 with information about the Photo Match feature.
- Yes, there do exist ways, but they generally require using Google Photos as an intermediary or making your shared album publicly accessible, neither of which I want. ↩
Hey there, I’m Shelly Brisbin and I’m here to demo a new feature in iOS 16.4. Specifically, it’s in the Weather app, and even more specifically than that, it is for people who use the VoiceOver screen reader that’s part of iOS.
VoiceOver is a tool used by blind and visually impaired folks to hear the contents of the screen rather than viewing them. So using a combination of speech and touch, you can find out what’s under your fingers. That’s pretty easy if the content is text or even something that can be described pretty easily like a button, something that you can label. But if you have something like an overlay from inside the Weather app, it’s a little harder to use VoiceOver to describe it because it’s visual and it’s color coded. So what I’m going to show you is what I call “sonic overlay.” It’s an overlay that uses pitch to indicate the level of rain that an area is having right now.
In 2021, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.
This is our third year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 117 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by Jason Snell and the Six Colors staff.
Overall scoresApple’s strongest scores came in hardware—Apple silicon Macs are a big winner—and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy.
In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of enterprise service and support and in macOS identity management (its 3.3 average was still fairly low overall, but up a whopping 0.4 from last year). However, Apple took a big hit in the deployment category, which dropped 0.2 to become the lowest scoring category in the survey.
We also asked a couple of questions outside the traditional set. For the second straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. There was a big change here, with “quicker than usual” moving from 37% last year to 51% this year. (A decision by Apple to force a Ventura update as a “minor” upgrade may be at least partially responsible—see the comments in that category for the gory details.)
With numerous reports that Apple might be forced to open up iOS to third-party app stores, we asked our panel about what their policy might be toward such app stores. Were they open to supporting them under some circumstances, would they reject them outright, or are they in an environment that doesn’t even allow use of Apple’s own App Store?
More than half of the people who answered said that while they allowed the App Store, they wouldn’t want to allow third-party app stores. In their detailed comments, several expressed concern that any policy ruling that forced Apple’s hand might make it harder for admins to block third-party app stores, which would make them very unhappy. Only 21% of respondents said they would be open to the idea of third-party app stores.
Here’s what Tom Bridge of the Mac Admins Podcast had to say about this year’s results:
“It’s no surprise that folks are thrilled with hardware and appreciative of the privacy work Apple continues to do. I love to see that, good feedback for Apple around that.
“Deployment and Software Reliability take a hit this year. Software Update was a disaster, and that is firmly reflected here. Apple had every opportunity to make that a gain this year, but a late mistake in last year’s 12.3 release which went unnoticed til 12.6 meant a lot of updates were extremely confused this year.
“Continued gains in MDM are the result of Apple making big moves for the future. And last but not least, the future is bright. A solid grade on the hopefulness of admins.”
Read on for detailed results from each category, with unvarnished commentary from panel participants.
Enterprise programsGrade: B- (average score: 3.5, last year: 3.4)
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Apple needs to enable their programs in other regions. Currently, the enablement of Apple Programs are mostly limited to organizations in the U.S.. For instance, Apple Business Essentials is still not available in EMEIA.”
John Welch wrote: “The programs are fine. At this point, they’re almost in maintenance mode.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “Major commitment and major strides. Work still to be done.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “This year we saw a big improvement in areas such as MDM, with the introduction of Declarative MDM to macOS, Platform SSO and some additional commands for updating and deferring operating systems. Apple Business/School Manager (AxM), which is the cornerstone of Apple deployment is still missing some granular controls around Roles, device grouping and API access. Businesses are still hoping for Managed Apple IDs to include features that will support the functionality we know and love in consumer Apple IDs (iCloud Keychain, Continuity etc). The inclusion of Google Workspace for MAID federation alongside Azure AD was appreciated but this still excludes many organizations who use other cloud identity providers.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Apple School Manager/Apple Business Manager should include warranty start and end date data of all Apple Devices in that Enterprise and MDM vendors should be able to import this data so it can be looked up from the MDM management console.”
Rahul Adari wrote: “Apple has performed really well with ADE [in the] last year.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “Managed Apple IDs are still a messy behemoth, especially for enterprises where consumer Apple IDs have run rampant for years prior to Apple Business Manager being set up. Many consumer-focused features of Apple IDs are still not implemented for MAIDs: iMessage, Sidecar, Universal Control. Additionally, the inability to forcibly log out an Apple ID from a device managed by the claimed domain for MAIDs is a huge factor. There should be better controls to ensure the type of ID that can be logged in to a managed device (regex for the domain and distinguishing between consumer and MAIDs).”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “The lack of warranty info in Apple School Manager/Apple Business Manager is a odd oversight to still have in 2023. That info should be available for importing into MDM management services/consoles. This should not be up to MDM vendors to manage through legacy GSX API calls.”
Kat Maerz wrote: “Apple has come a long a way, but they still aren’t fully understanding that privacy doesn’t exist in the enterprise. A company owned device shouldn’t have privacy.”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “The progress made towards DEP for Mac OS has been promising, but there are still a lot of workflows that need to be supported better through MDM management.”
Todd Ness wrote: “Managing the OS version on my computers is still a bit of a nightmare. Why can we not get a simple dialog to pop up and force a user to install an update? Microsoft is outpacing Apple here by a long way.”
Stephen Short wrote: “Managed Apple IDs are still a mess for multiple reasons. The primary frustration is that there’s no MDM method to distinguish between personal and managed Apple IDs. If your org’s goal is to prevent personal data from living on company-owned devices, it means that you have to use additional iCloud restrictions (like blocking Photos or Documents syncing) that may result in a poor user experience. Managed Apple IDs also do not support Apple Pay, which would be an excellent feature for company-managed credit cards, and would allow frequent travelers to store boarding passes in the Wallet app associated with the managed Apple ID. Another identity issue with managed Apple IDs is that it’s cumbersome (and explicitly recommended against by Apple Support) to use a managed Apple ID as a Developer ID. If an org enables managed Apple ID federation with Azure AD or Google, any existing Developer IDs associated with your domain have to be transitioned to email addresses not controlled by your org, which is a compliance issue. Support’s suggested workaround was to set each developer as a “people admin” in Apple Business Manager, which gives far too much access to your org. If there was a dedicated Developer role (or better yet, the ability to create custom roles) it would resolve this issue.”
Charles Edge wrote: “In general, we continue to see steady improvement in the services Apple provides for businesses. In some spots, it’s clear that Apple Business Essentials is benefitting MDM developers, as there are features the Apple engineers wouldn’t likely think to build without it. Yet in other areas, where people haven’t embraced how Apple wants devices to be managed, there’s still little empathy and therefore fewer features to work around. We see new features, like SSOE, but many are young and third parties haven’t fully exploited the APIs Apple has made available.”
Craig Doran wrote: “Declarative Device Management appears to solve some important issues with devices achieving a desired state, hopefully in a more timely and consistent state. However, the progress is still behind where I thought we would be when it was announced. The release of Configurator for iPhone is a big step forward in getting Macs into ABM. However, the device management role in ABM should be split to require another role for device removal.”
Jon Crain wrote: “Apple is still lacking in enterprise features like APIs and other IdPs for their offerings. However, there is a tangible increase in the team size and the communication of those inside Apple working on making these things better.”
Jacob Burley wrote: “I’d still love to see opening ABM/ASM up to allow for using more IdPs than just Azure and Google. Even just opening up SCIM would be a huge step in making Managed Apple ID adoption more widespread.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “It definitely works very well, but deploying VPP apps to macOS is not always stable, and it’s hard to investigate. So for macOS we always prefer the version from outside the App Store if available (which it often is), like the Microsoft suite of apps.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “I’m mostly happy with ABM — everything works, but there’s not been much innovation recently. I would like to see SAML Single Sign-On and more multi-factor authentication options.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “Managed Apple IDs continued to be of limited usefulness. It’s hard to justify using them when they are restricted from so many services.”
David Tommey wrote: “I feel that significant steps have been made inside Apple to improve enterprise performance. Specifically standing up a team that gives enterprise a voice inside Apple.”
Topher Wheeler wrote: “ABM is still too limiting on what you can do with organization owned devices, especially in regards to activation locks that are immensely time consuming to overcome for some fairly common use cases like introducing an MDM after deployment or acquiring devices from third party contractors or from M&A instances.”
James Corcoran wrote: “Apple are doing well overall, but some more integration with corporate identity would really help us. With hundreds of developers, MAID compatibility for Apple Developer accounts would align with our identity and access strategy.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “ABM ASM very stable. Interesting spin on Apple Business Essentials. Provides just the right amount of features, in my opinion.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple is cautiously expanding the scope and functionality of Declarative Device Management. The progress is encouraging, but the limited scope does not yet address most of the challenges with current MDM protocol. Apple Business Essentials and the attached services of expanded iCloud and AppleCare are still limited to U.S. only. MacAdmins can still not manage subscriptions and in-app purchases from the App Store. The direction the Apple is moving is encouraging, and the caution is definitely warranted, but it is still too early to be excited.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “After many, many, (many) years, I don’t think I once had to give ASM or any of the tools I use a second thought. It’s been a long time coming, but the direct use of the tool, and the integration with our MDM platform, really has meant that the ‘it just works’ is finally true.”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “Delivery of programs has been reliable, but some of the messaging around large changes has been confusing or not in line with the magnitude of the update.”
Shad Hass wrote: “Apple has continued to let me down by not releasing any substantive fixes or updates that would alleviate the headaches of managing a fleet of Macs. With OS updates buggier than ever, Apple is still forcing us to be very hands-on when managing Macs.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Everything has felt more stable this year. I am going to complain for the second year running about the lack of Continuity features with Managed Apple IDs. Working in the education sphere, these are sorely missed by teachers in iPad based learning environments.”
Joel Housman wrote: “No complaints from me. I primarily make use of Apple Business Manager, Managed Apple IDs, and MDM APIs. I have noted improvements in expanded MDM features and appreciate the continued improvement Apple is making with their MDM API.”
Fridolin Koch wrote: “With the introduction of the Enterprise Workflow Team, things are looking up, but we have only seen small results so far.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Business essentials is not available (yet) in Australia but I was fortunate to see a demo. It has some way to go but looks promising. I would still like to see tighter integration with other services though so that I could log in to Apple Business Manager and from there see our AppleCare Enterprise information, developer accounts, e-commerse portal, warranty information, purchases etc from the one location.”
Alex Jones wrote: “Apple Business Manager is still slow and clunky. Managed Apple IDs are next to useless and still don’t support Okta for SSO and SCIM. We have to “double-federate” with Azure AD as a middleman. Some of the limitations placed on Managed Apple IDs prevent some of our engineers using them for their Apple Developer Program account – usually because of needing app-specific passwords for CI/CD build tools.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Apple’s Enterprise programs are not a monolith, and some individual item I hold in high esteem (ABM/ASM are a 4, the MDM APIs are a 4), but others need revision and work. Specifically, Managed Apple IDs need the ability to have an iCloud Keychain associated with them to fulfill their promise to the community. Overall, Apple is middle of the pack here, and that’s okay.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Apple has continued to iterate improvements to Apple Business Manager and the AppleCare Enterprise portal. Apple has also had some missteps, like placing a permanent link to Business Essentials at the top corner of ABM. This sales tool was displayed to ALL customers, even if they had their own MDM server linked, or had far too many devices for Business Essentials to be usable (Apple’s recommended limit was about 500-1000; and we have over 50,000). Roles and Permissions in ABM/ASM need more granularity, and actions need more detailed auditing. Releasing devices is a permanent, irreversible action that needs an audit trail for investigations and disciplinary measures. The first version of ABM in 2018/2019 had this logged and easily accessible. The current version does not—at least, not to the customer.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Apple has been paying more attention to Enterprise, even if that’s not the conventional wisdom. My experience with their sales team(s) and Enterprise support has been pretty solid, even while it can still be true that Apple’s primary focus remains “consumer first.” Projects like mSCP (a GUI for managing the Security Compliance Project’s baselines) shows me they are paying more attention to Enterprise wants and needs. When I asked for help adhering my Mac fleet to a security baseline, Apple granted me a free several-hour session with one of their security experts to help me start to achieve this goal, thereby winning over some members of our usually dismissive security department.”
James Nairn wrote: “They work and are reliable, but not much innovation.”
Edward Marczak wrote: “Apple’s Enterprise management gets increasingly shoddy year over year, frustrating Mac admins everywhere. It seems as if Apple is nearly at the promised land, but never quite gets there. We see where they’re going—which is great!—but the current implementation of management tools, primarily MDM, are just too limited and unreliable.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “I see the quality of Apple’s MDM engineering getting worse. Managed login items were a trainwreck when they were introduced.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “ABM is fine, still a bit slow at times. Being able to add devices using Configurator for iOS is great (if a little cumbersome still). Would love bulk upload options. Also would like to be able to upgrade managed Apple ID storage for users without Business Essentials.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “Overall, enterprise programs are still quite solid, but minimal effort has been seen in the last 12 months to improve features in the education sector. Apple School Manager Azure Federation Sync being unable to read class metadata for student users and populate classes automatically, without CSV files, continues to be an ongoing frustration among schools. Managed Apple IDs continue to evolve, but the features and restrictions seem to be solidifying the wall between a consumer device and an organization-owned asset. User-Initiated Enrollment of a personal device in a managed environment allows a consumer Apple ID and a Managed Apple ID to coexist on the same device quite happily, providing the best of both worlds. However, on an ADE Registered, Supervised Device a consumer Apple ID cannot be entered if it’s already provisioned with a Managed Apple ID. This ensures the user cannot download apps, books, music, etc. on a supervised device if the organization wants the benefits of MAIDs. This is inconvenient for average employees of less strict companies, but downright problematic when you expect your users to easily test new apps for productivity workflows or for their educational benefit. It surprises me that the company that envisioned the simplicity of User-Initiated Enrollment, which prides itself on user creativity and freedom, did not see this use case on supervised devices and provide a suitable solution.”
Enterprise service and supportGrade: B (average score: 3.7, last year: 3.4)
James Corcoran wrote: “While the individuals are great, your support requests often go into a black box until you are told to test a beta with very vague release notes. Would like more feedback about our reported issues.”
Mikeal St. Ayre wrote: “It is difficult to gather appropriate info unless you are already in the enterprise ecosystem.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “Apple’s increased focus on the AppleSeed for IT program is certainly paying off. With Apple opening the program up to a wide range of businesses and enterprises, along with higher resourcing and advocacy, the program has become more accessible and relevant to more Apple Admins. The nurturing of the growing AppleSeed for IT community on the Mac Admins Slack has facilitated a community that shares the identification of changes and issues in beta releases, and coordinates feedback. With clear feedback channels and guidelines for what makes actionable feedback, Enterprise issues are being surfaced earlier in the beta cycles, feedback is coordinated by the community, and Apple is responding earlier and better to the issues faced by those who managed Apple devices.”
James Smith wrote: “There has been an increase over the last 12 months of Apple engineers engaging with admins directly in places like the Mac Admins Slack and I hope this continues into the future.”
Craig Doran wrote: “The surprise of Ventura upgrades being handled as a minor update was a terrible development. It left Mac administrators scrambling to control updates beyond what MDM software update payload restrictions were fully capable of. It required delicate timing and getting fleet to specific OS levels.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “The documentation is very good, but I miss best practices. Apple should be more specific in best practices for implementing management solutions on Apple devices. Sending out commands to have Macs update the OS is really a well implemented and very reliable function.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Apple’s Enterprise support used to be superior to most other enterprise vendors. The reps that you would get on the phone were always knowledgable and could typically resolve issues quickly. My experience with Apple’s support has been disappointing this past year. The people that I speak with seem far less competent and haven’t been able to provide clear answers. Apple’s Enterprise support is now about on par with the rest of the industry.”
Alex Jones wrote: “The Appleseed program and enterprise documentation is pretty good. Their human support, however, is not. It’s very difficult to get in touch with the right team. You get passed from pillar to post with each team saying it’s ‘not their area.’ And even when you do get to the right person/team, they usually just say, ‘Sorry, it’s not something that’s supported.'”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “I’ve had a great experience working with enterprise services and support over the past year. I also wanted to mention that, overall, Apple’s beta programs, documentation, and Feedback Assistant are excellent. I have the feeling that Apple takes our feedback seriously, both from the Feedback Assistant and from the community.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “The quality of AppleCare is generally low. If we didn’t know people who worked at Apple we would rarely get our issues resolved.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “I always feel there is room to improve here—not that we have a ton of support calls, but it always feels like there is one extra step in the process that doesn’t need to be there. We have a local/regional team that we can call on, but we haven’t really needed much from them this year.”
Jon Crain wrote: “There is a definite push from the teams involved here to make things better.”
Ali Al-Itejawi wrote: “One of the betas was never released and went into public release directly and caused major issues with Recovery issues. This was an issue that may have been solved if there was adequate beta testing cycle.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Documentation is improving all the time, especially with deployment guides. The Mac Evaluation Utility is a fantastic tool and the test plans in the Appleseed program are a great foundation for us. There are still gaps, especially around things like declarative management, but on the whole much better than years gone by. AppleCare can still be a frustrating experience at times, especially for hardware repairs. Still regularly getting connected to agents who suggest going to a store.”
Todd Ness wrote: “I submit feedback and rarely if ever get replies these days. Thank God for the Mac Admins Slack community who figure out and help those of us who cannot focus on the Macs all day everyday.”
Charles Edge wrote: “Appleseed continues to get better (despite a kerfuffle about what accounts might or might not be able to access the program in the future) and we see added active participation in online groups from actual Apple employees with connections to developers who can help evolve Appleseed and Feedback Assistant in ways people are actually asking for them to mature.”
Kat Maerz wrote: “Apple doesn’t own mistakes. The latest update to Ventura is causing major issues on [FileVault] machines. They refuse to own it.”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “My experience with Appleseed and training opportunities has been pretty good overall. I wish there was an option to access recordings afterward for reference.”
David Tommey wrote: “Documentation has improved significantly since last year. More direction and guidance on platform security and management has helped Mac admins.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Apple is getting too greedy. Every year they put up the price of AppleCare Enterprise Support and reduce what it offers. It used to include extended warranties for Apple Devices and OS Support, but now we have to pay $35k extra for OS support, and next renewal they’re cutting the number of support cases from unlimited to 50 per year. What’s also frustrating about paying for AppleCare OS support is tickets you log bugs about typically never get fixed. So you’re paying a lot of money just to be told you have to wait for the next major OS release and maybe your bug will be fixed. Not acceptable!”
Joel Housman wrote: “We finally bit the bullet and purchased an AppleCare OS Support Agreement in January 2023 which I’ve already made use of twice. Being abled to talk to dedicated enterprise-focused staff trained with the expectation that customers who call them are other IT professions has been a huge time saver for us. Previously, we’d use the same AppleCare+ support numbers that regular retail customers were using. By comparison, calls to Apple take half the amount of time they previously did. We’re immediately able to cut to the chase and attack the problem itself without first needing to jump through all of the hoops they have a retail customer go through first.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “While the Apple Enterprise Portal (and the wider support structure) is currently going through an update process, it still remains a decidedly poorer cousin compared to other vendors in this space. Staff who contact the dedicated support line for organizations with Apple Enterprise Support Agreements can be walked through any manner of Level 1 issues but the AEP does not show the tickets raised by your users, making it impossible to review the effectiveness of that particular service or follow up with the end users. Similarly bizarre, you are unable to add comments or updates to tickets you’ve individually raised via the portal. The only option is to respond to the generated email chain. The entire AEP feels bolted onto their existing consumer support system, with barely enough features to be acceptable to organizational administrators. Removing Activation Lock from a non-responsive warrantable device is no less painful for organizations as they have to follow the same process as consumers, namely uploading a tax invoice to provide proof of purchase. Ostensibly this makes sense at face value until you consider that not only is the device registered via ASM/ABM (potentially directly from the reseller providing a line of ownership) but also that each serial is registered with AppleCare for Enterprise (ACE), which requires verification of ownership to even set up the agreement. This not-insubstantial edge case causes extreme delays on warranty claims, while under an agreement specifically designed to alleviate them.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “Over the last several years the price of AppleCare Enterprise Support has gone up, while at the same time reducing the level of service provided. We should never be in a position whereby we need to justify the cost and necessity of this service to our business leaders, especially when you consider what this service offers to Apple. Many cases we have raised in the past have been linked to platform and OS issues, problems that would not only affect multiple enterprises, but thousands of end users. Beyond the enterprise getting high level technical support, Apple would be getting priceless troubleshooting and test data around beta OS builds and new hardware. The enterprise effectively has been paying Apple to provide them with end-user test data—then, in return, we get “priority” support. The recent limiting to 50 support calls makes us second guess what we will raise up the chain. The “value” in this service needs to be maintained, for the betterment of the platforms Apple and the enterprise manage. We shouldn’t be in a position of having to justify the purchase to our bean counters. Limiting the flow of data that comes up from then enterprise can only negatively impact Apple’s consumer base due to a lack of agility when it comes to picking up on possible platform issues. Greed should not get in the way of Apple keeping their platforms safe and reliable for the Enterprise and consumer bases.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “The new Enterprise Workflows team at Apple proved their value to enterprise customers right from their inception. Having a deep understanding of the requirements of enterprise IT within the Software Engineering organization has made a noticeable difference. I am keenly looking forward to see how their influence within Apple develops and the positive impact they make to ease of adoption and ongoing management in the enterprise. Apple’s expanded documentation continues to make it easier to get the clarifications required for working within a complex enterprise environment. The improved timelines between new features and supporting documentation is a noticeable difference this year and illustrates the efforts being put in to deliver this. Improved availability of regional-specific documentation is also greatly appreciated for those of us outside the U.S.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “AppleSeed for IT includes meaningful Test Plans and clear requests for feedback. Bugs filed with Feedback Assistant are seeing improved turnaround times and an increased rate of response within the first 7 days. For highly critical bugs that must be addressed within a beta period, the response is also improved. Admins have been advised to write ‘Deployment Blocker’ in the title of feedback that are showstoppers. The KB articles in the series ‘What’s New for Enterprise in…’ with each release of macOS are a positive step toward more release transparency overall. Admins like reading release notes. Please give us more! When it comes to documenting its technology, Apple needs to consider its audience of IT and security professionals. Apple also needs to be more blunt and direct with its audience. Sometimes the reader needs to be explicitly told what NOT to do, or what should NOT be attempted, or what will BREAK if they do X, Y, or Z, or what HAS broken when users try A, B, or C. It’s better to disclose potential issues first and let customers prepare for possible issues, and having nothing happen, than to wait for customers to experience the problem, be caught by surprise, and leave them at the whims of AppleCare. Finally, Apple should be commended for offering training at affordable prices for budding IT professionals. Their testing provider, Pearson, has a lot of room for improvement; the OnVUE app and testing service was awful. The live-proctored sessions were intimidating and testers were not allowed to talk, even if the proctor was satisfied the testing room was empty. Some people need to think out loud, but the live proctors would accuse a tester of cheating simply for talking, and threaten to abort the exam.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Overall service and support is excellent, especially with the introduction of the device support and management training courses. The only let down (again) is the apparent black hole that is Feedback with its non-intuitive requirements on selecting the right account to send feedback from (for those that have Appleseed for IT and one or more developer accounts) and the cryptic way in which Feedbacks are worded. It’s a failing of the system if the only hope of getting any response at all is if you happen to know an Apple employee and can forward them the Feedback number.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “They are definitely trying. The Appleseed beta program is a wonderful resource, but feedback often feels like it goes into a black hole. Meaningful changes only seem to happen when several Mac Admins band together and submit massive amounts of feedback, like in the case of managed login items.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “I have no complaints here. Even while our Mac numbers have not grown at the rate we believed they would, Enterprise Service and Support has remained responsive and optimistic as we work towards building platform-agnostic IT at my F500 workplace.”
James Stracey wrote: “Access to macOS and software betas and associated documentation continues to get better. However, AppleCare is still atrocious.”
Luke Charters wrote: “This is my seventh year working with Apple devices in enterprise environments and the support has never been better. Appleseed for IT and the documentation has been great. My only criticism is that it would be nice if Feedback Assistant could be less of a black hole.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “The lack of documentation for Device Management preference keys for Ventura has been very frustrating. Still, seeing the deprecated System Preferences keys still with no new equivalents for System Settings is unacceptable.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “We saw the benefits of the AppleSeed for IT program last year, when MacAdmins identified an issue with the new update mechanism from Monterey to Ventura. Apple reacted quickly to address the problem with the 12.6.1 update. The nature of the problem remained frustrating, but this shows that Apple was listening and ready to act where necessary. Management options for the new login items were also missing in early betas and added after requests through the AppleSeed for IT program. The Platform Deployment and Security Guides remain a great resource and are regularly updated, as are the new on Training courses for IT. I still wish Apple would expand these documentation efforts into some other areas relevant for Apple admins and developers, such as creating installer packages, configuration profiles, and the various useful, but often poorly documented command line tools.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “Apple gets top marks for hiring more excellent people from the Mac Admins community to work on a a team that has given admins more of a voice in the development process. For example, the Login Items notifications introduced in the initial Ventura beta were rightly called out by admins as too noisy. That new team at Apple helped admins be heard, giving us a much better result when Ventura shipped. The documentation that Apple is producing is great. My only quibble is with Feedback Assistant, which can feel like a black hole sometimes—but even then, the addition of flagging a submission as a ‘Deployment Blocker’ is Apple’s way of finding out what’s stopping people from upgrading to the latest version of the OS.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Appleseed is moving in the right direction, but making this a ‘secrets inside’ program that can’t be discussed cleanly and clearly in public seems to be erring on the side of secrecy for no good reason. While Feedback Assistant is significantly better than in previous cycles — thank you for the automatic sysdiagnose inclusion — there’s still work to do make this better.”
Stephen Short wrote: “Apple is continuing to improve communication to Apple admins via the AppleSeed portal, and I think their outreach efforts at conferences like JNUC is appreciated.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “The AppleSeed for IT program is worthwhile but it seems like we get better unofficial AppleSeed support through the private channel in the Mac Admins Slack. This is a pattern with Apple — the official channels can be opaque, but if you know the right backchannel you might be able to get an answer. I appreciate the Apple employees who spend their time answering questions, but I do wish the information and details were made publicly available for a larger audience. I greatly appreciate that improvements Apple has made to their enterprise-centric documentation the past few years. I consult both the Platform Deployment Guide and the Platform Security Guide almost weekly. They are both wonderful resources and encourage Apple to make more technical detail like this available.”
Edward Marczak wrote: “Apple doesn’t seem to take feedback seriously, act on it in a timely manner, or seem to understand the view from the front lines. The latter is the most frustrating, as it amounts to, ‘you’re holding it wrong.'”
Vaughn Miller wrote: “The formation of the Enterprise Workflows Team at Apple has been a positive development so far. A big ship turns slowly, though.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “The Appleseed beta program is a must-have for any Mac admin. Documentation is improving. But Apple is still too secretive. Many bug fixes and some impactful changes are not properly disclosed. I’m not as down on Feedback Assistant and the feedback process as some—I have had bugs fixed this year—but Feedback Assistant needs work.”
Hardware reliability and innovationGrade: A (average score: 4.4, last year: 4.4)
Luke Charters wrote: “In the education space, the value proposition of the M2 MacBook Air and the 10th Gen iPad just isn’t there when their predecessors are still available.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Apple Silicon is still doing great, we’re really happy with the performance and reliability of our devices on the whole. Innovation is hard to quantify here, but there aren’t many missing features for us… Maybe webcam upgrades?”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “At the beginning of this year, I started working with the brand new 14-inch M2 MacBook Pro, and let me tell you, what a game-changer it has been! Apple continues to surprise me with the reliability and speed of their Apple Silicon machines. And just when you think it can’t get any better, they come out with the new M2 series. Let’s not forget about the new iPad Pro M2 – connect it to an external screen and you’ll almost forget that you’re using iPadOS instead of macOS!”
Christian Lambert wrote: “Hardware reliability and innovation is strong for Mac due to Apple Silicon. Outside of SoC design, innovation is lacking across the board. Always has. More focused on refinements.”
Charles Edge wrote: “Our organization experienced zero failures this year, despite my sincere suspicion that plenty of devices were dropped, got wet, and were in general mistreated.”
David Tommey wrote: “Apple devices have been the most reliable and, with the move to Apple Silicon, most performant in our organization.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Apple Silicon continues to be wonderfully built hardware.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “Apple Silicon has changed the hardware game for Macs, and M2 is just awesome! These Macs simply just work, they are silent, have a great display, a great keyboard and the best trackpad on the market.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “Apple’s custom silicon effort is still simply spectacular. The transition to Apple Silicon exceeded expectations and keeps going. Simply amazing. The rest of the industry is still gobsmacked. Great incremental improvements across all products.”
James Smith wrote: “Apple’s recent hardware has been excellent. The performance increase between the M1 and M2, while not as impressive as the difference between Intel and M1, was a modest improvement.”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “Apple Silicon has been great, and I look forward to where it might go!”
Kevin Williams wrote: “Anything is better than the butterfly days, but we still see a fair number of display/ribbon cable issues with the laptops. Airs AND Pros of any type – I think the move to super thin displays leaves zero bezel and any slight bump in the bottom of a bag seems to set them off to failure. Never had any of these issues with the OG 101’s with the CD drives (not that I want to go back to 5 pound laptops, but..) or the Air with the 1″ bezels. Our 9th gen iPads for the students and iPad Airs for the teachers have been solid, and we were happy they did not get rid of the 9th gen with the price increase for the 10th gen. We also use the Logitech Rugged Keyboard case Apple sells for education (without touchpad) and that really makes the device work for everyone.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Apple Silicon Macs are insanely powerful and appear capable of delivering on Apple’s vision of a seamless user experience between Mac, iPhone, iPad, and various accessories.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “We hardly ever get any broken Apple devices. Most of our repairs are from accidental damage. One shortfall Apple’s entry-level laptops have is that they don’t support two external displays. I hope Apple addresses this with the M3 when it’s released. Having to pay an additional $500 for a 14″ MacBook Pro to have two external display support is too high a price.”
Fridolin Koch wrote: “The Hardware is still top notch. What really hurts in the Enterprise is the lack of two-monitor support on the Macbook Airs (hoping for the M3 generation there).”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “They did the best they could being stuck on TSMC’s 5nm process for longer than expected.”
James Nairn wrote: “Hardware is good/reliable and there are continual improvements but now Apple Silicon is Business as Usual—a bit of the excitement has died down.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “Reliability and repair hardware service/ repair delivery times for the enterprise are still industry-leading. The only exception to this would be around DOA devices. Apple needs to clean up their DOA practices for the enterprise. As a consumer, I can walk into an Apple store with a DOA device and get it swapped out without much drama. A similar experience needs to be implemented for the enterprise, especially considering current supply chain issues. Innovation around portable devices is industry-leading. Battery life, general performance, service experience and reliability make iPhone & Mac easy choices for the enterprise. Where this falls down though is around “market segmentation” or “product stack segmentation.” The entry-level portable Macs (MacBook Pro 13″ and MacBook Air) still not supporting multiple external displays natively is a huge missed opportunity. For my organization and others who I am in contact with, this is the one sticking point to having MacBooks as the default device. Having to pay in excess of $500 to run two external displays needs to be resolved when the M3 upgrade comes. There are other similar examples of forcing people into higher segmented products in order to get what would be described as basic features for the enterprise. Smoothing out the scale so organizations don’t need to make a huge jump up the price chain to get basic features would go a long way to make the Mac the go-to option.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “I’ve been managing Macs since the 68K days. I continue to be impressed by the Apple Silicon transition. Obviously, some processes had to change, but this has been the smoothest transition yet.”
Edward Marczak wrote: “Hardware is absolutely where Apple shines. The Apple Silicon Macs are pretty much perfect all around: Power, great battery life, ports—we have physical ports again!, dropping the TouchBar, and the choice of all of this in a relatively compact package.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “Apple Silicon processors have been solid. But the continued inability for Macs to handle multiple displays in a single Thunderbolt 4 connection is absurd. Every Windows computer made in the last four years can do this and Enterprises are not going to buy new displays just for this issue, they’re going to use multi-connection workarounds and further the perception that Apple doesn’t care about Enterprise environments. iPhones and AirPods need to be using USB-C/Thunderbolt connectors already.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “Apple Hardware continues to outperform the industry in clear and meaningful ways, providing substantial value to customers in the enterprise. Literally no one else comes close to Apple’s quality in hardware manufacturing, battery life, and operational excellence.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “Apple Silicon has turned the EUC landscape on its head. The computing power and battery life of the entry-level MacBook Airs is well suited to enterprise users with standard requirements. The higher spec machines give multiple pathways for satisfying the most power-hungry users. The only real limitation of the entry-level Macs is multiple external displays. There are third-party solutions to this, but many orgs would like to see that offered out of the box.”
Stephen Short wrote: “Apple Silicon Macs are absolutely fantastic, no notes. My only feedback is that users (and IT departments) should be able to switch out the VESA mount on the new Studio Display without requiring a Genius Bar appointment.”
Mark Frischman wrote: “Mac reliability has seemed to improve significantly with the release of Apple Silicon based machines. The previous generation of MacBook Pros – particularly the 13-inch Intels – had an unusually high rate of failure, especially the batteries.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “The quality of the hardware is the best in the business, and continues to be the reason they are successful in enterprise in my opinion.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Zero complaints. Best hardware money can buy, regardless of what the OS is.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “The 10th generation iPad is a confusing mess. It seems to be aimed at education, but anyone in education would tell you (without hesitation) that there are some huge missteps here. No headphone jack? Maybe a slight annoyance for consumers but imagine trying to explain to a classroom of kindergarteners how to pair bluetooth headphones. Or picture re-wiring hundreds of iPad carts to use the new USB-C charger.”
James Corcoran wrote: “Apple Silicon has had a measurable impact on our developers’ capabilities. It is just so much faster, enabling them to do more!”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “So far M2 has been a minor upgrade from M1. Not much to write home about.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “The continuance of the M Series chipsets is slowly starting to change the conversations and landscape in heretofore untouched parts of the enterprise market; and the reliability of their products is going from strength to strength. The fantastic iPad 10th Generation is necessary, long sought after and completely the wrong price point. Apple knows that to compete in education, you need to meet a price—and try as they might, they couldn’t get it cheap enough. The 10th generation is therefore, regrettably, a device destined to be skipped in some sectors. Similarly questionable but much less understandable is the base M2 MacBook Air still not natively supporting two external displays. A powerhouse under the hood and elegant in design, this is a perfect MacBook for nearly every user. The omission of that feature could make this device one tick box away from a bean counter choosing to move their fleet from Windows to MacOS, or simply give their users choice. Apple desperately needs feature difference to upsell customers to the MacBook Pro, but at what opportunity cost?”
Shad Hass wrote: “The continued extreme limitation of ports on devices still leads us to dongle hell for anyone using their laptops for anything desk-related. The single-external display for both the M1 and M2 is very disappointing, and the notch being so large but still lacking FaceID is unappealing. Apple’s continued use of the slow Lightning connector until they were forced to adopt a standard, then complaining about that standard, when they have already been adopting it widely in every other product seems borderline dishonest. The efficiency and “good-enough” speed of the new Apple Silicon chips is nice, though that seems to be more of a fault of Intel for their silicon troubles over the last half decade.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Like almost everyone else in our Apple world, I remain completely blown away by the new M1 and M2 architecture Macs. At this point, we’re about 75% switched over to ARM. I’m eager to replace the last of our Intel Macs. In particularly, the M1 and M2 MacBook Airs offer incredible “bang for the buck” and we hope to be able to use this model to implement platform-of-choice and see significanty lower total cost-of-ownership. I have yet to see a hardware issue with any of our M1/M2 machines and my users are ecstatic at the performance. One developer told me that his compile times a fraction of what they were on his 2018 MacBook Pro. Another who works with enormously large data sets was concerned that 16GB or RAM would not be enough, but his M1 MacBook Pro handles his tasks with ease”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Two years into the Apple Silicon transition, new releases might seem incremental, but they are still way ahead of anything else. It’ll be interesting to see what Apple does with the Mac Pro and iMac. The iPad product line, while excellent, seems caught in a weird transition with some features only available to certain models, seemingly without reason. The excellent iPad hardware still is limited by choices in iPadOS.”
Todd Ness wrote: “I cannot believe Apple still has not integrated touchscreens into their laptops. We’re basically running the same OS as the iPad these days—it should be a no-brainer.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “Big improvements in the Mac lineup, even if the Studio is a stop-gap for a more modern Mac Pro. In terms of mobile, iPadOS needs extensive polishing to be a laptop replacement. iPhone battery life is great. Its camera can take very good photos, but when zoomed in it is very hard to focus. The Apple hardware is of very high quality with no defects that I’ve noticed.”
Jon Crain wrote: “Steady, reliable increases are always welcome. Some lines have remained stagnant and are waiting for updates, but our business is focused primarily on the Mac portable line and that is seeing very good improvements and reliability.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Our environment is a fairly even mix of Windows laptops and Apple devices (mostly iPads). From a hardware reliability standpoint, the iPads are far superior. We have virtually no outright hardware failures when compared to what we see with PC laptops”
Software reliability and innovationGrade: C+ (average score: 3.3, last year: 3.4)
Todd Ness wrote: “Out of 1450 devices I have many tens of users, including several of my executives, that have to get help kickstarting the autoupdate daemon multiple times to get updates to even be seen on their devices. I miss the ability to download an update and push it through Jamf to enforce an update. Now at least I have Intune that can set the minimum OS allowed to connect and then the people will update because they cannot work until they do.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “MacOS Ventura’s System Settings feels like the beginning stages of a redesign that should have been started sooner and more thoroughly fleshed out. It feels like the iPad version was transplanted to the Mac without any consideration for the fact that Macs have wide screens. Stage Manager is also confusing and superfluous.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “The great Software Update debacle is still not fixed in macOS, thought it is a little more manageable in macOS 13 with MDM commands for forcing updates that actually work, unlike the ones in macOS 12 and earlier. macOS still has too many bugs in the OS itself and its bundled apps. Apple Mail and Calendar apps are still extremely buggy, especially with Microsoft Exchange/Office 365 accounts.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Last year, I mentioned how I loved the fact that the OS foundation was more in line, which I believed would lead to better innovation between iOS/iPadOS and macOS. However, it seems that Apple is slowing down on innovation, particularly when it comes to BYOD. While the possibilities of what we can do with the account-driven user enrollment on iOS/iPadOS are exciting, the lack of support for this method on macOS is disappointing. If Apple does not bring this feature to macOS soon, it may hinder personal-owned workflows and negatively impact productivity.”
Stephen Short wrote: “macOS is generally stable and reliable, but I’m still thrown by the transition from System Preferences to System Settings. The discoverability of multiple settings is poor, and sometimes related functions are scattered throughout different categories. I find myself using the search bar to do almost anything in the app. It seems like it was designed to mimic iPadOS, but without any usability gains or improvements.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “I think macOS is in a good place, although the constant changes to the UI for settings and other management things makes it hard for us to keep teachers and staff in the know on how to do some simple things for themselves. iOS likewise keeps changing UI in random ways, and we can’t keep the students and staff up to date on knowing how to do things.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Apple’s software still lags behind their hardware in terms of innovation and reliability. While I still think it is better than what we experience with Windows, we still have to work around bugs and some frustrating limitations in iPadOS.”
David Tommey wrote: “Platform stability has been an issue, many more bugs have seeped into production releases. This has had an impact on the trust that we can update our org quickly to the latest OS release.”
James Corcoran wrote: “Platforms are feeling more reliable. Would like more focus on enterprise features.”
Christian Lambert wrote: “Software reliability is slipping and innovation is slow.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “Ventura has been solid on its own. But Apple could do better to slow down their major release cadence for macOS to once every 2 years and make the beta release open to 3rd party vendors longer than ~6 months. This would vastly improve the time needed for vendors to update their applications for the upcoming release and be a positive step towards enticing Enterprises to adopt Apple products more broadly by making it less of a scramble every single year.”
stephen johnson wrote: “macOS software updates are still a dumpster fire.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “What reliability? macOS is in its worst state I have seen in my entire career.”
Ali Al-Itejawi wrote: “The software update process on macOS machines is the worst, with both GUI being unresponsive and unreliable as well as MDM commands not being respected by the machine.”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “The changes in Ventura, though hated by some, have been welcome to me. I have gotten very accustomed to using Stage Manager, and it is extremely helpful. Additionally the new System Settings is miles better than System Preferences. It takes what many users are used to from iOS and iPadOS and puts it into macOS. Stage Manager on iPad is sketchy at best, but I like that they’re at least making an attempt at having the interface be similar to Mac.”
Edward Marczak wrote: “There seems to still be a long-running sentiment that software quality has slipped, but I’m really not seeing that, particularly in the Enterprise. Help Desk is not inundated with reports of crashes or other bugs, but more with standard corp/tech questions and password resets. Pages and Numbers, which could be staples of Enterprise offerings, are great consumer products—but fall incredibly short of what’s needed in the Enterprise. Same for FaceTime: with remote work and streaming at an all-time high, FaceTime completely misses the boat, so we all stick with the standards of Google Meet, Cisco WebEx, and Zoom.”
Mikeal St. Ayre wrote: “They need to slow down, ship working software, not rolling bug fixes.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “macOS Ventura was a solid update, with few issues for users and admins aside from the ongoing challenges with software update. On iPads, however, Stage Manager is an un-useable mess and third party apps that could really make use of the excellent iPad hardware are held back by platform and App Store limitations.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “Better focus on software update and upgrade reliability.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “The botched HomeKit migration on iOS 16.2 left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Fridolin Koch wrote: “Death by a thousand cuts. The overall stability of Ventura is great, but lots of small niggles are annoying admins and users, and users are losing faith in the platform!”
Joel Housman wrote: “Pretty good overall with a few minor hiccups that were fixed with various point releases. You always wish that they could be better, but when I compare Apple to Dell (yes, we still have about 20 users that prefer Windows), the Apple machines are rock solid and our Dell machines are a flimsy, wet house of cards.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “Software updates and upgrades are an area that caused many headaches for Mac admins and enterprise organizations in the last 12 months. General unreliability of the underlying frameworks, poor end-user experience during the updates, bugs with the deferral profiles, devices booting into recovery, this list goes on. Without community provided solutions like Nudge and SUPER, it becomes challenging to deliver the patch compliance required in an enterprise environment. I am looking forward to seeing innovation to make updates a straightforward process so we as admins can go back to dealing with the many other things we could be focusing on.”
James Nairn wrote: “Current OS offerings are as good I remember. MDM commands are still unreliable and managing software updates via MDM is a disaster. That area is frankly embarrassing.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “Software Update! We still can not reliably keep our fleets up to date. We also still see too many bugs around OS updates and bundled apps. The enterprise should not be in a position of needing to hold back updates for extended periods due to testing and validation. We should be able to rely on MDM commands to keep the fleet up to date, as well as having confidence in updates that are pushed out. Due to the amount of zero-day vulnerabilities that pop up these days, we need to remain agile and be able to push out updates in a reasonable time with confidence nothing will break or regress in terms of performance.”
John Welch wrote: “Honestly, Apple’s the only OS vendor of note even attempting new things. Windows won’t and god knows Linux can’t.”
Charles Edge wrote: “As a developer who sits at the crossroads between device management, security, and software reliability, it’s easy to see how the updates have made the life of a developer and admin better. Some endpoints still have unexpected or undocumented behaviors; however, when we mention them, they get fixed. So, forward progress!”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “I’m in the middle because iOS and iPadOS have been pretty good, but Ventura has been buggy and confusing for users. I’m not opposed to change, but the Preferences/Settings rewrite has been hard to use and administer.”
Rahul Adari wrote: “Ventura’s performance is exceptional.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “macOS Ventura has some big updates for the enterprise. For example, Declarative Device Management, Platform SSO, and required network access to wipe and set up an MDM-enrolled Mac. On the user front, the new System Settings is the rewrite we didn’t need and makes it less likely we’ll get the rewrite we still need. Despite all the changes, the upgrade to Ventura has been a non-event at my company.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “1/2 point deducted for the arbitrary limitation on only allowing 2 copies of macOS to be running in VM’s. The hypervisor framework in macOS is amazing but is held back on running macOS VM’s by this requirement. I have a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra chip in it and with a 2 VM limit it barely makes a dent in the machine’s capability.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Rolling out Ventura and iPadOS/iOS/tvOS 16 hasn’t been completely bug-free, but it has been better than previous years. I’d be happy if it was like this every year.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “macOS and iOS remain incredibly stable and drastically unchanged over the last year, a comparatively mature OS on both sides with solid foundations making reasonable progress in traditional sectors. If anything, I feel Apple should not be afraid to release a new macOS version with even fewer new features, to allow developers time to work on bug fixes, polish and tech debt.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “For all of Apple’s focus on polish and completeness of vision, they fall short of the mark often on the Enterprise front. Software Update — both for end users and for MDM manufacturers/operators — is a travesty in its current form. That admins cannot depend on ScheduleOSUpdate should be an embarrassment across the company, given how important patching is to the good working order of the platform. The embarrassing situation surrounding macOS 12.3 to 12.6 and OTA updates was as unfortunate as it was disabling to customers. The System Settings app is a violation of human interface guidelines, good taste, and good functionality for end users and admins alike. It is inconsistently designed, and doesn’t live up to the standards of the platform. Many features of Ventura cannot be used with Managed Apple IDs at the core, especially Continuity Camera, which many orgs want to use with their managed iPhones.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “Aside from the mess that is System Settings (which replaces the mess that was System Preferences), Ventura has been a solid OS. Delivering the macOS upgrade has been a different matter. The iOS upgrade had some nice new features. I continue to use and be impressed by the iWork apps; collaborating on presentations using Pages and Keynote via iCloud has worked well for me.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Managing software updates remains a messy, unreliable chore. Okay, it’s a little better than it was, but it’s still pretty disappointing that Apple just hasn’t gotten this right yet. It’s not comfortable for me to have to continue to explain to my management that we don’t have the same level of software update control as has existed on our Windows fleet for literally decades. Never mind the recent boot-to-recovery/unlock code snafu with Ventura 13.2.1. How did that slip through quality control?”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “The transition to macOS 12 Monterey and to macOS 13 Ventura has gone well overall. Each OS has had hiccup points, especially around the update experience for particular dot updates, but the overall experience of rolling out the new OSes has gone well.”
Adam Rice wrote: “Ventura overall is rock solid. Any Mac that can run it, should—and many Macs that can’t should, via OpenCore Legacy patcher. It’s up there with 10.6.8.”
Vaughn Miller wrote: “Monterey and Ventura have been solid OSes. Software update continues to be a train wreck.”
Craig Doran wrote: “The OSes were lacking in features compelling to enterprise users.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Very few complaints in this regard, Ventura and iOS 16, once installed, actually have driven very few support tickets. Installation isn’t always great though, booting to recovery, failing to download, asking for recovery keys, all that madness.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “Fragile Secure Token environments continue to be a huge pain.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “The GUI of Notifications on macOS has to change. They are user hostile with confusing dismissal and action targets. I see users just disable any Application’s request for approval to enable notifications. Ensuring users are notified of critical management tasks (ie updates) is impossible to do reliably with the current Notifications.”
Security and privacyGrade: A- (average score: 4.2, last year: 4.1)
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “Apple has upped the communication level and precision on security. They made it certain that Ventura is more secure than Monterey. They also implemented XProtect Remediator as an improved remediation technique.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “I think it’s the main reason we feel so good about the devices in student hands, frankly. They’ve struck a good balance between control for the school and privacy for the student. Paired with a good MDM it’s a solid win.”
Luke Charters wrote: “I really appreciate the new background items management in Ventura. Their bumpy introduction during the beta period was a testament to how receptive and adaptive to enterprise customers Apple has been. Rapid Security Responses are a welcome addition. I’m keen to see the enterprise experience of deploying the first real one that comes out.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “Apple leads with security and privacy.”
Jon Crain wrote: “I feel like they are simply maintaining. The fact that they only officially patch and support the latest OS without creating great tools for upgrades is a very big issue.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple remains strong in this area. However, their focus on end-user privacy is often at odds with enterprise management requirement. Many features, like the new Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, are unavailable for managed Apple IDs. I don’t think user privacy and manageability have to be opposed. Apple could (and should) work harder to make all features available in managed environments. Several standard security options on macOS are still not able to be managed with profiles.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Privacy, I would say Apple does a great job. Security? It depends. RSR should be great and much needed. However, enforcement of OS updates is painful.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “The security change regarding login items was clearly made without enterprise in mind. It’s a great move for consumers, who have improved visibility for things like malicious LaunchAgents. But it also has the result of nagging end users to turn off important security tools that were installed by IT in enterprise settings. Yes, we can carefully hand-craft a configuration profile to prevent this nagging, but it shouldn’t have come to that.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “Restricting critical security features such as passkeys and iCloud Keychain to consumer Apple IDs shows Apple’s lack of care and attention to the enterprise space.”
James Nairn wrote: “Good, but Apple needs to tweak the balance between user privacy and enterprise management requirements for enterprise owned devices—in favor of enterprise. We should be able to mandate software updates and be confident that they can be applied.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “Apple’s constant progress toward a more secure OS ecosystem is laudable and appreciated by every Systems Administrator I speak to. On the privacy front, I fear their focus on this core tenant is continually coming at odds with usability. Apple made changes in 16.2 to AirDrop behavior, changing discoverability from “Everyone” to “Everyone for 10 minutes” with no further management options available. This change was introduced to solve AirDrop “bombing” but it has adversely affected the education sector that cannot or have not yet implemented MAIDs or the Classroom app. AirDrop is used regularly in classrooms around the globe to collaborate and deliver resources. Changing that setting regularly is at best frustrating and at worst, insurmountable for younger students. This seems to highlight yet that Apple is struggling to develop a single product and single OS that fits a cornucopia of use cases.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “The customer experience is completely different to the admin slog. Automating Mac management is becoming increasingly challenging due to Apple’s introduction of new privacy features that disrupt our ability to automate tasks via scripts or other MDM platform tools. In line with this, Apple tends to take a considerable amount of time to present alternative methods to execute administrative tasks (assuming they even consider or action replacement procedures). Apple needs to remember that the changes they make not only affect consumers. The enterprise needs to be kept in mind. Especially when it comes to automating tasks and managing devices.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “One of the top things Apple could do to improve macOS security in the enterprise is to make MDM-driven software update bulletproof. Apple’s privacy features are very user-centric, often forgetting that many users such as employees and students don’t own their devices and sign EULAs acknowledging that they don’t have any expectation of privacy from the organization. The new Login Items management and notification system gives the user too much information and generates call tickets. In enterprise, finding persistent malware is best left to EDR solutions.”
David Tommey wrote: “With the push for advertising directly in several Apple applications, the pronouncements of increasing privacy seem fairly hollow ”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Apple’s competition should stop making knock off iPhones and MacBooks and instead copy their stance on privacy.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “Apple shows continuous innovation on a wide range of Security and Privacy components across their devices and platforms. Improvements in hardening of the physical and software security, introduction of Security Keys to protect Apple IDs, and Advanced Data Protection for iCloud are the result of multi-year projects by Apple and are providing real end-user security and privacy. We are still seeing increasing dialogs with more decisions for users with no clear correct path. There is still inconsistency in privacy controls. We admins can have full control of all data on devices and yet can’t pre-approve Screen Recording to make the user experience better.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “Ventura patches have been solid. Really love the Rapid Security Response rollout. But if Apple is going to support n-2 or n-3 major versions, they need to patch the same vulnerabilities in all currently supported macOS versions. It’s disingenuous to claim to support Big Sur, Monterey, and Big Sur while having a big caveat in your documentation that says you’re not going to back-port all Ventura patches to Big Sur and Monterey.”
James Stracey wrote: “Still no native controls to easily manage egress firewalls, and while USB based SMB controls work, they are still marked as deprecated. The lack of these capabilities may lead to an increased exposure to data loss events.”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “Security/Privacy is always a balance and lately it’s been swinging toward more hassle/user aggravation for the same amount of security.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Apple’s Security and Privacy decisions, specifically the inability to manage individual settings, create regular problems in a K-12 environment. While I appreciate the focus on security and privacy for my personal devices, working with and around those settings is a daily battle in an educational environment.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “In my response from last year, I mentioned how Apple is becoming more of a target in the security world and how impressed I was with the way they’re making their devices secure without compromising the user experience. However, as the security landscape continues to evolve, I believe that declarative MDM (based on device state) will be a great addition to the security stack. Along with this, Apple needs to add more control via a configuration profile instead of relying on scripts, which are still required for some aspects of the security stack in macOS. While Apple already builds impressive security features into their devices on a software and hardware level, improving the controllability of these features will help enhance overall security posture.”
Craig Doran wrote: “Apple’s privacy controls for cameras, microphones, location, and screen sharing are admirable for personal use, but are difficult to explain to other IT departments why they cannot be managed. Much of enterprise computing became obsessed with security initiatives—yet Apple’s improvements there were either obscure or not promoted in a way that Apple admins could trumpet to their security team. iCloud+ security improvements were not welcomed by enterprise network security administrators. The MDM vendors started introducing security products which undercut the message that Macs have an edge on Windows for security and also sets up what I fear is a conflict of interest for them.”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “I love having the option to encrypt iCloud, and the new hide-my-email and hide-my-IP features are very nice as well. Also having lockdown mode as an option for those in particularly difficult situations is a good improvement.”
James Corcoran wrote: “Overall, security and privacy is great on Apple platforms… except for macOS software updates, where MDM completely lets the enterprise down. Keeping macOS devices on compliant operating system versions is near impossible with Apple’s native MDM software update commands. At present, we are unable to reliably patch a vulnerable OS without third party tools.”
Vaughn Miller wrote: “Apple has done many things to make Apple operating systems some of the most secure. But problems with software update continue to knock this score down.”
Joel Housman wrote: “There were a few zero-day issues that arose in the past year with Ventura or Safari that needed to get patched, but Apple released out-of-cycle security updates in all cases and we made use of our MDM to push our users to apply those updates.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Apple remains the leader in security and privacy, particularly with iPhones/iOS. Our security department considers iOS so secure that they only very lightly manage phones enrolled into InTune. Our much smaller Android phone fleet are significantly more locked-down/managed (because they have to be). On the Mac side, I have been able to pretty easily adhere our Mac fleet to a common NIST security benchmark/baseline. Apple is paying attention to cybersecurity trends and continues to lead the industry in securing their platforms.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “For the end user Apple Security and Privacy stuff is good. Not so much for system administrators. Every year it gets harder and harder to automate the management of Macs, because Apple added some new privacy feature that breaks our ability to automate things via scripts. And Apple usually takes years to provide an alternative method to perform the admin tasks. Having the users have to go into System Settings to approve Screen Recording before remote support tools such as Splashtop and Teamviewer work is also a major hassle for support staff.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Apple has now stated in writing that the current shipping OS is the one that’s really and truly supported, but they are also keeping their kind of official N-2 OS support strategy. When updates are made available Apple can still be vague or late to report if one of the two (sort of) still supported OSes has all the same relevant security patches and fixes as the new OS (e.g. does 12.6.3 close all the same CVEs as 13.2?). It would be appreciated if Apple was more upfront about security issue not being addressed in the older OSes they are still releasing updates for so customers could better plan mitigations and remedies.
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “Apple shines here. Period.”
John Welch wrote: “Security-wise, it’s not even close. Windows is a mess of patches and fascia that gets worse by the week. Linux is somewhat better, but the “oh has that bug been around for decades?” oopsies that happen all too regularly show that open source is a licensing mechanism, not a magic spell. Neither Linux nor Windows seem willing to do the work to actually harden and improve their OS, beyond some weird libertarian insistence on Caveat Emptor and relying on human perfection.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “When it comes to the technology, Apple is the leader in this space.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “While implementing new features such as Background Login Items caused a decent kerfuffle this past year, the overall security provided by Apple’s approach makes it somewhat easier to provide a secure environment leveraging the Endpoint Security Framework, code signing, application sandboxing and other built-in frameworks. We saw a rapid adoption of security benchmarks supporting macOS Ventura, but many of the security controls demanded by NIST, CIS etc. still require scripts to implement, with only a small subset being able to be managed with configuration profiles.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “Apple’s handling of the Login Items notifications, specifically the depth to which they addressed the feedback they got, pleasantly surprised me.”
Adam Rice wrote: “Lockdown Mode, Advanced Data Protection for iCloud — great stuff.”
Alex Jones wrote: “Security & Privacy are great on Apple’s platforms. However, the most annoying thing about Apple is their dictatorial approach to user privacy in the enterprise. Enterprises should have full control over their devices if needed, and it should be the enterprise’s choice on what is acceptable from a user privacy perspective, not Apple’s. For example, we have so many users get confused about how to share their screen in a Google Meet/Zoom/Teams meeting. We, as an organization, should be able to allow Screen Recording permissions for Chrome/Zoom/Teams via MDM. Similarly, if we try to help someone via remote access with something like TeamViewer, the user still has to root through the System Settings to allow us to do this. Not great when the whole reason we’re trying to connect to help them is because they’re not the most computer literate to begin with.”
DeploymentGrade: C (average score: 3.1, last year: 3.3)
Armin Briegel wrote: “MacAdmins now have the option of requiring internet during enrollment and thus better ways of enforcing automated enrollment. Despite the changes in macOS Ventura, managed software updates remain challenging, unreliable and laden with bugs. The level of frustration among MacAdmins with software update on macOS is hard to overstate. Not only is Nudge still a popular tool to address these short comings, but has been joined by Kevin M White’s super.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “The two big problems here are around MDM enrollment and MacOS update management. It is still possible to get around Automated Device Enrollment—that need to be addressed.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “No issues with ADE or app deployment. Software Update, on the other hand, continues its multi-year adventure in being a horrible experience. If the experience of using macOS as a whole was the same as using software update, we’re not sure we would want to purchase Apple systems and work with macOS. Despite years of discussing it with Apple, we’re not fully convinced that Apple appreciates the gravity of how software update’s misbehavior affects our daily operations and long term plans for using macOS systems. Apple software update’s inability to properly do its job is impacting our ability to operate as a company because we are unable to comply with security protocols.”
Craig Doran wrote: “macOS software updates in enterprise is a mess. MDM triggered updates are unreliable and not fine-controlled enough. The surprise of Ventura upgrades being handled as a minor update was a terrible development. It left Mac administrators scrambling to control updates beyond what MDM software update payload restrictions were fully capable of. It required delicate timing and getting fleet to specific OS levels.”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “It’s improving, but most of that has been better documentation of what’s happening and what’s available to configure and use.”
Edward Marczak wrote: “Train wreck? Dumpster fire? What’s the right analogy here? MDM isn’t ready for the tasks that Apple wants Enterprise to use it for. Software Update has gone backwards to the point that I can only wonder how we got here. Bugs, awful UI, it’s all here. This is the category single-handedly making life miserable for anyone trying to manage Macs in an Enterprise setting.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “Again, paired with a solid MDM, we’ve been really happy the past 2-3 years. We use Moysle for our MDM, and it’s designed specifically for schools – full integration with ASM, our student and staff get populated via API, even the kid’s schedules get pre-populated for use in Apple Classroom for those who use it. We hand configure every iPad so it’s ready for a student when they walk in the door (accounts, apps, everything – a true custom out of box experience) and paired with our MDM, we can configure 100+ in a day. Outside of the time waiting for apps to download and install, we touch the iPad for maybe 5 minutes or less to configure accounts, apps, backups – literally everything we’d want – label them, put them in a case, and they are ready to go.”
Vaughn Miller wrote: “Automated Device Enrollment coupled with auto-advance through the setup wizard is a boon for automated deployments. Lack of automation for OS updates drags this score down.”
James Corcoran wrote: “The state of managing software updates via MDM on macOS deserves a negative rating. Apple’s approach to macOS MDM software updates is fundamentally broken. Using the MDM commands to update macOS is a terrible user experience, if it event works. Compared to Microsoft’s Windows Update for Business solution, Apple is limping along with a sub-par solution that needs to be completely reimagined. At present, you are unable to reliably patch a vulnerable OS without third party tools.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “Not to pile on Software Update, but the abundance of third-party tools to ‘help’ with updates speaks volumes.”
Stephen Short wrote: “Apple still can’t seem to get automated software updates for macOS using MDM to consistently work. It seems every major upgrade to macOS promises improvements for software update reliability, but then the release notes for multiple point releases will include some line item about fixing the supposedly improved software update functionality. The softwareupdate process itself seems to be the culprit, and I was amused when there was a note in AppleSeed discouraging admins from using the launchctl kickstart command to resolve issues with Macs unable to successfully download or install updates.”
Rahul Adari wrote: “ADE is top notch.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Getting users to upgrade their Macs to the latest major version of macOS is still extremely hard work, especially on Macs with low free disk space. Apple needs to add an option to free up disk space for updates. They also need a better UI so users know their Mac is having a major OS upgrade installed automatically and can monitor the progress. Its also still too easy for a user to circumvent Automated Device Enrollment so their Mac remains unmanaged. Apple needs to address this ASAP.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “Software updates on macOS are quite simply a joke. Apple should be ashamed of the ‘quality’ of software update. The fact we aren’t able to simply specify that all patches be installed within X days continues to amaze me. Instead we are left with a fragile string of MDM commands that provide a terrible user experience. I cannot emphasize enough how bad software updates are. We spend zero time managing updates on Chrome OS and Windows, because Google and Microsoft give us sensible controls.”
Jon Crain wrote: “ADE is fine. Software updates and OS upgrades continue to be an unreliable dumpster fire. There are very few admins who rely on anything but third-party tools to make this happen.”
Ali Al-Itejawi wrote: “OS updates causing more and more issues, users are being put into Recovery. No or slow feedback from Apple makes this very painful.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Software update is still a tough experience at scale. Keeping Macs and iOS devices up to date with MDM is difficult, reliance on community tools like Super is essential for us. iOS is even worse if anything, especially as we use our devices in a retail context so have to meet a number of standards for handling payment data. There is no good way of getting all of our iOS devices up to date in a reliable manner, as the passcode has to be put in by end users. Retail staff just won’t do that, it needs to be enforceable.”
Tom Bridge wrote: “High scores for ADE and device lifecycle mixed with very low satisfaction for software updates, OS Upgrades, and app deployment. Upgrades & Updates were dramatically improved by new OTA update size, but no decrease in upgrade time, and the unreliability of the MDM commands.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Automated Device Enrollment is ‘something only Apple could do’. My Windows friends wish they had it. But it could use a built-in software update. macOS Software Update is getting better but has so many bugs. Tools like Nudge and Super really help but their existence is an indictment of how bad it’s been. It’s not the end-user’s job to patch their computers but nagging them to do it until it’s done is what we’ve been left with. However, given the progress, I’m optimistic that Apple will make this work. The delta update from Monterey to Ventura and the implication that admins couldn’t block that upgrade came as a shock. But after the shock wore off, and we decided to embrace the advantages, this upgrade cycle has been the smoothest so far at our organization.”
James Smith wrote: “Software Updates via MDM still leave a lot to be desired. One day I will be able to deploy and enforce macOS updates only using MDM commands, but today is not that day. I am still reliant upon 3rd party tools (like Nudge), and Conditional Access policies to ensure my fleet stays up to date.”
Christian Lambert wrote: “OS updates/upgrades are still an area of needed focus as there is no reliable tool that Apple provides for automating OS updates/upgrades. Apple has made strides to hire additional heads to supplement this area.”
Adam Rice wrote: “Software Update has been terribly buggy for years, but Ventura has fixed most of the biggest problems and finally delivered incremental OS updates which are much smaller and faster. We still need a reliable and friendly way to get users to update their Macs quickly when needed, but until Apple delivers we have great open-source tools like Nudge.”
Jacob Burley wrote: “The software update mechanism hasn’t worked exceptionally well since Big Sur, which means that actual enforced rollouts of updates do not always succeed. This leads to a poor experience on the admin and the end user side, even when using something like Kandji’s Managed OS.”
Alex Jones wrote: “Great to see that ADE now supports enrolling Macs manually using an iPhone. Still not a great solution when a device has been sent to a remote user and they don’t have an iPhone. It would be much better if Apple allowed devices to be auto-enrolled into ADE upon manual enrollment into an MDM, much like how Intune and Autopilot works. ADE is still not as reliable as it needs to be on macOS. It’s far too common for the Remote Management screen to be skipped during Setup Assistant, whether intentionally or unintentionally. OS Upgrades are still a pain to manage and the mechanisms provided by Apple hardly ever work. Most MDM providers end up having to build workarounds for these problems, and it results in a really bad user experience. The lack of App Store support with Managed Apple IDs is always a big problem. We want to allow our staff to download free apps from the Mac App Store as and when they’re needed, but they cannot do this with their Managed Apple ID. It would be great to have a managed App Store where all our approved App Store apps could be browsed and installed on demand. It’s not great when the IT team has to say ‘use your personal Apple ID instead.’ Erase all Content and Settings has been the biggest improvement in this area recently. It’s far easier to re-deploy a device that supports this, whether done manually by the end user, or remotely via an MDM erase.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “Apple continues to provide a rock-solid foundation of deployment tools that make me appreciate managing Apple fleets day after day. That said, every year they somehow manage to break something critical—currently MacOS MDM Update commands—and then leave it broken for a concerning amount of time. The negligence against a core framework of a core platform is quite surprising.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “No complaints here. ABM works quite well. I have no experience with Apple Business Essentials. We don’t use MAIDs either. The only breaks we’ve seen with device enrollment have been the fault of our main vendor not enrolling serials on time — not something Apple has any control over (and it doesn’t happy very often; maybe 5% of the time). With our MDM and and IdP in place, we’re almost at zero-touch deployment, a key marker for our move to makes Mac a standard offering for every employee.”
John Welch wrote: “You will never get a straight answer on this, because what is fine for one person is garbage for another. The tool and feature sets are solid, and from what I see, many of the problems are caused by admins more concerned with being clever than being reliable. Boredom should be the standard, not excitement.”
Mark Frischman wrote: “Loved being able to add computers to ABM via Configurator. And “Erase all content and settings” has been a game changer! ”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “Delta upgrades have significantly reduced the time for upgrades. Fantastic work, Apple. Reliably getting notifications, scheduling and completing macOS software updates is still very broken.”
Todd Ness wrote: “Fix updating. Let me set what version all the environment should have. Give the users a pop-up that says update now, remind me later, or schedule it. And actually enforce the update. Forcing the update and rebooting with zero warning is useless, but so is reminding users that the update needs to be installed and having them click the X and sleep their computer overnight so the update is never installed.”
Charles Edge wrote: “ADE, major OS upgrades, and apps are pretty solid. Software updates for point releases continue to be a work in progress.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Automated Device Enrollment and Volume Purchasing for iPadOS and iOS are very reliable and make maintaining a large deployment of device with only one or two staff.”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “Combing Automated Device Enrollment and MDM management has made our fleet rollout easier this year than ever before. However, recurring issues with software update make it difficult to keep our machines patched, even using MDM and Mac Admins tools like Super and erase-install.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “ADE is getting better, the APNS seems to be improving its reliability and shortening command delivery. OS updates and upgrades are still a huge issue in the Enterprise space. The hoops we have to go through as admins to get Macs upgrades are time consuming and tedious: Managing elevation for full upgrades, suppressing updates and upgrades until testing has been completed not only for internal groups but mostly for 3rd party vendors who have no obligation to support major or minor releases in a timely manner, and the inability to truly force an upgrade to a Managed and Supervised device is disappointing; these computers belong to the organization, not the employee, so strict enforcement should be built in.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “ADE paired with my MDM is very stable. macOS updates, on the other hand, are one epic fail. Updating/upgrading macOS in an enterprise lacks consistency and at times can lead to catastrophic failure. This is not acceptable. Period.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Only one complaint: managed software update on macOS. The existence of tools like Nudge indicates there is still a lot of room for improvement here.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Automated Device Enrollment has gained significant improvements. The benefits of Declarative Device Management have yet to materialize. Software Update is still a flaming hot dumpster fire! There was a high profile mistake in macOS Monterey 12.3 – 12.6 that was only caught during the beta cycle for Ventura, which required an elaborate and unprecedented server-side workaround on Apple’s part. Their Mac admin community advocates exhorted customers to upgrade to Monterey 12.6.1 as fast as possible to ensure that existing software update deferrals continued to work as expected. This created chaos and despair among Mac administrators, especially those with a fleet heavier on Apple Silicon devices where programmatic software updates were no longer possible. Only those organizations that adopted ‘user notification’ tools like Nudge or Super were successful in this endeavor. Organizations with ‘standard’ users (non-administrators) encountered additional headaches that generated support calls.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “A mixed bag here. Restoring macOS using Apple Configurator and an IPSW has been a godsend. When I get a new computer to deploy in our labs, the first thing I do now is wipe it using Configurator and let Automated Device Enrollment and my MDM (mostly) take care of the rest — fast and reliable. Software update still does not function reliably. Even updating the OS on my lab computers via MDM, which is the main method Apple provides for systems where a user is not managing the process, only succeeds about 80% of the time. I can see where Apple is headed by offering major version upgrades to macOS without having to download a 12 GB installer and it will be good… eventually. Finally, Apple has been narrowing the window of how many years they will support a particular device. At one time, an 8-year-old Mac could often run the latest version of macOS. With the last two releases of macOS, that window narrowed to 5 years and Ventura cut out models still being sold in 2018 and 2019 (Mac mini 2014 and Mac Pro 2013 respectively). Because we still had both of those models in production and could not get funding in place before our academic year began, we were blocked from upgrading to Ventura.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Overall, I believe Apple has done a great job in facilitating enterprise deployments in the last year. The implementation of Automated Device Enrollment is a solid solution and a must-have for large-scale deployments. It helps streamline the setup process and reduces manual efforts, making it easier for IT teams to manage their devices. However, I do think there is room for improvement when it comes to OS upgrades during the enrollment of a fresh out of the box machine. At times, Apple ships devices with months-old versions of macOS, which can present problems when updating. It would be beneficial to have a bit more control during enrollment and the ability to update/upgrade to a specific macOS version before continuing with enrollment. This would help ensure that devices are up to date and avoid any issues that may arise from using an outdated version of the OS. Regarding software updates, app deployment, and lifecycle management, I think Apple has continued to make strides in these areas, with a strong focus on security and privacy. The app deployment process has been made more efficient with Apple Business Manager, and I appreciate the continued emphasis on improving MDM capabilities. Overall, I think Apple’s performance in facilitating enterprise deployments in the last year has been positive, with room for incremental improvements.”
Luke Charters wrote: “I manage both Windows Autopilot and Apple ADE devices. You could say set-up and enrollment of an Apple device after doing it on a Windows one is like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell. You could also say that experience is reversed when pushing out OS updates.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “ADE is simply the best zero touch deployment in the marketplace.”
Joel Housman wrote: “We make use of Apple Business Manager and exclusively purchase from an Apple Enterprise-focused ecommerce site. Machines arrive to us pre-configured, matched to our MDM provider, and I can set up a machine in about 30 minutes. It isn’t quite zero touch, because we have a number of software packages that are not able to be remotely installed and joined to our account, but it’s 85% of the way there. There’s only minor configuration I need to finish up once we apply the MDM and the policies to the machine which auto-installs a list of applications. Most of the fault with the further manual configuration that needs to be done lies with various 3rd party application developers who don’t provide means to install their apps via MDM while also applying necessary org-specific attributes during installation. For example: we use backup software in which the client needs to be given full disk access to the machine and then an activation key passed to the client to join it to our account. The activation key is unique for each user. This is something I must do manually because I cannot trust our staff to follow-through on granting full disk access themselves or applying the key themselves, so I have still have to configure the machine myself, do this last 15% of configuration, and then ship it to them. I get that Apple is super privacy focused on the part of the user, but the computer is owned by the org, not the user. The MDM API needs to have the ability to grant security permissions such as Full Disk Access (backup software, remote support software), Accessibility(remote support software), Screen Recording (used by Zoom/Slack for screen sharing and remote support software). I have to end up doing this manually for 5 or 6 apps for each machine we roll out.”
David Tommey wrote: “Deployment performance is severely lacking. It is almost impossible to use Apple tooling alone to ensure the estate is updated in a timely fashion. This specific item alone drags down the whole score even though other aspects of deployment have improved.”
macOS identity managementGrade: C+ (average score: 3.3, last year: 2.9)
Stephen Short wrote: “Apple really needs to step up and provide native support for SSO (and account provisioning) at the login window for devices managed with MDM. It’s really sad that a company with such large resources is relying on 3rd party developers like Jamf to supply a critical business function. Ideally, an identity provider like Okta would only need to supply a configuration profile that orgs could deploy to facilitate account creation and password sync functionality. I’d even be happy with having users sign in with a managed Apple ID to facilitate account creation as well.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “There are still a number of limitations preventing use of managed Apple ID’s in an enterprise environment, particularly iCloud keychain.”
John Welch wrote: “The steady improvement in smart card integration across macOS and their other platforms are hugely welcome in my world.”
Kelly Guimont wrote: “I’d like improved functionality for managed Apple IDs, like Universal Control/Sidecar.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “Great strides to make Identity Management more extensible. The hard part now is waiting on the big vendors (Microsoft and Google) to build their apps and tools to work with the new features. A great feature would be to marry Managed Apple IDs with the ability to redirect all Apple-hosted iCloud storage to Microsoft (SharePoint/OneDrive) or Google Workspace (Drive). This would allow Enterprises to use nearly the full features of consumer Apple IDs while being able to fully control the data uses by those features for security and compliance needs, thus absolving Apple of needing to adjust ToS or BAAs/HIPAA/GovCloud agreements as much.”
Alex Jones wrote: “Great to see Platform SSO finally become a reality. Shame that we’re still waiting for Identity Providers like Okta to actually add support for it. Even still, it’s only one step in the right direction, but slightly contradictory to Apple’s general approach on passwords in the consumer world. Why is a password still required at all? When will we get password-less for macOS? Just enroll Touch ID during Setup Assistant, no password needed. Or defer to the IdP for an MFA factor other than password. IdPs seem to be ahead in the passwordless world, but they’re still being limited by the support from the endpoint, whether macOS or Windows.”
James Nairn wrote: “Not an area we have greatly explored, but user SSO is certainly a direction of travel. If Platform SSO could be extended to include JiT account provision that would be a big win for us.”
David Tommey wrote: “More work needs to be done to help identity providers leverage the tools and extensions Apple has built. Almost a year after announcing platform SSO, not a single provider I am aware of has successfully implemented it into their platform”
Fridolin Koch wrote: “Apple could (and should) do more to entice Vendors to support SSO Extensions and in Case of Microsoft, maybe pick up the ball themselves (aka Enterprise Connect for Azure).”
James Smith wrote: “While available since the release of macOS 13, we are still waiting for 3rd party vendors to adopt the Extensible Enterprise Single Sign-on framework.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “The introduction of Platform SSO in Ventura was a great indication of Apple understanding the need for linking the local user account to a cloud identity. It will be great to see this when it is implemented by the cloud identity providers. More and more organizations are wanting to provide a full user/device/data trust model and this is now easier than ever on macOS. More choice and flexibility around cloud identity providers with Managed Apple IDs will be imperative to expansion in the enterprise.”
James Stracey wrote: “The SSO extension is still not consistently applied to a device and I can’t believe we’re still unable to manage which Apple ID domains a user can log into on macOS.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple added Google Workspace federated authentication to Apple Business Manager last year. They also introduced Platform SSO. However, the practical implementation is left to the identity providers and none of them has a solution yet. Until we get working implementations, it is hard to judge the new functionality. Apple also added support for external Security Keys to Apple ID, but again, managed Apple IDs are excluded. You can make a good argument that this is the federated identity provider’s job, not Apple’s. This further confirms that Apple is not even trying to be a player in the Enterprise Identity space, but attempting to support organizations with integrations instead.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “The Enterprise SSO extension continues to work (we use Kerberos), even while the MS SSO extension is actually a little bit better. I remain eager to see what the imminent Platform SSO will allow for us. Having a first-party Platform SSO extension that could replace our MDM IdP connector (that enables Zero Touch) would be amazing, but it’s unclear to me whether it will have this functionality. However, that Apple is working on the Platform SSO extension shows that they are listening to their Enterprise customers. I am hopeful, even while I keep other solutions in my back packet in case it doesn’t allow for everything I’d like.”
Todd Ness wrote: “We have a bunch of problems with the SSO extension, it is not pretty if you have a regular account and an admin account or connect a service account to Outlook. I’ve had tickets open with my 3 vendors, MS, Zscaler and Apple on this for more than a month and it is working better after fixing zscaler problems, but the multiple account thing is still a huge problem.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “Apple has improved a lot of the frameworks for 3rd party developers, which is really great. Microsoft has implemented this very well, so it shows that the framework works. So it’s clear that moving to the cloud is the way of the future, and we suddenly got a lot of options for IdP solutions. Configuration through MDM is also easy to deploy.”
Jon Crain wrote: “More ID providers are needed with ABM.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “We use Managed Apple IDs and SSO with Azure AD, and these work reliably.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “Still no coherent Identity story. With Personal Apple IDs (which everyone has) there have been improvements. Managed Apple ID are still horribly limited in scope. Whilst we have Platform single sign-on for macOS, there appears to be little adoption by vendors.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Federation of Managed Apple IDs is still a pain. We can’t even consider it without iCloud Keychain. Platform SSO feels like a half-baked product that’s meant to serve as an example for how others should build a login window replacement. Jamf Connect and XCreds already won this battle. Passkeys, introduced last year, are too new to be judged for their utility.”
Charles Edge wrote: “This is new, so there’s plenty of rough edges. No passkeys due to iCloud Keychain being disabled, spotty vendor support. In general, I have high hopes and continue to watch what’s happening – hoping that the need for Chrome extensions or other unnecessary requirements for specific flows get removed as time goes on.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “We are still waiting for Okta to deliver support for Platform SSO and for Apple to deliver support for using Okta to federate.”
Bill Christie wrote: “Not really Apple’s fault per se, but the lack of adaption by Microsoft of platform SSO is a disappointment. Microsoft is working on it, of course, and implementation takes time, but this is a security piece that could change perceptions in security departments and help adaption in Microsoft dominated environments.”
Mark Frischman wrote: “Still needs improvement, but heading in the right direction.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “Apple’s support for Cloud Identity Management on the Mac is currently inadequate, and there is a noticeable lack of effort in this regard. While their Platform SSO may seem like a viable alternative, it falls short of the full integration and functionality that comes with binding to Active Directory and utilizing Mobile Accounts. To be truly effective, Apple must provide complete integration with significant Cloud Identity Providers within the Mac Login Window and Directory Services. This integration should allow users to have accounts established, authenticate with multi-factor authentication, and maintain password synchronization. It is crucial that Cloud Identity support is not left solely to a third-party workaround that may break with each new macOS security update.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Apple’s SSO platform is impressive, but its success relies heavily on the implementation by Identity Providers. To create a seamless integration process and optimal end-user experience, Apple should work more proactively with Identity Providers. I’m hopeful that by collaborating closely and listening to feedback from IT teams, Apple can continue to improve the platform and provide a reliable and easy-to-use SSO solution.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Some good features here, but adoption hasn’t been as quick as I would have liked from our IdP, Okta. Might not be an Apple problem, difficult to tell.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Platform SSO is a big step forward but Apple needs to get more Identity Providers inside the tent.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “The API connection between our school systems and ASM is reliable are robust, and has been working fantastically for the last 2-3 years. Interested in the new passwordless future, but that remains to be seen.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “The strides Apple has made in this area over the last few years are appreciated and the movement to Platform SSO, while unrealized, is welcomed with open arms. My only quibble is the lack of an option to sign into macOS with a Managed Apple ID and have either a mobile or local account be provisioned and kept in sync with their iCloud data, similar to SharediPad.”
Shad Hass wrote: “Their terrible support for AD binding, while still not supporting anything newer themselves, has left me not confident in their abilities here. SSO extension is not a great replacement, as it needs constant connection to on-prem servers as well.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Identity management has been pretty good. At this point, however, I’m waiting for the rollout of Platform SSO.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “We have had to build out our own device trust platform in macOS. Managed device attestation on iOS looks promising, but until it is on macOS it really doesn’t have any utility in the enterprise.”
James Corcoran wrote: “While Apple have put considerable effort into this, their is poor adoption from the big identity provides. Makes me wonder if Apple’s approach is too bespoke.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Apple is being incredibly lazy when it comes to supporting Cloud Identity Management on the Mac. Their Platform SSO doesn’t go far enough and isn’t a viable replacement for binding to Active Directory and using Mobile Accounts. They need full integration with major Cloud Identity Providers into the Mac Login Window and Directory Services so users can have accounts created, login with MFA support, and keep their passwords in sync. Cloud Identity support shouldn’t be left to a third-party hack that breaks every time Apple released a security update for macOS.”
MDM protocol and infrastructureGrade: B (average score: 3.6, last year: 3.5)
James Nairn wrote: “Reliability can always bee improved. If MDM is to be the only way of managing Apple devices then it must be as reliable as possible.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “Declarative management should still be highly lauded, with potential new workflows of devices reliably switching functionality based on time and/or location—even without a network connection. That said, the implementation of this is now in the hands of MDM developers and largely unrealized. Mature solutions will take time, while the administrators sit on the sidelines eagerly hoping for a new era of Apple device management. Noticeably absent, however, is any indication that existing payloads or MDM commands will be given a fresh coat of paint or any quality-of-life features.”
Charles Edge wrote: “I see fewer failures to enroll devices and send commands. We used to sometimes have hours (sometimes a day) where we couldn’t enroll new devices, but those issues seem to crop up far less.”
James Smith wrote: “Improvements are modest but more reliability around Software Update would be appreciated.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Managed Software Update MDM commands are still unreliable, especially for portables. We have resorted to using Nudge, an open-source tool that encourages our users to click the Update button. There are complications caused by CoreDuet and Duet Activity Scheduler Daemon (dasd) that will block the MDM update command if the laptop is too warm, or memory usage is moderately high, or battery is below 50% — a threshold that made sense for Intel Macs, but needs to be reëvaluated in the age of Apple Silicon Macs with 20-hour battery life.”
Craig Doran wrote: “Good developments and increase of payloads.”
Todd Ness wrote: “It mostly works, but the update stuff via MDM is not very helpful.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “MDM protocol has been reliable. Would love to see an API opened up for renewing APNS certs automatically to remove the human element from it causing catastrophe by expiring. For the payloads themselves, we really need more info on the replacement for the deprecated preferences.”
Luke Charters wrote: “MDM commands have been so much more reliable this past year. I would like to see payloads expanded to control more of the basic settings on iOS, iPadOS, tvOS.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “I still love the MDM protocol, but I’m excited about the potential of declarative device management. It’s frustrating that it’s currently limited to a small subset of use cases, but I’m hopeful that Apple will expand more support in the future. However, I’m aware that MDM vendors need to adopt this as well, so it may take some time to become more widely available. Overall, I’m optimistic about the future of device management on Apple devices.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “The MDM protocol hasn’t really changed. Declarative MDM looks promising, but at the movement the configuration items available to us are worthless.”
James Stracey wrote: “Better monitoring and reporting to ensure the correct application of MDM based policies would is a core requirement in the enterprise.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “The protocol capability is evolving, which is a good thing—though perhaps at too slow of a rate.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “MDM commands and payloads have been fairly reliable for me, but when they’re not, I’m not sure whether to blame Apple or the MDM vendor.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “At present, it remains uncertain how Declarative Management will address the various inadequacies of traditional MDM. Additionally, Apple must offer a more extensive selection of configuration profile payloads for security benchmark settings. Currently, not all of these benchmarks can be effectively enforced through config profiles, as some require scripts or lack any means of enforcement. We are forced to either rely on open source projects lacking that Apple polish, or our MDM providers who in many cases does not prioritise the development of the tools we need. To ensure compliance, Apple should introduce config profile support for all major security benchmarks, leaving no room for user circumvention.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “I think that the MDM capabilities are superb, and moving to JSON will really be improving performance when MDM providers start to implement and support this full scale. New features are explained well at WWDC and the new privacy controls in Ventura for Status items was easily to manage, so very nice to see these options hand in hand. But I’m still missing features (like config for active corners and what items to show in menu bar), and Apple Configurator is totally lost in being the reference for creating config profiles. Apple did not make a full circle for building configuration profiles.”
Kat Maerz wrote: “They need to give us a bit more control. On the iOS side, allow multi-user support. Shared devices are common.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “Declarative Device Management is an important innovation and has been solid.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “I have incredible hope for a a new MDM framework that will allow me to not only have management parity with our Windows fleet, but far surpass it. At so many F500’s, Security is driving the bus towards modernizing our IT stack, tools, and management; we are no different. Being able to show Cybersecurity and InfoSec that a new MDM framework with versatile and reliable DDM controls will secure the Mac fleet can only lead to a greater embrace of platform-agnostic IT.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Device Management compared to what it was when I began managing iPads 10 years ago is fantastic. However, advancement in this area has stagnated over the last few years. There are any number of settings and features from Accessibility to Safari that we can’t manage via MDM which then forces us to rely on elementary school students, or their teachers, to manually manage a growing number of settings.”
Anthony Reimer wrote: “The biggest change for me is that I am having success deploying the core Apple apps using the MDM; it wasn’t reliable before. macOS updates are only about 80% successful. Otherwise, I haven’t seen much movement here. Declarative management can’t come soon enough.”
Jon Crain wrote: “Things seem to be moving very slow here. There is a promise of declarative management, but it has just been very slow in coming. MDM has always had decent reliability but the common issues related still remain.”
Craig Cohen wrote: “DDM has the potential for the future of device management.”
Stephen Short wrote: “Declarative management for iOS and macOS is a step in the right direction, but it’s up to each MDM provider to implement those changes for their customers. Would love an MDM command to force restart a Mac.”
James Corcoran wrote: “MDM has been remarkably reliable and consistent since inception. Now, the transition to declarative device management has begun. Watch this space—no pressure, Apple.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Apart from software update, I find MDM pretty solid. It’s always a balancing act, and in certain situations I would like to be much more prescriptive and restrictive (again in the retail and payments space) but overall the MDM framework is useful and reliable.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Declarative Device Management is showing a lot of promise. While Apple expanded its scope an functionality, its full potential is not being used yet. The BYOD user-enrollment strategies for iOS and macOS are interesting but are still missing some features to be useful. There are related technologies, such as distribution through the App Store, Managed Apple IDs, and iCloud for Business where Apple still needs great improvements.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “The gradual roll-out of Declarative Device Management looks like it is on-track for such a big change, with a careful-let-us-see-how-this-works approach. With two limited scope releases completed, I’m hoping things are ready for a full release this WWDC.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “I always wish there was ‘one more thing’ our MDM could do if Apple allowed it, but mostly it’s been fantastic for the past year or two. We’ve been using various ways to use iPad in a 1:1 school for almost 10 years, and certainly the current state is light-years ahead of where we started. Same for Mac management via MDM—we wish there was something so simple yet powerful on the Windows side!”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “Declarative MDM offers so many possibilities. While the slow implementation of features leveraging MDM 2.0 can be frustrating, ensuring it is delivered carefully and incrementally is much better than needing to re-enroll devices. The minimal current configurations available is tempered by the excitement for the future state.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Our MDM still only has limited support for Declarative Device Management (which itself still has limitations) so any improvements Apple has made to the MDM protocols is more theory than practice for us.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “Still a work in progress. We haven’t seen what Declarative MDM will provide to fix the numerous short falls of traditional MDM. Apple also need to provide more config profile payloads for security benchmark settings. Not all of these benchmarks can be enforced with config profiles currently and rely on scripts or for some there’s no way to enforce. Apple needs to added config profiles support for all the major security benchmarks so they can’t be circumvented by users.”
David Tommey wrote: “Declarative device management addition has been a great addition to the MDM spec, but the unreliability of MDM initiated software updates has held the platform back significantly.”
The Future of Apple in the EnterpriseGrade: B+ (average score: 3.9, last year: 3.8)
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “Apple is improving its enterprise offerings every year, on hardware, software, and services, but they need to continue listening to larger organizations and improve device management capabilities to meet their needs. While there is still work to be done, Apple is making progress in this area.”
Fridolin Koch wrote: “The Future still seems bright for Enterprise adoption, but there are some shadows creeping in with decreasing Budgets and a lot of ‘hot stuff’ in Enterprise being Windows-only (Azure SQL Tools, Power Apps/PowerBI).”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “The last year showed us that Apple devices are no longer relegated to being simply tolerated, or even unsupported in the enterprise, but are now able to be integrated as first-class citizens. The number of enterprise vendors not providing timely support for the annual OS refresh cycle is reducing and the appetite for employee choice programs is growing.”
James Corcoran wrote: “Apple has a great reputation with leadership in our organization, where we’re 50/50 CYOD.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Apple is finally paying attention to Enterprise (except with AppleTV management). It’s really an interesting balancing act on the company’s part — keeping devices user-friendly and attractive, but also building the tools and infrastructure to allow them to be managed like enterprise devices. I find it incredibly interesting to watch what Microsoft is doing with Windows 10/11 and TPM2 — effectively following Apple in securing their OS. I predict that the next version of Windows won’t even be Windows — it’ll be a Linux or Unix derivative with a Windows32/64 emulation layer for legacy apps. Again, following Apple’s lead in securing their platform.”
Shad Hass wrote: “I’m sure they’ll introduce more features for Enterprise faster than they can fix the ones they currently have, leaving so much potential on the table while trying new methods of sales and revenue.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “I still feel Apple is being lazy and only doing a half-baked attempted at enterprise management. They’re quite happy to take your money but offer little in return. They either still don’t get it or don’t want to spend the money to do it properly.”
John Welch wrote: “I think it’s solid, but I would like to see Apple doing more in the CAD/CAM/Additive Manufacturing world, to get vendors like PTC and Dassault to add Apple as a platform. Manufacturing needs more than just Autodesk.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “I feel the transition to ARM with better performance without compromising of battery life for mobile Mac, total cost of ownership, and focus on user data security and OS security is what will help Apple propel gaining more of the market share.”
Joel Housman wrote: “I think Apple’s recent behavior over the past five years or more shows they recognize this is an area they need to pay attention to and have slowly been making iterative improvements with each new release of macOS. I would say: please keep making these continued improvements.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “I’m sure Apple will succeed since people want iPhones. This is not indicative of the quality of macOS, which is at an all-time low.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “Definitely positive. The Device Compliance Partner API looks like a positive step in the right direction for MDM vendors to better utilize Conditional Access in Microsoft Endpoint Manager and other identity providers (Okta, ping, OneLogin) by simplifying the data needing to be parsed. As much as its a reverse-cliche, Apple needs to look at some of the things that helps Windows stay as the #1 OS in the Enterprise: longer OS support; more granular control over updates, upgrades, and patches; expanded customization of macOS to meet unique customer needs.”
Craig Doran wrote: “Less optimistic than last year. End users still want Mac devices but tech spending is stalling and there is more pushback about procuring Macs.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “There is a sense of year over year improvements to Enterprise support. The overall impression though is that Apple are still trying to figure out (at least publicly) what that is.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “While the future is bright and I look forward to WWDC with more excitement than trepidation, I feel that Apple’s ideology of having an OS & device combination that needs to be everything for everyone, across all markets and sectors is straining against the bonds of its initial conception. Using privacy as an example, we continually come up against issues where a feature initially designed for a consumer experience requires end-user acceptance even under management. This is perfectly acceptable on a personal or organization-owned device, but how can an 8-year-old student with reading comprehension difficulties or a terminally ill patient being kept pain-free by life-saving drugs make the educated decision to enable location services or some similar prompt? In these instances, the user is incapable of providing informed consent, requiring us to build workflows where support staff handle the prompts that are outside of MDM control, thus defeating the purpose. Otherwise, we burden these users with a potentially complex task outside of their comprehension. Apple’s stalwart position on user privacy and security is a breath of fresh air compared to the other tech giants of our age, but the inability to delegate certain responsibilities to administrators, in specific instances, results in a poorer experience for everyone involved. Interestingly enough, a potential solution has been hiding in plain sight. We are currently running iPads in two different modes, with Supervision and without. iPads respond to commands differently when under supervision, more restrictions are available and in certain circumstances, the UI changes. Perhaps the time has come to expand non-supervised and supervised to also include ‘Supervised Education’ with its own set of features, checks and balances.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “Apple always seems to move in the right direction, just not always as quickly as we would like.”
Vaughn Miller wrote: “The formation of the Enterprise Workflows Team is a sign that at least someone in Apple is taking enterprise seriously.”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “Apple is not going anywhere, but Software Update is going to continue to be a huge point of friction for corporate environments or any organization trying to manage Macs at scale.”
James Nairn wrote: “Apple need to engage more in the Enterprise to get real life feedback, hopefully before implementing new functionality. Often new functionality is revealed with little to no MDM management offered which then has to be added in. Login Item notifications in Ventura is one example.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “I’m always afraid they are going to mess something up (because it seems they can’t stop themselves from screwing up a free lunch sometimes..) but if the last two or three years are any indication, it seems they have figured out how to move forward while maintaining a good thing. We did re-evaluate whether after 10 years it was time to move to Chrome or Windows for our students, and while there some advantages and better compatibilities with other software platforms out there, it was decided to stick with Apple for another five years on the student side. On the teacher side, I don’t think anyone except a few specific areas in our building would ever consider leaving Apple without a fight.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Engagement from Apple is actually pretty good if you know where to look. MacAdmins slack is a treasure trove of knowledge, and it’s good to see Apple interacting with it, even in a limited capacity. We’re in a much better place than ever before in that respect.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “The new Enterprise Workflows team at Apple is making serious headway into improving our quality of life as Apple device administrators. Kudos to them, and we hope they continue to be our advocates inside the walled garden.”
Jacob Burley wrote: “I think Apple is taking steps that show their commitment to Apple in the enterprise, from building the new Enterprise Workflows team to even launching their own MDM for small business. I’m definitely confident that they will continue to grow in this area, but would love to see Apple embrace modern concepts such as SSO for ABM, or even an API for ABM. This would help tie Apple services into our existing IT offering.”
Reid Blondell wrote: “I have seen improving efforts with outreach – talking and listening.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “There is so much friction in simply keeping our fleet up-to-date that I worry about the future of Apple in enterprise. We have absolutely no trouble with keeping our Windows and Chrome devices on the latest OS.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “I’m still concerned about the CloudOS strategy of Microsoft and Google. I can almost run only Chrome or Edge on macOS and be full a citizen of the CloudOS world with no local Apps. Once all my data and apps are accessible via Browser, why do I need macOS when ChromeOS will do?”
David Tommey wrote: “With the addition of a team inside Apple to drive enterprise improvements I have faith that the future is bright.”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “If Apple Silicon devices can keep the same ~7 year reliability as many of their computers have had in the past, then Apple devices will continue to be a compelling purchase in enterprise. Though only time will tell how AS devices stack up in the long run.”
Fraser Hess wrote: “I feel quite confident about the near future of Apple in the enterprise. The expanding Enterprise Workflow team is doing great work, and they’ve been going for less than a year. The next benchmark is this year’s WWDC. Will there be features in macOS 14 that, like Login Items, appear to have been designed without the enterprise in mind?”
Luke Charters wrote: “Feels like things have never looked more bright for Apple in the enterprise.”
Jon Crain wrote: “The team that is working with admins is a solid smart growing team. There is evidence they are moving things in the right direction. I am very optimistic that things are getting better.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple’s excellent hardware and the way they have (so far) mastered the supply chain issues has allowed them to gain market share with consumers and enterprise. They need to support these gains with similarly excellent management and deployment support. Then, they should be able to consolidate and further expand. There is a lot of work left to do.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “Apple have many of the right pieces there, however many are half baked or not implemented in a enterprise-friendly manner. The hardware is 90% of the way there. We just need a couple more basic features on the low end, and better or fairer product segmentation in the middle of the stack. After that, the Mac would be a easy choice for most enterprises. On the other hand, Apple are at best 50% on their way to meeting what the enterprise actually needs. There are several critical areas where Apple needs to make significant improvements before enterprise adoption of their products can be assured. These areas include Cloud Identity Management, and enforcement of security benchmark settings. Specifically, Apple must provide full integration with major Cloud Identity Providers (Azure, etc.), offer a comprehensive solution for Declarative Management, and introduce config profile support for all significant security benchmarks. It is essential that these improvements are made to ensure seamless integration and airtight security for enterprise users.”
OS Adoption trendsMischa van der Bent wrote: “It’s great to see that more and more organizations are adopting the newer versions of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS to keep their devices secure with the latest security patches. Compared to previous years, the upgrade cycle seems to be moving at a faster pace, which is a positive trend for overall device security.”
James Nairn wrote: “We are moving to running the latest macOS within a couple of months of release.”
Adam Tomczynski wrote: “The instability of the Mac during the upgrade process is what is holding me back.”
David Tommey wrote: “We have seen an 85% adoption of the latest OS. This may be skewed due to an early MDM bug that would initiate a major is upgrade instead of a minor one.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “In my experience, interest & conversion across MacOS & iOS platforms have been never higher.”
James Corcoran wrote: “Thanks to AppleSeed for IT, our organization adopted the latest OSs on release day last year. Apple’s native MDM functionality to manage those software updates has completely let us down. We have had to use third party tools to manage macOS upgrades.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “It’s about the same, which is to say, slow. Issues with software update, complications added by the removal of admin rights to meet security baselines make it fairly tough.”
Christian Lambert wrote: “We keep users/devices as close to the most recent release as possible. Especially with Ventura being the only OS that supports all security updates.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “iOS adoption is fine, developers have that cadence down pretty well and the containerization of iOS apps makes securing data easier. macOS is the main issue. Still, Apple releases major OS versions too frequently and stops support for n-1 and n-2 versions too soon. Both of which try to strong-arm developers to make apps compatible with new architecture in unrealistic timelines. Enterprises cannot move as quickly as Apple wants. They are more likely to remove macOS computers altogether than allow the computers to be force-upgraded without compatible security software.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Whether the organizations like it or not, Apple is pretty much forcing a fast adoption rate. While some customers are still resisting, sometimes for good reasons, there are very few efficient tools left to block upgrades. Unfortunately, the tools to encourage and enforce software updates are broken and have a poor user experience”
Jason Broccardo wrote: “We’re about 85% of the way to being all Ventura and expect to be at 100% by the end of April. Nudge is the driver of our compliance.”
Jon Crain wrote: “Apple does not give proper reliable tools to enterprises to make this happen. They have communicated better than in the past about what risks companies open themselves up to by doing this though which is helpful from a security perspective.”
James Stracey wrote: “Upgrading devices from macOS Monterey to Ventura continues to be plagued with issues.”
Grant Brinkman wrote: “Historically, our org has gone so far as to skip major OS versions if they did not seem stable and wait until the next cycle. With 90 deferrals being the longest option now, as well as Apple not supporting all security patches for older OSes, staying up to date is the only realistic option. It’s a good change overall, but much quicker than we are used to.”
Fridolin Koch wrote: “Users were quicker than usual to update, but Software Update woes made it challenging for Admins.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Our users are pretty quick on upgrading, even without forcing it with software update commands.”
Rebecca Latimer wrote: “Quicker than usual, thanks to extensive testing with the Appleseed beta program. We were confident that all of our tools were ready for Ventura on day 1 and used Nudge to prompt for updates as soon as it was released to the public.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “With the improved MDM commands for forcing major macOS upgrades we’ve been able to achieve a much hight rate of adoption of macOS 13. But five months on, we’re still nowhere near the 100% we’d like to be.”
Joel Housman wrote: “100% of our staff were upgraded to Ventura by mid-December, 2022. With each new point release, we upgrade quickly, mostly due to security concerns.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “Ventura posed fewer hurdles to adoption than previous upgrades. Coupled with the ability for standard users to perform upgrades and a limit of 90 day deferral, this saw fewer organizations needing to block, which was good as it is now more difficult than ever to stay on older versions beyond the deferral threshold.”
Todd Ness wrote: “We enforce minimum OS on all our Apple devices and when a zero-day problem comes out we’re on the latest within 7 days mostly, it may not be pretty for those that don’t see the updates on macOS but we get there.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “Users are upgrading to Ventura on their own, since the macOS deferrals have expired. No one has reported any major issues. We’ll do a larger rollout targeting Big Sur users to encourage them to upgrade. For this campaign, we’ll be using Erik Gomez’s Nudge tool. We also had to delay most of our plans due to year-end change freezes.”
Graham Gilbert wrote: “We only support the latest versions of macOS and iOS. This hasn’t changed – this is primarily down to Apple not fully patching anything older than the latest versions of its operating systems.”
Kevin Williams wrote: “We usually wait 90 days or so (and our MDM helps with that) before we start releasing updates. Most of the time, it’s waiting for app vendors to catch up. (I’m looking at you, Google…)”
Third-Party App StoresAdam Tomczynski wrote: “Will third-party app stores require notarization and other Apple security models? If yes, then I do not see the need for 3rd party stores. If no, then you will be potentially opening up devices to exploits, malware, etc. Very bad decision in my opinion.”
John Welch wrote: “Third-party App stores solve exactly one problem: the logo on the front. They don’t change what has to happen to be safe and reliable. That’s still going to cost money, which will be charged to devs. This fantasy that third-party app stores will somehow be nirvana compared to the App Store is just the worst kind of jejune magical thinking. Competition is useful only if it is better, not just different.”
Charles Edge wrote: “We’ve used SetApp, and really like not only the people there but the product they deliver.”
Damien Barrett wrote: “Our Security team already sees iOS as more secure. Opening up this walled garden to a 3rd Party App Store would weaken that view. At this time, I cannot see our Security team allowing unvetted 3rd party apps to be installed on our many thousands of managed iPhones.”
Mischa van der Bent wrote: “I believe that downloading directly from the vendor, as demonstrated by tools like Installomator and Root3’s app catalog, is generally preferable. However, it’s important to keep in mind that different use cases may require different solutions. As for the potential benefits or risks of a third-party app store for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS, I am uncertain. While I recognize the safe mechanism that Apple has built with the App Store, I think it’s important to consider the potential risks and benefits of alternative solutions.”
Rich Thomas wrote: “Probably not something we would consider for the majority of users. Too risky.”
Brad Chapman wrote: “We don’t see much of a business reason to allow third-party app stores on a company-owned device. Game developers are the major proponents of third-party stores, and mostly because they didn’t want to give their cut to Apple. Their scope might be expanded later on to include security-related tools that flirt with the idea of jailbreaking, and Cybersecurity teams may take issue with that.”
Bart Reardon wrote: “Third party stores would not be allowed. We barely allow the App store give how full it is of adware and scam apps.”
Luke Charters wrote: “Personally, I’m open to third-party stores if Apple aren’t going to relax certain App Store policies. Professionally, there’s no way I’m allowing them on my fleet.”
Jon Crain wrote: “We don’t do much with any App Store. However I would have less trust in an outside App Store.”
Shad Hass wrote: “Personally I’m inclined to supporting them, however, the ability to manage their use is important to me as a sysadmin.”
Dennis Logue wrote: “We don’t allow students (the large majority of our Apple users) access to the App Store. We are trying to nudge staff towards managed Apple IDs as well.”
Cameron Kay wrote: “We definitely don’t want third-party app store and would want to block them.”
Kale Kingdon wrote: “Strongly against. This move is often framed by its advocates as increasing choice for users. However, it actually restricts their safety. Should Apple be forced into accepting 3rd party app stores, we would block or disable such functionality as it would be a vector for malicious attack. However, should apps required for the business migrate out of the App Store, and into an undesired method of distribution, IT departments may have little effective choice in the matter – which is why we also hope this possibility will not come to pass.”
Joel Housman wrote: “I’m all for allowing side loading on iOS devices via the user jumping through several hoops in order to do it. However, I do not want the greedy Facebooks and Epics of the world, and their narcissistic CEOs to open up their own App Stores and force users to download their popular apps through these stores, thus opening iOS devices up to all sorts of security vulnerabilities potential security vulnerabilities. Yes, Apple does a poor job at curating their own App Store, but training users to become used to going to 3rd party stores not controlled by Apple with the lax rules these companies would likely use to police them, could turn iOS into the hellscape that is Android and app security.”
Nic Wendlowsky wrote: “There are pros and cons. A Pro is that Apple loses its stranglehold over app and in-app purchases, thus allowing devs to make more money for themselves. A Con is that having 3rd party app stores increases the attack surface for nefarious apps.”
James Stracey wrote: “The App Store contains various applications which simply do not meet our risk appetite (ie. they present an increase DLP risk). We’re also still unable to purchase subscription based applications.”
Daniel Woodcock wrote: “In the event that a third-party app store installation option is made available, it is imperative that a MDM process is established to block such installations. This process should be granular in nature, enabling us to allow for the installation of specific vendor app stores in exceptional circumstances. Having an absolutist approach to blocking would be devastating. However, not blocking these external stores would be equally destructive.”
James Corcoran wrote: “We trust Apple’s ecosystem and have no interest in third party App stores. You only need to look at Android to see what a security disaster the ecosystem is.”
Søren Theilgaard wrote: “We already use Setapp which could be said to work like a 3rd party App Store and it offers a tremendous value for money. I could imagine Adobe would create their own store, and then suddenly those apps could be much easier to deploy.”
Craig Doran wrote: “Security hardening protocols generally instruct to turn off App Store access. Which seems truly misguided and misunderstood.”
Adrian Stancescu wrote: “Unless a VERY specific app is available on a third party App Store, they will not be allowed.”
Marcus Ransom wrote: “While some of the challenges of a single app store can be frustrating, the security offered by this approach is one of the major benefits of iOS in the enterprise. I would expect that Apple will deliver a solution that allows enterprise customers to limit their exposure.”
Marcus Rowell wrote: “I’m very very concerned what third-Party App stores will do to the Apple eco-system. I see huge risks for privacy and security, along with loss of management. I believe that Apple will be forced to allow Third-Party Apps and this is because Apple has totally mismanaged the App Store.”
Alex Jones wrote: “We use Kandji’s self-service App Store to provide a kind of Managed App Store. I like that the apps are still coming from the Apple App Store and I trust that they will be properly vetted from as security perspective. I’d be less inclined to trust apps from a third-party store.”
Armin Briegel wrote: “Apple has not been a good curator of the App Stores. They are full of worthless apps with questionable, if not outright scammy, business practices. App Store ads have worsened this impression. Justified software often faces capricious and seemingly random hurdles in App review. Many types of tools and software are still excluded from the App Stores. On macOS, managed deployment through the App Stores is unreliable to the point of being useless. My hope for third-party app stores is that competition will force Apple to make the App Store into the well-working, well-curated garden which they claim it to be, with great conditions for users, developers, and admins, that competes on its merits and not because it is the only option. My fear is that we will all have to deal with several capricious and inconsistent stores with questionable security and privacy from multiple vendors instead.”
Kirk McElhearn, longtime Macworld contributor and classical music aficionado, has taken an in-depth look at Apple Music Classical over at TidBITS:
I’ve long complained about the way iTunes, then the Music app and Apple Music, have dealt with classical music. The earliest such articles I can find on Macworld date back to 2005. In Corral your classical music, I wrote, “If you’re a fan of classical music, then you’ve probably, at some point, become frustrated with iTunes and the iPod. Track information from the Web is inconsistent, pieces are difficult to tag and categorize, and imported songs don’t flow seamlessly into one another.”
I’m happy to say that Apple has finally solved many of these problems. It’s a shame that it took so long.
Kirk has written more about dealing with classical music on Apple’s platforms than anybody I know, and I’m glad to hear his experience mostly mirrors mine. But he also talks about a lot of things that I wouldn’t have even thought to look into (how good search actually is, for example), which makes it a solid read if you’re wondering how good this app really is for classical music fans.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The apps we use for taking notes, the iOS 16.4 features (and emoji) we’re excited about, our thoughts on Apple Pay Later and installment payments, and what we hope — and expect — to hear about at Apple’s WWDC.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference now has a date for 2023: June 5-9. The company’s developer site announced the dates on Wednesday, along with a few more details. As in previous years, the event will be free and online, but like last year there will also be an all-day event for select developers and students at Apple Park, which will involve watching the keynote and State of the Union, along with some meet and greets and other activities. You can request to attend and people will be picked randomly and notified next week, on April 5.
Apple also announced the Swift Student Challenge for 2023, which lets eligible students submit an interactive scene for the chance to win prizes.
Expectations are high for 2023’s WWDC, which is thought to feature the unveiling of Apple’s mixed reality headset, as well as annual updates to the rest of the company’s platforms. Let the countdown begin!
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
When Apple announced the Apple Watch Ultra, I was especially interested in its introduction of an Action Button, an additional bit of hardware that could be set to trigger just about anything on watchOS. I began to wonder if future regular Apple Watches might get their own Action Buttons, too.
Now I’m starting to wonder if the Action Button might have been a sign of a major new Apple feature to come. What if the Action Button… came to the iPhone? It might happen as soon as this fall.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser writing at his blog:
In my dumble opinion, Apple should:
• Break Passwords out into a standalone app, with an actual fully resizable window (!!), and full, proper UI for most of its features
• Make Passwords a toolbar item in Safari for easy access and to be top-of-mind for the user
• Stick to a basic feature set, but do that well
I use both Apple’s built-in passwords feature and 1Password, but I prefer Apple’s because of its seamless integration. To Cabel’s point, though, it’s not publicized nearly well enough: I’ve tried to nudge many people towards setting up 2FA codes in Apple’s Passwords tool, but anything that starts with telling someone to tap down several levels into Settings tends to make their eyes glaze over.
Unlike Cabel, however, I would like Apple to implement some sort of family sharing feature for Passwords. I share a bunch of logins with my wife, and while I can share them with 1Password, there’s an additional hurdle to getting someone on a third-party app that requires their own account, etc. Especially as we shift more and more to passkeys, where traditional methods of sharing will be impractical, it’s more important that Apple make it easier to share credentials.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It may not have made Apple’s self-imposed 2022 deadline, but three months into 2023, the new Apple Classical app is finally taking its bow.
The result of Apple’s acquisition of Primephonic back in August 2021, Apple Classical is a bit of a strange beast. It’s best thought of as a different window through which you can view Apple Music, as from what I can tell all the tracks here are also available in the standard Apple Music library. And, indeed, it’s part and parcel of an Apple Music subscription: no extra cost, just another app.
So why an entirely separate program? Apple Classical is clearly intended to provide a better way to browse, find, and listen to classical (and adjacent) music. That’s a welcome addition for many classical music fans, who have long complained about how Apple Music (and its predecessor, iTunes) have handled—or failed to handle1—the genre.
At the root of the issue is that classical music has its own peculiarities that diverge from contemporary music: at the most base level, consider that most classical music isn’t performed by the artist who wrote it, given that in many cases they were long dead before the advent of recording technology. Thus listeners may want to look for performances by certain artists…but that’s complicated too, given that many are performed by orchestras, which might also mean looking for a specific conductor. That’s not even including other oddities, like the arcane cataloguing system of opus numbers.
Having grown up in a household with a classical music aficionado, I was steeped in the genre: Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Prokofiev—all of these were in regular rotation in my home. Even though I didn’t have the same passion for classical music as my father, I know the importance of finding precisely the work you want to listen to. Anybody who’s ever asked their HomePod to “play Beethoven” knows that you often end up with a weird selection that’s not really what you wanted, and trying to get more specific is often a fool’s errand. The question is whether Apple Classical solves this problem, or merely compounds it.
Helpful overturesAt first glance, Apple Classical largely seems to ape the Apple Music interface; at the bottom are four tabs: Listen Now, Browse, Library, and Search. But delve into a couple of these, and you’ll start seeing the differences.
Information about the track is quickly available from the Now Playing screen.I particularly appreciate the refinement Apple has done to the Library section. While it’s shared with Apple Music (you’ll see albums already in your Apple Music library that are also available in Apple Classical), there are also new sections for Recordings and Works, and refined sections for Artists and Composers. In all of those cases, Apple has implemented a Favorites system, where you can choose to save specific items, rather than simply providing an exhaustive catalogue of every single artist or recording you have in your collection. That’s handy if you want to be able to quickly access a particular artist or see all recordings of a specific work. (The Albums and Tracks sections work more like the conventional Apple Music equivalent.) It’s worth noting that albums added to your library in Apple Classical do show up in your library in Apple Music as well.
There’s a lot of curation happening in Apple Classical, too. For example, searching for a specific piece will generally pop up a ton of recordings, but the app will identify an Editor’s Choice version as well as Popular Recordings to help separate the wheat from the chaff.2 There are also the usual Essential playlists, as per Apple Music, for artists, eras, and genres, as well as biographies of composers and information about specific pieces. That last is also available from the Now Playing screen, in case you want to quickly see details like the record label or catalog number.
Apple Classical’s Browse interface adds not only the ability to drill down via composers, periods, conductors, soloists, and more, but also playlists via specific instruments if you’re a fan of the French Horn or Lute.
Apple has also added refined controls for sorting within your library or other lists of items; an icon in the top right allows you to arrange items by criteria like Title, Release Date, Recently Added, Popularity, Duration, and more. That’s a really nice feature that makes it way easier to sort through a large list and help find what you’re looking for.
Not just the classicsA few weeks back, in my discussion with Jason about this app before its release, I mentioned that a lot of the challenges with classical music also apply to my favorite genre: movie scores. And lo and behold, Apple Classical includes soundtracks in its catalog, along with scores for Broadway musicals and operas.
Which is certainly cool, but the implementation as it stands right now is a little wonky. Scores have a lot in common with classical music—there are often versions performed by different artists, and many include pieces by different composers on the same album—but they’re not exactly the same, and trying to fit that round peg in that square hole causes a bit of a disconnect where the metadata is concerned.
Why is Braveheart even mentioned here?For example, looking at the score for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse by Daniel Pemberton breaks it down into several subsections with the composer’s name at the top…but also includes several sections labeled “Pemeberton: Spider-Man.” It’s certainly uncool for Apple to reveal his secret identity like that, but more to the point, it breaks the album up into weird subsections. I can only assume this is the result of some automatic cataloging system, as it only seems to have pulled out the tracks with “Spider-Man” in the title. Something similar happens in the Avengers: Endgame score by Alan Silvestri and The Rocketeer score by James Horner, though even weirder in those cases, as it seems to link in to some of the composers’ music from other movies entirely.3
(To see how this idea works more beneficially, you can look at something like this Seiji Ozawa album featuring pieces by both Mussorgsky and Britten, which is divided up into relevant sections by composer and piece.)
I also found tracks attributed to the wrong album, such as the main title for The Force Awakens as a single track on an album labeled as A New Hope.4 I’m hopeful this will get ironed out in time; it is, after all, the app’s first day of availability and there are sure to be some rough edges.
One other note: not all of my movie scores or classical albums showed up in Apple Classical. I think, reading between the lines of the albums that aren’t there, that it’s largely a function of metadata; most of them seem to be albums I ripped that were uploaded to Apple Music and, in some cases, I had already edited the metadata to correct for inconsistencies in the way Apple Music (and iTunes before it) handled them. For example, I have a melded together version of the Tron: Legacy score from multiple tracks that were available separately; there is a Tron: Legacy score available in Apple Classical, but it doesn’t show my version. Likewise, my ripped double-disc sets of the original Star Wars trilogy scores and the deluxe version of The Phantom Menace score don’t appear, as those editions don’t appear to be in Apple Music’s catalog, alas.
Phoning it inWhich brings us to one other oddity: Apple has focused on making Apple Classical available primarily on the iPhone. The app is designed for iOS and though, yes, it does work on iPad in an iPhone-sized window (a far better experience in Stage Manager), you can’t run the app on an Apple silicon Mac, nor does the functionality appear in the Music app. There’s no tvOS option either, for those who might want to listen through their home theater system.
Apple Classical does work on the iPad, albeit in an iPhone-sized window.Those are both disappointments, particularly on the Mac side, if not wholly surprising. I have to imagine a macOS version—either integrated in the Music app or as a separate app—is coming at some point, and was simply deemed not to be a priority, but given the many problems with the Music app on the Mac, there’s a definite feeling of that particular venue being ignored.
Part of me wonders if, long term, Apple Classical will eventually find itself folded into a future version of Apple Music, but I’m honestly not sure if that is the best approach. Far be it from me to suggest that every genre of music needs its own app, but I do think that classical music is a special case with enough of a following that it merits it. Whether or not it does get integrated with Apple Music, I hope Apple commits to continuing development and improvement of the app. Many of the artists might be dead, but there’s still plenty of life in classical music.
- Or should I say…Handel. ↩
- And, given that many of these works are in the public domain and thus have hundreds if not thousands of recordings, there’s a lot of chaff. ↩
- In those cases I think it’s because the scores all seem to have tracks with a similar name? Very strange. ↩
- Shame, Apple. Shaaaaaame. ↩
With WWDC (presumably) a couple of months away, we take time to list some of our wishes for iOS 17. There’s also a lot more noise about the forthcoming Apple VR headset, and the entertainment industry and Apple are having communication issues.
Go to the podcast page.
What have we learned? This week, it’s that Russia is not happy with iPhones, the iPhone 15 will not be the same as the iPhone 14, and that Apple has reported to Spring Training in the best shape of its life and is ready to play ball.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to BZG Apps for sponsoring Six Colors this week. BZG makes Unite 4, which allows you to turn any Website into a Mac app. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and M1 support. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource-hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when using the promo code SixColors at checkout. There’s also a 14 day free trial, and the app is included in Setapp for subscribers.
A remarkable blog post by Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis uncovers a key moment in the history of Apple and the recording industry:
At that time, our sales were slow enough that we often skimmed incoming orders to learn about who was buying. On September 30, 2003, exactly one year after we opened our virtual doors, an order with an RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] email address came through. That put a damper on our first anniversary celebrations, as we had full knowledge of the organization’s litigious history. We were naturally concerned that they were aware of our product. Unfortunately, there was nothing for us to do but feel uneasy and await their next move.
The late 90s and early 2000s were an interesting period when it came to Apple and the music industry. The rise of MP3s, CD burning, and peer-to-peer file sharing meant that piracy had gone digital—but many of those technologies could also be used for legal purposes, enabling iTunes and the iPod and creating mix CDs from your own music collection.
As is traditional, industries reacted to the new technologies with fear and tried to stamp them out. Which is why foundational podcast creator and former MTV VJ Adam Curry’s recent podcast interview, quoted by Kafasis, is so fascinating. Curry:
Steve asked: “How do you do your recording?” We didn’t really have any tools to record, there was not much going on at the time. But the Mac had an application called Audio Hijack Pro, and it was great because we could create audio chains with compressors, and replicate a bit of studio work.
Eddy Cue said: “The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro, because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything.” Steve then turned to me and said: “Do you need this to create these podcasts?” I said: “Currently, yes!”. So Steve Jobs told them to get lost.
This worldview was pretty much Apple’s take at the time when it was accused of encouraging piracy: While people might use its technology to violate licenses and break the law, the technology itself had valid, legitimate uses, and therefore Apple wouldn’t limit the utility of its products just because some people would do things with them that groups like the RIAA didn’t like.
Was Steve Jobs well aware that they were enabling piracy when they started the “Rip, Mix, Burn” ad campaign? Of course. Did the iPod make it easy to take songs downloaded from Napster on the go? It sure did. (So much so that at the iPod launch event, it literally gave journalists CDs along with their review iPods so that they wouldn’t be accused of pirating music.)
But Jobs and Apple also saw the bigger picture, and the world is better for it.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Hannah Miao, Gregory Zuckerman and Ben Eisen reporting for the Wall Street Journal (Apple News) about the last-ditch attempts to save Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from running out of money:
The Fed needed a test trade to be run before the actual transfer could occur. That took time and the Fed didn’t extend its own daily deadline of 4 p.m. PT for collateral transfers to help SVB. Time ran out on the bankers and SVB couldn’t get the money that day…
The next day, the BNY transfer to the Fed went through, potentially allowing SVB to borrow from the central bank. According to people familiar with the matter, the San Francisco FHLB was still working on its transfer when executives saw an announcement from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.: The regulator had taken over SVB.
As usual, I can’t recommend Bloomberg Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine’s take highly enough:
[Miao, Zuckerman and Eisen] have the actual, horrifying explanation, which is that the Fed’s computers go to bed at 4 p.m. and you can’t wake them up until the next morning….
I do not actually think that the banking crisis of the last two weeks… all could have been avoided if the Fed had said “hmm, normally we do a test transaction first, but you seem to be in a rush and it’s getting toward closing time so we’ll just skip that and go straight to lending you the money.” SVB’s problems were bigger than the Fed’s 4 p.m. transfer cutoff.
And yet! Man! What the heck! A lot has been written about how SVB was a bank run for a speedier, modern age. Instead of hearing a rumor at the coffee shop and running down to the bank branch to wait on line to withdraw your money, now you can hear a rumor on Twitter or the group chat and use an app to withdraw money instantly. A tech-friendly bank with a highly digitally connected set of depositors can lose 25% of its deposits in hours, which did not seem conceivable in previous eras of bank runs.
Or as Byrne Hobart of The Diff (quoted by Levine) put it, “when the user interface improves faster than the core system, it means customers can act faster than the bank can react.”
Back to Levine:
There will be all sorts of proposals for changes in bank regulation and supervision and deposit insurance and Fed facilities that come out of this crisis. [This] is probably not going to be top of the list: Again, I doubt it would have saved SVB, and I do not have any great technical insights into how it should be improved. But, I don’t know, wouldn’t it be a good idea? Wouldn’t you have more confidence in the banking system, if banks that had lots of assets could get money when they needed it?
It’s disturbing to think that the systems to save banks just don’t run as fast as the systems that have been built to streamline transactions that can lead to bank runs. More disturbing, perhaps, is to realize that this incident might not actually change anything.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The generative AI we’ve found the most compelling, our thoughts on Spatial Audio and surround sound systems, whether we think the game console is dying out, and our social media habits in the wake of the relaunch of Gowalla.
Go to the podcast page.
Boox Leaf 2 running EinkBro (left) and Substack (right).I love e-readers. The high-contrast black-and-white E-Ink displays, the long battery life, and the software that’s focused on reading all made me a fan of the Kindle and, in recent years, the Kobo series of ebook readers.
Back in 2021 I reviewed the Boox Nova Air, a $389 Android tablet with an E-Ink screen. The idea: what if you could run all sorts of different apps on a single E-Ink device the size of a Kindle or Kobo? Ultimately, I found the Boox Nova Air to be an impressive piece of hardware that was let down by its software.
Spurred on by a rave review by The Verge’s Alex Cranz, I’ve been using a $200 Boox Leaf 2 e-reader on and off for the past few months. It’s a 7-inch reader that’s sized and priced more like a standard Kindle or Kobo. I’m happy to report that in the intervening months, the Boox software experience has improved—but a device like this is still probably not a good idea unless you are comfortable tinkering with Android apps and utilities.
By adding physical page-turn buttons to the Leaf 2, the device is much more usable as an e-reader than the Nova Air was. Many Android apps that understand the concept of turning pages of content support using the volume up and down buttons (which is what those page-turn buttons really are) to go forward and backward through content. Boox has added some clever software to let you set how the buttons are detected in different apps, and you can assign some very E-Ink-specific functions—like forcing a refresh of the screen!—to specific button gestures.
Page turning is a big deal, because E-Ink screens still don’t refresh fast enough to be usable with smartphone-style scrolling interfaces. Everything gets smeary and unreadable and generally is just… bad. Scrolling a webpage on an iPad is fine, but doing it on an E-Ink browser is really unpleasant.
Fortunately, there has also been some progress on the browser front. There’s a new Android browser called EinkBro that is specifically designed to be used on E-Ink devices, and it makes it easy to page through stories rather than scrolling through them. Though EinkBro would occasionally lose the plot and misrender pages a bit too wide, in general it was a huge boost to the usability of the device, since a lot of what I read is on the web.
As a result, my experience was much better than it was in 2021. Unfortunately, I ran into a lot of apps that still didn’t support page-turn buttons (Substack, I’m disappointed in you), and while Boox has a workaround for that (a utility called Navigation Ball lets you put up floating page up/page down buttons on screen), it’s an inconsistent and fiddly experience.
The other thing I realized is that a lot of Android apps are just bad. Okay, I’m not being entirely fair there—some Android apps are bad on the Leaf 2 because (for obvious reasons!) they were designed to be used with fast-refresh screens on Android phones, not slow-refresh E-Ink on a tablet. Other Android apps are just bad, or at least worse than the dedicated software you’d find on a fine-tuned, purpose-built e-reader by Amazon or Kobo.
The Kindle app on Android is actually pretty good, and works well with the Leaf 2 once you get it up and running. But if you use the page turn buttons too soon after you launch it, the Boox software won’t have kicked in yet and you’ll get a volume prompt instead of a page turn. And don’t swipe or tap to turn the page, or you’ll get a page-turn animation that can’t be turned off or properly rendered by the E-Ink screen.
The Kobo app is worse. It’s got a lot fewer options than the dedicated Kobo reading experience does, which is a shame since Kobo’s dedicated reading experience beats Kindle’s.
Boox also supplies its own e-reader app, but it didn’t let me turn off forced justification, which is a dealbreaker for me. But at least that app felt like it was specifically built for E-Ink, which is what’s missing from most of the Android apps I tried.
After this latest experiment, I’m left with two overriding thoughts about the future of e-readers. First, I wish Amazon and Kobo and the rest would finally embrace their hidden-away, “experimental” web browsers and just integrate them into the device experience. EinkBro shows that it can be done. More broadly, I wish those e-ink readers would consider adding basic support for other kinds of apps, especially given that Amazon just killed its digital newsstand program.
Amazon’s browser has been experimental for more than a decade now, so I’m not holding my breath. The other option—and this one has a far greater chance of happening—is that E-Ink refresh rates could keep getting faster. Right now some E-Ink displays are capable of 15 frames per second in black-and-white mode, which is pretty good! The more the screen can respond in the way that Android apps expect, the less a user will feel like they’re stuck in the mud when they’re using one of these devices.
The truth is, the e-reader market is so small—and so dominated by Amazon—that small companies like Boox are about the only ones trying to compete here. The products still aren’t good enough, in my opinion, but they’re getting closer all the time. Maybe someday I’ll fulfill my dream of reading everything, not just books, on a single E-Ink device. But we’re not there yet.
Baseball season is almost upon us, and that means the return of Apple’s Friday Night Baseball doubleheader. As was the case last year, it’ll be a broadcast with recurring national announcers and a bunch of extra Apple flair, including drone shots and spatial audio. As was not the case last year, when Apple gave it away for free, this year’s programming will be limited to Apple TV+ subscribers. As detailed by Apple Newsroom:
“Friday Night Baseball” will be produced by MLB Network’s Emmy Award-winning production team in partnership with Apple, bringing viewers an unparalleled viewing experience. Each game will feature state-of-the-art cameras to present vivid live-action shots, and offer immersive sound in 5.1 with Spatial Audio enabled. “Friday Night Baseball” will again utilize drone cameras for beautiful aerial stadium shots, as well as player mics and field-level mics to immerse fans in the gameplay and stadium atmosphere. Fans in the U.S. and Canada will also have the option to listen to the audio of the home and away teams’ local radio broadcasts during “Friday Night Baseball” games.
That last line is big news. One of the biggest complaints people had last year about Friday Night Baseball—and let’s be honest, it’s a complaint about any sport with a strong local announcer base that’s then broadcast to a single national audience using a neutral set of announcers—is that people couldn’t hear the voices they knew and loved while watching the game. Apple has addressed this issue by letting users switch over to audio from home or away radio broadcasts. (This is also a feature of Apple’s MLS streaming package, though right now I believe it’s home radio only.)
There are a few minor catches—aren’t there always? According to Apple, “Radio broadcasts for the Texas Rangers are available only for the team’s home games. In Canada, radio broadcasts are available only for Toronto Blue Jays games.” Tough break for Canadian fans who want to listen to non-Blue Jays broadcasters of non-Blue Jays games, and I don’t even want to know about the contractual issues that preclude the Rangers radio voices from being used on away games.
But for everyone else, this is a great step forward for Friday Night Baseball, one that uses the multi-stream, multi-layer potential of streaming media to improve the product and improve audience choice.
Friday Night Baseball returns April 7 with Rangers-Cubs followed by Padres-Braves.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
HBO has another hit, Jason Kilar has some advice for Bob Iger about the future of Hulu, and Sports Corner returns to discuss the ongoing saga of regional sports networks bankruptcies and the future of streaming sports.
Go to the podcast page.
Is the iPad still the future of computing, or is it the Mac (again)? This week we’re pondering Apple’s dividing lines between the iPad Pro and the Mac, and wonder if each product is limiting the potential of the other. Also, is Apple planning on raising iPad Pro prices to new heights? We also consider Apple’s moves to show fiscal responsibility without laying off a lot of people like the rest of the tech industry.
Go to the podcast page.
Artificial intelligence continues to be the latest of buzzworthy buzzwords floating around the tech industry. (Sorry, blockchain and NFTs—your fifteen minutes are up.) And though Apple has plenty of ways that it already leverages machine learning to power up its technologies, it’s hard to deny that there are some places where the company could still benefit from jumping on this latest bandwagon.
Which is why it’s interesting to hear a report out of the New York Times that Apple engineers are actively looking into language-generating AI, similar to the systems that underlie chatbots like ChatGPT, for a number of applications.
How could this technology be used in Apple’s products? Well, as it happens, I can think of a few ways that it might be deployed, not all of which are simply about just creating a chatbot.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:
- A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
- A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
- An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
- A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
- A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
- A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when you use the promo code ‘SixColors’ at checkout.
You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!
AI continues to be a lot more A than I this week as Apple expands its manufacturing outside of China, and we enjoy the return of everyone’s favorite mustachioed man, Ted Lasso.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Over the past couple years, Apple’s been rolling out its “Detailed City Experience” in Maps to cities across the world and finally, at long last, those improved maps and better landmarks have come to my hometown of Boston, as first noted by Frank McShan on Twitter.
As a lifelong resident of this fair city,1 I thought it my responsibility—nay, my duty—to take a spin through all these new landmarks and judge them on their fidelity to the reality (and the spirit)
Without further ado, let’s take a look.
Perhaps most recognizable to non-Bostonians, the nation’s oldest active ballpark. A thumbs up on the seat colors (green in the bleachers, red elsewhere—and yes, they even got the Ted Williams seat), and the Green Monster is present, but would it have killed them to put in the scoreboard? (Extra points if it features the Red Sox beating the Yankees.)
Ah, South Station: where the Red Line of the T meets Amtrak, bus, Silver Line, and Commuter Rail service. An excellent rendition, down to the gold of the doors, the red awnings, and the clock. Then again, anything would be better than the time the TV show Fringe forwent stock photography in favor of a charming depot.
Chances are if you’ve been to Boston as a tourist, you’ve visited Quincy Market, a lengthy building adjacent to Faneuil Hall that features a ton of restaurants and the like. Well-rendered, with particular attention to the dome and correct chimney placement.
The brutalist monstrosity in the flesh! Love it or hate it, Boston City Hall is a weird-looking building. I’m only sad that this doesn’t include the awesome new playground that now occupies the north side of the plaza.
Our noble statehouse, atop Beacon Hill, is given its proper brick front facade and gold dome. Fun fact: it was first covered in copper by Paul Revere and it has a pinecone on top (not shown, sadly).
I wouldn’t call TD Garden particularly picturesque, but given that it’s home to two of the city’s most prominent professional sports team, seems fair that it’s included. Also included: the weird new Verizon building that’s part of the complex.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in all its glory (simply “the MFA” to locals). You can see the statue, Appeal to the Great Spirit in its proper place at the front.
Copley Square, the heart of Back Bay, has no less than three prominent landmarks: Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library, and…look, they want to call it “200 Clarendon Street” but it will always and forever be the Hancock, sorry.2
Just a closer look at the Boston Public Library, a place with particular significance for me (it’s where my parents both worked and met). Nice detail on the historical McKim building, down to the courtyard, though the Science and Art statues by the main entrance are a bit blobby. (Come on, if you’re going to give the New York Public Library its lions, the least you can do is match ’em.)
A missing landmark! If you zoom out a bit, you can indeed see the Prudential Building (aka The Pru) rendered in Maps’s old style, but as it’s mostly a shopping mall, indoor navigation apparently trumps the external fidelity.
The only landmark I could find that’s not in Boston proper, this rendition of Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT feels like some artist on the Maps team just really wanted a challenge.
My favorite random landmark in this collection. But hey, it’s one of the longest standing (and operating) restaurants in the country.
I kind of want to switch to night mode just so I can see how many lanterns are in the steeple of the Old North Church.
Speaking of hanging lanterns, I definitely went to Paul Revere’s House on a field trip in elementary school, and it’s just as dark and cramped as I remembered.
I have indeed climbed the Bunker Hill Monument, which is not to be confused with the Washington Monument, even though they look kind of the same.
As I was just at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum a few weeks ago, I can confirm this version deserves an A. Alas, no sign of the stolen artworks.
Updated with three missed landmarks.
- Okay, yes, technically I have never lived in Boston proper. But I was born there, and I’ve lived 90 percent of my life within a few miles of the city lines. Deal with it. ↩
- Sears Tower fans, you know what I’m talking about. ↩
I love Continuity Camera, the feature introduced in macOS Ventura that lets you use an iPhone as a Mac webcam. Unfortunately, the creation of a systemwide feature often results in a third-party app being trampled, and that was the fate of Reincubate’s Camo Studio, which lets you… use your iPhone as a Mac webcam.
But as is often the case with a “Sherlocking“, Apple didn’t build a solution with all the features of Camo Studio. It kept it minimal—both Continuity Camera and the camera in the Apple Studio Display, use handful of toggles in Control Center to turn off basic modes like Center Stage, Portrait Mode, and Studio Light.
Camo Studio, on the other hand, offered all sorts of plenty of brightness, color, and zoom settings. And as of Wednesday, with the release of Camo Studio 2, the app also fully supports Continuity Camera, the Studio Display camera, and pretty much any other third-party webcam. (If you’ve been using lousy software to control your webcam, it might be time to replace it with Camo Studio.)
I’ve been using Camo Studio 2 for a few weeks and I’ve been relieved, frankly, to finally have proper control over my Continuity Camera and Studio Display cameras. The lighting in my office is weird, so I often need to adjust the color balance, and I’m never happy with the default zoom and options that Apple offers. With Camo Studio, I can drop an iPhone into a MagSafe mount and use it immediately without attaching a cable or launching an app on the iPhone.
Camo Studio has also picked up a bunch of new tricks. In addition to its classic zoom and image-adjustment settings, it’s got its own versions of Center Stage, Portrait Mode, and Studio Light. Reincubate claims its features are better and less processor intensive than Apple’s versions. (I did notice a few cases where Camo’s software seemed to better detect the difference between me and my background.) There’s also a really nice auto-pan mode that’s similar to Center Stage, but allows you to lock the zoom.
Other new features include a privacy blur, virtual green screen, support for 4K output, a bunch of LUT filters and presets, and a built-in overlay editor. And Camo Studio is still compatible with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, OBS, Chrome, Discord, Safari, FaceTime, and other video apps. (The output of Camo Studio appears as its own “virtual” camera.)
And for even more customizability, you can still download and run the Camo Studio app on your iPhone, which allows Camo to have access to settings that Continuity Camera doesn’t provide. With the app running, you can choose which lens to use, control focus, and more.
Camo Studio isn’t cheap—it’s $40/year or $80 for a lifetime unlock—but if you rely on a webcam for any part of your job and you want more control than what’s offered out of the box, it really delivers. If you’re interested, you can try it for free.
How we display and enjoy our digital photographs, celebrating Digital Cleanup Day by revealing the messiest areas of our digital lives, software we don’t like but have to use, and our thoughts on replacing aging tech.
Go to the podcast page.
I’ve never felt the need to choose between the iPad and the Mac. I use and value them both. But over the last few years, it’s started to feel like both the Mac and the iPad are increasingly limited by an artificial barrier that Apple has placed between them.
The iPad has slowly become more Mac-like without ever really reaching the promised land. The Mac, meanwhile, has failed to pick up many features from the iPad.
I admire the discipline Apple has had in keeping its product lines separate, but it feels like that decision is starting to harm the futures of both products. The Mac and the iPad are on a collision course, and I’m concerned that they’re both about to run into the brick wall that Apple has erected between them.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Did Apple’s designers want the company to give up on its dreams of augmented reality and just wait it out for a few years? We ponder that baffling report and try to make sense of conflicting rumors about the arrival of the new MacBook Air. Then we get mellow about yellow, and Jason exposes his limited knowledge of classical music and his comprehensive knowledge of 1980s novelty pop hits.
Go to the podcast page.
After three days of research on the subject, Adam Engst of TidBITS has provided a detailed explanation of what’s happening with cloud-storage providers on macOS Ventura:
My understanding is that Box, Google, and Microsoft have migrated their Mac users to the File Provider approach, whereas Dropbox—probably the most popular among everyday Mac users—has only recently started to encourage those outside its beta program to switch (while others are still being asked to join the beta).
Adam’s story has all the details. In short, Apple is having all these apps migrate away from kernel extensions and to an Apple-built API, leading to some major changes in how they work and how users interact with them.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, shines a light on an area of security that is often ignored, but is nevertheless a massive hole in many companies’ Zero Trust fortress.
These findings are particularly alarming given the overall state of device security. IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing your most sensitive data–things like customer records, confidential IP, and plain-text access credentials–on devices that are vulnerable to attack.
This problem has gone unaddressed because until now there hasn’t been a good solution for it. MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument for dealing with sensitive data, and DLP tools are too extreme and invasive for most companies. After all, you’re not trying to ban downloads together, nor regard every download as suspicious. You’re just trying to make sure employees aren’t keeping data for longer than they need or keeping it on an unmanaged or unsecure device.
Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.
Our unique approach makes device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. But instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
Last week, Apple announced its latest “new” iPhone—if by “new”, of course, one means “yellow.” But that’s not uncommon for the company, which has taken to adding a new shade to its phones about halfway through the model year.
Still, if you’re waiting for a truly new iPhone to hit the market, you’ve got another six months to go. Which means, naturally, that the rumors for the upcoming iPhone—the new new iPhone, if you will—are starting to pick up. But is this year’s update likely to be a major change from its predecessor? Or is this just going to be on par with a yellow iPhone. Let’s take a run through what will likely be some of the more significant changes.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Technology marches ever forward, even if it does stumble drunkenly from side to side, as it sometimes does. This week Apple contemplates its AI strategy, sets a ship date for its classical music app, and makes plans for new Macs.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Track a game from the Scores screen (left) and it will appear on the lock screen (center) and in the Dynamic Island (right).Major League Baseball’s venerable MLB app was updated this week to add support for iOS 16’s Live Activities API. The result: you can now track your favorite team’s game status from the lock screen or, on iPhone 14 Pro models, the Dynamic Island.
Tracking appears as an option only on games featuring a team you’ve marked as a favorite. Beneath the game in the app’s Scores tab, you’ll find a blue button that allows you to turn on tracking. Once you tap the button, when you leave the app you’ll see the score in the Dynamic Island (where available) and on your lock screen.
I plan on using this feature a lot during the upcoming baseball season, which officially starts at the end of the month.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I switched from a regular Amazon Echo to a screen-bearing Echo Show back in 2017. As a kitchen appliance, it essentially existed to answer basic queries, set timers, and play music. If I’m being honest, it became indispensable in a single way: setting multiple named timers via voice and being able to see their status with a glance. It’s a little thing, but once you’ve got it, you don’t want to give it up.
But my frustration about literally every other aspect of the Echo Show just kept building. When I first got an Echo Show, I complained about its lack of customizability and the fact that it littered its screen with a bunch of junk that I didn’t care about.
Unfortunately, over the years, that situation didn’t improve much—and in the past year, it became untenable. Amazon offers settings to stop unwanted items from displaying on the Echo Show’s screen, but on a regular basis, the company just added new items—and the new items would be on by default. The result was that I was constantly being bombarded by unwanted garbage on the Echo Show, followed by a frustrated scroll through the device’s settings to discover which new “features” I had to turn off.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Amazon also decided that its voice assistant needed to continue pushing unwanted features and services to me whenever I interacted with it. After dutifully replying to whatever voice command I’d give it, it would inevitably continue: “By the way…” followed by a proposal for me to join something or activate something. For a device that did nothing but live in one room, the Echo Show had a remarkable inability to read the room.
Enough was enough. Out of desperation, I bought a $100 Google Nest Hub (second generation), the Google Home equivalent of the Echo Show. Google seemed like an unlikely provider of respite from incessant marketing, but I wanted to give it a chance.
Setting up the Nest Hub was a pain because I’ve got a managed Google account that doesn’t support all the features of Google Home. In the end, I had to set it up with an alternate Gmail account and share a bunch of stuff from my managed account to my alternate identity in order for the Home Hub to see it. (I wish Google was better at this.)
That all said, once it was up and running, it’s been a breath of fresh air. The Nest Hub’s touchscreen interface is a bit laggy, but I basically never have to touch the screen. It displays multiple named timers nicely. There’s even some whimsy that Amazon never managed to find: When you set a chicken timer, it displays a chicken and clucks! When you set a pasta timer, you may end up hearing a brief blurt of stereotypical Italian music.
The Google Assistant is accurate, probably more accurate than Alexa, though it does seem to be a little worse at detecting that we’re talking to it. (I’ve yet to get an accidental activation, but sometimes we do need to tell it twice before it hears us.) And a clever proximity sensor means that I can dismiss alarms by waving my hand in front of the screen without actually touching it, which is nice when you’re cooking, and you have stuff all over your hands.
The Nest Hub supports Apple Music, works with AnyList (which we use for shared shopping lists), and apparently works with lots of video-streaming services—but on that tiny screen, it’s hardly worth it. I am using almost none of its other features, which include access to some of my smart home equipment (including my Nest thermostat) and some of my home security cameras. I did use it to start my robot vacuum cleaner the other day. But for the most part, it is a little box that does alarms and plays music and otherwise just shows the time and a picture from a Google Photos album I created for it. That’s plenty.
Best of all, I have never felt punished for being in a home that’s primarily in the Apple ecosystem. The Nest Hub has filled its niche in our home ecosystem, and not once have I been interrupted by a special offer or other marketing opportunities.
Unless and until Apple comes through with a product in this category—there are rumors that it might be considering it—the Nest Hub seems like it’s going to be a kitchen mainstay in my house.
Nineteen months after Apple bought classic-music app Primephonic and promised a new dedicated app in 2022, and three months after the end of 2022, Apple is poised to finally deliver the app that classical music fans have been waiting for.
Apple Music Classical has been added to the iOS App Store, but the wait’s not quite over: it’s available for pre-order, with an expected arrival date of March 28.
According to Apple, the app will be available to Apple Music subscribers at no additional cost, will run on iOS 15.4 or later, supports Dolby Atmos and spatial audio, and will work anywhere Apple Music is available (except for China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan).
As I learned years ago from Macworld contributor Kirk McElhearn, classical music fans have some very specific needs that aren’t well served by the pop-music-oriented design of Apple Music (and all the way back to iTunes, for that matter). Hence the need for a dedicated app. (It’s unclear to me if a Mac app is in the works, however.)
I hope Apple has done right by those classical music fans. I guess we’ll find out at the end of the month.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple sent me the new iPhone. Well, “new.” It’s the same old iPhone 14 but in yellow. And it came with a purple case. Anyway, to celebrate the color yellow I did a livestream:
Yellow is not a bad color. There are better ones, but it has its virtues.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Whether we use spatial audio, the oldest tech in our setups, our smart TV situations, and what our Twitter experience is currently like.
Go to the podcast page.
The release of the M1 processor was a milestone. Apple finally migrated the Mac to its fast, low-power mobile processors, and the results were incredible. They were a hard act to follow—and after about a year and a half, the M2 processor arrived with a (not unexpected) set of incremental gains.
You can’t reinvent the wheel every time out, and clearly the M2 was a careful follow-on to the M1 designed to keep the ball rolling. But now reports abound that the M3 is on the way—not at the end of the year or in early 2024, as you might expect from the 18-month gap between the M1 and the M2, but very soon, perhaps as soon as late spring or early summer.
Surprise! It turns out that Apple may be more aggressive with its Mac processing masterplan than we might’ve guessed from the first couple of years of Apple silicon.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Jason returns from New Zealand as a better wizard, just in time for Zaz to announce new “Lord of the Rings” films. Has it been done, or can you not keep a good Hobbit down? Also, Netflix explores lower prices, and there’s Sports Corner, too.
Go to the podcast page.
Callum Bains, writing for PCGamer, recounts the disastrous launch of a SimCity reboot in 2013 and how it spelled the end for the storied franchise:
When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game’s servers. If that connection dropped, they’d be booted from the game. The problem, simple as it seemed, was significant: there wasn’t enough server space to go round. Players were met with frequent crashes, extreme latency, exceedingly long load times, disconnections, and delayed downloads. Swathes were unable to get into the game at all, left endlessly hanging in the launch menu, let alone experience the fresh multiplayer city building they were promised. The game’s servers buckled under the tidal wave of players trying to connect, and there was no subsidence on the horizon.
SimCity was one of the first games I can really remember playing on my Mac, and I must have spent hours at it1. But the last version I ever played was SimCity 2000, which came out thirty years ago. (How come we still don’t have arcologies?!)
Of course, nothing stays dead forever these days and even though there hasn’t been a SimCity game in ten years, I wouldn’t be surprised if we haven’t heard the last of this particular series. The popular spinoff The Sims is still going strong, so maybe some day they’ll be organized into…cities?
- I also have fond memories of playing SimEarth with my friend on a Mac at his mom’s office, and SimAnt. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced a new yellow iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus, adding even more color choices to the lineup this spring. […] The new yellow iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus will be available to pre-order this Friday, March 10, with availability starting Tuesday, March 14.
These mid-year color updates are pretty much the norm now. I think this marks the first yellow iPhone since the XR in 2018. There are also new silicone case colors—canary yellow, olive, sky, and iris—and iPhone Emergency SOS launches in six new countries—Austria, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portugal—later this month.
Apple also announced its spring Watch band collection, which includes sports bands in bright orange, olive, and sky; solo loops in canary yellow, olive, purple fog, sprout green; and braided solo loops in bright orange, olive, and purple fog. Plus “horse-racing” inspired Hermès bands, if you’re into that sort of thing. There don’t seem to be any specifically for the Apple Watch Ultra, however.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Kia ora! Jason’s back from vacation to discuss Apple’s continued quest to optimize its iPhone product revenue and the reason why M3 Macs might be closer (and more interesting) than we thought.
Go to the podcast page.
Jay Weinberg, E Street Drummer Max Weinberg’s kid, about that moment when Bruce Springsteen asked him to drum with the band while his dad was off in L.A. doing The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien:
He said, “It only takes one song to know what someone’s about. I have a good feeling I know what you’re about.” After 14 years, I’ve come to understand how true that really is. No matter the musical situation you find yourself in, you can tell when you have undeniable, magical musical chemistry with someone — or a group of people — after playing just one song. No one but my dad had sat on that throne for 35 years, but Bruce basically said, “Well, you know one tune…what’s a few hundred more?”
Weinberg’s entire piece is amazing. It’s about his own unique story—which itself takes some incredible turns—but also about how it has informed his approach to getting through life.
[Via Antony Johnston.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
George Joseph at UX Collective with a fascinating, hilarious, frustrating, and sweet story about what happens when the government paperwork gets your name wrong:
A few years later I met another Fnu. This time in a Lyft. Fnu was an older man from Kabul. He shared stories of how he had moved to the US to seek asylum, how he was grateful for the opportunity his family had been given, and how although he didn’t mind having an imposter’s name on all his official identification, it did make him feel stripped off his identity. “This is what has been given to me. I cannot change it.”
I will be on the lookout for Fnus from now own.
[Via Burrito Justice.]
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
PowerBook G5, by Dana Sibera.Marcin Wichary, whose amazing Shift Happens kickstarter is wrapping up in a few days, posted an excellent newsletter item honoring Dana Sibera, who posts extremely strange Apple hardware photos to the Internet:
These “mock-ups that mock” all feel great to me, a perfect antidote to the pretentious Jonny Ive white-room videos of the previous decade. And where fun and cleverness intersect is where things get really interesting.
If you haven’t seen Sibera’s work—and she’s an extremely entertaining follow on Mastodon or Twitter, Wichary’s post is an perfect introduction.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The folks at AppleVis have used the Six Colors Report Card as inspiration for their own survey:
We are thrilled to unveil our inaugural Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card, which provides valuable insights into the experiences and opinions of visually impaired community members who rely on VoiceOver, Braille support, or the low vision features on Apple devices.
I love to see this format being re-used, and look forward to reading their results.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Right now, “Zero Trust” is in serious danger of becoming an empty buzzword. The problem isn’t just that marketers have slapped the Zero Trust label on everything short of breakfast cereal–it’s that for all the hype, we don’t seem to be getting any safer.
At the heart of Zero Trust is a good idea, but the way most companies execute that idea is incomplete. Specifically, most security practitioners forget that device compliance is a crucial element of Zero Trust.
Think about it: your identity provider can ensure that only known devices access your company’s apps, but just because you recognize a device, doesn’t mean it’s in a secure state. A malware-infected laptop running an outdated OS can’t exactly be “trusted.” And you can’t count on MDMs to achieve total compliance. Things like unencrypted access credentials are out of their reach, not to mention Linux devices writ large.
Kolide solves the device compliance element of Zero Trust for companies that use Okta.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide’s unique approach works with Okta to make device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
Kolide works across your Mac, Windows, and even Linux devices, with mobile support coming soon. Our lightweight agent complements your existing tools, brings a lot of compliance issues into scope and under control, and can complete your Zero Trust picture.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
Over the last two decades, technology has reinvented much of what we do in our everyday lives, but the first major domino to fall was probably the advent of digital music. Next month will mark twenty years since the launch of Apple’s iTunes Store (fun fact: a birthday shared with yours truly), which, though not the first way to obtain digital music online, was certainly the most far-reaching.
The digital music experience has certainly changed in the intervening years, especially with the rise of streaming over the past decade, but when it comes to Apple’s take on the act of listening to music, well, there are some things that frankly haven’t changed enough. It sometimes feels like Apple believes that digital music is a solved problem, with the company sitting back and dusting off its hands, but there are definitely places where the music listening experience could be improved.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
This week we wonder what the Apple headset will look like, hope that Apple will improve the Apple Watch’s battery life, and sigh loudly again at Twitter.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
Dan is joined by special guest Guy English to discuss iPhone passcode security, App Store refunds for third-party Twitter clients, and the rising costs of grain.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
How we decide which companies get our data, how we manage our personal music collections, our thoughts on iPhone and Apple ID security, and the last time we felt like a clueless technophobe.
Go to the podcast page.
When Twitter shut down third-party clients in January, it not only left out in the cold the users of those apps, but the developers too. Many of those apps were significant sources of revenue for the teams behind them, and that income was cut off capriciously, without any warning.
One additional complication is that some clients had shifted to a subscription-based system in recent years, with users paying by the month or the year. Since those subscriptions were generally prepaid, users ended up in a situation where they essentially no longer had access to the app they’d paid for.
Now two of the most popular iOS clients, Twitterrific and Tweetbot, have been updated to offer options to their former customers. By default, if you take no action, you’ll get a pro-rated refund for the amount of time left in your subscription at the point when Twitter cut off access.
While that’s well within your rights as a consumer, it’s also kind of awkward, given that the money comes out of the pockets of those independent app developers like Tapbots and The Iconfactory, who got just as much of the short end of the stick as their users—if not more so. So for both apps there’s also an option to opt out of the refund. (Though you remain eligible if you change your mind.)
In the case of Tapbots, which has recently launched the Mastodon client Ivory, there’s also an option to transfer your existing Tweetbot subscription to Ivory on a non-recurring basis.
Unfortunately, chances are the developers will still end up refunding the majority of subscriptions, if for no other reasons than most customers will probably not even know these options exist, given that they have probably not opened their now defunct third-party Twitter client since they stopped working. But if you’re a former customer who feels like they got their money’s worth over the time you used one of these app, you can at least help lighten the load on those developers as they move on to their next projects.
Apple is a notoriously secretive company. A company so secretive that, in the past, when information has leaked out, it has stridently told its employees that it’s doubling down on its already secret secrecy but secretly it’s quadrupled down on its secrecy.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Myke is joined by Casey Liss to discuss Mark Gurman’s report on Apple’s ‘Moonshot’ efforts. Also, what is that ‘ComputeModule’, how thick will the Pro Max camera bump be, and how does Casey fare in a brand new segment?
Go to the podcast page.
There’s an age-old take when it comes to Apple and hot new technologies: if the company hasn’t shipped whatever everybody else in the industry is currently focusing on, it must be behind.
This is rarely the truth.
Apple’s business is like the proverbial iceberg: we only see the tip of what the company’s doing, while the vast majority of its research and development efforts are looming beneath the surface. Just look at its finances in its most recent quarter: it spent $7.7 billion on R&D, accounting for more than half of all of its operating expenses.
The latest technology to feature in this storyline is, of course, artificial intelligence. How can the company compete in this burgeoning new market if it doesn’t come out with a chatbot or image generator post haste? (Never mind that it still hasn’t shipped its virtual reality headset that was the last market where the company was clearly falling behind.)
But, as is always the case with this particular canard, the truth is that Apple’s been doing AI in its own particular way, and it’s never about chasing the market.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, shines a light on an area of security that is often ignored, but is nevertheless a massive hole in many companies’ Zero Trust fortress.
These findings are particularly alarming given the overall state of device security. IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing your most sensitive data–things like customer records, confidential IP, and plain-text access credentials–on devices that are vulnerable to attack.
This problem has gone unaddressed because until now there hasn’t been a good solution for it. MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument for dealing with sensitive data, and DLP tools are too extreme and invasive for most companies. After all, you’re not trying to ban downloads together, nor regard every download as suspicious. You’re just trying to make sure employees aren’t keeping data for longer than they need or keeping it on an unmanaged or unsecure device.
Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies.
Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.
Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.
Our unique approach makes device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. But instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.
To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.
Is the Apple Watch about to become as scarce as woke liberal elites at Elon Musk’s birthday party? Meanwhile rumors about the iPhone 15 and the Apple headset are heating up, hopefully not like the devices themselves.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
With Jason off on assignment, Dan recruits his Clockwise co-host Mikah Sargent to talk about reports of Apple’s latest medical device and how the company uses machine learning.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
How we listen to digital music, would we pay for increased account security, keeping our devices clean, and Apple’s pricey upgrade costs.
Go to the podcast page.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Apple is working on a “moonshot” project for continuous non-invasive blood glucose testing, and that it’s looking promising:
Apple is taking a different approach, using a chip technology known as silicon photonics and a measurement process called optical absorption spectroscopy. The system uses lasers to emit specific wavelengths of light into an area below the skin where there is interstitial fluid — substances that leak out of capillaries — that can be absorbed by glucose. The light is then reflected back to the sensor in a way that indicates the concentration of glucose. An algorithm then determines a person’s blood glucose level.
Rumors of Apple working on this have been around for at least as long as the Apple Watch, and it meshes nicely with the company’s focus on health.
But there are a lot of challenges still to overcome. Gurman mentions that the prototype is likely to be the size of an iPhone and will be strapped to the user’s bicep. Obviously, the company will probably want to get it smaller (and less obtrusive) than that over time. In an ideal world, I’m sure they would like it to be simply a feature of the Apple Watch, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the first version is an accessory.
The bigger challenge is probably regulation. Apple can get away with saying that the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor is “not intended for medical use” and “only designed for general fitness and wellness purposes.” That’s not going to cut it with glucose monitoring, where an inaccuracy could have significant damaging consequences to those who rely on it. This tech needs to be absolutely rock solid before the company can deploy it, which suggests that it may still be many years before it’s ready for consumer use.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Look, I’ve been hoping that at some point, the rocky transition from iTunes to the Music app would be over and we’d all look back on it and say, “Wow, I can’t believe that was so brief.”…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Susan Wojcicki steps down as YouTube CEO, what will her legacy be? Ant-Man performs well at the box office, but do reviews indicate ‘Marvel Fatigue’? And guest-host Myke Hurley quizzes Julia on why he has to wait for shows to premiere in the UK.
Go to the podcast page.
A wise green puppet once contended that “size matters not.” Obviously he never had to contend with navigating Apple’s product lineups.
Recent reports suggest that Cupertino might soon be releasing a MacBook Air with a larger 15-inch screen. Strategically, that makes a lot of sense: the MacBook Air is Apple’s best-selling Mac, and for it to only be available in a single size is a missed opportunity. Yes, there are upsell opportunities for those who want a larger display above all else, but given that currently entails a jump all the way from $1200 to $2000, many customers won’t take the leap—especially if they don’t need the power or performance of a MacBook Pro.
Screen size has proven to be a key differentiator in many of Apple’s other product lines, and even the MacBook Air was itself available in multiple sizes in its past incarnations. But I say why stop there? There are plenty of other Apple products where another screen size might make a big (or small) difference.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
With Jason on vacation, Myke is joined by David Smith. They discuss a potential delay for Apple’s headset and what that may mean for WWDC. Also, David’s AI-powered podcast transcription website, and the introduction of ‘Ask Underscore’.
Go to the podcast page.
If you’re already using two-factor authentication on your Twitter, account, great! But with the company’s announcement Friday evening1 that it would be discontinuing two-factor authentication via SMS for all but its paying Twitter Blue subscribers, you may suddenly find yourself wondering what a person’s to do if they want to keep their Twitter account secure?
Have no fear: while these changes were perhaps hastily and questionably enacted, there is a silver lining here. Two-factor authentication via an authentication app is more secure than using SMS, and, better yet, if you’re using a recent version of iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, then not only is the ability to set up that feature baked right into the operating system, but the system will even autofill the password for you every time you login.
Here’s how to set it up:
First, fire up Twitter, either on the web or in the app. In the toolbar on the left, tap the More button (the one with the three dots), and then tap Settings and Support; under the menu that appears there, tap Settings and Privacy.
This will take you to the account section of your Twitter Settings; tap the entry for “Security and account access” and then, on the right hand side of the screen, tap Security.
You’ll see an entry for “Two-factor authentication”: tap that and you’ll get options for the various ways to secure your account. Tap the checkbox for “Authentication app” and a dialog will appear prompting you to get started.
Fun so far, right?
Here’s where it gets a little tricky, depending on what device you’re using. To set up the two-factor codes, you’ll get a QR code. While in some apps and websites, macOS/iOS can actually detect the QR code being show onscreen, allowing you to tap and hold on it to set up the feature, that didn’t happen for me on Twitter on the iPad. That leaves two other options for configuring this feature.
Scan this QR code with another iOS device to setup two-factor authentication.If you happen to have an iOS device handy, you can point its camera at the QR code on your screen. In the Camera app, as you hover over the QR code, you should see a yellow bubble pop up that says Add Verification Code to Twitter.com. Tapping that will open the Passwords section of iOS, and prompt you to add the verification code to an existing account. Search for your Twitter login, tap it, and you should be prompted to save the verification code there.
If you don’t have an iOS device handy, you can do the process manually. Tap the “Can’t scan the QR code?” in the dialog box, and you’ll instead be prompted with a long string of characters. Copy this and go to the Passwords section of System Settings, where you’ll need to authenticate with your passcode or biometrics. Then search for your Twitter login, tap on it, and select the Set Up Verification Code button. You’ll be prompted to either scan the QR code or Enter Setup Key—choose the latter, paste in the string you just copied, and hit OK.
You should now see a new section showing a six-digit code along with a timer counting down. Copy that code and return to the Twitter website to paste it in. (The OS should also offer to autofill it for you when you tap on the verification code feature.)
That’s it! The hardest part is over and now whenever you log in to Twitter in the future, the OS should autofill the two-factor code just like it does for your username and password.
- If you have any question that this decision was bad news, couched as it was, then just remember that they put out this news at the end of Friday. ↩
The Air might be getting bigger up here, this Mastodon deal keeps getting better and better, and the Apple headset get kicked down the road (disclaimer: kicking an Apple headset down the road will void your warranty).…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Microsoft Edge for Windows running in Coherence mode on my Mac Studio.Parallels announced on Thursday that Microsoft has officially authorized running Windows 11 Pro for ARM processors on M1 and M2 Macs via the Parallels Desktop app for Mac.
Previously, users of Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion have found success virtualizing Windows for ARM by downloading and installing prerelease versions, but it was never approved by Microsoft and only unofficially supported by the makes of those VM apps.
But as of now, it’s all on the up-and-up. Earlier today I downloaded the Parallels Desktop installer, used the app to install Windows 11 Pro directly from Microsoft, bought and entered a Windows product key, and I was off and running.
While Windows itself runs at near-native speeds on M1 and M2, if you want to run Intel binaries on Windows, they’ll run using Microsoft’s code-translation layer—the Windows equivalent of Rosetta—and things will slow down.
Whether Apple and Microsoft will ever make the effort to bring Boot Camp to Apple silicon remains to be seen, but at least running Windows on M1 and M2 Macs is now not just a sneaky workaround but an entirely legal and supported option for Mac users who need to run Windows 11 Pro on Apple silicon.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Five of the new Apple emojis.Keith Broni at the Emojipedia blog:
New emoji designs have arrived on iOS as part of the first iOS 16.4 beta, including the shaking face, two pushing hands, and the much-requested plain pink heart emoji.
The two pushing hands enable digital high-fiving, and there’s also a Wi-Fi symbol at last. New animals include donkey, moose, goose, and jellyfish. And for those of us who love ginger, there’s good news—the ginger emoji has also finally made it!
The final Apple OS releases are probably a month or two away, but when they arrive, the new emoji will come along for the ride.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
How we’d add AI technology to our tasks, our non-starter factors for buying an electric car, the device screen sizes we think Apple should consider, and how we’re using climate data to automate our smart homes.
Go to the podcast page.
It’s been a rough decade for the Mac Pro. In 2013, Apple released a weird cylindrical model that didn’t meet the needs of most of Apple’s pro customers and wasn’t really upgradeable. In 2017, Apple called a bunch of tech journalists into a room and reaffirmed their commitment to the Mac, promising a new Mac Pro. That Mac Pro shipped in 2019… right before Apple made the announcement that it was shifting the Mac off of Intel and onto its own processors.
Just short of the tenth anniversary of that first Mac Pro misstep, Apple is now late in concluding its processor transition by shipping the first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. What’s worse, reports from Bloomberg suggest that the company has ditched the next Mac Pro’s highest-end processor, calling the computer’s entire purpose into question.
Is Apple rethinking its commitment to the Mac Pro? And, given the many powerful characteristics of Apple Silicon Macs, should it?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Jason has released the 2022 Apple Report Card, and now it’s time for him and Myke to once again share their grades for Apple for the year gone by. Also, Tim and Eddy go to the Super Bowl, and Apple gets a new Chief People Officer.
Go to the podcast page.
The new, second-generation HomePod is a funny product. So many of us assumed that the original model was discontinued because it was a sales flop, but here it is: reincarnated, and not as some sort of Hollywood-style reboot, but more like a faithful remake of the original, right down to the $299 price tag1.
I guess it wasn’t such a flop after all, since Apple brought it back. The new HomePod is not quite the same as the original model, but it’s similar in bad as well as good ways. It’s better in a few small areas, but is this progress? More than anything, it seems to call Apple’s lack of progress in the smart home category over the intervening five years into sharp relief.
Let’s start with what forward progress there is: The new HomePod’s basically picked up a bunch of technology from the HomePod mini. Like the mini, its brain is an Apple Watch chip, though a slightly newer model. It’s been outfitted with a Thread radio and can act as a home hub, which will be great when the Matter smart home standard finally materializes. And it’s got temperature and humidity sensors, which show up in the Home app and could theoretically be used by intelligent automations in your house. Theoretically.
Now for what hasn’t changed much. The new HomePod has two fewer tweeters than its predecessor, but the truth is that the two speakers sound remarkably similar. No, they’re not the same—the new HomePod offers more clarity in the mid-range (most notably, it feels like vocals were generally clearer on the new HomePod) but doesn’t quite offer the same oomph when it comes to big bass. (Given that the original HomePods were so bass-heavy that Apple had to add a “reduce bass” preference, it’s not that big a deal, but it is noticeable at loud volumes.)
But if I had to boil it down, I’d say that both the new and old HomePods sound really good. If a (bizarrely generous) burglar broke into the house of someone who had old HomePods and swapped them out for new models, they probably wouldn’t notice. (There are slight physical differences—a slightly recessed top panel and detachable power cable, most notably—but only someone with Sherlockian powers of observation would notice at a glance.)
I also compared the HomePods (old and new) to the $99 HomePod mini and the $199 Sonos One. Sorry to be boring, but at least among these products, you get what you pay for. The HomePod mini is half the price of the Sonos One but doesn’t sound as good. The Sonos One is much larger than the mini—it’s roughly the size of the HomePod—and while it definitely outpaces the mini, it is definitely inferior to both old and new HomePods.
Now double the prices in order to get a stereo pair of these speakers. Your choices are now $200 for HomePod minis, $400 for Sonos Ones, or $600 for HomePods. The HomePods sound remarkably good for the compact space, and they look good on a shelf or countertop, but they sure aren’t cheap. (I’ve used a pair of Sonos Ones in my office for the last few years and feel like I found a decent balance between quality and price.)
My biggest disappointment with the new HomePod is that it’s too much like its predecessor. The touch-sensitive top panel is easy to brush accidentally and can’t be seen easily if the speaker is placed up high—which I suppose is okay since the little light show it plays when it’s listening to a Siri command or playing music is completely pointless. Worse, the volume up/down controls (which were already hard to see on the original model since they didn’t light up until you touched the surface) now don’t light up at all, making changing the volume via touch a frustrating guessing game at times. Apple would’ve been better off dumping the “screen” and just putting a few physical buttons up top.
And then there’s Siri and AirPlay, which should be the highlights of all of these products—and instead are their greatest liability. When the wind is blowing right, and the moon is in the right part of the sky, Siri can be solid, responding to your questions quickly and playing music with ease. When it falls over, it’s incredibly frustrating, and it still falls over far more often than it should.
As for AirPlay, like Siri, it’s great when it works, but it doesn’t work reliably enough. In testing for this article, I AirPlayed from a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad to all four speaker pairs at various times. AirPlay failed far too often, especially if I tried to play from more than one speaker at a time. Several times I ended up in a situation where only one speaker in the pair would play or only one speaker would respond to commands.
To be fair, this isn’t just about AirPlay—it’s also about the fundamental instability of the HomePod stereo pair. I also encountered multiple situations where one HomePod would simply stop playing audio, even though it was listening for audio commands, and I could pause or change the volume on its opposite pair from its controls. So strange. But then, the first-generation HomePods in my living room also sometimes go off on their own. It’s a thing HomePod stereo pairs do.
My point is that the new HomePod doesn’t appear to address any of the underlying stability issues with the original model, and both Siri and AirPlay are frustratingly inconsistent. At $299, this is a premium audio product that can live up to that price when it’s working flawlessly—but the bugs and errors and quirks are so great that I can’t in good conscience recommend them to anyone who isn’t well-versed in troubleshooting misbehaving Apple technology.
- The original HomePod premiered at $349, but by the end of its life, it was re-priced at $299. ↩
Apple looks to the future as two of its rivals make AI announcements, rumors swirl of an even more expensive iPhone, and the company would like some games for the Mac, please.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I can’t thank Rogue Amoeba, makers of Audio Hijack, enough for sponsoring the site this week. Rogue Amoeba was our first sponsor, I use their software every day, and I’m so happy that they were here to sponsor the release of the 2022 Apple Report Card.
With Audio Hijack, you can record any audio on your Mac. Whether you want to save audio from individual applications like Safari or Skype, hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, and even the entire system audio output, Audio Hijack can handle it. Simply put, if it can be heard on MacOS, Audio Hijack can record it.
You can:
- Record conversations from Skype, Zoom, and other VoIP apps
- Save streaming audio from the web
- Create podcasts, both remote and in-studio
- Digitize vinyl
…and so much more. Audio Hijack 4.1 just shipped, and it adds over 50 (!) enhancements on top of the award-winning version 4.0.
Through the end of February, Six Colors readers can save $10 when you purchase with coupon code 6CAHTEN. Learn more and download a free trial today.
Disney’s first financial results of the Iger II era make us consider the future of Hulu and ESPN. Discovery+ pulls a fast one, Showtime can’t dodge its fate, Peacock looks surprisingly robust, and Netflix’s password crackdown is stuff you already knew!
Go to the podcast page.
As I did last year, I turned to Six Colors member, Duke University professor, and data visualization expert Kieran Healy to take the initial Report Card scores and slice them in a few interesting ways.
First up is a chart that drills down into the vote distributions across all the categories, so you can see which categories gathered a variety of votes and which ones were a bit more consistent across all 55 voters.
Next is a chart comparing those distributions to the overall distribution (shown in gray). This one lets you compare how people think Apple is doing on each particular topic with their sense of how Apple is doing overall.
Here’s a plot of all the participants in the survey, ranked from most positive to least positive. I’ve removed the names from this because I didn’t clear such detailed analysis with the panelists in advance, so you’ll never know who our sunniest panelists were, nor the identities of our grouches. I will say that my pal Myke Hurley was dead center.
The next chart is a list of what categories were not answered by respondents. As you can see, most non-developers opted not to answer the developer relations question. Many people also opted out of HomeKit, AppleTV, and the iPad. Everyone had an opinion about the Mac.
As Kieran points out, it’s important to note the non-responses:
To a first approximation, every pundit surveyed has an opinion on Reliability, the Mac, the iPhone, Wearables, the Watch, Software, Services, and the iPad. Opinions on those topics run, in the order I just listed, from overwhelmingly positive to somewhat divided or negative. By contrast, Societal issues, the TV, Homekit, and especially (by far) Developer Relations have both more negative sentiment and more non-response. The respondents to those questions—especially the people with views on Developer Relations—are more like specialists, niche-dwellers in the Apple ecosystem. Their views are more negative. The things they are interested in are not really amongst Apple’s high priorities right now. And this is underscored by the fact that even people who are professional Apple pundits often don’t have any view about those things one way or another, or don’t feel they know enough to give an answer.
Finally, here’s a Bertin Matrix:
As Kieran says:
Again we try our best to cluster the rows and columns so that we jointly see the pattern of responses amongst the respondents and the topic areas. And then we draw little bars indicating the answers. Height corresponds to the score. I think you can really see the overall structure here quite nicely.
Thanks to Kieran for his pretty and interesting charts!
A little section of Upgrade 444 in David Smith’s original Podsearch engine.A while ago, David Smith created a site called Podsearch, a search engine for a few of his favorite podcasts, including a couple of mine. That project went by the wayside after a while, and I found myself getting frustrated during episodes of Upgrade that I couldn’t refer people back to specific episodes where we had already discussed a topic.
About the same time, I began reading about OpenAI Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system that “approaches human level robustness and accuracy” for converting the spoken word into written text. Up until then, I’d been doing speech-to-text—most notably, for my transcripts of Apple results calls using various services (Trint, Rev) that charge by the minute.
Whisper’s free, and you can run it on your own computer. I thought that I might give Whisper a go in transcribing Upgrade—or at least recent episodes of Upgrade, maybe since episode 400—for my own reference.
I rapidly discovered that while the python implementation of Whisper would run on my Mac, it ran at about 0.5x speed—so a two-hour podcast would take four hours to transcribe. Not great. Still, the results were promising. Here’s the state of the art of podcast transcription circa 2017:
Alright we’re going to wrap it up that this ends this edition of our red chickens with Batman that are affiliated with like extension cords for Batman University I’d like to think my gas for being here and watching some Batman movies with me… and told her I think you were the king of the Wicker people. Goodnight everybody for listening to be uncomfortable I’ve been your Hostess and smell but really I Batman.
And here’s how Whisper fared:
All right, we’re gonna wrap it up. This ends this edition of our check-ins with Batman that are affiliated. It’s like extension course for Batman University. I’d like to thank my guests for being here and watching some Batman movies with me…. And Tony Sindelar, I think you were the king of the Wicker people. Goodbye nerds. And thanks everybody for listening to The Incomparable. I’ve been your host Jason Snell. But really, I’m Batman. Hmm.
While not perfect, Whisper was staggeringly better than the 2017 transcript and really, much better than any other AI-driven transcription I’d tried recently. It got the punctuation. It got proper names. And it didn’t turn “Thanks for listening to The Incomparable, I’ve been your host Jason Snell” into “Goodnight everybody for listening to be uncomfortable, I’ve been your Hostess and smell.”
Fortunately, a fellow named Georgi Gerganov made a C++-native port of Whisper that is easy to install and run on macOS and is optimized for Apple silicon. I downloaded and installed Gerganov’s version, downloaded the medium English model, and discovered that it could transcribe a podcast at rates up to 2x!
This was great, but the last thing I needed was to have to remember all the arcane command-line commands required to get the files in the right place. So instead, I wrote The Transcriptor, a Shortcut that lets me control-click on audio files and turn them into transcripts in a format of my choice. (I also pointed Whisper at an episode of Total Party Kill and it made a remarkably good subtitle track ready for uploading to YouTube.)
Who needs to remember all this stuff?Along the way I mentioned what I was doing to David Smith, who sent me his code for PodSearch so I could use it to generate my Upgrade archive. This apparently turned David on to Whisper and he’s since revived the site with Whisper-derived transcripts of seven podcasts, including Upgrade.
Then last week, Apple’s financial results came out. Rather than using Rev, which I had been using to generate and correct transcripts the past few years, I decide to use Whisper and The Transcriptor to do the job.
Other than a few hiccups involving using separate tools to record, transcribe, edit, and play back audio—I need to figure out a more complete workflow there—it worked spectacularly well. Over the years I’ve internalized all the Apple financial analyst call-specific phrases that the AI engine used by Rev would get wrong, which I’d need to correct. Almost all of them were rendered correctly by Whisper! I had to do less to get the transcript in good shape than I ever have before.
This is not to say that web apps like Rev aren’t always seeking better speech-to-text systems, and might even adopt Whisper themselves. And those services add other nice features—like the integration of audio playback and text editing—that definitely make editing a transcript easier than what I did. (I was editing in BBEdit and clicking into Overcast—playing back uploaded MP3 files at 1.5x speeds—when I needed to pause or back up.)
Still… this is amazing. If I have learned anything from this journey, it’s that the ability to generate high-quality, readable transcripts from podcast audio is going to be here soon. It’s not quite here yet—Whisper has quirks that make it better for searchable transcripts than actual reading, and it doesn’t identify speakers—but it’s perilously close now.
While reading a podcast transcript will never be the same as listening to the podcast, providing usable transcripts will make podcast content more accessible, searchable, and able to be referenced. It’s all just around the corner now.
Our experiences with modern day Internet search, what we’re doing with AI tools, actors and AI voice generation, and our favorite Black technologists.
Go to the podcast page.
With the Dynamic Island expanded as a song plays, you can select the scrubber with VoiceOver, and flick up or down to move through the track.… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
It’s the dead of winter, even in endless-summer California. Everything’s dormant. Gray. Cold and hazy. What better time to ponder the scary, the unthinkable—the existential threats to Apple.
Back in 1997, Apple was weeks or months away from bankruptcy, depending on who you ask. Of course, Steve Jobs came back and turned it around and instilled in the company a save-every-penny ethos that persists even as Apple has transformed into one of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world.
Given this mindset, it’s undoubtedly true that inside Apple, there are people thinking deep thoughts about the long-term future of Apple. With well over $100 billion in cash and enormous profits rolling in every quarter, Apple can afford to take the long view when it considers existential threats.
So why not perform that exercise ourselves? Apple’s riding high right now, but 25 years ago, it was at death’s door. Life comes at you fast. What could lay Apple low?
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
How you read Apple’s financial results really depends on what you want to see in them. We break down the numbers, ponder the state of Apple’s deisgn group, and reconsider what Apple may or may not be folding in the near future.
Go to the podcast page.
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.
This is the eighth year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category. I received 55 replies, with the average results as shown below:
Since I used largely the same survey as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion on all but one question compared to previous years. The net changes between 2021 and 2022 surveys is displayed below:
Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and commentary from the panelists.
Apple in 2022: The Six Colors report card is sponsored by Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. With Audio Hijack, you can record any audio on your Mac. Through the end of February, Six Colors readers can save $10 when you purchase with coupon code 6CAHTEN. Learn more and download a free trial today.
MacGrade: A- (average score: 4.2, median score 4, last year: 4.6)
Coming off the high of the release of Apple Silicon, the Mac has slid back for two consecutive years. There was plenty of praise for the M2 MacBook Air, but the delay to the M2 Mac mini and MacBook Pro—which didn’t get announced until January, when our survey was in the field—definitely led to the Mac taking a hit. Panelists also expressed frustration with the lack of updates to the iMac, the lack of a Mac Pro, and issues with the Studio Display.
James Thomson wrote: “The Mac Studio is fantastic, the Studio Display camera less so. The M2 Air is delightful, the M2 13″ MBP is perplexing. Aside from all that, the Mac Pro didn’t appear, nothing else got updated, and Ventura was a swift step backward in a number of ways, with yet another slightly different layer of window management added.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “Although we are still waiting for a Mac Pro, all the Apple silicon models are home runs. I’m on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio and I haven’t found a task that comes even close to stressing it out.”
John Gruber wrote: “MacOS 13 Ventura is a solid upgrade. The Apple silicon transition continued with another strong year. The MacBook Air is Apple’s most popular and most important Mac, and the M2 models that debuted at WWDC are the best laptops for most people ever made. Thin, light, fast, long-lasting battery life, and they even introduced the midnight colorway — the first truly ‘dark’ laptops from Apple since the last plastic PowerBook G3 all the way back in 2001. The Mac Pro was the one Mac that skipped the M1 generation of chips, but while disappointing, that omission was more than made up for by the addition of the Mac Studio, the ‘small tower for pros’ form factor that Mac users have been clamoring for ever since the discontinuation of the G4 Cube. Apple also finally (no sarcasm intended) introduced the reasonably-priced standalone 5K Studio Display. The built-in webcam is meh at best, but the display itself is wonderful, including the $300 option for “”nano-texture”” anti-glare/anti-reflective glass. This is my ideal display.”
Alex Cox wrote: “It still feels like a Mac Renaissance. With the redesigned MacBook Air, there feels like a ‘default’ to what most consumers want when they get an Apple (or any) laptop. The lack of a Mac Pro update is disappointing, but if the M series of Macs we’ve gotten so far are any indication, it will be worth the wait.”
Robert Carter wrote: “I have owned Macs since 2006 and I am more impressed with my M1 iMac and MacBook Air than I have ever been with any Mac. I am a person who really loves the Mac so that is saying a lot.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “It’s killing me that there’s nothing wrong with my 2017 13″ MacBook Pro, so I have no excuse to buy a black MacBook Air. I am, however, lobbying my workplace to issue me the 16″ MacBook Pro, even though there is also nothing wrong with my 2020 13″ MacBook Pro. In short, there was a lot to be excited about on the Mac side of the house this year. Bring on the accountants’ tears!”
Casey Liss wrote: “Apple’s transition to Apple Silicon has been better, if a touch slower, than anyone could have imagined. Every single new Mac Apple has shipped has been widely regarded as excellent. The MacBook Pro I bought at the end of 2021, equipped with a M1 Pro, has been amazing. But there is still some of the transition story still left to be told. The Mac Pro is still a big question mark. Personally, I still lament the lack of a 27″ iMac, or potentially even an iMac Pro.”
Christina Warren wrote: “It is unfortunate the M2 Pro/Max machines launched in January 2023, precluding them from being part of the discussion, but I still think this was a very strong year (again) for the Mac. The M2 was a nice iterative update, and with the M1 Ultra on the Apple Studio, we get a look at what Apple will be able to do if it takes on an Apple Silicon Mac Pro. I do have some complaints. The 27″ iMac doesn’t have a replacement in terms of screen size or features. I don’t think a Mac mini or Mac Studio and a display really does the same thing. The Studio Display is a flop. The built-in camera is an abomination and the inability to turn it off is the sort of design decision that the team who made it should be filleted for. I’m excited Samsung is coming out with some 5K display competition this year. My other complaint is that Apple needs to stop having 8GB of RAM as the default for its machines. It is now 2023 and this is unacceptable. I don’t care how fast swap on macOS makes RAM seem, I personally won’t buy a machine with under 32GB of RAM for any reason, but not even having the baseline at 16GB just comes across as stingy. The new MacBook Air is wonderful. But there is absolutely no reason for the 13-inch MacBook Pro to exist. All in all, a great year for the Mac.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “In 2022, I rediscovered the pleasure of working with macOS and having the freedom to install any app I want without judgement or limitations. Ultimately, there are two reasons why I can’t fully embrace Macs and, in particular, MacBooks as my main computing devices: I like convertible computers (like iPads) too much, and Macs don’t have a touchscreen. My question for 2023 and beyond is: can Macs become iPads sooner than iPads can become as capable as Macs? Rumors are unclear at this point, but it sounds like we’re entering a transitional phase that’s going to last a few years. For now, I can’t use a Mac full-time because I don’t want to be always be forced into using a laptop.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “My 2022 MacBook Air M2 with 24GB of RAM is the greatest Mac I’ve ever owned, and it’s not even close. The only debate I had was whether I wanted the M1 MacBook Pro or the M2 Air. I am pleased with my decision. Apple silicon is great.”
Philip Michaels wrote: “I think Apple’s ongoing transition to Apple silicon is proceeding nicely and putting Apple in a good place, even if some of the recent releases were more iterative than innovative.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “It’s very hard to fault Apple for anyone in a year they shipped the Mac Studio and M2-series chips. The Mac Studio has received an appropriately hearty welcome for folks in the consumer to professional range who wanted or needed the oomph. The overall line-up appears well populated, if aging just slightly. The Mac Pro has missed its promised window in 2022, but it’s more remarkable that Apple continues to upgrade and ship things on any kind of schedule. They’ve likely done better than any other consumer and professional electronics company, particularly with lockdowns and COVID raging in China. In a regular year, I might have given them a lower grade, but for this year, I feel like they’ve exceeded themselves.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Almost perfect. The Mac Studio is a huge leap forward, as is (comparatively) the M2 Air —and the Pro and mini versions of the M2 were only a couple of weeks off making it perfect. Sure, the Mac Pro hasn’t happened, but that’s more like the sprinkles on top of the sundae: optional.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “I know that people have machines that they are looking for Apple to still revise with Apple Silicon, I know that macOS Ventura has some pretty weird decisions, but in my opinion 2022 is one of the best years for the Mac in modern memory. The new MacBook Air is my favorite Mac of all time. It’s the perfect balance of what I want from a laptop, with ultimate portability and with way more power than I realistically need. It’s an almost impossible combination. As well as this, they launched a brand new Mac model this year! The Mac Studio is a great machine for those that want it. And the Studio Display (even with its faults), is the best monitor for me.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “The M2 Air is a great machine – I’m typing on one now, and I love it. It may be my favorite laptop since the 11″ Airs. The continued speed bumps on nearly all machines are welcome. Where is a larger iMac? I’d like to see it. The Mac Studio was somewhat surprising and unexpected. The lack of a Mac Pro means Apple whiffed on their two year transition, but it doesn’t bother me much.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “The Mac Studio is the machine I’ve been waiting years for. I’ve long been a fan of the Mac mini, which is a great machine for its price point. But the Studio I got this year blows my last mini out of the water is is an amazing bang for the buck.”
Andrew Laurence wrote: “Together, the Mac Studio and Studio Display are overdue breaths of fresh air. A function-first desktop computer, and a monitor that’s worthwhile for normal humans. After several years of incremental chaos, Ventura has been a mostly-peaceful upgrade experience.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “The MacBook Air saved the day for Apple on the Mac side in 2022 with a fantastic redesign and a nice set of feature upgrades. The Mac Studio is another appreciated addition that we’d heard whispers of in the form of a ‘smaller Mac Pro’ or a ‘bigger Mac mini’, but which was great to see come to fruition in its actual form with the speedy M1 Ultra chip option. But beyond those two products, Apple really seemed to drop the ball as Apple’s announced two-year transition window for Apple silicon has passed. No update for the iMac was also a disappointment.”
John Siracusa wrote: “I’m not dinging Apple for failing to ‘complete the transition’ to Apple Silicon in 2022. COVID continues to complicate the supply of… nearly everything. But the continued lack of a larger-than-24-inch iMac combined with the inability to transition all the existing plain-old-M1 Macs to the M2 means the Mac line lacks the luster of last year’s M1-powered supergroup. In fact, the strength of the M1 is one of the things propping up the Mac line in 2022. (That, and the less-than-shocking gains the M2 provides over the M1.) The new Studio Display was a pleasant surprise, in keeping with recent customer-pleasing changes like the return of the SD card slot and HDMI port to the MacBook Pros. Unfortunately, Apple tripped at the finish line by including a subpar camera—and by charging $400 for a height-adjustable stand and $300 for a matte screen. In early 2023, third-party displays from Samsung and Dell are already learning from Apple’s mistakes, at least in terms of bundled features and technology. Still, full points for finally filling this gap in the Mac lineup.”
David Sparks wrote: “I am still completely smitten with Apple Silicon Macs. The new M2 MacBook Air just continues the streak. Hopefully, Apple sticks the landing on the Apple Silicon transition with the new Mac Pro release. I, do, however, wish that the M2 Mac mini models had shipped in 2022.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Macs these days are truly amazing. I would like to see the quality of macOS and Apple’s Mac apps live up to the machines they’re running on.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I bought the Mac Studio, and have been pretty happy with it. I’ve been generally underwhelmed by Ventura, and I’m quite disappointed that ‘Advanced Data Protection’ leaves out Macs stuck on Monterey. I had to sign out on my MacBook, effectively making the device useless to me even though the hardware still has some life left in it. Stage Manager is… interesting? I feel like I’m fighting Stage Manager most of the time, constantly overriding its insistence on opening each new app on a separate stage. I’m not sure it’s adding much value to my workflow. The Studio Display could have been exciting, but for an expensive monitor it’s had some issues (camera quality, speaker issues) and I would have required an HDMI port for use with consoles at the very least so it wasn’t for me.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “It was great to see Apple finally throwing power desktop users a bone with the Mac Studio. I just wish the M2 MacBook Pro models arrived earlier. I genuinely feel bad about recommending the MBP M1 models to people in the fall.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “On the positive side, the Mac Studio is a great machine, and Apple is seemingly back in the display business. On the negative side, if you want the Mac Studio with an Apple display, it’s quite costly. There was no Apple new Silicon Mac Pro. No new 27” iMac. Ventura isn’t terrible, but it’s still littered with issues that have existed for several major releases. I’d love to see a “bug fix only” release some year. Never going to happen, but I can dream.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “Apple is entering the third year of its two-year transition to Apple silicon. While the company has been tight-lipped about why it missed its self-announced deadline, the Apple silicon machines that have shipped are all very impressive. The malaise that Mac hardware found itself in in the latter 2010s continues to fade into history. The Mac Studio and Studio Display in particular stand out when thinking about 2022, but the M2 MacBook Air is probably the highlight of the Mac’s year in hardware. On the software front, 2022 brought the first new productivity app from Apple in ages. Freeform isn’t as powerful as some third-party options, but it fits in nicely between the iWork apps and Notes. macOS continues to receive updates that let it keep up with iOS and iPadOS features, even if Stage Manager leaves something to be desired for many of us.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “Apple Silicon has, of course, been game-changing. I love seeing Apple continually producing more-and-more-powerful Mac models, and I also love that most of us Mac users—myself included—aren’t even coming close to maxing out the power of the M1. But, man, that battery life sure is nice! Unfortunately, macOS Ventura still leaves a LOT to be desired. Ventura remains sluggish, restarts often include painful (and incorrect) permissions requests, and it feels woefully undercooked. I wonder if Apple (and we Apple users) might be best served backing off the pace of expecting a new version of macOS every single year.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “With its own silicon, Apple is getting a huge opportunity in business beyond BYOD—something that will offer growth opportunity for a while.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “Performance, battery life, ports and a superb screen on the MacBook Pro — after years in the wilderness, the Mac is where it’s at again. My 14-inch MacBook Pro remains the cornerstone of my entire working life, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try the revised MacBook Air M2. I am delighted to report that this might be the best laptop of all time. I can run my entire business on this little beauty, and it can go everywhere with me. Apple’s theme seems to be about achieving the right set of compromises on more devices and the Midnight M2 Miraclebox is the epitome of the art of compromise.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Apple continues to ride Apple Silicon strengths on laptops, launching M2 chip with the flashy new MacBook Air. However, Apple ended 2022 with multiple Intel Macs still on sale, a situation that was clearly not the original plan. Doubts remain as to how exactly high-end desktop Macs will scale to Apple Silicon, namely Mac Pro and a high-end iMac. For instance, the M1 Ultra in Mac Studio is not slow by any means, but it isn’t exactly leaps and bounds ahead of the PC industry. It’s not as impressive a feat as what the M1 achieved for Apple’s laptop line. I’m glad the Studio Display exists, but what they shipped for version one didn’t quite hit the mark.”
Nick Heer wrote: “We still do not know what the M-powered Mac Pro is going to look like, but we got a whole new category in the form of the Mac Studio. The M2 MacBook Air is approaching something like the perfect laptop for most people. Aside from the aforementioned Mac Pro, the only thing in Apple’s lineup that seems incongruous is the continued availability of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. MacOS Ventura’s modest feature updates are both welcome and an indication of the platform’s maturity. I like Stage Manager and have used it more than I thought I would. I wish MacOS were more stable and refined than it feels. There have been years of backsliding, and filing reports in Feedback Assistant often feels as effective as whining into a paper bag. I know there are engineers at Apple who also care deeply about these issues and I wish they were listened to.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “The hardware continues to excel beyond expectations, and macOS Ventura has some features that might seem small but are really powerful, like Stage Manager and Continuity Camera. I’m forgiving them entirely for not coming out with the Mac Pro on time.”
Josh Centers wrote: “The Mac is actually… good now? At least on the hardware front. In terms of software, my complaint across the board is Apple is too invested in cramming in new features over bug fixes and reliability.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “In a year when some were doubtless disappointed that a favorite product wasn’t refreshed, the new (Mac Studio) and improved (MacBook Air) were worthy additions to the lineup, advancing the silicon transition.”
Christine Romero-Chan wrote: “Apple is definitely killing it with the M-series chips, but I’m still wondering when we are going to get a 27-inch iMac replacement with M2 (or M3, etc). The 24-inch is great, but what about those who want an all-in-one with a larger display size and 5K resolution?”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “I think the Mac lineup is extremely strong this year. The M2 MacBook Air is quickly becoming one of my favorite Macs ever. And the M1 iMac will probably sit on my desk for several years. Some will complain that there is no new Mac Pro, but they are certainly in the minority.”
Marco Arment wrote: “Apple-silicon Macs continue to blow us all away, and the M2 MacBook Air was the star of 2022 as the epitome of the era so far: light weight, zero noise, truly all-day battery life, and fast enough for almost anything — even workloads that required a pro-level desktop only a few years ago. macOS took a step back with Ventura’s awful new System Settings app, but the Mac hardware is so unbelievably great that we can look past the software warts this year.”
Adam Engst wrote: “Although it’s difficult to criticize what Apple did with the Mac in 2022, it’s easier to find fault with what the company didn’t do. Apple’s seeming move away from the extremely popular 27-inch iMac with Retina display has dismayed many users who were waiting for a version with Apple silicon. The combination of the Mac Studio and the Studio Display fits the same niche, but at a much higher price point. Plus, although the M1 Ultra Mac Studio is massively powerful, Apple still hasn’t released a Mac Pro with Apple silicon, leaving it as the sole remnant of the Intel era.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “With the M-class processors, Apple has created a new narrative around their laptops. They are computing super stars. As software developers gradually support the M1 better, I’ve seen tremendous speed boosts that should make Intel salivate. The hardware is impeccable. The tolerances on the MacBook Pro are some of the best in the industry, which has resulted in a sleek and powerful device.
Quinn Nelson wrote: “It’s easy to focus on the absence of Mac Pro and/or a lackluster macOS launch, but it’s important to remember how excellent the Mac Studio is—the first novel Mac desktop since the 2005 mini!—and how strong the entirety of the notebook lineup remains. The Mac has never been a better value than it is today.”
Jeff Carlson wrote: “It felt like a transition year for the Mac. After the somewhat unexpected (in performance) release of the M1 chips, the only notable release was the Mac Studio, which was a surprise in how powerful it is. The M2 MacBook Air is great, but despite the new welcome design, still felt like a bump.”
Dan Moren wrote: “The Mac Studio makes me wonder whether Apple really needs a Mac Pro in its lineup. And the end of the year supply chain issues seem to have backed up the higher-end M2 chips, leaving a pretty barren field going into 2023.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Midnight MacBook Air made me care about the M2. Mac Studio and Studio Display are nice to have around too.”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple made solid progress on the Mac by releasing the M2, but it missed its deadline of transitioning the entire lineup by the end of 2022.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “The highlight of the year has to be the Mac Studio, which seems like a success except for the multi-month shipping delays that extended into the fall. Otherwise it was a quiet year for hardware, except that the new MacBook Air gained a welcome 24 GB RAM ceiling. That’s OK since the rest of the hardware lineup is still solid. After many years of waiting, we finally got the Studio Display. As a display, it’s great, albeit pricey, however the camera is extremely disappointing, the audio and USB hub have been unreliable, and the lack of a power button causes a variety of problems. macOS continues to deteriorate in terms of reliability, and in general it seems like Apple has forgotten how to design Mac software. Many apps feel like iOS ports, and the services apps just don’t work very well. Aside from its own efforts, Apple continues to get in the way of third parties making good software. The Mac version of SwiftUI still doesn’t live up to Apple’s pitch.”
Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote: “Just finished my first full year with a M2 MacBook Pro, which I bought mostly to reward Apple for bringing back MagSafe. In truth, my MacBook Air was good enough for my needs — and not as heavy or as hot.”
iPhoneGrade: B+ (average score: 3.9, median score 4, last year: 4.0)
Like the Mac, iPhone scores also slid for the second straight year. (Given the smaller updates in the iPhone 13 and 14, that’s not surprising.) Despite expressing some boredom about the iPhone hardware, the panel largely had praise for iOS 16’s Lock Screen improvements and the Dynamic Island, and the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display was generally well received. The iPhone mini being discontinued was also a negative. This is tied for the lowest score Apple’s flagship product has ever received in this survey, but it’s still a strong score, all things considered.
Jean MacDonald wrote: “The iPhone 14 Pro camera(s) has been a significant upgrade, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I can do. I’ve been upgrading every year on the Apple Payment Plan, and this kind of improvement means I’ll probably continue to do that forever.”
Alex Cox wrote: “I think most people are bored with the iPhone. That’s not to say that the features the iPhone continues to add aren’t spectacular. The Dynamic Island is a great reminder of what Apple can do when it controls both software and hardware. I just wish/hope that Apple sees the iPhone like a laptop: an essential tool we’ll always need that deserves tweaks, but is also looking for the Next Big Thing.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “The Dynamic Island seemed like an interesting idea, but it seems like Apple hasn’t really done much with it.”
Philip Michaels wrote: “I’m a big fan of iOS 16 and like the way Apple implemented things like lock screen customization and the always-on display. I’m less impressed with the more deliberate effort to separate the iPhone 14 Pro models from the standard models — great if you like the Pro, less great if you want a more affordable phone. The iPhone SE is a disappointment, and it’s very clear Apple is ceding the midrange market to Samsung and even Google.”
Christine Romero-Chan wrote: “I’m happy to see more customization options in the form of the Lock Screen, but seriously, that’s one of the worst user interface experiences I’ve seen come from Apple. It needs serious fixing. Also, I would love to see more use come out of the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro, because right now it’s still pretty limited.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “The 14 line wasn’t particularly exciting, but they executed what they needed to. I am a big fan of the always-on display and Dynamic Island in the Pro Max. That’s enough for me to say it was a great year for the iPhone.”
David Sparks wrote: “It was a good year for the iPhone Pro. I dig this year’s camera upgrade and the Dynamic Island landed with me. It just makes me want Apple to put even more delight into its operating systems.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “Nothing to complain about on iPhone, but moving year to year on the phones provides only tiny changes in capability and power.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “Close to ideal in a hard year. The iPhone 14 Pro is definitely the best iPhone I’ve ever owned and it has particular features, like the 48MP raw mode for shooting, that are just outstanding and even a little mind-boggling. Apple didn’t hit every mark, and I think the confusion over whether a modern SE or newer iPhone mini should appear… well, I feel like they don’t totally get the audience for smaller devices.”
John Gruber wrote: “Not a groundbreaking year for iPhone, but it’s neither possible nor desirable to break new ground every year. iOS is 15 years old and it’s appropriate for Apple to treat it as a mature platform, because that’s what it is. iOS 16 is a solid upgrade, with much of Apple’s efforts seemingly directed at polish and reliability. Both technically and conceptually, iOS has a solid foundation. It’s a shame that the Mini was dropped from the iPhone 14 lineup. But big-ass phones are more popular than elegant small ones, so the addition of the iPhone 14 Plus—Apple’s first non-Pro 6.7-inch iPhone—is a net win. My biggest gripe about the iPhone 14 Pro models remains their use of polished stainless steel for the sides. It feels slippery at times, and steel is so much heavier than aluminum (or, cough, titanium). I bought a 14 Pro because of the camera system and other Pro-exclusive features, but I’d prefer those features in an iPhone that feels like and weighs as little as the non-pro iPhone 14. The Dynamic Island is a wonderfully inventive design: useful, attractive, fun.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “I’m a staunch serial upgrader when it comes to the new iPhone every year—for journalism’s sake, sure, but also because the iPhone is the lifeblood of my digital being. I love my 14 Pro Max, but hoping Apple is more committed to improving the Dynamic Island than they were 3D Touch or the Touch Bar.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Nothing very special? It’s the iPhone, the chips reportedly didn’t quite hit the mark that it wanted but most people didn’t notice, iOS is fine, the supertanker sails on.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Effectively having 2x and 3x zoom on iPhone 14 Pro is my favorite new thing this year.”
Aleen Simms wrote: “I love the whimsy and functionality the Dynamic Island brings to iPhone.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “I love my new 14 Pro, but, honestly, it’s more phone than I need.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “It’s still an iPhone. While it remains one of the best mobile phones, I’m not sure there is the spark that lures in new users or convinces an existing user to upgrade. I’m finding less incremental value in upgrades and this year was a tiny improvement to my day-to-day life.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “As always, there was a little change to the iPhone 14, with the exception of the very big change of the 48 MP sensor for the iPhone 14 Pro. This makes the iPhone a true competitor for “real” cameras. I am extremely impressed of the quality of photos that this iPhone can take, compared to previous models. Especially when shooting in raw.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “iPhone updates have largely been iterative for a number of years now, but there were some nice updates in 2022, particularly on the Pro side with the always-on display, the clever Dynamic Island (which has yet to see its potential tapped), and a 48-megapixel camera. The non-Pro phones were more of a status quo update. The new iPhone SE was a welcome upgrade for those people who still prefer Touch ID and a budget price tag. It’s not for everyone, but those whose previous SE or iPhone 7/8 devices were getting long in the tooth, they’ve now got a few more years of familiarity in their pockets.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “I’m not overly impressed with the iPhones 14 this year. I have one, of course, but the functional delta between the 14 and the 13 is a bit undercooked. Mostly, I’m upset that the iPhone mini has not survived. Based upon the very anecdotal vocal minority from which I hear, I think an iPhone mini Pro would’ve turned a LOT of people on to that model, and may have saved the size for those of us who really prefer a true one-handed iPhone.”
John Moltz wrote: “No iPhone 14 mini. Boo. Otherwise the updates are fine, if not exceptional.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “As part of my yearly theme for 2023, I’ve been playing around with Android lately. I purchased a Google Pixel 7, used it for a couple of weeks, and returned it. The degree of focus and refinement Apple puts on the iPhone platform is vastly superior compared to the Mac and iPad (not a surprise, given how much money the iPhone makes them). I love my iPhone 14 Pro Max and how the iOS 16 UI is optimized for it. The Dynamic Island is Apple at its best: instead of trying to hide an even larger sensor cutout, they outright embraced it, turning it into an innovative interface element that combines hardware and software to achieve the unique interplay of distinct components Apple is well known for. The always-on display has been a success for me too, allowing me to more easily keep an eye on music playback and incoming notifications in a way that wasn’t possible before. The one aspect of the iPhone experience I’m still not fully convinced by is photography. More specifically, how iOS processes the images captured by the iPhone’s camera. For the past few years, iPhone photos have had that particular iPhone “look” that often feels kind of boring and muted, and I’d like Apple to improve this aspect of the experience. On balance, and especially after having tried Android again, it’s apparent to me that it doesn’t get any better than iOS and iPhone when it comes to Apple’s focus, design ethos, and innovation on mobile devices. This is where Apple never drops the ball.”
Nick Heer wrote: “iOS is a mature operating system, so it’s notable to see Apple completely redo core features like the Lock Screen. It is still identifiable as an iPhone Lock Screen, of course, but Apple leaned into users’ customization, and I appreciate that. There are lots of great little changes in iOS 16 like improvements to Focus modes and editing in Messages. But there is still a disappointing feeling of fragility.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “iPhone hardware and iOS seem to be in decent shape. I usually upgrade my phone every two years, but I skipped this one because there was no new iPhone mini, and the regular iPhone 14 got a relatively minor update. The Dynamic Island is interesting. Lock Screen customization is welcome but awkward and limited. The camera seems to be slipping a bit versus the competition, and photos sometimes look too processed and fake.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Things with the iPhone were very good this year. The Dynamic Island is classic Apple: instead of a hole punch and a potential eyesore, Apple worked within the constraints to come up with something that is seriously delightful. I still wish the tap and long-press gestures were reversed. However, even with this paper cut, I still love the Dynamic Island. Beyond the obviously useful things like timers, podcasts, or music, It’s also excellent for following sports games, as well as when flying. I do wish the non-Pro phones still got the new processors, instead of last year’s leftovers, but this is a reasonable place to draw the line. I much prefer this over the Max (née Plus) phones getting the good cameras, and the human-sized phones not. I’m a little underwhelmed with the new camera. Perhaps it’s user error, but I don’t feel like my photos with my 14 Pro are noticeably improved over the 13 Pro. Though I do quite like having the 2× ‘lens’.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “I wish I hadn’t traded in my iPhone 13 Mini for the iPhone 14 Pro. It was small and pink and my new phone is not better enough that I don’t miss that. I was lured by the apparent coolness of the Dynamic Island, but in practice, it’s just not that amazing. Cool demo aside, I don’t feel like there was any really super compelling reason for folks with a 13 series phone of any stripe to upgrade this year — although I do actually like the dark purple.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “The Dynamic Island was exciting at first, but I think that wore off quickly. I like the Lock Screen changes in iOS 16 and changes to the Focus feature, and while I like my iPhone 14 Pro Max, I feel like the non-Pro iPhone 14 models are some of the most disappointing iPhones ever, at least for anyone with an iPhone 13.”
Christina Warren wrote: “The iPhone lineup this year, like every year, is good. I’m no longer wowed by the iPhone the way I once was, but that also doesn’t matter. The iPhone remains the best phone available. RIP to the iPhone mini, a phone I know plenty loved, but as someone with genuinely small hands (child like is a better descriptor), the size was still too large to use one-handed so I’ve gone all in on the big phone life. The cameras continue to improve and at this point, Apple is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to chip prowess in mobile devices that it doesn’t even need to try anymore. As for iOS 16, this release cycle seemed to go better than in the past. I love the new update offering E2EE for iCloud—fantastic move. And the new Home Screen stuff is really fun. The Dynamic Island is a bit of a gimmick but also can be genuinely useful. I did turn off the always-on mode for my phone immediately. I don’t need that, but it’s nice to see Apple match what Android and even Nokia have done for forever.”
James Thomson wrote: “The Dynamic Island is the smartest bit of symbiotic software and hardware design I’ve seen Apple do in years. The options for home screen customization are a lot more than I expected I’d get, and still a lot less than I wanted. Phone hardware is boringly excellent, and the new safety features could genuinely save lives.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “I’m saddened by the loss of the iPhone Mini. I still (still!) want a smaller phone, but with the best possible camera. Apple never made that, and thus I never bought it, but my purchase of larger phones doesn’t mean it’s what I actually want. The 14 Pro is very nice. The Dynamic Island needs work though, and ultimately was overhyped and isn’t so hot to me.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “I really like the iPhone 14 Pro. It’s a minor upgrade over the iPhone 13 Pro. But man, my screen is scratched to hell. To hell, I say. I don’t use a case but haven’t used a case in three phones. This is the most scratch-prone iPhone screen for me in some time.”
Cherlynn Low wrote: “The iPhone 14 Pro got me to finally ditch a Pixel as my main and switch to Apple. Enough said.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “iPhone 14 was a bit of a bust, except for the Plus bringing a bigger screen to a more accessible price point — a greatly welcomed change. Dynamic Island showcased classic Apple care in attention to detail, with plenty of room to expand its utility down the road. I liked the colorful default Always-On Display; it was both distinctive and technically impressive. The camera was a little bit of a let-down. You can get some great shots out of the iPhone 14 Pro, but it requires shooting RAW and doing manual edits after the fact. The ‘point and shoot’ camera quality does not feel like it benefitted much from the new lens; it feels like the software is not fulfilling the potential of the hardware.”
Adam Engst wrote: “Perhaps this falls into the category of beating a dead horse, but it’s disappointing that Apple moved away from the form factor used for the iPhone 13 mini. Presumably, total sales volume doesn’t support the small form factor, but there are still plenty of people who want it. Pick up an old iPhone 5 these days and you’ll be amazed at how small it feels in your hand and pocket.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “The iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island is the biggest UI change to come to iOS since the iPhone X ditched the home button back in 2017. Having quick access to media controls, sports scores, weather and more, from anywhere in the system, makes the iPhone feel more useful and alive, somehow. The iPhone’s take on the always-on display was decidedly whimsical, with Apple keeping a user’s wallpaper on the display all the time. But when iOS 16.2 added a toggle to disable the always-on wallpaper, I flipped the switch and went to the all-black background. Speaking of Lock Screen widgets… I love this feature, but would like to see Apple add more flexibility in terms of layout and design. As inventive as the iPhone 14 Pro is, the regular iPhone 14 is a bit of a swing and a miss. And hopefully this is the last crop of iPhones with Lighting. USB-C is here to stay, and I don’t even mind if Apple claims faster file transfers for things like 4K ProRes video are the reason for the switch.”
Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote: “iOS still works for me, but I’m a frog that’s been slowly parboiled. I fear for anyone coming fresh to an operating system so deeply honeycombed with hidden operations.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The iPhone 14 family is great, and iOS 16 is mature and stable with lots of great user features and developer APIs. Both iOS and the iPhone have gotten fairly boring, but in very good ways: they rarely have widespread bugs or issues, and just quietly keep working for us all day, every day, in the vast array of wildly varying tasks and circumstances in which we ask them to perform.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “This has been one of the few years where software has surpassed hardware. The iPhone 14 is by no means a bad phone, but the real star of 2022 is iOS 16.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “While I can’t say there was anything super-exciting this year, the camera improvements in the Pro were more noticeable than I expected. And as a former mountain-rescue and ski-patroller (and current disaster response paramedic) the idea of widespread satellite emergency beacons is super compelling. I may not be ready to ditch my Garmin, but for the average adventurer (or person driving outside cell coverage) this is game changing for safety.”
Josh Centers wrote: “The iPhone feels stagnant, and new features feel increasingly irrelevant and even complicate what was once a simple experience.”
John Siracusa wrote: “The iPhone continues to be a great product, but it is now ever-so-slightly overdue for a refresh to address the closest things it has to weaknesses. It’s time for the camera bump to be… rethought, if not reduced. What used to be a cluster of lenses tucked into the corner of the phone now takes up the majority of the width of the device and prevents it from laying flat when set down on a surface. The Dynamic Island makes some pretty good lemonade out of the lemons of the front-facing sensor array. The whimsy of the Dynamic Island is appreciated, but its features with the most practical benefit would work just as well on a true all-screen iPhone—and would spare us a baby black hole at the top of our devices. Someday.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “With unmatched power and stellar camera performance, the iPhone remains solid, but it’s beginning to feel heavy and dare I say it, unexciting.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “Good solid year, with a few features that set the iPhone apart like satellite and Dynamic Island.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Months later, I find myself thinking the iPhone 14 line was a pretty meh update. The Pro’s Dynamic Island feels like it could be revolutionary, but it’s still not widely adopted and probably won’t be until it spreads through the entire line-up. iPhone updates are feeling increasingly incremental, which makes me wonder if there are any big surprises left for the smartphone market?”
iPadGrade: C (average score: 3.0, median score 3, last year: 3.7)
The iPad took a precipitous fall to its lowest score in the history of this survey. There was some praise for the iPad 10th generation, but even that product got dinged for its confusing Apple Pencil story—and the fact that its new features make the rest of the product line feel antiquated. A treading-water update for the iPad Pro and the rough introduction of Stage Manager seem to be the biggest culprits in the bad mood of our panelists.
Myke Hurley wrote: “Apple had one job to do with the iPad Pro and they couldn’t get it done. They’ve left the lineup incredibly confusing with the new iPad. But that does look like a great device for those that need it.”
John Gruber wrote: “I’d have scored this lower if not for the solid improvements to the consumer-level iPad hardware in 2022. It’s great that the 10th-gen no-adjective iPad starts at just $450 and brings that model into the modern ‘all-screen/no home-button’ design era. I can’t help but believe that if not for COVID and two years of work-from-home and severe travel restrictions between the U.S. and China, that we’d have seen a design refresh for the iPads Pro in 2022. It feels like just another sign that among Apple’s three personal computing platforms, iPad comes last in terms of attention. Stage Manager on the iPad isn’t appealing and feels half-baked conceptually. The iPad experience offered much more clarity — which I found satisfying, if at times frustrating — in the early 2010s, when it was just a big iPhone. Conceptually I find advanced usage of iPadOS to be muddled.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “It seems like the iPad Pro is inching closer to being a computer with some serious software limitations. I guess. I’m all about the iPad Mini, and it didn’t get an update this calendar year.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “The hardware continues to improve, but iPadOS is a bit of a mixed bag. I’d love to see more pro-level apps on the iPad. While I wait for those, the iPad mini remains my favourite of the bunch.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The iPad story seems lost, erratically delivering multitasking features every few years such as Stage Manager that are too confusing for novices yet too limited for power users.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “The iPad seems to have stagnated in the past couple of years, but there was a solid line up from the iPad pro models down to the less expensive models. The iPad Pro models are still expensive, however, but I don’t imagine that will change.”
Aleen Simms wrote: “The iPad product line is more robust than it’s ever been, but none of the models fits my needs well.”
Alex Cox wrote: “People who are more passionate about the iPad have better words to convey the dismay and frustration most of us feel—but I will say I sold off my M1 iPad Pro. I have an iPad mini I love, yet I realize I’m using it more like my phone because I LIKE my phone way more than I liked my iPad Pro the past few years.”
James Thomson wrote: “Even if I hadn’t spent the majority of the summer working on support for an iPadOS feature that turned out to be underwhelming, I would still be down on the iPad this year. Again we didn’t see the pro apps that justified the powerful hardware, and Stage Manager was equal parts constrained and confusing. Did the iPad Pros get updated this year? I genuinely had to look it up. The new entry-level iPad is at least interesting, but the Pencil situation is a mess.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “It’s a little hard to suss out the iPad line as it currently stands, given the new iPad Air an older iPad Pros. But that seems like a minor issue when compared to the iPad multitasking situation. Stage Manager was late, and confusing when it finally arrived.”
Robert Carter wrote: “I think the iPad models are a bit confusing. My wife, however, does love her new iPad Air.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “Lots of new and interesting tech, but the iPad has become such a moving target in terms of both capability and interface that the new ones include an extra helping of confusion.”
John Siracusa wrote: “It’s hard to tell if the iPad line suffered from supply constraints or underinvestment in 2022. The new no-suffix iPad includes a lot of new thinking from Apple, including a repositioned camera and a new key layout and keyboard attachment method. But the use of the (very) old Apple Pencil design is galling, even if it is technically explicable. It’s Apple’s job to solve these design challenges, not our job to live with them. And then there’s the iPad Pro line, which didn’t benefit from any of the “new thinking” from its cheaper sibling. If Apple can’t justify the expense required to update the features of the iPad Pro as frequently as the lower-end models, then at least try to synchronize the rollout of the biggest changes to hit the whole line at the same time. As a bonus, doing so might have given Apple more time to figure out the Pencil situation and avoid shipping another awkward dongle.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Conceptually, Stage Manager doesn’t do it for me. M2 iPad Pros exist, but that’s about all I can say for “new” Pro models.”
Casey Liss wrote: “While I’m as perplexed and overwhelmed by the iPad lineup as anyone, I do think that the iPad hardware is mostly quite impressive. I just wish Apple had a clearer story in damned near every capacity: Fewer models, and/or a clearer delineation between them. More powerful software, which doesn’t stand in my way in both expected and unexpected ways. And consistency between the models—I so desperately wish my brand-new M2 iPad Pro had a landscape-mounted camera. Although I’m using and enjoying my iPad Pro more than I have in a while, I can’t deny that the iPad story is messy at best, and lost at sea at worst.”
Joe Macirowski wrote: “The years when the best features aren’t all available on any one device at any price point at all are not fun for would-be buyers or the people likely reading this article who are consulted for Apple related buying advice by their friends, family, and coworkers.”
David Sparks wrote: “The iPad is fine. That is, and continues to be, the problem.”
John Moltz wrote: “The iPads are all individually great devices and I continue to be impressed by the value exhibited in the base iPad model. However, it’s a confusing lineup with a lot of overlap.”
Christina Warren wrote: “The new iPad feels like the right device for its audience. However, the increase in price and the fact that it still uses the first generation Apple Pencil is ridiculous. I’m glad it has USB-C, but that makes charging the old pencil that much harder. Total fail. It’s software where I get so frustrated. Four years in, iPadOS doesn’t feel any more finished or ready for ‘real’ work the same way macOS is. I know you can. I know people do. But it’s not good enough. Especially not when it costs the same as a MacBook Air or 13″ MacBook Pro once a keyboard is priced in. The iPad suffers, I think, because it has no competition of any kind. Only at the very low end or in niches like E-Ink does iPad have anyone else even selling tablets. And honestly, I think it hurts the overall product.”
Jeff Carlson wrote: “This is getting to be an old record. Hardware great, software still lacking. Stage Manager seems like a nifty idea only partially implemented (and I’ve since turned it off on my 11-inch iPad Pro).”
Charles Arthur wrote: “This would have been higher but for all the madness of the “works with a Pencil, no not THAT Pencil the other Pencil, also not THAT keyboard, the other keyboard” in the latest round of releases. We still seem to be waiting for some big breakthrough – OLED? – that will take the whole thing forward again.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “As always, the software seems to be letting down the hardware. iPadOS continues to feel limited. Stage Manager seems half-baked, and its system requirements are too steep.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “I have not been an iPad user for several years, and 2022 didn’t change that. Even ignoring all of the Stage Manager bugs that shipped, Apple hasn’t come close to a great multitasking design for a primarily touch-oriented UI environment. If Apple wants people like me to take the iPad seriously, it needs to get far closer to the productivity of a Mac experience. And the state of Stage Manager, even today following several OS updates, doesn’t inspire confidence that will ever happen.”
Nick Heer wrote: “The current lineup of iPads and accessories is confusing, but I do not think that was the biggest frustration with iPads for 2022. No, the greatest disappointment has been the rocky launch of iPadOS 16. When Stage Manager was announced, it felt like an appropriate evolution in the iPad story: a bigger, better multitasking experience that took advantage of the most powerful iPads for the most demanding users. Instead, its rollout has been a catastrophe. What was supposed to be an amazing year for iPad Pro users turned into something of a dud. Hopefully it will get fixed in 2023.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “The 10th-generation iPad was the big winner this year with its complete redesign, although it unfortunately comes with a significantly higher price tag that will come back down over time. The M2 iPad Pro models aren’t much more than a minor spec bump as Apple awaits a bigger splash with a rumored transition to OLED, while the iPad Air was a similarly small upgrade and the iPad mini hasn’t received any upgrades since its 2021 overhaul.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “You know it’s a bad year when the highlight of Apple’s tablet lineup for 2022 is the 10th-gen iPad. It’s not a bad device (at all!), but it has the wrong price and further confuses the lineup. The iPad Pro update was insultingly lazy, Stage Manager is half-baked, and the lineup seems more fragmented than ever. Only the base-model iPad has pro features—like a function row on its keyboard and a landscape camera.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the iPad lineup is a mess. The 10th-generation iPad and M1 iPad Air make the M2-powered 11-inch iPad Pro seem both expensive and redundant. Besides the cost/price confusion in the iPad line, the mismatch of features between the various products makes me think that something in Apple’s plans derailed over the last couple of years. I can’t imagine it was the initial plan to ship the 10th-generation iPad with its function keys and its camera-on-the-correct-side, all just to sell it with the first-generation Apple Pencil. And why didn’t the iPad Pro get some of these changes when it got bumped to the M2? Something doesn’t add up here. Then there’s iOS 16 and Stage Manager. Lots of digital ink has been spilled on the subject, and I think it’s clear that Apple missed the mark with this new feature. It should have spent more time incubating within the company before shipping as the hot mess it still is as of iPadOS 16.2. iPad power users simply deserve better.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “The biggest problem for the iPad in 2022 was its software story. I don’t think I need to get into the details of Stage Manager again or how Apple shipped an incoherent, confusing multitasking interface that gets in the way of getting work done more than facilitating it. I’ll say this: I think it’s great that I can now use my iPad Pro with an external display and have a separate set of app windows on it. The problem is everything else: in practical terms, aside from more concurrent windows onscreen, iPadOS 16 doesn’t let me get more things done on a daily basis compared to iPadOS 15. I want to continue loving the iPad, but I also need to get my work done and I’m tired of having to rely on supplementing my iPad Pro with a Mac mini to do all the things I need to do. At the moment, the iPad seems to be stuck in this limbo of ‘more than a tablet but not quite a desktop-class computer,’ and I think it’s time for Apple to do some soul-searching and make up its mind. The device is called iPad Pro, but this gray area surely doesn’t help pro users at all.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “The 5th-gen iPad Air really started the year strong, putting the M1 into hands of the “not Pro” crowd. Of course, the M2 iPad Pro released later in the year upped the ante even more. The iPad lineup—including the not-to-be-forgotten iPad mini—is really a strong family right now; perhaps the strongest it’s ever been from an offers-and-functionality standpoint.”
Christine Romero-Chan wrote: “The 10th generation iPad is a bit of an awkward one. I love that it’s now USB-C and doesn’t have a Home button anymore, but that adapter dongle for the first generation Apple Pencil? Ouch. It’s also priced weird, too, considering that the iPad Air is not that much more expensive anymore. Also, Stage Manager is still just meh, not very impressive.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “I think the biggest disappointment for me is that the camera on the iPad Pro didn’t move to the proper position at the top of the screen (in landscape) as it did for the 10th-gen iPad. Whatever the reason, I’m sure it will be sorted out next time. Stage Manager is more useful for me on iPad, though not perfect. It’s certainly a lot better than previous multi-window options on iPad, but there’s still room for improvement. I think the iPad product lineup is confusing and in need of some cuts. There’s the iPad mini, iPad 9th-Gen, iPad 10th-gen, iPad Air, and the iPad Pro in two sizes. This is too many iPads. It’s also too many for Apple’s designers, as they can’t seem to keep the design consistent enough between them all.”
Joe Rossignol wrote: “iPadOS 16’s new Stage Manager feature broke Federico Viticci’s heart, and the 10th-generation iPad is a confusing mess.”
Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote: “Had several. Gave them all away. I have no use for the form factor.”
Dan Moren wrote: “That base level iPad is almost a great update across the board…but then they had to go and stick the original Apple Pencil in it. Meanwhile, the Pros don’t the landscape-orientation camera? Seems like Apple’s found itself stuck in the middle of a transition, and despite having a lot of good products, none of them feel like a clear winner right now. Meanwhile, iPadOS still founders, especially with Stage Manager’s continuing bugs. There’s still a ton of unexploited power in the hardware that the software isn’t bearing out, and I almost wish I could just run macOS on it.”
Josh Centers wrote: “I don’t think Apple knows what to do with the iPad. High-end iPads are as expensive as Macs, but less capable. The iPad is just kind of there.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “It feels like Groundhog’s Day with iPadOS every year, standing at odds with the top-notch hardware of the iPad. I’m perfectly happy with my 2021 iPad mini as a consumption device and light work like email triaging. The iPad 10 is the weirdest iPad Apple’s ever made.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “iPad hardware continues to shine, but iPadOS continues to… not. Someday Apple will figure out multitasking on tablets. Someday.”
Wearables and Apple WatchWearables: Grade: A (average score: 4.4, median score 4, last year: 4.0)
Apple Watch only: Grade: A- (average score: 4.2, median score 4, last year: 3.6)
Things are good in wearables land. The Apple Watch Ultra refreshed that product line, and AirPods continue to impress as well. (We began asking about Wearables as a whole in 2019, which is why there are two sets of scores in this category.)
Myke Hurley wrote: “The Ultra is awesome. It’s shame that they Series 8 did not get a meaningful jump all around. Still waiting on that redesign. AirPods Pro 2 are stupendously good.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra is the biggest departure from the original’s design that we’ve seen so far, at least in terms of physical design. I’ve been wearing mine daily since it shipped and truly love its combination of larger size, incredible battery life and rugged construction. Sure, watchOS could take better advantage of the larger screen, but the same could be said for iOS, so I’m willing to mostly overlook it. The rest of the 2022 Apple Watch lineup is far more pedestrian, but shouldn’t be overlooked. Year-over-year, the Series 8 isn’t a big upgrade, but if you have a Series 4 or 5 on your wrist, it’s a really nice jump in terms of features. Apple’s AirPods line continues to do well, with the second-generation AirPod Pros 2 being universally acclaimed. I upgraded from an aging pair of AirPods 2 and couldn’t be happier with them. Meanwhile, the costly AirPods Max are now two years old, and due for an upgrade that should include better sound quality, USB-C support and a new carrying case. Really, even just the last one would be more than welcome for anyone who has had to wrestle with the worst case Apple has shipped since the atrocity it sold for the first-generation iPad back in 2010.”
Philip Michaels wrote: “The split between the Apple Watch Ultra and Apple Watch is how Apple should handle the differentiation between a high-end product and something for a broader audience. If only the watch people and the phone people were allowed to talk to one another.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “The updated AirPods Pro continue to dominate, and as a frequent flyer the upgraded noise cancellation makes a real difference. The Apple Watch Ultra looks awesome, but the battery life still keeps me on my Garmin for adventures.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “AirPods Pro 2 were the upgrade I’ve been waiting for. They sound as good as massive Sony earbuds from a few years ago.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “Apple Watch gets high marks for the Ultra, but the Series 8 was the first time I didn’t choose to upgrade every year because it just didn’t offer enough. The lineup of AirPods now is impressive and if you include the Beats line they have offerings for every ear type. Noise cancellation improvements are also impressive.”
Alex Cox wrote: “I giggled when Tim Cook introduced Apple Watch as their ‘most personal device’ in the age of innocence that was 2015. Here we are, and it’s absolutely true. My phone might hold the data my watch gives it, but this thing on my wrist has made me personally healthier and to my surprise, safer. I used to joke that Apple is the only company I’d trust with my menstrual physical, but the U.S. Supreme Court made that monkey’s paw bit into a harsh reality. The AirPods family is by far the best-augmented reality experience you can get for the price with its transparency mode.”
Jean MacDonald wrote: “After the Apple Watch, the AirPods Pro are my most used device. The new ones were worth waiting for. They are easily misplaced, so having a built-in speaker is a big deal. And being able to adjust volume with a gesture fixes the most glaring annoyance of the AirPods since they were first released.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “Apple Watch Ultra has set a new standard, and so have the AirPods Pro.”
Josh Centers wrote: “The Apple Watch feels like a finished product at this point. The Series 8 doesn’t add anything significant, but it doesn’t need to. The Apple Watch Ultra is an exciting product. The AirPods continue to be great, aside from their fundamental disposability.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Apple Watch Ultra is the boost I needed to stay interested. AirPods Max are unchanged but excellent. AirPods Pro 2 apparently adds Adaptive Transparency, but has anyone experienced the feature?”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “The AirPods are leading what seems like an entirely new category, and with a steep price. They are THAT good. The latest AirPods Pro aren’t a huge leap forward but they are a solid iteration on a design that works well for most people. The Watch Ultra was a nice surprise even if it was a bit niche with little to grab me. But, that’s the thing about the Apple Watch. It’s easy to use the same watch for multiple years without feeling like I’m missing out.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The second-generation AirPods Pro improved an already excellent product. Apple Watch Ultra was a bold risk to expand the watch lineup, and it worked out very well, with seemingly strong sales and an excellent critical reception. While the Apple Watch Ultra is a great new addition to the lineup, the Series 8 is almost unchanged from the Series 7, which was itself only a moderate upgrade from the Series 6. watchOS still holds back much of the Apple Watch’s usefulness and style, and Apple still needs to give users and developers more flexibility with the design of watch faces and complications.”
John Moltz wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra, while not for me, shows that the company still has the ability to ship a product with some real sizzle.”
Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote: “AirPods Pro 2 hit the sweet spot for me. Sound fine and don’t fall out too often. Silent applause for the noise cancelling.”
Adam Engst wrote: “it’s a little disappointing to see Apple put so much effort into the Apple Watch Ultra, which large swaths of the population won’t even consider because it’s just too big. Perhaps the size is necessary to fit all the tech that Apple crammed in there, but it feels like another situation where Apple is focusing on larger people instead of smaller ones.”
Robert Carter wrote: “Being an audio user, I love the new AirPods Pro second generation. They work well and sound great.”
Casey Liss wrote: “While the Apple Watch Ultra is not at all for me, I’m pleased to see Apple trying new things with the Apple Watch. The incremental improvements in the rest of the line are fine, but I feel like it’s time to do something with the main watch lineup. I think the AirPods Max are due for a refresh, hopefully to right some of the dubious choices the original product made.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “The new AirPods Pro are great. Apple Watch Ultra is a cool expansion of the lineup. However, I had hoped that the baseline watches — the ones that I actually buy — would have gotten more changes than they have done. The Watch has plenty of headroom to grow, but the hardware and watchOS only received very incremental improvements in 2022.”
John Gruber wrote: “Apple Watch Ultra is a splendid new interpretation of what an Apple Watch can be. It’s obviously more rugged, but the larger screen and significantly longer battery life offer serious advantage even for the un-athletic and unadventurous. Titanium is an excellent material, more durable than aluminum and far lighter than steel. (Would be cool if, next year, they offer it in a dark-tinted titanium too.) Software-wise, watchOS has seemingly achieved platform maturity. Apple knows what watchOS is for, users agree, and they continue to polish and improve it. I loved my first-gen AirPods Pro and didn’t think I’d see a need to replace them with the new second-gen model, but holy hell are both the noise cancellation and transparency modes improved. Making the case Find My compatible is a nice addition too. When they were announced in September, I wrote, ‘The new AirPods Pro are the best single expression of Apple as a company today. Not the most important product, not the most complicated, not the most essential. But the one that exemplifies everything Apple is trying to do. They are simple, they are useful, and they offer features that most people use and want.’ Having owned and used them daily for months now, I stand by that.”
Cherlynn Low wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra outdid the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro and the Pixel Watch and of the three most anticipated smartwatches this year, it was the only one that really impressed.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “AirPods are not the best product on the market at their price point. I’m not sure what the selling point for the AirPods Pro actually is.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “Apple Watch Ultra was by far my favorite Apple product of the last year. You don’t have to be a diver or marathoner to appreciate the big screen! AirPods Pro 2 are a worthy upgrade over the originals; it’s a little thing, but that charging status light on the case is a huge help.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “AirPods Pro 2 are one of the greatest products Apple has ever created.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “I don’t see how they could have done better or more: features, execution, product line, and even pricing. I’m not in the audience for the Ultra, but I bought a Watch 8 this year for all the features it packed into it, and I have no regrets in not owning one between a first-generation Watch (sold after six months) and a few months ago. It offers me all the health features I want, I love the Sleep mode integrated across my Watch and iPhone, and I don’t find myself frustrated with anything. It’s often a delight.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Temperature sensing on my Apple Watch is so cool. It’s the main reason I bought a new watch, even though my Series 6 watch is fine.”
Rosemary Orchard wrote: “I love my Apple Watch Ultra. I wish it came in a smaller size, but despite having genuinely tiny wrists, it’s awesome.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “The Watch does well on battery life, screen size and speed. The AirPods Pro are a smart move forward. There’s a lot more room to expand into with wearables, it seems like. And maybe there will be more this year? Who knows?”
Eric Slivka wrote: “Love, love, love the Apple Watch Ultra even though I’m not out there doing extreme sports. I am an athlete and love the bigger screen and rugged design for tracking workouts, and it’s simply a great blend of functional and stylish, and it really is a bargain when you consider what you get in comparison to a regular stainless steel Apple Watch. The Series 8 is more of a disappointment with not much new to report, while the updated SE gives a nice budget pick that will serve users well for years to come. And thankfully, the Series 3 has finally been put out of its misery. On the AirPods side, the AirPods Pro 2 are a really nice upgrade with lots of little improvements that really add up. AirPods 3 were a late 2021 update that also brought some really nice upgrades for those buying in 2022. AirPods Max continue to be a bit of a mystery, now lagging behind the AirPods Pro 2 in several features with no sign of an update.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “AirPods Pro are great. Apple Watch is solid, if perhaps somewhat complete. The Ultra is much too big to be appealing to me personally, but is at least interesting and new. I hope to get an Action button on a regular Watch in the future. Perhaps interestingly, I’ve been getting a new Watch every 2 years, and I was due, but I skipped the 8. My battery life is still good, and I didn’t find myself compelled to move up. Maybe on the 9?”
Joe Macirowski wrote: “Maybe one year I can have a watch face that is just full saturation red (no pinks) to use in movie theaters and to bed. This is not that year, but it showing up on a specific face of just the Apple Watch ultra is at least a step into hoping it comes both to other watch faces and all watch models. AirPods Pro 2 are still weak to sweat and water (often temporary) “damage” but when not in that state their improvements and new XS tip size have let them leap over AirPods Max for a lot of my uses.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “Apple should make a new version of the AirPods 2 for people who dislike the redesigned third-generation AirPods. Otherwise, the second-generation AirPods Pro are incredible and I have no complaints.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra feels like a surprise hit. This rugged, unusual-looking device appealed to people who admit they’re not extreme sports enthusiasts. And though some of that has to do with Apple fans typical gravitation toward the newest, shiniest option, the Ultra brought incredibly innovative features and extended battery life. Even the hefty price tag seems justifiable. This year’s mainline watch upgrades were solid, making even the lowly SE a truly viable choice for a lot of would-be Watch wearers. AirPods Pro 2? Good stuff.”
John Siracusa wrote: “I’m sure it’s hard to stay motivated when there’s so little competition in the smartwatch market, but the Apple Watch Ultra gave the product line a well-needed kick in the pants. It’s not so much the feature set as it is the addition of some variety. More like this, please.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “While the Apple Watch Ultra isn’t for me, I appreciate that they’re trying to do something new. I just wish it wasn’t at the expense of the titanium Apple Watch Edition models, which have been my go-to. I skipped this year’s Apple Watch entirely as it didn’t seem to offer anything new for me and I couldn’t justify the Ultra, especially since I’m not a fan of the design. I hope the action button comes to all watches some day, though. As for software, the new low power mode is nice to have, but overall it’s another quiet year for watchOS.”
James Thomson wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra is function over form. I don’t like how it looks, and it’s not made for me, but I definitely respect it. The AirPods Pro team continues to defy the laws of physics.”
Nick Heer wrote: “Leaning into the sports bonafides of the Apple Watch with the Ultra seems like a more realistic direction in which to extend the line upmarket, and the updated Apple Watch SE is an impressive offering at a lower price. Both models made the modest Series 8 updates feel a little dowdy but, while tech products are often expected to change radically year over year, I think the slower pace of Watch updates suits the product and its category.”
Dan Moren wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra might be the best product Apple released this year. Great style, the Action button (which needs to make its way to the rest of the lineup, stat), and a surprisingly low price (which is something you rarely find yourself saying about Apple).”
Christina Warren wrote: “Man, Apple continues to kill it on wearables. AirPods Pro 2 was the biggest surprise and also my favorite Apple product of 2022. Apple managed to improve on an already stellar product. I didn’t think the noise canceling could get that much better. It did. I’d like to see Apple do a similar 2.0 update to AirPods Max, with USB-C support and maybe some fit adjustments (and a case that doesn’t look stupid).”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Apple Watch Ultra and the watch hardware in general seem to be doing well, except that CPU improvements continue to be minimal. The software has had some problems, with complications broken for me for much of the year, the Camera Remote timer delay too short to be usable, and unexplained giant battery drains. AirPods Pro’s noise cancellation has gotten worse with software updates, and I’m now having regular problems with static that never occurred before.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “More than ‘all day’ battery life is a big win. I’m grateful it exists on the Apple Watch. I’m also grateful I still haven’t had to test its crash detection. AirPods Max remain the best AirPods. Don’t @ me.”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “It’s about time that Apple iterated on the Apple Watch, with the new Apple Watch Ultra model. However, they really need to make two sizes of this model, because it only works for men with large wrists. I would love to see other form factors for the Apple Watch, because there have been nothing but extremely minor changes to the hardware in the past few years.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “The Apple Watch Ultra is the nicest upgrade so far. The case is substantial and so is the battery life. AirPods Pro Gen 2 are a good upgrade and offer the perfect compromise in weight, comfort, fit, noise cancellation, transparency mode and audio quality. I wouldn’t change any of the trade offs Apple made here.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “AirPods Pro (gen 2), alongside the AirPods (not-Pro) gen 3 released last year, really have that product line firing on all cylinders right now. I find use for owning both, though I realize that’s probably not something most folks would try. 2022’s AirPods Pro (gen 2) really found all the sweet spots that these products need, including Find My tracking and improved audio quality at the top of that list.”
Apple TVGrade: B (average score: 3.6, median score 4, last year: 3.1)
Could it be… a positive trend for Apple TV? In two years its score has risen dramatically. Guess that’s what happens when Apple makes hardware improvements and gets more competitive on price.
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “Slow, incremental improvements… which is not a bad thing, since the last thing you want to do when watching TV is trying to figure out the interface.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “This year’s hardware update was relatively minor, though it was nice to see some lower price points. I do wish the cheaper model could have at least had Thread support for some smart home future-proofing. tvOS continues to be a serviceable platform but could probably use some freshening up to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “Hardware got cheaper. Good! Even cheaper hardware would be good. Getting an update one year after the last one is way better than the four year gap between 4K gens 1 & 2.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “Apple finally made the Apple TV 4K cheaper, I can’t help but praise that.”
John Siracusa wrote: “The new Apple TV is smaller, cheaper, more powerful, and ditches the fan from the earlier model. In short, it is what we expect from a tech product upgrade. I still think the remote could be improved, but Apple can (and probably will) coast on its current design for a few more years.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “They’re doing what they need to do and nothing more. Still hoping for a leap forward.”
Adam Engst wrote: “It was nice to see Apple coming out with a better Apple TV at a lower price, finally. I still find the interface of the TV app to be messy and confusing, with more attention paid to fancy effects than actual usability.”
James Thomson wrote: “I am at least glad that the Apple TV is getting more regular updates, and slightly more sensible SKUs, but you could buy the new model and literally not be able to tell the difference. I know this, because I bought the new model. Another year of mostly invisible software changes suggest this is not one of Apple’s favorite children in terms of resources.”
John Gruber wrote: “The best new feature of the new Apple TV hardware is the price. It’s finally in the range where I felt it should have been for years. No, it’s nowhere near as cheap as the HDMI sticks or cheap boxes from competitors, but the real competition for Apple TV is the built-in ‘smart’ software on modern TVs. The current pricing of Apple TV hardware is commensurate with its value. Apple doesn’t get enough credit for making advanced features like Dolby Vision and Atmos audio ‘just work.’ I can imagine numerous ways that the tvOS interface can be improved, but it’s by far the best such interface I’ve seen. I use it nightly and don’t know what I’d do without it.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “The Apple TV is the simplest device I hate to use. The remote is still an abomination of design over function and I hate using it. Luckily for Apple, a lot of people hate cable TV more than the Apple TV. For the Apple as techno-media giant, the Apple TV should be an embarrassment.”
Casey Liss wrote: “I’m an Apple TV apologist. So, consider that when I say that I don’t think the Apple TV is doing too badly. I think it’s dumb they removed the ethernet port from the cheaper one, but I sincerely doubt your average Apple TV user leverages the ethernet port on their Apple TV. I consume all video media through my Apple TV. The remotes are great now, and I appreciate that the new one charges via USB-C. The software is not perfect, but honestly, it’s consistent, and mostly stays out of the way. Which is all I really want in this context.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “The improvement here (including dropping the lousy version) has been pretty big. OK, you could complain about the fact the lower-specced one doesn’t have Thread or an Ethernet jack. Be my guest.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “I’m knocking Apple TV way down for the terrible marketing decision to make an Ethernet-less model with less storage look attractive because it’s less expensive, and then not including Thread support. Muggles won’t know what that means and will likely buy the less expensive model and miss a very important feature.”
David Sparks wrote: “The Apple TV got a little better (and a little more price competitive) this year. Nevertheless, will this product ever stop feeling like a “hobby” for Apple?”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “The Apple TV still feels like an also-ran even as they keep upgrading models over time. The Home screen remains a mess. Navigation is a mess. The updated Siri Remote is better but still crummy. It’s easy to find innovation elsewhere. At the price they charge, the Apple TV 4K should be not just a HomeKit, Matter, and Thread hub, but a Wi-Fi base station and have better audio output options as well. The pricing by internal memory continues to be ridiculous. I wish they’d step up.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Honestly, it was pretty much a status quo year, even with the release of a new Apple TV, but then they had to go mess around with the Apple TV app and make it harder for people to get to the content they want to watch. Unforced error.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Nice chip upgrade, even better price improvement.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “USB-C. Need we say anything more?”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “I continue to see no reason to switch from my Roku devices to an Apple TV. The UI is not intuitive to me, and at times is downright annoying, and the box doesn’t offer enough other stuff that I really want one. The Apple TV App on the Roku is also not great, but it gets the job done and does a better job of presenting my other streaming services to me.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “I continue to be somewhat mystified by the Apple TV as a physical product. Sure, they made the remote nicer in recent years and the tvOS UI exhibits all the best traits of Apple software (easy to use, smooth, consistent with other platforms), but at the same price point (if not lower), competition from Amazon and Google is matching (and, in some classes, going beyond) Apple’s offerings with features such as better integration with TV sets (Fire TV Cube) or a better remote (the Alexa Voice Remote Pro, which supports finding the remote via voice and has backlit keys at night). I think the Apple TV is overpriced for what it does, but, at the same time, the tvOS interface is nice and the Apple TV doubles as a HomeKit hub on my local network, which is a good enough reason to continue to use it and upgrade it over time. I just wish Apple was a little more creative with it; maybe I just need to wait a couple of years.”
Alex Cox wrote: “Whenever someone asks me if they should get an Apple TV I just kind of make a verbal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon. The Apple TV’s software is infuriating but not as infuriating as any other TV software I’ve used.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “The most important thing for the Apple TV box was to make it cheaper. And they did that. The two SKU lineup is a little awkward, but the price point is great — it starts lower than the (thankfully discontinued, finally) Apple TV HD started at. Wish it would have been $99 rather than $129 starting price, but I’ll take it.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “I appreciate how Apple tried to clean up the Apple TV box with lower prices and more storage. We have two in the house—the 2017 A10X and the 2021 A12—and they both run extremely well, especially the older one. There’s no reason for us to upgrade, which is an indictment of tvOS and how relatively little Apple has poured into improving it.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “The tvOS updates this year were pretty handy, from Shared with You to Siri profiles.”
John Moltz wrote: “The Apple TV got a little cheaper and a little faster and it continues to be a product in the company’s lineup. That’s about the best you can say for it.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The Apple TV was updated.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “New hardware is nice, but while I prefer the OS to many alternatives it still doesn’t feel like a fully complete Apple experience.”
Christina Warren wrote: “The surprise Apple TV update in late October was great. The Apple TV is still expensive but it’s way more accessible than before. I do have complaints about tvOS. What they did to Up Next is gross and indicative of the worst types of growth hacking. But at least Apple finally remembered it has a set-top box.”
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple TV hardware received a surprising amount of love this year, and the price has finally entered the realm of reality. The Apple TV is still very much a niche hobby—and probably always will be—but it’s a fine product for what it is.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Apple doesn’t seem to know what to do other than add a faster processor. The software seems to be designed around Apple’s business needs rather than what customers would want. The remote still needs work.”
Nick Heer wrote: “Pricing that actually seems reasonable on some really good systems. tvOS is still janky.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “The newest version of the Apple TV 4K continues Apple’s long line of set-top boxes that are overkill for almost anyone’s needs. At least they haven’t messed up the remote in a little while. tvOS feels the most stagnant (or stable, if you’re a glass half-full kind of person) of all of Apple’s operating systems, as the TV app continues to be a bit of a confusing mess and the company still unable to get more streaming services to play ball with Apple’s user interface … cough Netflix cough.”
ServicesGrade: B+ (average score: 3.8, median score 4, last year: 3.6)
Services scores ticked up a bit this year, and panelists cited a strong performance from Apple TV+ (especially “Severance”) and the convenience of the Apple One bundle.
Paul Kafasis wrote: “I got off Dropbox and fully into iCloud Desktop in 2022. It’s worked well over all, but my god would I like a ‘Force Sync’ button. Every few months, sync gets stuck for a hours to days. Figure it out, Apple! I’m using Apple Pay more and more, and I appreciate that. I especially like using it on transit systems, like the NYC subway. I turned off my Apple TV+ subscription. I’ll buy a month or two when Ted Lasso returns, and watch Severance then too. I don’t need or want Apple to try to be HBO.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “The Apple One bundle is convenient, and is actually saving us money as a family. Before, everyone was doing a hodgepodge, and now it’s all in one lump sum, and lower than the separate activities.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “TV+ continues to improve its content offering, but Arcade seems almost exclusively child orientated, a missed opportunity to take gaming somewhere new.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “After years and years of begging, users of iCloud Photos have finally heard their cries answered in the form of Family Sharing. I turned it on so my wife and I can share photos, but now have a mountain of work ahead of me to sort out duplicates and add metadata to photos that are missing dates, GPS information and more. To my great sadness, Album support is lacking in the family library, but it’s forcing me to add tags and the other metadata mentioned above for easier searching. I’m sure that as soon as I finish that work in 2027, Apple will add Albums to the product. In terms of other Services, TV+ and Fitness+ continue to be bright spots, with both receiving regular content. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how well run both seem to be run. That’s in sharp contrast to Apple News, which is stuffed with some of the worst ads I’ve ever seen. As someone paying for Apple One, I should not see them. The rest of Apple’s Services are not something I think about regularly, which is probably how things should go. iCloud is keeping all of my notes, contacts, events, bookmarks, iMessages and more in sync, quietly in the background.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “Apple TV+ can’t compete with some of the heavyweights in the amount of content it has to offer, but it has had some quality offerings and it comes with a relatively cheap price tag. Apple Pay remains fantastic as merchant adoption continues to increase, while Apple Card is a convenient and very Apple payment option, but it really needs to expand beyond the U.S. I still don’t find myself using Apple News+ or Apple Fitness+ much, but I appreciate the Apple One Premier bundle that gives me access to them for the times I do use them without me having to pay for them separately and feeling like I’m wasting my money.”
Alex Cox wrote: “Services is always a hard category to think about with Apple. Apple Pay? Amazing. Apple Music? Yikes. Everything else? Kind of in between. I worry about the push to market services, but I’m sticking with the Big Tech I know.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “Severance, For All Mankind, Slow Horses, Spirited, Mythic Quest. Most of my favourite content of the year came from TV+. And FINALLY end-to-end encryption for iCloud.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “Apple TV+ is simply killing it right now. And the updated security for iCloud is a paranoid security pro’s dream come true.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Services is growing like crazy, but lots of it is actually good. TV+ has made some excellent shows (Slow Horses, Severance). Fitness+ is a really useful service. Music and iCloud just chug along in the background, Apple Pay works. The only thing that freaks people out, justifiably, is the way that pay-for-play seems to be seeping into everything.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “Wondering where the promised Apple Classical music offering is.”
Robert Carter wrote: “Services have really matured. I am trusting the cloud more these days.”
Casey Liss wrote: “I don’t like that I feel like they’re just nickel-and-diming all their customers to death. It seems like everything new must have a services component, or it never sees the light of day. I especially don’t like that one of the richest companies in the world felt like it needed to raise the price of Apple One by $3, just because it could get away with it. 🤮 Also, iCloud storage. Holy shit. It’s 2023 and we’re still defaulting to 5GB. That feels so punitive and cheap. However, in terms of performance, the services are doing well, and I enjoy most of them. iCloud Photo Library has been very stable so far, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Shared Photo Library being the same. I very much enjoy Fitness+, though I wish they’d explore doing programs, rather than just an endless supply of one-off workouts. Apple Pay is accepted almost everywhere I frequent — if Kroger would just get on board I’d almost never have to use a physical card anymore. Apple Music as a service is pretty good, though the Music app is a complete dumpster fire. Anything I’ve spent the time to watch on TV+ has been great, though I’m extremely sad we didn’t get any new Ted Lasso in 2022. I’ve even found myself occasionally using News+ and Arcade, which are two services I didn’t expect to ever crack open.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Apple One Premier is a good value despite the price increase, but the software experience for literally every service really needs attention.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “iCloud+ was a smart update that continues to pay dividends. They brought iCloud Private Relay out of beta. The security upgrade to Advanced Data Protection was unexpected and a boon at no extra cost. AppleCare+ switching to unlimited repairs definitely improves its value as an offset to risk. Apple TV+ had a lot of great programming in 2022. I’m not sure Apple’s weakest service offerings improved much, but the good ones stayed good or got better, and some are quite great now.”
John Gruber wrote: “2022 was a mixed bag. I’ve been a fan of TV+ original content from its inception and it continues to get better. Severance was my favorite season of a TV series since Mad Men ended in 2015. Apple Music has a great catalog but a lousy confusing software interface — quite possibly Apple’s worst app. iCloud is underrated — many people internalized the ‘Apple is bad at services and syncing’ narrative from a decade ago and don’t realize how good the company has gotten at it. iCloud is secure, fast, and reliable today. iCloud backup for iPhones and iPads is a remarkably good and essential service — not just for disaster recovery, but also for seamless migrations from old to new devices. It’s starting to feel downright miserly, though, that Apple is still offering only a mere 5 GB of storage at the free tier, and have left the paid-tier storage allotments unchanged since like forever.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “A bit of a mum year for Apple’s content services — not much new to speak of. TV+ continued to expand its content lineup — with Severance being the standout success — but I wish the pace of rollouts was faster, still. The movies slate is particularly lacking. TV app remains woefully behind where it needs to be. Big props for shipping iCloud Advanced Data Protection though, and hence finally delivering an end-to-end encryption option for iCloud backups.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “Advanced Data Protection was unexpected and welcome.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “I continue to have reliability problems with iMessage and Siri. The apps that go along with the media services just aren’t very good. Apple Maps is still not as good as Google Maps in the areas where I go, but it does seem to be improving.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “I can’t think of a single miss Apple made in the services segment. TV+ is creating a huge amount of fantastic content. Fitness+ has included unique workouts like a series called Yoga for Runners along with continuously updated content. Apple Card continues to delight in notifications, visual effects, and especially support when someone tries to hijack your card. I use essentially every service from Apple and they all delight, even a credit card.”
Adam Engst wrote: “Overall, Apple has done an extremely good job with Services, though some are better than others. Apple Card remains awkward in a number of ways, Apple Music still doesn’t help much with music discovery, and Apple News+ remains overkill for all but the most hard-core of news junkies. That said, Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is a welcome addition, and using Apple Pay on the Apple Watch still feels like living in the future.”
Christina Warren wrote: “The price raise was fine. I’m glad iCloud now has end-to-end encryption for backups and iMessage.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Apple is still killing it with TV+ content, and I’ve used Fitness+ quite a bit. Apple Music is fine? Apple News+ is sometimes really nice to have? Apple Pay is very convenient, particularly from my watch? For the most part I barely think about these things, which sometimes is a good thing (particularly with Apple Pay — It Just Works, like in the old days).”
Kirk McElhearn wrote: “I guess this is the space where I will mention that Apple has not kept their promise for a classical music app this year. My speculation is that Apple didn’t realize just how bad the metadata is for classical music in their library, because one of the main elements of classical music app needs is search. Without good metadata, there’s really no point in a classical music app.”
Cherlynn Low wrote: “Fitness+ has a uniquely inclusive approach to workouts, while TV+ continues to shine with excellent content like Severance, Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest and more.”
Josh Centers wrote: “TV+ seems to be hitting its stride, even though I don’t watch TV. I am deeply disappointed that the classical music app never materialized, because Music is a poor front-end for that genre. I am concerned Apple is going to be overly focused on pushing out new, unwanted services to milk its customer base.”
John Siracusa wrote: “Apple’s services continue to shake out into the must-haves and everything else. Among the must-haves, iCloud’s free storage tier remains embarrassing, and the Apple Music app on the Mac is in dire need of some love. But otherwise, they’re doing well. Apple TV+ sometimes seems plausibly poised to be “cheaper HBO” rather than “expensive NBC.” (Actual HBO fumbling the ball doesn’t hurt.) Apple Pay and the Apple Card quietly just work, which is ideal. The services that are struggling are surely helped by being part of the Apple One bundle, but I do wonder how long Apple will want to carry that weight.”
James Thomson wrote: “Many great shows on Apple TV+, including Severance, which I didn’t expect at all. Everything else felt like it was just in gradually decaying maintenance mode.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “A price increase for Apple Music, a broad and deep roster of Apple TV+ shows, and not much new from other services. 2022 feels like a very mixed bag for this part of the business. It is worth pointing out that Apple Fitness+ gained Audio Hints, making workouts significantly more accessible to users with disabilities.”
Nick Heer wrote: “Apple’s services portfolio is increasingly compelling. But my experience with all of them is unfortunately filtered through client apps which are buggy, frustrating, and overly interested in upselling. It is a shame because Apple is clearly doing good things: a film distributed by the company won the “Best Picture” Oscar in 2022! iCloud Advanced Data Protection has brought long-awaited privacy improvements, too. Good things are happening in services, but system applications feel neglected despite being core to their experience.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “The secret sauce of Apple’s services is that they seem optional but to really enjoy their premium devices, you kind of need them.”
Marco Arment wrote: “Apple TV+ continues to expand and delivers consistently great shows. Most other services are either quiet-but-massive success stories, like iCloud, Photos, and Messages, or they’re completely forgettable and seemingly surviving merely from their platform advantage — which is fine, to the extent that they’re not hurting or precluding competition.”
David Sparks wrote: “I’m a little surprised at how much I’m enjoying Apple TV+. I don’t watch much TV and am picky about sitting through an entire series of anything. Apple TV+ released several shows this year that I enjoyed. I still am uncomfortable with Apple’s increasing focus on services. It inevitably makes other things worse. For example, the 5GB of free iCloud data is now over 11 years old. If you’re keeping score, that’s longer than the Beatles were together.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “I’m very happy with Apple’s expansion as a services company in the past few years. In fact, I hope Apple does even more and continues to grow in this field. Offering native apps for their services on different platforms is key to attracting customers who may like Apple’s service offerings without actually using Apple hardware. The company has long offered native apps for Apple Music and Apple TV on Android and smart TVs, but as of this month, they’ve even rolled out native Windows clients for Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices (not to mention the previously announced iCloud integration for Windows). I applaud this decision as it shows an understanding (and acceptance) of the fact that people may like Apple’s content but, at the same time, prefer non-Apple hardware. I’d go even further and say that Apple should make a native Apple Music app for Amazon’s Fire TV devices (there isn’t one at the moment, which surprised me while setting up my Fire TV Stick). Looking ahead at the future, I’m very optimistic that Apple’s services division understands the importance of integration across different types of hardware, and I think we’ll continue to see similar announcements in 2023.”
HomeKit/Home automationGrade: D+ (average score: 2.7, median score 3, last year: 2.7)
Holding steady isn’t what you want to see when your grade is a D+. Everyone seems to be waiting for the Matter shoe to drop and make things better, but until then, our panel remains largely unimpressed. Apple’s false start when it came to rolling out its new home architecture didn’t help matters.
Aleen Simms wrote: “I love the home automation HomeKit brings, but Siri and HomeKit are flaky together.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “The HomeKit Architecture upgrade didn’t change anything for me personally. Luckily it didn’t break my Home, but I also didn’t notice the performance/reliability improvements they were promising.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “2022 felt like a year in waiting for HomeKit, with Matter rolling out at the end of the year. It promises cross-vendor support for a wide range of products. For HomeKit users, it should unlock the world of Amazon-backed products… assuming vendors actually bother to update their existing products. Time will tell how successful that undertaking is. In terms of the Home app itself, the new design is an improvement, but like many Apple software products, it feels like too many things are behind hard-to-find menus. I mostly interact with my HomeKit products via Siri or Shortcuts, so at least I don’t have to spend too much time in there.”
Robert Carter wrote: “I am impressed with the VoiceOver accessibility that Apple has created for HomeKit.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “Reliability is just so poor, and debugging it is nearly impossible. I hit multiple issues in 2022 with HomeKit, and I found myself terribly frustrated. I want to use it more, and to like it more. When it works, it’s magical. When it fails, it’s maddening. It fails too often. Maybe Matter will help?”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “Home is abysmal. The UI is a hot mess, devices come and go at will, programming seems to be forgotten randomly. I have two devices that are properly programmed with actions, but they do their own thing, completely ignoring the schedules. I love the concept, and have a ton of HomeKit devices. But it’s very frustrating that it doesn’t ‘just work.’ Is Matter here yet?”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “The Matter transition continues to be rough, and will hopefully work itself out in 2023. The Home app is still a bit of a mess.”
James Thomson wrote: “Clearly things are going on deep down in the HomeKit pond, and at some point we may have a wonderful cross-platform smart home future, but everything remained pretty stagnant on the surface. The Home app was rewritten though, and made it just slightly harder to switch my lights on and off.”
Josh Centers wrote: “Home has had a lot of trouble this year, but Apple should be credited for making some big moves: implementing Matter, redesigning Home, and working quickly to improve iOS 16’s initially shaky reliability. It seems to have some life again.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Apple leading the Matter effort is a big plus. The new iOS 16 Home app is a pretty good UI upgrade over what was there before. Sadly, still waiting for the full home strategy to come together — no new home hardware from Apple this year at all (outside of Apple TV).”
John Siracusa wrote: “The wait continues for Matter to come and solve all the interoperability and reliability woes that plague this entire sector. Apple’s abortive effort to overhaul its pre-Matter Home system is a black eye in an already grim year for this part of the business.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “Since I haven’t really found a home app I like better (and I have 100+ home automation devices and 15 years of custom code) I’d say Apple is doing okay. But having to roll back their updated framework release was not good.”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple redesigned the Home app to make it tolerable. I still think the company needs to make its own devices because setting up and maintaining third party kit is still annoying.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “HomeKit and the Home app are still a mess, and I’m currently still trying to recover from a situation over a month ago where my home suddenly had no owner and I’ve struggled to reset everything and re-add dozens of devices. Here’s hoping Matter makes things easier, but it’ll take a while to get there.”
Marco Arment wrote: “HomeKit is slowly — very slowly — getting better. Hardware support is weak, but very, very slowly increasing. Reliability is a mixed bag, but seems mostly limited by the quirks and quality of the individual hardware peripherals, not HomeKit itself. The nascent Matter standard promises to improve nearly everything about HomeKit, but we haven’t seen much from it yet.”
Alex Cox wrote: “Apple keeps taking one step forward and two steps back with its ambient computing strategy. I don’t like speculating about the inner politics of the company, but I hope that their HomeKit teams are able to collaborate and get more resources (especially as nerds and normal consumers alike become increasingly frustrated with Amazon’s slurry of IoT devices).”
Zac Hall wrote: “HomeKit lost the best garage door opener and irrigation controller due to apparent lack of interest and reliability, but the Home app is a little better? The lack of lighting icon choices from the company that makes SF Symbols is a glaring issue.”
John Gruber wrote: “Progress continues, clearly. Anecdotally, the HomeKit stuff in my house seemingly works more reliably than ever. It’s great that Apple contributed HomeKit to serve as the foundation for the open Matter standard, and that Matter devices are now starting to come to market. But big picture, this whole thing still feels like it’s always poised to get good ‘next year’. 2022 wasn’t that year.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “2022 marked the official arrival of the Matter automation standard and the rollout of a new home architecture to improve wireless communication between devices and accessories. Except a few things here didn’t quite go as planned. Apple had to pull its “underlying architecture” for Home. It surely looks like Matter support for the HomeKit framework was going to need a little more time in the oven. I’m excited about Matter, but I would have expected Apple to have a smoother rollout on their side of things. Then there’s the Home app, which received a substantial redesign in 2022 that made it easier to use, faster, more compact, and nicer to look at. I like it. I think Apple has done a good job slimming down the experience while making different accessories easier to recognize with new icons and key data points (such as security status or temperature) quicker to see at a glance. In my opinion, the best aspects of Home’s native integration with iOS remain Siri and Control Center: they’re both incredibly fast ways to control accessories and scenes with some visual feedback shown onscreen, which is not something I can say about Alexa. But we still don’t have interactive Home Screen widgets for the Home app.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Still disappointing. HomeKit never quite works correctly two days in a row. Apple doesn’t seem to be doing its own thing that we could all rely on, and the integration with other companies is never quite perfect.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “I use HomeKit mostly to handle the lights in my apartment, and, for that, it works wonderfully.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “So close to a better score here, but a botched Matter rollout is not a great start for Apple.”
Quinn Nelson wrote: “The new Home app update is praised by everyone save for those that actually have to use it. Don’t get me started on automation limitations, failing to add new categories part of Matter, the iOS 16.2 update that was pulled, etc.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “As you add devices to HomeKit, it feels ever more kludgy. I now have two cameras, a thermostat, garage door open/close detector, and others, and the app in iOS/iPadOS and macOS just feels lackluster. The interface requires diving through options, and not all the features of some devices can be handled through HomeKit. (My thermostat requires a separate app to manage several features that HomeKit ignores.) Shortcuts and Automation could be improved to work better with HomeKit triggers and sensors. Overall, a lot more work to bring it up to, say, iOS standards.”
Casey Liss wrote: “HomeKit’s strongest skill is its ability to fail in new and exciting ways while never giving any actionable information to fix it. It rarely gives any information at all. I cannot overstate how infuriating it is to have something not work in your home, but have no way to find a solution. The automations in HomeKit are… okay. I wish we were given far more flexibility with the automation. Users are only allowed to use a subset of the things Shortcuts is capable of, which is a real bummer. The Home app is way better than it was, but it’s still slow, often fails with no explanation why, and is still clunky as hell. HomeKit is so very clearly an afterthought to Apple, and I wish it wasn’t, because it has so much potential.”
Dan Moren wrote: “Well, that turned into a real snafu. There was a nice Home app redesign, but it was overshadowed by the so-far anticlimactic Matter launch and, more significantly, pulling the promised architecture update, which was supposed to be more reliable, because of reliability issues. Feels like Apple really doesn’t know what it’s doing here.”
Hardware reliabilityGrade: A (average score: 4.5, median score 5, last year: 4.5)
Apple’s solid A grade for its hardare maintains itself. If there’s an area where there’s largely consensus that Apple’s doing it right, it’s here. Clearly there’s a lot of goodwill left over from the resolution of the keyboard problems in late-2010s laptops.
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple hardware is in a great place.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “My Mac hardware itself has been very reliable, but I count problems with iOS and audio on the Studio Display under hardware reliability. Hardware can regress through firmware updates; my AirPods Pro’s noise cancellation doesn’t work as well as it used to. My iPhone’s battery seems to be failing after a little more than 2 years, though iOS reports it at 88% health.”
Dan Moren wrote: “A continued bright spot. Hardware is still second to none, even there are a few head-scratchers. (The Studio Display’s webcam, for example, and the reliance on Center Stage with no manual controls.)”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “Apple hardware is nearly always solid. When it isn’t, it’s news. I wish they made their products more durable, but overall, they do well.”
Alex Cox wrote: “When it comes down to it, most of my frustrations with Apple’s hardware reliability might not even be the hardware itself. Their Macs are everything I could have hoped for. The HomePods are everything my ears hoped for, but their function as an assistant leaves much to be desired… is that the software? The microphones? Faulty something or others? I don’t know! Also: I will continue to complain about how iPhones are too big and heavy.”
Philip Michaels wrote: “Look, I’m still using a MacBook Air with flakey A and P keys, which maddens me, and 2022 was the year another iPhone of mine gave up the ghost because its Lightning port became wonky. I don’t think Apple builds things to last.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Can’t think of any crazy hardware gates for 2022. It probably does help that Apple’s new hardware launches for 2022 were relatively conservative — almost every new product Apple featured the same chassis design as the previous generation.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “My Studio is the most reliable Mac I have, and I’m going on 3 years with my current iPhone and have yet to have a moment where I think I need a new one. Solid performance.”
Nick Heer wrote: “There were two main hardware problems this year which captured headlines: the camera in the Studio Display sucks, and the Mac Studio has a whiny fan. It felt like a slide from the past couple of drama-free years, but not to the egregious extent of the butterfly keyboards and, no, I do not think it is past time to keep bringing that up.”
Zac Hall wrote: “A midnight finish will reliably collect more fingerprints than a crime scene investigator, but actual reliability is strong post butterfly era.”
Christina Warren wrote: “I had to get my AirPods Max and AirPods Pro 2s serviced in the same week. They gave me a hard time in the store about the AirPods but did the swap. Doing it online for the AirPods Max was the way to go.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Apple is doing wonderfully on hardware — all of it, as far as I can tell.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “Apple has pretty much perfected their work with both aluminum and glass over the years, and now that the Butterfly Keyboard is gone, I don’t have any real complaints here. Users can even get their own parts now through the Self Service Repair Program! What a world we live in.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “No major issues for me in 2022. AppleCare continues to generally be a smart buy for peace of my mind, but thankfully I haven’t needed it recently.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “The only Apple device I need to reboot regularly is my iPhone 14. That’s a terrific endorsement of the Mac.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “Pretty solid for me – though my three-year old Watch died abruptly while on holiday when the touch screen wouldn’t take touch. ‘Oh we see this a lot… I mean, this is the common problem we get.'”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “The last time I had a hardware problem on any of my Apple devices was in 2016 — and I’ve had a bunch since then. Since Apple stopped making The Bad Keyboards, things have been pretty solid.”
John Moltz wrote: “Overall, I think Apple’s improved its hardware reliability since the butterfly keyboard era.”
John Gruber wrote: “Anecdotally, no hardware problems for me last year other than my old, much, much-used and still-used 2014 MacBook Pro suffering a swollen battery. A much-used 8-year-old device finally suffering a problem is a sign of how good Apple’s hardware reliability is.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “We haven’t had any hardware issues with any of our Apple stuff since the infamous butterfly keyboard era.”
Software qualityGrade: B- (average score: 3.4, median score 3, last year: 3.4)
Apple holds steady with a B- grade, and the panelists are concerned, but restrained in their criticisms. There’s a general sense that Apple’s infrastructure is getting worse, but that things are not completely falling apart. And yet there’s a lot of trepidation, highlighed by the introductions of the System Settings app on Mac and on the rough introduction of Stage Manager.
David Sparks wrote: “It’s becoming increasingly clear that Apple is turning up the dial on their productivity software. Notes, then Reminders, and now Mail are increasingly more powerful and useful. This year we got another entry with FreeForm. I’m super curious to see if there is more to this in the future.”
Robert Carter wrote: “Apple sometimes takes too long to fix important VoiceOver bugs. On the other hand, they have worked hard on Braille access this year.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Most things feel kind of buggy, and the Mac is in a particularly bad state, with a large number of small bugs (many persisting for years) and some debilitating larger ones.”
John Gruber wrote: “I still have the same concerns about the direction of Apple’s software design that I did last year, especially on the Mac. But I think their software reliability has been excellent. Consider the numerous features under the Continuity umbrella. Features like copying something on your iPhone and being able to just paste it on your Mac, and vice-versa. Or starting a new message in Mail on your iPhone and using Handoff to finish writing it on your Mac. Those features have been around for years, but it seems to me they work more reliable than ever. I appreciate that.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “As much grief as we’ve given Apple for poor OS updates in the past, it has to be pointed out that most releases this year were not crippled by show-stopping bugs. It’s true that, especially in iOS, many features were delayed until later-year dot releases. And it’s possible that more of these are coming. Stage Manager is the greatest exception.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Considerably light on software improvements, but the iPad got a Weather app.”
Joe Macirowski wrote: “In the Big Cat naming era, System Preferences was a destination I urged switchers to take a complete tour of because they would encounter every standard Mac control in its proper use. If System Settings can be considered a tour of modern Mac UI controls, then modern Mac UI controls are not in a good place. The whole thing feels like somewhere between ‘not thoroughly considered’ or ‘the team was unable work with the relevant UI frameworks teams to achieve a better result than this for one reason or another.’ That doesn’t really matter to me, because the bad thing shipped.”
Dan Moren wrote: “A decidedly mixed bag. I feel like I’ve seen more buggy and inexplicable behavior than ever, but everything generally still works. Is this a case of more complexity leading to more edge cases and more bugs that don’t get caught, or is Apple stretched too thin? It’s hard to say.”
Devindra Hardawar wrote: “It’s very nice to see Apple change up its multitasking philosophy with Stage Manager.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Every year it’s the same thing — but now the achievement gap between the hardware and software is really glaring.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “iOS has been fine for me, as has iPadOS. I haven’t felt any great need to use Ventura.”
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple is overly focused on marketing new features that are esoteric, irrelevant, half-baked, or poorly communicated. Meanwhile, technical debt accrues. I desperately wish Apple would slow down and take time to polish and declutter its operating systems.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “2022’s flavors of iOS and iPadOS hold pretty strong, and I’m impressed with their stability and interoperability. In fact, that latter point may well be Ventura’s saving grace: the increased seamlessness with which all our Apple devices now interact is perhaps something too easily overlooked. This is the Apple Way, of course, and perhaps the shining reason so many of us initially chose this platform, back whenever that first happened.”
James Thomson wrote: “Apple’s rewrite of the Settings app on Ventura just showcased the limitations of SwiftUI and a vertical design that only makes sense on much smaller devices. Features like Stage Manager got delayed, and even then still arrived with both design and reliability problems.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “The macOS Settings app needs some attention, and the Password manager in particular needs some serious UX improvements. I transitioned to it from 1Password with iOS 16 and while it’s good enough most of the time, there are a lot of easy improvements they could make. The Home Architecture Upgrade situation was unfortunate and certainly another hit to their reputation.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad wrote: “All the OS upgrades seem to go smoothly on all devices, which is an exceptional achievement. I find pretty much all bundled Apple apps a bit basic and while I’d love to be more stripped down in my software approach, I turn to third party alternatives for most software.”
Federico Viticci wrote: “Most of my concerns about Apple’s software quality this year are about the poor, unfinished, confusing state they shipped Stage Manager in. I’m not going to rehash all that. Instead, I’d also point out that I was hoping to see more improvements on the Shortcuts front in 2022, and instead the app was barely touched last year. It received some new actions for built-in apps, but no deeper integration with the system. I continue to experience crashes and odd UI glitches when working on more complex shortcuts, and I’d like to see more polish and stability in the app.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Some things have gotten better for me — longstanding bugs are either squashed, or happen far less frequently, particularly on macOS. However, I must acknowledge the utter disaster that is Stage Manager. I can’t believe it shipped. Apple really needs to take their foot off the accelerator pedal on new shiny, and spend some time shoring up the things they’ve already shipped. Same as it ever was.”
Christine Romero-Chan wrote: “Lock/Home Screen customization on iOS 16 is the worst.”
John Siracusa wrote: “The relatively uneventful rollout of macOS Ventura was a blessing, but System Settings is a sore spot. Each new or overhauled feature added to macOS increases my fear that Apple no longer knows how to make good Mac software. While iOS reliability remains good, the Stage Manager debacle on iPadOS continues that platform’s years-long struggle to define itself.”
Eric Slivka wrote: “A lot of iterative improvements with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. Stage Manager took its lumps during the beta period and I still haven’t found it super useful. Freeform looks cool but it’s also not something I’ve found reason to use. I like the new Lock Screen customization in iOS 16, but still waiting for Live Activities to take off.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “It’s been years since I’ve had a Mac experience a kernel panic or even had an Apple application crash on a regular basis… with the exception of the macOS version Freeform, which I could make crash 100% of the time when interacting with text written on an iPad. Seeing as that’s a 1.0, I’m mostly willing to forgive that. Apple’s software issues are more subtle than crashes and reboots. It’s the little things that bother me, like the mis-match of features found in the Mac and iOS version of Reminders, or how the Mac version of Messages still struggles to catch up with iCloud upon its first launch after sleeping over a long weekend. On another note, I fully understand that Mac developers have to choose between Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI as Apple continues to make its slow transition away from Objective-C and its traditional methods of building apps, but I continue to be disappointed with SwiftUI on macOS. Look no further than Ventura’s new System Settings app to see just how badly this technology falls short at this point. I’m not convinced that a UI toolset designed for touch will work well on the Mac without a massive amount of additional work on Apple’s part. Whether an app is written in SwiftUI or not, the trend of Apple’s designers hiding controls and features behind buttons and menus continues to add unneeded complexity to macOS in particular. UI clutter is bad, but it’s far lesser evil than UI confusion.”
Nick Heer wrote: “It seems like longer software update cycles should give Apple’s engineers more time to solidify features, but quality is oftentimes still frustrating. To paraphrase Merlin Mann’s metaphor about email: every problem is a pebble. While some are bigger than others, this big bag of rocks is weighing down all the Apple stuff I own. I don’t think the bag was ever empty, but it has been heavy for quite awhile, and I am very tired.”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “Ventura and iOS/iPadOS 16 were substantive improvements that had issues on release, but improved. I think if the version that shipped in December had appeared in September, I’d give them a 5. I have no idea why they released Freeform; it’s not up to the standard of any comparable tool.”
Alex Cox wrote: “I love iOS 16, which makes the lack of powerful first party software on the iPad Pros even more frustrating than last year, which sure is saying something.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Sometimes my work Mac gets weird and annoying and I reboot it. What is this, Windows? And the new System Settings app. I do not like it. I do not think I will ever come to prefer it.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “In the reliability category, I think Apple’s software is worth the price of entry. They still fall down when it comes to features. How is the Files app on iOS and iPadOS still so awful? Why is Apple Mail so barebones? Why does Siri fail more than it works? A lot of Apple’s software functions like it’s 10 years old. Even their “new” collaboration features in the work apps (like Pages & Numbers) feels like it was invented in a parallel universe that never had Google docs.”
Adam Engst wrote: “Everyone involved with System Settings for Ventura should be reassigned to work on fax drivers.”
John Moltz wrote: “We’re in a real awkward phase for macOS. While the previous System Preferences app was no great shakes, the new System Settings app in Ventura is jarring. I’m not a fan of summarily ditching long-time Mac conventions such as check boxes in favor of iOS controls. But maybe it’s leading to touch-enabled Macs so I will wait to see how it shakes out.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “iOS and MacOS updates seemed generally fine. The aforementioned HomeKit debacle is not good. There’s too much “It just works!” that doesn’t always work, and Apple still isn’t putting in the ability to enable folks to handle those failures manually.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “I find I have to reboot my iMac (with M1 processor) several times a week because of various freezes.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “It feels like stability is better, but the attention to detail isn’t quite there like it used to be. System Settings on MacOS is a mess, Stage Manager is… struggling, and there are plenty of features that aren’t quite there yet.”
Christina Warren wrote: “I think this improved some over the past, at least it felt that way. I still yearn from the days of macOS a decade ago, but here we are.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “macOS keeps improving, though the lingering bugs are annoying. iOS has gotten quite good, and the bundled apps are generally first rate. FreeForm is an intriguing new app that has replaced Keynote for me when I need to quickly sketch out an idea or chart.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “Stage Manager. So close but yet so, so far.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “Personally, Apple’s operating systems have been running fine for me this year. iOS 16 was a relatively big update in terms of features, and I encountered relatively few bugs.”
Marco Arment wrote: “While I question many of their design choices on macOS, Apple’s overall software quality and reliability have significantly improved over the last few years.”
Developer relationsGrade: C- (average score: 2.8, median score 3, last year: 2.8)
Another hold-steady year, at a not particularly impressive score. Many seem resigned that Apple’s approach to App Store policies will only be changed by government force. Apple’s controversial addition of unpleasant ads to app pages was cited repeatedly. Things have been worse in this category, but it feels like a lot of resignation combined with waiting for changes to be forced upon Apple.
Myke Hurley wrote: “I think it was very interesting how they handled WWDC this year. Clearly a lot of thought went in to making this something for the developer community. But continued monopoly tactics drag this score down. The new ads in the App Store was a major fumble this year.”
James Thomson wrote: “WWDC continues to evolve its form in pandemic times, and we got slack channels and more to try to replicate the in-person experience for a wider audience. While the day-to-day developer experience arguably improved, high level policies continued to drag down the average. Terrible highest-bidder advertising across the App Store devalued Apple’s own excellent editorial work, and they ended up fighting multiple regulatory bodies across the world, all in the name of maintaining revenue they consider their Jobs-given right.”
Brett Terpstra wrote: “Loving the Small Business program at Apple (that gives me an extra 15% on my sub-$1m apps, which is all of them), and reviews have been timely and helpful.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “It still irks me that the bug reporting system is a black hole—send in bugs, get back nothing 99.5% of the time.”
Dan Moren wrote: “There were some ups and downs, but 2023 will be a big tell because of all the increasing regulation from governments around the world. Ads in the App Store got a lot of blowback and rightfully so.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Apple has had innumerable opportunities to do right by developers, both big and small. It is becoming inarguable that the only way Apple will do what’s right for anyone but Apple is by legislation. That legislation is coming. Naturally, this relates to things that maybe shouldn’t be regulated, like USB-C in iPhones. But some things I find easier to swallow, like loosening Apple’s monopoly over the App Store. I am tired of Apple making developers — including me — feel like we owe them for the air we breathe. While it is true that I wouldn’t be able to make apps for iPhones if there were no iPhones, it is simultaneously true that the iPhone would not be what it is without developers. Apple should remember that. I’ll also take this opportunity to bang the same drum I’ve been banging for years: documentation. While Apple is finally making positive steps in this department, there’s still a dire lack of documentation. And often the documentation that is provided is surface-level, with no description beyond what can just as easily be gleaned from the name of the thing you’re looking up. There’s almost never any discussion about how to use an API, and even more rare is a discussion of best practices on how to use something. It’s absolutely maddening.”
John Gruber wrote: “Repeating myself from last year: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unimproved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers want to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.”
Michael Tsai wrote: “Pretty much everything to do with the App Store needs work, as does the documentation.”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “It’s harder to think of a harder self-own than Apple’s rollout of additional App Store ads in late 2022. The App Store was instantly flooded with ads for low-brow titles like gambling and hook-up apps. Seeing those ads instantly made the App Store feel like a worse place to be, but having them placed at the bottom of an individual app’s page was simply a bridge too far. It’s like Apple was trying to burn goodwill with developers with the move. Apple continues to be willing to die on the hill of its 30% cut of App Store purchases. Things like additional price points or the 15% commission on subscriptions that are older than one year are nice, but the market — and government regulators — are ready to see Apple’s iron-fisted control over the App Store loosen. There are a couple of bright spots here, though. Being at WWDC with developers was a welcome change after two years of COVID forcing the conference to be online-only. The Developer Center is a physical promise on Apple’s part to communicate better with developers. The ‘Ask Apple’ Slack-based Q&As are a good step in the right direction as well.”
John Siracusa wrote: “Not much has changed since last year, so I think my previous assessment still applies: The past several years have really cemented an adversarial relationship between Apple and developers. Apple seems to merely tolerate developers, and developers continue to mostly tolerate Apple, but too much has been said and done to damage the relationship. Apple’s reflexive expressions of love for developers now ring hollow. Developers’ complaints continue to fall on deaf ears. The only thing that seems to move Apple at all is the threat of government regulation.”
Marco Arment wrote: “The App Store in-app-payment policies are so unreasonably anti-competitive that major world governments are stepping in to regulate Apple with far-reaching laws that could do much more harm than necessary. Apple’s refusal to give an inch is a major strategic error that will result in regulators taking a mile.”
Christina Warren wrote: “There are still far too many arbitrary decisions being made, too many scam apps and games getting promoted, and too much of a disconnect between developers and Apple. But I do see Apple trying and I think that is great. I say this with the disclosure that I work in developer relations at GitHub, so I’m not unbiased in how I feel about how Developer Relations should be done.”
Benjamin Mayo wrote: “It was about the same as 2021 until the Apple Store ads debacle, which sounded bad when they announced the new placement slots in August, and turned out to be even worse with what shipped in the fall. Showing casino and gambling apps next to top-tier iOS software was incredibly embarrassing, and disrespectful to the developers who made them. Apple eventually ‘paused’ those categories of ads from appearing, but it remains in limbo.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “Just fix the App Store experience for developers please. We hear too much about broken review process.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “The iOS App Store, as it is currently constituted, continues to be a terrible deal for developers and users. Apple’s mismanagement and greed is hurting its reputation, and it’s not like this is the money that makes the company successful. Apple could afford to go in a healthier and freer direction. They could start by stopping lying about what software distribution was like before the App Store.”
Dave Hamilton wrote: “Maybe it’s just from my perch, but the past year seems to have seen Apple struggling yet again with developer relations. We had a good run for a while, but now it seems like we’re veering back towards the old days where Apple’s default position towards the average developer is antagonistic, at best. I hope someone in power to course correct over there recognizes this sooner rather than later. If they truly are going to release an AR/VR platform this year, they’ll need to woo developers with a very different attitude than we’ve seen as of late.”
Zac Hall wrote: “This is the year Apple opened a physical Developer Center, then put ads for competing apps on developer product pages.”
Adam Engst wrote: “Will App Store approvals ever work properly? Perhaps it’s a hard thing to get right, but if Apple is going to keep banging on about how important it is for security, there have to be fewer stories of legitimate developers having trouble getting apps approved and scammers sliding them through with no difficulty.”
Societal and social impactGrade: B- (average score: 3.4, median score 3, last year: 3.2)
As always, our panelists see what they want to in this category. Apple talks a lot about its values, but how does it live up to that talk? Apple’s attempts to prevent its retail employees from unionizing was mentioned several times. But the company also received praise for its introduction of Advanced Data Protection.
Josh Centers wrote: “Apple talks out of both sides of its mouth on social issues. It proclaims environmentalism while manufacturing ultimately disposable products in countries with looser environmental regulations than in the west. To be fair, they have made some inroads on improved repairability. Apple touts its social gospel while enacting anti-worker policies around the world. Jobs was no better on that front, but at least he was honest and unpretentious about it.”
Steven Aquino wrote: “I’m giving Apple a top rating based on accessibility alone, which obviously matters greatly to me. The short film they put together at the beginning of December highlighting disabled people using their products is a poignant reminder of my community’s basic humanity, and Apple TV+ continues to be overlooked when it comes to disability representation on screen. Apple doesn’t get nearly the credit they deserve on that front.”
Philip Michaels wrote: “Apple’s environmental efforts continue to be commendable. Apple’s unwillingness to weigh in on anything happening on Texas with regards to the governor’s targeting of trans kids continues to be cowardly, especially given the amount of business Apple does in that state.”
Alex Cox wrote: “I don’t think Apple always being in mainstream news is detrimental. I might find it annoying that there are a dozen puff pieces for every trickle of a headset rumor, but if it keeps people excited enough to also pay attention to Apple’s privacy policies and App Store controversies in order to make it a better company for consumers, so be it!”
Glenn Fleishman wrote: “Apple’s weird insistence on in-person work remains a sticking point: they have over two years of delivering incredible products and results and think that demonstrates a necessity that people risk their health for certain levels of mandatory office time. It seems very 1950s. Apple’s attitude towards unions is unacceptable, though easy to anticipate. Apple wants the flexibility to control its workers, pretend to give them the best, and then have relatively arbitrary circumstances under which they can change their work or fire them. Apple could stand the scrutiny of unionized workers. I haven’t heard boo this year about eco stuff—it feels like the pandemic suppressed many of those concerns, at least briefly.”
Carolina Milanesi wrote: “I still expect more from Apple. Sustainability and accessibility are good but there is more to be done in inclusion. Social impact shines in response to disasters.”
Cherlynn Low wrote: “Finally making iPhones repairable, changing up the design of the iPhone 14, as well as continued dedication to accessible products make Apple a leader here.”
Zac Hall wrote: “Bless Tim Cook’s heart for ending a war with the new Twitter CEO before it actually started.”
Joe Macirowski wrote: “Apple is simply anti-union in principle in both their words and actions. While many other social issues plaguing Apple (China, green-ish energy, diversity) are uphill battles against inherited sins of the father (some of whom are still executives), being anti-union over such small demands and failing to see the value in being perhaps the first company to exceed demands of prospective unions to thwart their formation is not a social issue with large inherited components that are slow to change. The beans were counted and the most profitable retailer per square foot decided chose to not strive to be equally far ahead of the competition on the treatment of the workforce powering it. Shameful. Without stating my thoughts on side loading and iPhone charging ports and regulation, it’s a failure of Apple to self-regulate well enough to keep these issues from become worth any large government’s time. The walled garden is full of subjectively scammy apps that an overbearing human-including review process should be rejecting since the same process seems to be able to never miss an app that attempts to link out to digital storefronts.”
Robert Carter wrote: “I love Apple’s public commitment to accessibility.”
Shelly Brisbin wrote: “Apple’s accessibility updates this year were pretty good this year, as was Apple’s much-appreciated decision to feature accessibility-related announcements in a context of their own. Most coverage of ongoing labor strife in China focuses on the impact on iPhone shipments. Given the closed nature of Chinese society, it’s difficult to tell if the company has had a positive or negative impact on working conditions for Chinese people who build iPhones. But it’s a topic on which more shareholders and media observers should press Apple leadership.”
Rich Mogull wrote: “This was the hardest category to score. Advanced Data Protection is a huge step up for privacy and security, as was Safety Check and Lockdown Mode. Apple is also more directly engaged in protecting journalists, human rights advocates, and others. On the other hand, they have an anti-union position and are still nearly completely reliant on China and thus can’t keep their human rights stance there. To give Apple credit, they are slowly working to unwind that dependency. On the whole they did better this year, but still have room to go.”
John Gruber wrote: “I believe that climate/carbon is the societal area where a company like Apple can and should make the most difference, and I’m hard-pressed to think how they could be doing more than they are, practically. We’re living in sensitive times on other social issues, and Apple seems to be managing that very astutely and honestly.”
John Moltz wrote: “Apple has created a very antagonistic relationship with its retail employees and it’s unnecessary. If Microsoft can commit itself to having a positive working relationship with unions, Apple can, too.”
Allison Sheridan wrote: “I appreciate Apple’s continuing efforts to protect our privacy up to and including Advanced Data Protection.”
Gabe Weatherhead wrote: “Apple took a lot of justified heat over their return-to-office transition. You can tell what a company’s core values are based on what they are willing to sacrifice.”
Myke Hurley wrote: “I think Apple could be doing a lot better with their trade-in program. They should be offering much larger amounts for their devices, to further encourage recycling.”
Casey Liss wrote: “Advanced Data Protection is excellent, and I’m very pleased to see it land. Apple’s environmental efforts are still some of the best. Apple has continued to diversify speakers during their presentations. The executive board is still overwhelmingly old white guys though. China continues to be a point of extreme concern for me. This starts with the obvious things like having a tremendous manufacturing bottleneck. However, I’m finding it harder and harder to shrug off Apple’s continued kowtowing to the Chinese government’s every whim. I wish so badly that I could say ‘Apple universally stands up for human rights.’ Instead I have to say ‘Apple stands up for human rights [as long as it’s not financially burdensome to do so].'”
Stephen Hackett wrote: “Apple continues to do important work in the areas of environmental conservation and social issues, but the back-and-forth over its return-to-office plans and its willingness to look the other way in China continue to be troublesome, if not downright hypocritical. Apple needs to do better the world over, not just in parts of the world far from its factories.”
Paul Kafasis wrote: “Apple is far better than most companies, but that’s a terribly low bar.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “The quiet attempt to shift production out of China has been subtly managed: not blowing any trumpets, except perhaps about any manufacturing that’s going to happen in the US. But work going to Vietnam or Brazil rather than China? Very quiet.”
Jessica Dennis wrote: “Apple pays a lot of lip service to DEI but we don’t really see that reflected on the Leadership page. And there’s that thing with the virtual slave labor in assembly plants. Likewise the environment — Apple says the right things, but we all know by now that carbon offsets are fake, and the fact that they tout removing accessories from the box for iPhones as a green win is just obnoxious.”
Marco Arment wrote: “Apple continues to face friction with significant numbers of its employees on a broad range of issues. Apple is still so reliant on China that they often need to cooperate with the Chinese government in extremely uncomfortable and morally questionable ways.”
James Thomson wrote: “Remote working policies continued their Corporate Culture Knows Best approach, only now they actually did make people return to the office to the detriment of many.”
Lex Friedman wrote: “Seeing Tim go on walks with Elon isn’t quite as aggravating as seeing Tim bend the knee to Trump. But until and unless Apple can decouple itself from China, all the recyclable elements in the world won’t negate its overall societal weaknesses.”
Brent Simmons wrote: “Apple’s commitment to accessibility continues to shine.”
Nick Heer wrote: “Apple’s continued dependence on China has once again become a liability. It continues to do favors for a government intent on suppressing its own people’s expression as they protested aggressive anti-COVID measures. Those measures resulted in demonstrations at factories manufacturing iPhones. If Apple’s management was not embarrassed by its deference to authorities, it seems to have been ashamed of its difficulties delivering some iPhone models in its most important quarter. That likely explains rumors this year of Apple working to reduce its dependence on manufacturers in China. Even if you ignore all the China-related news, Apple was repeatedly accused of union-busting tactics. On a more optimistic note, Apple announced better security for iCloud users while also saying it has discontinued development of the previously announced on-device photo scanning. Also, its accessibility strides this year were impressive, particularly the Door Detection feature.”
Final commentsGlenn Fleishman wrote: “Apple had a great year but some seeds from the last decade of its future failings are starting to pop their heads above the soil. Their commitment to working and selling in China while adhering to government requirements that involve repressive actions against citizens that violate fundamental human rights and rights to privacy is a fault that I don’t know how they could have avoided as such nor how they navigate out. They’re building and working with new partners in the U.S. and India to diversify risk, which is smart, and puts them in countries with nominally more democratic ideals. (India is at the crux of a shift that might lead them into something closer to what the former Yugoslavia was like than how China works now.) Apple could wake up one morning and find billions of sales gone and an inability to manufacture in China because an executive said “Taiwan is an independent country” in an unguarded moment. That feels like a dangerous position to be in, while Apple also fails to uphold fundamental rights. I’ll note, however, that the ADP iCloud offering ostensibly will be allowed in China—I don’t know how they square that with end-to-end encryption.”
Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote: “Apple needs an inspiration kick in the pants.”
Rob Griffiths wrote: “With the exception of the Mac Studio, I found most of 2022 somewhat ‘meh’ as far as Apple goes. Here’s hoping 2023 will bring more better Macs, and perhaps some truly new stuff (as opposed to just iteration number 15 of a given design).”
John Siracusa wrote: “Any day could be Mac Pro Day!”
James Thomson wrote: “I don’t know how much Apple’s internal focus has been on headsets and cars, but I hope we start to see some results from that soon.”
Charles Arthur wrote: “It felt as though Apple managed to stay out of the headlines for controversy in 2022, and that’s probably how they like it. (The retreat on local scanning for CSAM is an example of ducking away from controversy.) But maybe that also indicates a company that isn’t pushing ahead with things? Sure, if The Headset happens then there will be a lot of talk. But in the main, there’s a feeling—again, like after the Watch and before the AirPods—that we’re waiting for something to erupt again.”
Michael E. Cohen wrote: “Unlike many large corporations, Apple seems to have retained a vestige of its principles and commitment to the common good. Could do better, but could be far worse.”
Brian Mattucci wrote: “Despite some surprises (Mac Studio), it seemed like Apple was playing it safe this year with some underwhelming hardware refreshes (iPhone 14, iPad Pro) and some unexciting software releases.”
NotesI didn’t vote in the survey. Thanks to all of those who who participated: Shahid Kamal Ahmad, Steven Aquino, Marco Arment, Charles Arthur, Shelly Brisbin, Jeff Carlson, Robert Carter, Josh Centers, Michael E. Cohen, Alex Cox, Jessica Dennis, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Lex Friedman, Rob Griffiths, John Gruber, Stephen Hackett, Zac Hall, Dave Hamilton, Devindra Hardawar, Nick Heer, Myke Hurley, Paul Kafasis, Joe Kissell, Andrew Laurence, Casey Liss, Cherlynn Low, Roman Loyola, Jean MacDonald, Joe Macirowski, Brian Mattucci, Benjamin Mayo, Kirk McElhearn, Philip Michaels, Carolina Milanesi, Rich Mogull, John Moltz, Dan Moren, Quinn Nelson, Rosemary Orchard, Christine Romero-Chan, Joe Rossignol, Allison Sheridan, Brent Simmons, Aleen Simms, John Siracusa, Eric Slivka, David Sparks, Brett Terpstra, James Thomson, Michael Tsai, Federico Viticci, Christina Warren, and Gabe Weatherhead.
All our previous surveys are available via our Apple Report Card archive page.
With Audio Hijack, you can record any audio on your Mac. Whether you want to save audio from individual applications like Safari or Skype, hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, and even the entire system audio output, Audio Hijack can handle it. Simply put, if it can be heard on MacOS, Audio Hijack can record it.
– Record conversations from Skype, Zoom, and other VoIP apps
– Save streaming audio from the web
– Create podcasts, both remote and in-studio
– Digitize vinyl
– And so much more
Audio Hijack 4.1 just shipped, and it adds over 50 (!) enhancements on top of the award-winning version 4.0.
Through the end of February, Six Colors readers can save $10 when you purchase with coupon code 6CAHTEN. Learn more and download a free trial on our website.
Here we are, almost forty years after the debut of the Mac, and if there’s one issue that remains a hot button to this day it’s gaming on the platform.
This past week, my colleague Jason Cross penned a piece explaining the technological moves Apple would need to make in order to turn gaming on the Mac into a real, going concern. Jason’s points are good ones: there are a variety of technologies that Apple could embrace in order to make it easier for game developers to bring their work to the Mac.
But those hurdles are only one part of the overall issue—and a fairly small part, in my opinion. If Apple is capable of writing an impressive piece of software like Rosetta 2, which runs Intel-based apps on Apple silicon Macs with high performance and full transparency, then the company surely has the skills to implement existing game APIs that leverage all the power of their current machines.
No, the real obstacle for gaming on the Mac is one of culture and drive. And changing those is going to be a lot harder.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Cue up your best Ken Watanabe gif because the kaiju of Apple rumors are going head to head! Samsung announces it’s getting into… some kind of reality, but it doesn’t matter because Apple’s going out of business.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
If you were bored of all those stories every three months about Apple continually setting records and posting one banner quarter after another, I’ve got great news! Apple’s first fiscal quarter of 2023—covering the holiday quarter of calendar-year 2022—was merely the company’s second-largest quarter ever, unable to match up with the same quarter a year ago.
The world of Wall Street doesn’t care so much about Apple’s tidy $30 billion profit during the quarter. It’s more worried about that five percent year-over-year decline—the company’s first such decline in almost four years. Fortunately, Apple executives were well prepared on Thursday to explain what happened. You see, it’s all about headwinds.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spend an hour talking to investment analysts about the company’s just-completed quarter. And as always, we’ve got a transcript! Here it is, as it happened…
Tim Cook’s opening remarksThank you, Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today we’re reporting revenue of $117.2 billion for the December quarter. We set all-time revenue records in a number of markets, including Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Vietnam, along with quarterly records in Brazil and India.
As a result of a challenging environment, our revenue was down 5% year over year. But I’m proud of the way we have navigated circumstances seen and unforeseen over the past several years, and I remain incredibly confident in our team and our mission and in the work we do every day.
Let me discuss the three factors that impacted our revenue performance during the quarter. The first was foreign exchange headwinds, which had a nearly 800 basis point impact. On a constant currency basis, we grew year over year and would have grown in the vast majority of the markets we track.
The second factor, which we described in a November 6th update, was COVID-19 related challenges, which significantly impacted the supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max and lasted through most of December. Because of these constraints, we had significantly less iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max supply than we planned, causing ship times to extend far beyond what we had anticipated. As we always have every step of the way throughout the pandemic, we continue to prioritize people and worked with our suppliers to ensure the health and safety of every worker. Production is now back where we want it to be.
The third factor was a challenging macroeconomic environment as the world continues to face unprecedented circumstances, from inflation to war in Eastern Europe to the enduring impacts of the pandemic. And we know that Apple is not immune to it. But whatever conditions we face, our approach is always the same: We are thoughtful and deliberate. We manage for the long term. We adapt quickly to circumstances outside our control while delivering with excellence in the things we can. We invest in innovation, in people, and in the positive difference we can make in the world. And we do it all to provide our customers with technology that will enrich their lives and help unlock their full creative potential. It’s a wonderful thing to be a part of, and it’s so rewarding for all of us at Apple when we hear how much our customers are loving what we create.
Let me talk now about what we saw across our product categories. Starting with iPhone, revenue came in at $65.8 billion for the quarter, down 8% year over year. However, on a constant currency basis, iPhone revenue was roughly flat. Our customers continue to rave about the astounding camera capabilities and unprecedented battery life and the groundbreaking suite of health and safety features. The iPhone 14 lineup pushes the limits of what users can do with a smartphone.
During the quarter, Mac revenue came in at $7.7 billion, which was in line with what we had expected. We had a difficult compare because this time last year we had the extremely successful launch of the redesigned M1 MacBook Pros. We also faced a challenging macroeconomic environment and foreign exchange headwinds. We remain confident in and focused on the long-term opportunity for Mac. Just last month, we introduced new MacBook Pro models powered by our latest developments in Apple silicon, M2 Pro and M2 Max. These chips enable unprecedented performance and do so with less energy, which is not only good for the environment but gives the newest MacBook Pro the longest battery life ever in a Mac. We also introduced the M2-powered Mac Mini, which will supercharge productivity for users of all kinds and leave them stunned by just how powerful a Mac Mini can be.
During the quarter, iPad revenue grew 30% to a total of $9.4 billion. The very strong growth was due in part to a favorable compare to the December quarter a year ago when we experienced significant supply constraints. Customers continue to praise our new lineup for its versatility, whether it’s the new iPad Pro, now powered by the M2, or the newly designed iPad 10th generation with its stunning Liquid Retina display and beautiful colors.
Revenue for Wearables, Home and Accessories was $13.5 billion, which was down 8% year-over-year, driven by foreign exchange headwinds and a challenging macroeconomic environment. We remain excited about the long-term opportunity in the category. As an example, a few weeks ago, we announced the Next Generation HomePod, which is an indispensable addition to the smart home. This powerful smart speaker relies on advanced computational audio to produce an incredible listening experience. We’re also helping users make their home safer with sound recognition. This feature, arriving later this spring, allows HomePod to send a notification directly to a user’s iPhone if a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm sound is identified.
We continue to hear wide praise for Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra, which has set a new standard for what’s possible with a wearable. From a whole host of health and safety features to incredible new capabilities for extreme athletes, there is something for everyone in these amazing products.
Customers are excited about some phenomenal new features we’ve made available across many of our products as well. One of the highlights is Emergency SOS via Satellite, which launched for iPhone 14 customers in the U.S. and Canada in November, and for customers in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK in December. This is a feature we hope our users will never need, but it is incredibly heartening to get emails from people describing the life-saving impact our new safety features have had on them.
We’re always looking for new ways to empower people to create and collaborate. In December, we released Freeform, a brand-new app that lets users take their ideas wherever they want, anywhere they are, all while collaborating in real time. Freeform has already received praise from reviewers for its flexibility and simplicity as it works seamlessly across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Today we are very excited to announce that we’ve achieved a truly incredible milestone. Thanks to our deep commitment to innovation, incredible customer loyalty and satisfaction, and a large number of switchers, we now have more than 2 billion active devices as part of our growing installed base, double what it was just 7 years ago. This is an incredible testament to our products and services and the strength of our ecosystem.
We set an all-time revenue record of $20.8 billion in services, which was better than what we had expected. We achieved double-digit revenue growth from App Store subscriptions and set all-time revenue records across a number of categories, including cloud and payment services. All told, Apple now has more than 935 million paid subscriptions.
Apple has also just begun a historic 10-year partnership with Major League Soccer. Just yesterday, we launched MLS Season Pass, which will give fans in more than 100 countries access to every live MLS regular season game, as well as the playoffs and MLS Cup, all with no blackouts.
And while we’re providing more content to sports fans than ever before, Apple TV+ continues to showcase powerful characters and moving storytelling. We were thrilled to celebrate the holidays alongside our Apple TV+ subscribers with the hit movie Spirited, and we’re delighted to see how much people are enjoying new and returning series like Shrinking, Slow Horses, and Truth Be Told. And we have some great upcoming movies in Sharper and Tetris, along with Emmy Award winner Ted Lasso returning this spring.
During the quarter, we made some great updates to Fitness+ as well, expanding our catalog of more than 3,500 workouts and meditations to include a new kickboxing category and a new sleep theme for meditations. Our latest Artist Spotlight series features the music of the incomparable Beyoncé, and we’re excited to take a stroll with guests appearing on our fifth season of Time to Walk.
And we continued to build on our decades-long commitment to helping small businesses thrive when we announced Apple Business Connect. This new tool gives business owners even more control over how billions of people see and engage with their products and services every day. Businesses of all sizes can now customize key information for users across Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet, Siri, and other apps.
Meanwhile, in retail, we celebrated 25 years of the Apple Online Store and also opened Apple Pacific Center in Vancouver and Apple American Dream in New Jersey. And I’m grateful to all the teams who helped our customers throughout the busy holiday season.
At Apple, we spend a lot of time focused on creating an unparalleled experience for our customers and every product and service that we offer. We’re also just as dedicated to leading with our values in everything we do. As part of that work, we strengthened our deep commitment to privacy and security, giving users three new tools to protect their most sensitive data: iMessage Contact Key Verification, Security Keys for Apple ID, and Advanced Data Protection for iCloud.
At Apple, we feel a deep sense of responsibility to leave the world better than we found it. We’re also a year closer to 2030, and we remain ever focused on the environmental commitments we set out for the end of the decade. As an example, the latest Mac Mini and MacBook Pro models all use 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure and recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. And in a first for HomePod, we’re using 100% recycled gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards.
In honor of Black History Month, we released the Black Unity Collection, including the special edition Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop, a new matching watch face, and iPhone wallpaper. Through our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, we’re expanding our support of five organizations focused on lifting up communities of color through technology. And we are committed, as ever, to building on our progress around inclusion and diversity.
During the quarter, we also announced that since the inception of our Giving program 11 years ago, we’ve donated more than $880 million to humanitarian efforts, disaster relief, childhood education, and more. And over the last 16 years, through our partnership with RED, Apple-supported grants have helped more than 11 million people get the care and support services they need.
As we look ahead in 2023, we are excited about the year to come. At Apple, we are always looking forward, always focused on the next challenge, always determined to do great things with unmatched creativity and unrivaled innovation. And that makes me more confident about the future of Apple than I have ever been.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Luca.
Luca Maestri’s opening remarksThank you Tim, and good afternoon everyone. As Tim mentioned, revenue for the December quarter was $117.2 billion, down 5% from last year. A number of factors had a significant impact on our results. First, we faced a very difficult foreign exchange environment, which affected our performance by nearly 800 basis points. In other words, we grew revenue on a constant currency basis, and in fact, we did so in the vast majority of markets. Second, the macroeconomic environment this past quarter was markedly more challenging than 12 months ago. Third, we experienced significant supply shortages for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max in November and through December. On the other hand, we had the positive impact of the 14th week in the quarter that Tejas mentioned at the beginning of the call.
Products revenue was 96.4 billion, down 8% from last year due to the factors I just called out. At the same time, however, our installed base of active devices grew double digits and achieved all-time records in each geographic segment and in each major product category. We are proud to now have over 2 billion active devices in our installed base. This continued growth in the installed base is due to extremely strong levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty and a high number of customers who are new to our products. The installed base growth also helped our services set an all-time revenue record of 20.8 billion, up 6% over a year ago. We achieved this new milestone despite more than 700 basis points of negative impact from foreign exchange.
We reached all-time services revenue records in the Americas, Europe, and the rest of Asia-Pacific, and a December quarter record in Greater China. We also set records in many services categories, including all-time revenue records for cloud services, payment services and music, and December quarter records for the App Store and AppleCare. Company gross margin was 43%, up 70 basis points from last quarter due to leverage and favorable mix, partially offset by foreign exchange. Products gross margin was 37%, up 240 basis points sequentially, and services gross margin was 70.8%, up 30 basis points sequentially, both due to the same factors that impacted total company gross margin.
Operating expenses of 14.3 billion were significantly below the guidance range we provided at the beginning of the quarter and grew at a slower pace than in the past, as we took actions to respond to the current macro environment. Net income was 30 billion, diluted earnings per share were $1.88, and we generated very strong operating cash flow of 34 billion.
Let me now get into more detail for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was 65.8 billion, despite significant foreign exchange headwinds, supply constraints on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, and a challenging macroeconomic environment. In spite of these circumstances, we set all-time iPhone revenue records in Canada, Italy and Spain, and saw strong growth in several emerging markets, including all-time iPhone revenue records for India and Vietnam.
Importantly, the installed base of active iPhones continues to grow nicely and is at an all-time high across all geographic segments. In emerging markets in particular, the installed base grew double digits and we had record levels of switchers in India and in Mexico. Our customers continue to love their experience with our products with the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research indicating customer satisfaction of 98% for the iPhone 14 family.
Mac revenue was 7.7 billion, down 29% year-over-year and in line with our expectations. There were three key drivers for our Mac results. First, we had a challenging compare against last year’s launch of the completely reimagined MacBook Pros, our first notebooks with M1 Pro and M1 Max. Second, we believed that the macro environment impacted our Mac performance. And third, we faced significant foreign exchange headwinds. At the same time, however, the installed base of active Macs reached an all-time high across all geographic segments and we continue to see very strong upgrading activity to Apple Silicon. Customer satisfaction with Mac remains very strong at 96% based on the latest survey of U.S. consumers from 451 Research.
iPad revenue was 9.4 billion, up 30% year-over-year, despite significant FX headwinds. This performance was driven by two key items. First, during the December quarter a year ago, we experienced significant supply constraints, while this year we had enough supply to meet demand. Second, we launched our new iPad and the iPad Pro powered by the M2 chip during the quarter. The iPad installed base reached a new all-time high thanks to incredible customer loyalty and a high number of new customers. In fact, over half of the customers who purchased iPads during the quarter were new to the product.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was 13.5 billion, down 8% year-over-year. The year-over-year decline was driven by significant FX headwinds and a challenging macroeconomic environment. However, our installed base of devices in the category set a new all-time record thanks to the largest number of customers new to a smartwatch that we’ve ever had in a given quarter. In fact, nearly two-thirds of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product.
Moving to Services, we generated 20.8 billion in revenue, a new all-time record in total and for many Services offerings, in spite of a difficult foreign exchange environment, and macroeconomic headwinds impacting certain categories such as digital advertising and mobile gaming. In constant currency, we grew services revenue double digits on top of growing 24% during the December quarter a year ago.
We remain focused on the large long-term opportunity in this category and we continue to observe several trends that reflect the strength of our ecosystem. For example, we saw increased customer engagement with our services during the quarter. Both our transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits year-over-year, each setting a new all-time record. Paid subscriptions also continue to grow nicely. We now have more than 935 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, up more than 150 million during the last 12 months alone and nearly four times what we had just five years ago.
And we continue to increase the reach and improve the quality of our offerings. For instance, Apple Pay is now available to millions of merchants in nearly 70 countries and regions, and we saw a record-breaking number of purchases made using Apple Pay globally during the holiday shopping season.
Finally, our installed base of over 2 billion active devices represents a great foundation for future expansion of our ecosystem, and it continues to grow even during difficult macroeconomic conditions, which speaks to the exceptionally high levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction, and our ability to attract new customers to our platform. The growth is coming from every major product category and geographic segment, with strong double-digit increases in emerging markets, such as Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Turning to the enterprise market, we have seen continued adoption of our services for business, like Apple Business Essentials, AppleCare, Tap to Pay, and Apple Financial Services. For example, Mars Incorporated has expanded its use of AppleCare for Enterprise to provide timely device support and assurance for iPads deployed across their manufacturing sites. Meanwhile, HCA Healthcare has leveraged Apple Financial Services to manage the annual refresh of its entire fleet of iPhones. This not only ensures that their staff stay current on the latest Apple technology, but also provides them with significant annual savings in the process.
Let me now turn to our capital return program and our cash position. We returned over 25 billion to shareholders during the December quarter as our business continues to generate very strong cash flow. This included 3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and 19 billion through open market repurchases of 133 million Apple shares.
We ended the quarter with 165 billion in cash and marketable securities. We repaid 1.4 billion in maturing debt and decreased commercial paper by 8.2 billion, leaving us with total debt of 111 billion. As a result, net cash was 54 billion at the end of the quarter and we maintain our goal of becoming net cash neutral over time.
As we move into the March quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Tejas referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we are not providing revenue guidance, but we are sharing some directional insights based on the assumption that the microeconomic outlook and COVID-related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter.
In total, we expect our March quarter year-over-year revenue performance to be similar to the December quarter. This represents an acceleration in our underlying year-over-year business performance as the December quarter benefited from an extra week. Foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind and we expect a negative year-over-year impact of 5 percentage points. For Services, we expect revenue to grow year-over-year, while continuing to face macroeconomic headwinds in areas such as digital advertising and mobile gaming. For iPhone, we expect our March quarter year-over-year revenue performance to accelerate relative to the December quarter year-over-year revenue performance. For Mac and iPad, we expect revenue for both product categories to decline double digits year-over-year because of challenging compares and macroeconomic headwinds.
We expect gross margin to be between 43.5% and 44.5%. We expect OpEx to be between $13.7 and $13.9 billion. We expect OI&E to be around negative $100 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments and our tax rate to be around 16%.
Finally, today our board of directors has declared a cash dividend of 23 cents per share of common stock payable on February 16, 2023 to shareholders of record as of February 13, 2023.
Q&A with analystsDavid Vogt, UBS: You talked about the supply chain returning back to normal after a very difficult October and November, but we’re still seeing some disruption across tech products, whether it’s enterprise or consumer facing. How do you think about your supply chain and maybe the levels of inventory or builds that you might need as we go forward to sort of insulate your business from these sort of episodic disruptions? Have you changed your view? And if so, how does that effect, you know, ultimately margins and sort of your balance sheet and cash flow items going forward? Thanks.
Tim Cook: This is Tim, David. From a supply point of view, we did see disruption from early November through most of December. And from a supply chain point of view, we’re now at a point where production is what we need it to be, and so the problem is behind us. In terms of going forward in the supply chain, you know, we build our products everywhere. There are component parts coming from many different countries in the world and the final assembly coming from three countries in the world on just iPhone. And so we continue to optimize it. We’ll continue to optimize it over time and change it to continue to improve. I think when you sort of zoom out and back up from it, the last three years have been a pretty difficult time between COVID and silicon shortages and the like. And I think we have had a very resilient supply chain in the aggregate. In terms of supply for this quarter, which I think was one of your points, I think we’re in decent supply on most products for the quarter currently.
Shannon Cross, Credit Suisse: Luca, I wanted to dig a bit more into the commentary on gross margin. The guidance, especially 43.5 to 44.5 is obviously quite strong. So I’m wondering what’s helping you out there to mix and some other things. And then, you know, how should we think about what currency and hedging is going to do as we look forward?
Luca Maestri: Shannon, yes, I mean, we’ve had good margin for the December quarter to start with. We reported 43%. Obviously, in December, we have the benefit of leverage because of the seasonality of the business. But we also had favorable mix across the board. Of course, foreign exchange is an issue right now. In the December quarter, on a sequential basis, foreign exchange was a negative 110 basis points for us. And on a year over year basis, it’s 300 basis points. So obviously, the FX environment has changed a lot during the last 12 months. For March, yeah, we’ve seen a margin expansion, 43.5 to 44.5. We’re doing a lot of work around cost, of course, you know, mix will continue to help both within categories and services mix as we move away from the holiday season. But we’re doing a lot of work on the cost structure and that is paying off. Foreign exchange is still a negative, about 50 basis points sequentially, but it’s mitigating. The last couple of weeks, the dollar has weakened a bit. And so hopefully, as we go through the year, hopefully things will improve. But for now, as you correctly state, we are in a good position on margins.
Shannon Cross, Credit Suisse: Thank you. And then, Tim, can you talk a bit about China? You know, what you’re seeing, obviously, you had the issues with production, but I mean more on the demand side. As you know, we’ve gotten through Chinese New Year and the opening. I’m just wondering, you know, are you seeing the Chinese consumer come back? What are they buying? And how are you thinking about your position there?
Tim Cook: Shannon, last quarter, we declined by 7% on a reported basis, but we actually grew on a constant currency basis. And that was despite some significant supply constraints that we talked about earlier. And obviously, the sort of the COVID restrictions throughout China that happened in various different places throughout the country also impacted the demand during the quarter. When you look at the opening that started happening in December, we saw a marked change in traffic in our stores as compared to November, and that followed through to demand as well. And I don’t want to get into January. We’ve obviously, for January, is included in the color that Luca provided earlier. But we did see a marked change from December compared to November.
Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley: Hey, guys, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe Tim, first one for you. That two billion installed base figure, that’s up, I believe, 200 million units year over year. That implies the strongest annual gain in new devices in your install base, basically as far back as you’ve provided those data points. And so I guess my two questions are, one, can you provide the install base for the iPhone at year end? And then two, is there anything that you see in this new cohort of users that might look different or similar to past cohorts, either by demographic or regions or monetization ramp?
Tim Cook: The installed base is now over 2 billion active devices, as you mentioned, and we set records across each geographic segment and major product category. And so it was a broad-based change. To correct one thing you said, it’s up over 150 million year over year. The last report we reported to be over 1.85. And so it’s 150, which we’re very proud of. We also saw strong double digit in several of the emerging markets, which is very important to us. For example, India and Brazil as just two examples. So very, very strong, and obviously it bodes well for the future.
Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley: Great. Thank you for the color, Tim. And then Luca, obviously the December quarter was negatively impacted by the production challenges. Can you just maybe unpackage where channel inventory levels are today kind of across the iPhone broadly? And then what the data that you’re seeing so far this quarter is telling you about phone demand deferral versus kind of iPhone demand destruction and perhaps pushing some upgrades later into the year rather than into the March quarter.
Tim Cook: Yeah, Eric, I’ll take that one as well. The channel inventory levels on iPhone, we obviously ended the December quarter below our target range, given the supply challenges on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. But as you think about this, keep in mind that a year ago we also exited the December quarter below our target inventory range because of supply challenges in the year ago quarter. Not related, not the same issue, but just as a point. And so that hopefully gives you some flavor of that. In terms of what we’re seeing in January, we’ve included in our color that Luca provided kind of our thinking. It’s very hard to estimate the recapture because you have to know exactly what would have happened and how many people bought down. And it takes a while to get those reports in during the quarter. And so we’ve made our best guess at it. In terms of the sizing of the constraint in Q1, what we estimate, although not with precision, is that we believe iPhone would have grown during the quarter had it not been for the supply shortages. So hopefully that provides you a little bit of color.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Just going back on the gross margin line, pretty good guidance into this March quarter. I’m curious if you’d unpack that a little bit, specific around what you’re seeing as far as maybe benefits from component pricing in the guidance, if you’re embedding any of that at this point.
Luca Maestri: Yeah, of course, you know, with our guidance, we try to capture every aspect of our cost structure. And obviously components are a big portion of that. So definitely that’s included. And keep in mind, again, that foreign exchange… I mentioned earlier, I think to Shannon, that the sequential negative on FX is 50 basis points. Versus a year ago, it’s 270 basis points. Obviously the U.S. dollar has moved a lot over the last 12 months. So obviously we need to find offsets and more to the negative FX in order to be able to provide this kind of guidance. And so obviously components are a big part of that.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: And then kind of, you know, from a strategic perspective, giving kind of the things that we’re seeing out in some of your peer group, I’m curious, Tim, how you think about, you know, the role of AI in your strategy as far as particularly in the services segment, whether or not you see opportunities to excel monetization abilities within the paid subscriber base and whether or not AI is something that you’re implementing a bit more strategically there
Tim Cook: Yeah. It is a major focus of ours. It’s incredible in terms of how it can enrich customers’ lives. And you can look no further than some of the things that we announced in the fall with crash detection and fall detection or back a ways with ECG. I mean, these things have literally saved people’s lives. And so we see an enormous potential in this space to affect virtually everything we do. It’s obviously a horizontal technology, not a vertical. And so it will affect every product and every service that we have.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Tim, I think basically earlier comments that iPhones would have grown X, the production issue that implies that maybe it’s a $7 billion or so impact that you had in December quarter from the production challenges on the high-end models. I’m sure it’s tough to see what happens this time around, but I think historically when you’ve had production issues or things like this happen, what has the consumer behavior been typically? Do they tend to go down towards the lower-end models and get the phone they want quickly, or do they just defer their production? Just from a historical perspective, I think, do you typically recover what’s deferred out, or no?
Tim Cook: It’s very hard to estimate, is the real answer, because you have to know a lot of data, and it’s usually only in hindsight that you have a more reasonable view of it. And so we put our best views in the color that Luca provided. That’s kind of what I would say.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: All right. And then I guess maybe if I think about services as you go forward, and you had really good growth in services, I think, over the last several years, but as you go forward in services, what do you think drives the growth more? So is it the expansion of your install base, or is it more going to be driven by ARPU going higher for you? I’m just curious, how do you think about those two buckets as you go forward?
Luca Maestri: I mean, there’s a number of things, and I mentioned a few of them during the call. The first step is always the installed base. The installed base is the engine for services growth, and the fact that the installed base is growing very nicely, and in a lot of emerging markets it’s growing even faster, that gives us a larger addressable pool of customers. That’s incredibly important. The second one is that we’re seeing that the level of engagement of our customers already in our ecosystem continues to grow. I mentioned that both transacting accounts and paid accounts grew double digits, and so that bodes very well for the future, and we have a lot of transacting accounts that can move to paid accounts over time. The other aspect that is very important for us is to continue constantly to improve the reach and the quality of our services, and I gave the example of Apple Pay, which is a great example because we started off primarily in the United States, now we’ve taken it to 70 markets, millions of merchants, and so obviously payment services continue to set new highs all the time for us. As you’ve seen over the last few years, we also launched new services over time, and that obviously contributes to the growth. We’re very excited, and when we look at the behavior of our installed base, we think it’s very promising for the continued growth of our services business.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Yeah, hey, Tim. I had a quick question on emerging markets. Seems like you’re making a lot of strides in India. I potentially wanted to understand the kind of share you have in China and India, and relative to that, what would be your aspirational but sort of achievable share in iPhones in those territories, whether it’s units or revenues? And I was hoping to draw on your experience of maybe what you’ve seen in other countries where you’ve had some longer presence.
Tim Cook: Looking at the business in India, we set a quarterly revenue record and grew very strong, double digits year over year. And so we feel very good about how we performed, and that’s despite the headwinds that we’ve talked about. Taking a step back, India is a hugely exciting market for us and is a major focus. We brought the online store there in 2020. We will soon bring Apple retail there. So we’re putting a lot of emphasis on the market. There’s been a lot done from a financing options and trade-ins to make products more affordable and give people more options to buy and so there there’s a lot going on there. We’re in essence taking what we learned in China Years ago and how we scaled China and bringing that to bear and I don’t have the exact market shares in front of me, but I think you would you would see that from a market share point of view that we grew around the world last quarter on iPhone despite the the challenges that we had on the supply side. And I wouldn’t expect to have a difference in those two markets.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Understood. I had a sort of a interesting theoretical question on pricing. Assuming we get the CHIP act passed and there’s a whole bunch of manufacturing that happens in US and other territories that are potentially somewhat more expensive than the ones you might be in now, has the company done any studies to gauge the elasticity of demand relative to small price increases in your products?
Tim Cook: We have experience in that but I wouldn’t necessarily draw the same conclusion that you have in terms of the the cost of the product. We don’t know at this point exactly what that will be but we’re all in in terms of being the largest customer for TSMC in in Arizona and are very proud to take part in that. That’s what I would say about that.
Wami Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, you’ve done a phenomenal job with driving consumer choice towards higher-end products within your portfolio. How would you compare this cycle for iPhones if you were to segment the pro versus non pro models versus the cycles from from the past few years, and do you think this move to higher ASPs is sustainable or do you think it reverses in a tighter consumer spending environment?
Tim Cook: The 14 Pro and the 14 Pro Max have done extremely well up until the point where we had a supply shortage and couldn’t provide the total of the demand. And so it’s definitely a strong pro cycle. I think there’s a number of reasons for that but the the most important one is always the product and I think the innovations and the product speak for themselves and we feel very good about the product that we announced back in September and are happy to now be at a point where we’re shipping to the demand.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: And Tim, do you think that button this move to sort of higher ASPs that has happened over the last few years is sustainable or could it could sustain on this very tough macro environment that you’ve cited?
Tim Cook: I wouldn’t want to predict, but I would say that the the smartphone—for us, the iPhone—has become so integral into people’s lives. It contains their their contacts and their health information and their banking information and their smart home and so many different parts of their lives, it’s the payment vehicle for many people. And so I think I think people are willing to really stretch to get the best they can they can afford in that category
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: And Tim, you you clearly emphasized the focus and importance of the installed base. If we think about the absolute growth of the install base from a billion to two billion over seven years from a device standpoint, how should we think about the penetration of services? Or the growth in paying customers on services? Over that time frame, is that penetration rate increasing or decreasing? How fast is that growing relative to the growth of the overall install base?
Luca Maestri: Yes, of course we keep track of that. It’s really really important for us. Over the last seven years as we’ve doubled the installed base we’ve seen a growing engagement of our customers on the platform. That happens first of all by customers transacting on the platform and then moving to paid accounts, so starting to pay for some of the services. That percentage of paid accounts tends to grow over time. We’ve seen it in developed markets. We see it in emerging markets. And that is due to some of the reasons that I was explaining earlier, including the fact that we made it easier for our for our customers to get engaged on the platform. For example, we offer multiple payment methods in many countries. And we’ve made it easier to explore for more services because we’ve added a lot of services on the platform over the last seven years. So to your question, of course higher engagement means a higher percentage of paid accounts over time.
Jim Suva, Citigroup: Tim and Luca, you both mentioned earlier on the Q&A a little bit about India. I was wondering if we’re now entering a situation of even more opportunity because we’ve exited COVID, we’ve exited countries with different COVID criteria, we’ve also seen India build out its higher speed transmission and your market share is tremendously underrepresented there and it appears with the supply chain you’re looking at diversifying kind of operational risk not specific to any country, but just overall. Now you look at potentially opening up stores and stuff. Am I right, that’s the way you look at it is it’s even more prime for opportunity now than ever. And once you start opening up stores there, you could just see a complete, you know, green shoots of adoptions or any additional commentary on your view on India as now we’ve navigated COVID and supply chain and so many challenges over the past two years?
Tim Cook Yeah, Jim, we actually did fairly well through COVID in India and I’m even more bullish now on the other side of it, or hopefully on the other side of it. And that’s the reason why we’re investing there
Jim Suva, Citigroup: You’d mentioned that services, not necessarily specific to India, but services overall were better than expected. And of course, supply chain was more challenged than expected. So what was the bridge factor of services being better than expected on the upside? Was it like, advertising or apps or paid monthly subscriptions? Or what were kind of the things that really surprised you to the upside on services?
Luca Maestri: It was primarily the level of engagement that we saw, which then it reflects into the, as you said, the paid subscriptions. We saw very good results in our cloud services business, in payment services, music was very strong. So we had a number of categories that set new records, all-time records, and they did a bit better than we were expecting at the beginning of the quarter. And so Tim mentioned that during his prepared remarks, that when you look at it in constant currency, we grew services double digits, and that was on top of a 24% increase a year ago. So it’s very sustained growth that we’re seeing.
Krish Sankar, Cowen & Company: You mentioned how the macro did soften and had an impact and as consumers tighten their belt, when you look across your hardware products and service businesses, where have you seen the biggest impact and where have you seen the least impact from the softening macro?
Tim Cook: We think there were some impact across the products and in services. Probably the ones that we saw the most impact on were Mac and wearables. You can see that in those numbers and probably the least would have been iPhone.
Krish Sankar, Cowen & Company: And then just a quick follow up on the Mac. The PC industry is expecting decline in PC shipments this year also. How to think about the Mac relative to kind of like where the PC industry as a whole is expecting the shipments to end up. Is there any color you can give on that? Thank you very much.
Tim Cook: The industry is very challenged, as you say. The industry is contracting. I think from us though, and I don’t know how this year will play out so I don’t want to predict the year, but over the long run we have a market that is a reasonable sized market, a big market, and we have low share and we have a competitive advantage with Apple silicon. And so strategically I think we’re well positioned in the market, albeit I think it will be a little rough in the short term.
Apple on Thursday announced its fiscal first-quarter results, and it was a step backward. The company’s year-over-year revenue fell $6.7 billion, though with total revenue of $117.2 billion it was still the company’s second largest quarter ever.
Here are our usual charts with some added commentary. We also have posted our traditional transcript of the conference call with analysts and offered additional analysis on a YouTube Live Stream right after the call concluded.
Now on to the charts:
Apple’s holiday quarter is always its strongest, and it was here too—just not as strong as last year’s holiday quarter.
Again, total profit was the second-most ever at $30 billion but it’s down from last year.
This quarter is Apple’s first with lower year-over-year growth since four years ago, when the company’s growth slowed in successive quarters.
As you might expect, the iPhone continues to dominate Apple’s overall revenue picture.
MacBy all accounts, Apple originally intended to have new MacBook Pro and Mac mini models ready to go during this quarter, but those releases were delayed until this month. With no new Macs in the offing at all, Mac sales took a big hit, down 29 percent year-over-year.
iPadWith new iPad models in the mix, the iPad was actually Apple’s most positive category in these results, with revenue at its highest point in nine years! After four lackluster quarters, this was a blockbuster quarter for the iPad.
iPhoneHonestly, given that Apple warned of iPhone production problems that would prevent the company from meeting demand, being down only 8% year over year strikes me as being a bit of a relief. It’s still the second-best iPhone quarter ever, and I suspect that at least some of those lost iPhone sales will roll over into the company’s second fiscal quarter. Still, if you’re a financial analyst looking to get upset, this is where you’d do it: we don’t actually know if iPhone demand is soft or if this based on shortages!
ServicesServices’ explosive growth seems to have slowed, as this is the second straight quarter with single-digit growth after a multi-year expansion period with growth easily in the double digits every quarter.
Wearables, Home, and AccessoriesSame old story: the second-best quarter ever for the category, but not better than last year’s. This is the second time in the last three quarters that this category has shown year-over-year decline, after many years of rapid growth.
Regional charts
Our thoughts on an app aiming to be “the TikTok for text,” whether we’re bothered by AI-generated content when it’s accurate and useful, Apple’s rumored foldable iPad, and our home speaker setups.
Go to the podcast page.
Folding iPads, folding notebooks… wait, notebooks already fold.
Go to the podcast page.
Special guest Dan Moren joins John Gruber to talk about the new M2 MacBook Pros and Mac Minis, and the triumphant return of the full-sized HomePod.
Go to the podcast page.
It wouldn’t be the release of a brand new Apple product without the release of a brand new -gate to go along with it. Unlike power adapters and headphones, the company continues to bundle in controversy with every single purchase.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
This is the episode where our brains break as we try to process wild rumors of folding iPads and Siri-driven VR app development. Also, proving the raw interactive power of UpgradeFeedback.com, Myke hears from many listeners about why they choose to use the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Jason, meanwhile seems to hate plants.
Go to the podcast page.
During last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple spent a surprising amount of time talking up a set of features focused on the idea of collaboration. The company attempted to tie together a few dipsparate ideas, such as working together on documents in apps like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers with pre-existing communication features in Messages and FaceTime.
The clear message was that Apple was taking a shot at collaborative office environments like Microsoft Teams and Google Docs. But given those longstanding alternatives with, if not devoted userbases, then at least entrenched user bases, there’s a question of who exactly these features are for?
That said, as someone who works in a small environment populated entirely by those in Apple’s ecosystem, it seems like I’d be the ideal candidate for such features. But in comparison to what other companies offer, Apple’s foray feels a bit slapdash and duct taped together, and my experiences using it have been far from smooth.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
The M2 Mac mini and MacBook Pro reviews are in, Ivory is here, and details of the Apple headset?! Our collective cups runneth over.
“You made the car too good.”… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Clay for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Clay is a thoughtful relationship manager designed specifically for macOS and iOS. Clay makes it easier to connect with people, to be more generous and responsive with our fellow humans who are core to our own personal and professional lives.
Before Clay, being thoughtful required relying on your memory as well as a mix of spreadsheets, notecards, address books, and other tools. In addition to being difficult to manage, this approach let important relationships, moments, and context fall through the cracks. That’s why Clay exists. It’s a stunning, intuitive, and private relationship manager, populated automatically from your email, calendar, Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, and iMessage.
Clay helps you be thoughtful with your relationships by creating and automatically updating beautiful cards for each of your contacts with context such as profile photos, bios, education and work history, location, and social profiles. Use powerful features such as natural-language search, dictation and note taking, reminders, birthday notifications, news updates about people you know, and more to deepen your relationships over time.
Clay is designed using Apple’s latest tech (the iOS app is one of the most advanced SwiftUI apps in production) to ensure the app is attractive, performant, and secure. Clay has taken care to polish the small stuff because it matters—the exact timings and damping on the animations, the shadows on the cards, the haptic feedback on taps.
If you’re looking for a tool to be more thoughtful with the people in your personal and professional life that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices, you’ll love Clay! Try 60 days for free today!
Just the other day, I was lamenting one of my big frustations with Mastodon—that links to posts, unlike tweets, don’t display nicely in Messages. Instead you get a preview that shows the poster’s profile image and their name, rather than the actual text or image of the post itself. Not exactly useful.
It was unclear to me exactly who to point the finger at here: Apple supposedly uses metadata from the open source Open Graph protocol to pull that information, so it seemed like it was potentially an issue with Mastodon…only the system’s creator, Eugen Rochko, confirmed in my mentions that they’d provided the appropriate information and it was up to Apple. It seems that Apple was taking additional steps to embed tweet information in their previews beyond the standard metadata.
Mastodon link previews in Messages currently (left) and using Tyler Hillman’s tool (right).Well, the ball may be in Apple’s court, but not everybody’s waiting for them to return the serve. iOS developer Tyler Hillman has come up with a workaround: a web service that can provide the necessary metadata to show post content in Messages. Paste in any Mastodon post’s URL and you’ll get a new link, which will display nicely when you paste it in Messages. Not sastified with leaving it at that, Tyler also created a shortcut for macOS and iOS that makes the process even easier.
It’s likely Apple will at some point correct this oversight, making Tyler’s tool no longer necessary—an eventuality that he’s not just ready for, but eager: as he writes on the service’s site, “Please Sherlock me, Tim.” But until then, this is one way to ease the transition to the federated social network.
[hat tip: Lex Friedman]
Whether we spec up our Macs, our philosophy on menu bars, what we use for pointing devices, and our screen sizes of choice.
Go to the podcast page.
With the release of the 2023 MacBook Pro and the 2023 Mac mini, the shape of the second generation of Apple silicon on Mac has been revealed. It is, unsurprisingly, a bit of a replay of the first generation: Apple has segmented its chips into a few different varieties.
As with the M1 generation, the new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips are closely related to each other and to the M2 chip introduced last summer. They’re all based on the same foundation, but each chip has some different characteristics. When it comes time to choose how much to pay for a Mac mini or a MacBook Pro, those differences matter.
Continue reading on Macworld ↦
Netflix shows Disney how CEO transitions happen, as Reed Hastings is elevated to chairmanship and Greg Peters becomes co-CEO. Julia has analysis of Netflix’s earnings report, we discuss streaming Oscar nominees, and we answer your amazing letters!
Go to the podcast page.
Sometimes when the universe force quits a Twitter client, it launches a Mastodon client.
Rising from the ashes of the recently departed Tweetbot, developer Tapbots has officially launched its much-anticipated client for the federated social network, Ivory, for iPhones and iPads.
If you’ve been anywhere near Mastodon recently, you’ve probably heard some talk about Ivory, which has been in beta for the last month or two—a beta so popular that when Tapbots opened thousands of new slots they were usually snapped up within seconds.
I’ve been using Ivory for several weeks now, and it’s hands down my favorite of all the Mastodon clients I’ve tried. (Little surprise, given that I was a long time Tweetbot user.) Even in beta, it felt incredibly reliable, offered a bunch of features that many other clients didn’t (timeline syncing, I’m looking at you), and had a slick, polished interface.
While Ivory has been free during the beta period, it will be a paid product within the App Store: you can pay $1.99 per month or $14.99 per year.
Tapbots has said that a Mac version of Ivory is in development, but there’s no current timeline on when it might arrive.
As a part of Data Privacy Week, on Tuesday Apple announced a privacy-themed session at its retail stores and released a video highlighting privacy features in iOS.
The video, which the company posted to its YouTube channel, features Nick Mohammed of “Ted Lasso” and is titled “A Day in the Life of an Average Person’s Data.” It’s essentially a humorous infomercial about Apple’s privacy features, as a gentleman in an Apple t-shirt helps Mohammed navigate various privacy-oriented situations. Mohammed, playing a (presumably) exaggerated version of himself, tries to combat his feelings of inadequacy, most notably that he’s apparently the titular “average person” in the video. Along the way he’s introduced to email privacy features, App Tracking Transparency, and more.
Meanwhile, Apple retail stores are gearing up with a new Today at Apple session called “Taking Charge of Your Privacy on iPhone“, which is designed as way for users to walk through their current iPhone settings and get tips about how customize those settings to set an appropriate level.
Jason’s spent most of the last week with an M2 Max MacBook Pro, so it’s time for his full review. We also discuss the M2 Mac mini and the second-generation HomePod. This naturally leads into a discussion of Apple’s future home products and what form the M3 processor might take.
Go to the podcast page.
New Macs are here. We’ve got ’em. Jason and Dan provided a live look at the new hardware on YouTube on Monday afternoon, and answered your questions. Here’s an archived video of the event.
With today’s release of iOS 16.3 and macOS Ventura 13.2, Apple added yet another additional security feature, allowing users to secure their Apple IDs with hardware security keys.
If you’re not familiar with hardware security keys, they’re small devices that plug in to a hardware port—usually USB, though Lightning models exist—and provide a means of cryptographic authentication.
Apple says security key support is aimed mainly at those who want extra protection from targeted phishing or social engineering attacks. Adding a security key replaces the existing multifactor verification process, where you’re required to provide a six-digit code that appears on your other devices logged into the same Apple ID. So if you want to log in to a new device, manage your Apple ID on the web, or reset your Apple ID password, you’ll need to present your registered security key instead. (If you want to log in to a device that doesn’t have a way to directly connect to a security key—such as an Apple TV, HomePod, or Apple Watch—you’ll need to authenticate with the key on an iPhone or iPad.)
Notably, this feature does not seem to allow the use of a passkey, the security feature rolled out in iOS 16. Many online services that support security keys treat passkeys as essentially the same thing, but it’s possible that such a usage here could present a security vulnerability if a bad actor got access to a device.
Other restrictions include the inability to log in to iCloud for Windows, no support for older devices that can’t update to an OS that allows for security keys, no child accounts or Managed Apple IDs, and no support for other family members Apple Watches paired with a different phone.
I went through the process of adding security keys, which on the Mac can be accessed in System Settings > Apple ID > Password & Security. There’s a new Security Keys section where you can click Add, and the system will walk you through the process. It’s worth noting that Apple requires you have two security keys to set this up, so that you have a backup in case one gets lost. If both your keys are lost, Apple warns that you may be locked out of your account permanently. (In this way, it’s similar to the Advanced Data Protection features for iCloud that Apple added late last year, which put the encryption keys in the hands of users rather than Apple itself.)
Setting up the security keys proved to be straightforward enough, though a bit awkward if you need to connect them to a Mac where the USB ports are out of the way—I plugged mine in to my Studio Display’s ports, but I had to reach behind it to activate the key, which would get old pretty fast if I had to do it several times a day. (I think this is the first time I’ve really wanted a Mac to have an NFC chip built in.)
I’m curious to see how this impacts my day-to-day usage, but I think it will actually be pretty minimal. Now, here’s hoping I can just avoid losing my security keys—maybe it’s time to AirTag them.
As someone who’s recently been spending more time with a MacBook Air both hooked up to an Apple Studio Display and on its own, I’ve definitely noticed that what works in one setup isn’t always the best answer for all display configurations.
Enter HiDock, a new app from Rafael Conde, that attempts to deal with this issue when it comes to macOS’s Dock.
The idea behind HiDock is simple: based on the current display situation, it can automatically change your Dock’s size; whether it’s positioned on the left, right, or bottom of the screen; and whether it’s shown or hidden. So if you prefer to have a left-mounted Dock when you’re connected to an external display, but a bottom Dock when your laptop’s out and about, you can set those options and have HiDock handle it for you. There’s also a configuration for when you have multiple displays active, as opposed to using the MacBook in clamshell mode.
HiDock is exceptionally simple to use and has a very straightforward interface that lets you preview exactly what your screens will look like in various monitor setups. (There’s no option, of course, to set different Docks for the different displays in your setup, given that macOS generally handles that on its own, depending on whether you’re mirroring or extending your display.)
And, for all that, the app is free to download and use, though the developer welcomes donations via his website if you’re so inclined.
[via the old Mac Gemster himself, Dan Frakes]
People make us laugh, challenge us to improve, support us when things are tough, and celebrate with us once they get better. They’re core to our personal and professional success, but being more generous, more responsive, more conscientious with them? That takes effort. Clay is here to make it easier.
Before Clay, being thoughtful required relying on your memory as well as a mix of spreadsheets, notecards, address books, and other tools. In addition to being difficult to manage, this approach let important relationships, moments, and context fall through the cracks. That’s why we created Clay—a stunning, intuitive, and private relationship manager, populated automatically from your email, calendar, Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, and iMessage.
Clay helps you be thoughtful with your relationships by creating and automatically updating beautiful cards for each of your contacts with context such as profile photos, bios, education and work history, location, and social profiles. Use powerful features such as natural-language search, dictation and note taking, reminders, birthday notifications, news updates about people you know, and more to deepen your relationships over time.
We’ve designed Clay specifically for macOS and iOS, using Apple’s latest tech (our iOS app is one of the most advanced SwiftUI apps in production) to ensure the app is attractive, performant, and secure. We’ve taken care to polish the small stuff because it matters—the exact timings and damping on the animations, the shadows on the cards, the haptic feedback on taps. A few of our other features:
- iOS 16 homescreen widgets
- iMessage and iCloud calendar integrations
- Smart push notifications
- Spotlight search
- Sign in with Apple
- Native M1 chip support
- Full keyboard shortcuts and command bar
- Zapier integration
- Siri suggestions
- Native share sheet
- Optimized for retina displays
- Beautiful light and dark themes
- No advertising
If you’re looking for a tool to be more thoughtful with the people in your personal and professional life that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices, you’ll love Clay! Try 60 days for free today!
Here’s what the new M2 MacBook Pro is not: new. Yes, it’s powered by a new generation of Apple silicon, but it’s very much the same laptop that was updated for the Apple silicon era in 2021. If you’ve seen an M1 MacBook Pro, you know what the M2 MacBook Pro looks like.
But when it comes to professional workhorse computers, novelty can be overrated. The M2 MacBook Pro is the product of Apple’s repentance from its confused mid-2010 laptop designs and offers all the benefits of running on Apple’s own processors. The new M2 Pro and Max processors are an incremental improvement over their predecessors but an enormous one over all Intel-based models.
Of course, what makes the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops appealing goes beyond the processor running inside them. From their bright HDR displays to an array of ports and slots, they’ve got functionality that separates them from the lower end of Apple’s laptop line.
I’ve been able to spend nearly a week with a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 Max processor, and it’s been a great experience. But how you view these laptops will depend on who you are, where you’re coming from, and what you’re looking for.
The chip storyLooking beyond these particular trees to see the whole forest, the new MacBook Pro models are also the first Macs to be powered by high-end versions of the M2, Apple’s second-generation Mac-specific system-on-a-chip. The laptops are available in both M2 Pro and M2 Max configurations, and those chips differ from the base M2 model in a few ways.
The M2 is an eight-core chip with six to eight high-speed “performance” CPU cores and four lower-speed “efficiency” CPU cores. The base-model 14-inch MacBook Pro has six performance cores, while on all other models, the M2 Pro or M2 Max chips have eight performance cores.
When it comes to GPU cores, the M2 Pro starts at 16 cores but is also available in configurations with 19, 30, and 38 cores. The M2 Max comes standard with 30 cores and is also available in a 38-core configuration.
It’s important to note that each individual M2 core, both CPU and GPU varieties, are essentially identical. (Witness their nearly identical single-core Geekbench scores.) The speed gains from higher-end chips are largely because there are more cores doing the work. And that speed scales somewhat linearly (albeit with diminishing returns) based on the number of performance cores. (Efficiency cores are not going to get you fast scores on computer benchmark tests, but they’re great in saving power when your computer’s not working hard.)
The 16-inch MacBook Pro M2 I tested1, which has the 12-core (eight performance cores) M2 Max chip, was roughly 1.6 times the speed of the six-core (four performance cores) M2 chip in the M2 MacBook Air or 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro. Similarly, this MacBook Pro’s 38-core GPU posted a Geekbench Metal score 2.8 times higher than the 8-core GPU in my M2 MacBook Air.
Back in 2021, I referred to the M1 Pro and Max versions of the MacBook Pro as providing the power of a Mac Pro in your backpack, and as you might expect, the M2 generation provides even more of that. These are incredibly fast laptops, and they don’t slow down when they’re running on battery power. They will warm up, however, at which point the MacBook Pro’s cooling system will kick in to keep them running at peak performance. (And I mean that—I ran Cinebench on a loop for ten minutes and didn’t see any degradation in performance.)
For those who are sensitive to fan noise, I am happy to report that I couldn’t make the MacBook Pro’s fans audible unless I deliberately stressed out the GPU cores. Even maxing out the CPU cores failed to make a peep.
Since you’ve got the choice of an M2 Pro or M2 Max processor on these laptops, it’s worth detailing the differences between them: memory and graphics. The M2 Max can have as many as 38 graphics cores and maxes out at 96 GB of RAM with 400 GB per second memory bandwidth. The M2 Pro is limited to 32 GB RAM, and its memory bandwidth is half of the Max, at 200 GB per second. The M2 Max also has an extra video encode engine, and an extra ProRes video decode/encode engine.
All told, what this means is that the M2 Max is the choice for you if you are performing work that requires a large amount of graphics power or enormous amounts of memory (and memory bandwidth).
So what about the differences between the M1 and M2 series of processors? The M2s are faster, yes. As we learned last June, an M2 CPU core is about 12 percent faster than an M1. The GPUs are also faster. When I compare the M2 Max MacBook Pro I used for this review with the M1 Max model I tested in late 2021, the new laptop was about 25 percent faster at multicore operations.)
If you’re someone with an M1 MacBook Pro, you shouldn’t feel particularly envious of these new models. Unless you’ve been feeling buyer’s remorse about not spending enough on that laptop to make it more powerful, I can’t see why you’d upgrade from an M1 MacBook Pro to an M2 model. On the outside, these computers are essentially identical. The screen’s bright and gorgeous, but no more so than last year’s model. The SDXC card slot is no faster. Unless you need an HDMI 2.1 port for ultra-high-resolution or ultra-high-refresh video output, there’s just not a lot that’s new. So many of the MacBook Pro’s appealing features aren’t directly tied to the nitty gritty details of the processor running inside.
The upgrade storyVery few people buy a new laptop every year and a half. (If you’re one of the people who do, congratulations, and enjoy your new MacBook Pro!) As a result, most of the people in the market for a 2023 MacBook Pro will not be owners of an M1 MacBook Pro. Instead, a lot of them will be upgrading from an Intel-based laptop.
When the Apple silicon era began, I definitely heard from a lot of people who expressed a lot of concern about living through a chip transition and who insisted that they’d sit the first generation out and watch how it went from the sidelines. Now, the transition was so smooth, and the gains in switching the Mac from Intel processors to Apple’s own processors were so huge that I suspect a lot of those people couldn’t manage to hold out from upgrading during the M1 generation. But if you had a late-model Intel MacBook Pro and it was doing the job, and you’re the kind of person who uses a computer for a long time before getting a new one, the 2023 MacBook Pros won’t be a small upgrade.
As I wrote 15 months ago:
Apple has undone its mistakes of the past few years and created a laptop that’s essentially a Mac Pro you can slide into a backpack. With this revision, Apple has admitted that it’s okay to stick a few extra ports on a laptop to please professional users.
The Intel Mac I used for reference in that review was an 8-core Xeon iMac Pro, which was roughly as fast as a last-generation Intel MacBook Pro. You can click through to see the results if you want, but suffice it to say that the M1 Max MacBook Pro was 1.5 times as fast in Geekbench multicore tests, built an Xcode project in half the time, encoded a Final Cut Pro video just as fast as a 12-core Intel Mac Pro, and destroyed the iMac Pro in disk performance due to its ultra-fast SSDs.
To repeat myself, the story of the Apple Silicon MacBook Pro isn’t just that raw processor speed. The processors are also energy efficient: those four “efficiency” CPU cores keep the computer happily burbling along efficiently when there isn’t hard work being done. The result is staggering battery life compared to an Intel-based MacBook Pro.
Of course, battery life is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone’s usage profile—how much you are slamming those CPU and GPU cores versus sitting back and reading a web page in Safari—will make their actual battery life vary widely. Apple’s claim of 22 hours of movie playback in the TV app is two hours more than on the M1 MacBook Pro, but it’s a very specific use case. The company’s “wireless web” task suite, which is a scripted test of browsing through various websites in Safari, is not particularly taxing, either, and the battery life claim there is up to 12 hours. Even a little change can make a huge difference.
I can tell you what happens if you make all of the MacBook Pro’s CPU cores run at 100 percent, though: the battery drains in a little more than two and a half hours. That’s actually pretty impressive since most people only use their computer’s CPUs and GPUs in brief bursts.
The story of the Apple Silicon MacBook Pro is also the screen—a bright, ProMotion mini-LED display that’s basically the best Mac display ever made. Adding a notch to the display allowed the bezels to shrink perilously close to the edge, but you get used to the notch in a hurry because Apple has tucked it inside the height of the menu bar.
The story of this laptop is also the connectivity. The SD card reader is back from exile. There are three USB/Thunderbolt ports, none of which need to be used for charging since MagSafe has returned to the MacBook Pro for charging in a snap. There’s an HDMI port—supporting a shocking 8K output at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz, but also just helpful in case you need to present somewhere and don’t have an adapter. And memory is configurable up to 96GB, up from the 64GB limit on the M1 MacBook Pro.
Oh, and the Touch Bar is gone, replaced with a fully functional function-key row, including Touch ID and a big ol’ Escape key.
If you’re upgrading from an Intel laptop, you’re going to love the new MacBook Pro. However, you may notice that upgrading from the base configurations is more expensive than you might have expected. Due to the integrated nature of Apple’s processors, memory is not upgradeable after the fact—so you’ll need to choose your memory up front, and choosing a larger configuration will cost. Likewise, storage is tightly integrated, and Apple’s storage options rapidly rise in price.
If you’re worried about the transition to Apple silicon, don’t be. Every app I use has made the transition, but even apps that run in the Rosetta code-translation layer run about as fast as they did on Intel, if not faster. If you survived the migration away from 32-bit apps in macOS Catalina, you’ll be fine. (If you’re using an older laptop that’s still running macOS Mojave, you should check the compatibility of your apps.)
Why MacBook Pro?Why do people buy the MacBook Pro?
There was a time when pro Macs of all shapes and sizes were appropriate for everyone who considered themselves power users. The iMacs and iBooks and MacBook Airs of the world were for the masses. But those of us who really cared about our computers, we opted for the finer things. The more powerful things.
Today, the amount of raw computing power in a MacBook Air—even the $999 M1 model, never mind the more stylish and powerful M2 Air2—has more power than a vanishing fraction of users will need. Given that the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models start at $1999 and $2499 respectively, it’s worth asking yourself the question: Do I really need a MacBook Pro, or is the Air nice at half the price?
As big of an advocate of the MacBook Air as I am, there’s no doubt that if you’re someone who really does need the huge CPU and GPU power and memory bandwidth of the M2 Pro or M2 Max processor—creative professionals working with huge files, doing work that previously required a high-end workstation, for example—is a better fit.
I admit that this is an area where I’m rapidly running out of personal experience: for most of my high-end media tasks, the M2 Air runs slower but still does the job eventually. Saving time is great (and is reason enough for many people to buy a high-end device!), but the extra RAM and memory bandwidth of the higher-end chips also enable using enormous files or data sets that a lesser laptop can’t even open.
So yes, if seeking ultimate performance is your thing, this is the laptop for you. But there are other reasons to upgrade to a MacBook Pro that go beyond the need for speed:
- Display. Nothing beats the MacBook Pro’s mini-LED backlit display. It’s bright and supports HDR, and offers the ProMotion high-refresh-rate technology for ultra-smooth scrolling. Not to mention that both the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro displays are fundamentally larger than the MacBook Air’s.
- RAM. The M2 chip is limited to 24GB of memory. If the way you work needs more than that, MacBook Pro is for you.
- Ports and slots. The MacBook Air only has two Thunderbolt 4 ports versus three on the MacBook Pro. It doesn’t have an SD card slot, so if you transfer files from SD cards, you’ll need to carry an external reader. It also doesn’t have an HDMI port, for easy extra video-out without adapters.
- External display support. The MacBook Air can only connect to a single external display. If you want to dock your laptop to a dual-display setup, you’ll want the MacBook Pro, which can support two external displays—or four, if you get the M2 Max version.
Should you need to spend $2000 on a high-powered laptop just to get one that supports two external displays or has the best, brightest screen? Or $2499 for a laptop with a substantially larger display? Apple has decided that you should. But great as the MacBook Air is, there certainly feels like there’s a yawning chasm between it and the MacBook Pro.
The fact remains, though: If you want the very best laptop Apple has to offer, the MacBook Pro will not disappoint you. The M1 models were great in late 2021, and these new M2 models are even better—albeit incrementally so.
- Like the M1 versions, these M2 MacBook Pros come in 14- and 16-inch models, but they’re essentially identical except for physical size and battery. ↩
- Don’t even consider the 13-inch m2 MacBook Pro, which is a living fossil of a previous era. ↩
In 2005, when Apple first introduced the Mac mini, it was a carefully designed, strategic product: a low-cost computer aimed primarily at luring customers from the Windows PC hegemony with the promise that they could save even further by using all of their existing accessories, thus putting a dent into the argument that investing in the Mac was by necessity expensive.
Eighteen years after its debut, the Mac mini is, surprisingly enough, still going strong. At its core, however, it remains a machine of contradictions: it has become a bastion of Apple’s lineup, but it’s been updated more sporadically than any other Mac. It was one of the first Macs to make the jump to Apple silicon back in 2020, but at the same time, a more expensive model lingered as one of the last remaining Intel Macs. It’s an entry-level machine, but it’s also been deployed in server farms and modded and smushed into any number of applications.
With the most recent update to the M2 family of processors, the Mac mini is once again doing more than just one thing at the same time. In its base configuration, with an 8-CPU-core/10-GPU-core M2 processor, it’s a respectably performing desktop that can now be had for just $599, a $100 price drop from the M1 mini, solidifying its status as the cheapest Mac around. But bump the mini up to an M2 Pro, and it’s also a high-performing machine that will go up against the more expensive products in Apple’s desktop line, like the Mac Studio.
It’s hard to argue that the mini’s versatility isn’t the biggest part of why the product is still going strong, nigh on two decades after its debut. If the iMac, the Mac Studio, and the still-waiting-in-the-wings Apple silicon Mac Pro are the bricks of Apple’s Mac lineup, the Mac mini is the mortar, with its various configurations filling the gaps in between.
Mini meI’ve owned a handful of Mac minis over the years, though never as my primary machine. For the last decade, I’ve split my time between an iMac and a MacBook Air; prior to that, I was an all-laptop-all-the-time person for several years. But with the demise of the 27-inch iMac (and, more to the point, the demise of my personal 27-inch iMac), I’ve been waiting for a mid-range desktop—a machine that can bring a little extra performance without the heftier price tag of the Mac Studio.
And until now, that gap was unaddressed in the Apple silicon era. With the introduction of the Mac Studio last spring, desktop Mac users had to choose between an iMac running the company’s least powerful chip or a much beefier machine that not only carried a higher price tag but also required you to shell out for a separate monitor. Even if you were prepared to pay a little bit more for better performance, the realm in between the $1299 iMac and the $1999 Mac Studio was a barren wasteland.
The new M2 Pro Mac mini fills that gap quite nicely. The default M2 Pro configuration offers a 10-core CPU—six performance cores and four efficiency cores—with a 16-core GPU, but you can also upgrade it to a 12-core CPU with eight performance cores and four efficiency cores for an additional $300. With 200GB/s memory bandwidth and up to 32GB of RAM, the M2 Pro’s specs handily trump those of the M1 iMac. And given that it starts at $1299, it’s priced far enough below the Mac Studio to offer some cost savings. (The Studio’s base M1 Max configuration, by comparison, has the same total number of cores as the standard M2 Pro, but has two more performance cores, plus eight more GPU cores, twice as much RAM, and double the memory bandwidth.)
However, upgrading the stock configuration of the M2 Pro Mac mini can close that price gap in a hurry. Move up to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and you’re just $100 shy of the Studio’s introductory price—and that’s not even including that more powerful CPU and GPU option. All in all, a maxed-out M2 Pro mini will run you $4,499, surpassing the cost of the Studio’s standard M1 Ultra configuration—heck, now you’re in Mac Pro territory.
In short, the Mac mini is really two products. The base level $599 M2 mini is basically the equivalent of the MacBook Air: a pretty affordable machine that’s capable of handling almost any daily task thrown at it. The M2 Pro mini, on the other hand, is a mid-range Mac desktop that’s aimed at what you might have once called the prosumer market: a powerful Mac that can go the extra mile—for a price.1
Design of the timesThe design of the mini is basically unchanged from its M1 predecessor, which itself was unchanged from its Intel forebears. From the front, it’s a nearly unmarred slab of aluminum, broken only by the tiny pinprick of a power light. On the back, you’ll find a solid array of ports, including gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, two Thunderbolt 4 ports (four on the M2 Pro configurations), a 3.5mm audio out, and—hurray for those who hate dongles—two USB-A ports.
If there’s a disappointment with the design of this latest revision, it’s that Apple seems to believe ports on the front of its machines are a luxury to be reserved for those who want to spend two thousand dollars on a Mac. The Mac Studio got high marks for prioritizing function over form with two USB-C (or Thunderbolt, depending on the version) ports and a card reader on the front, handy when you just need to just quickly pop in a flash drive or, say, a hardware security key. Nobody wants to go rooting around behind their computer. The new Mac mini, alas, offers no such consideration.
In the pre-Apple silicon era, the mini’s versatility was bolstered by it being one of the only upgradable Macs that Apple sold, but that ship has long since sailed. As with the M1 mini, you won’t be removing the black plastic foot on the bottom and popping in extra RAM or somehow wedging in another drive. So what you buy is what you get and what you have forever.
Also lost with the departure of the Intel Mac mini is any color choice in the mini line. Once again, the Mac mini is available in any hue you want, as long as it’s silver. So long, space gray, wherever you are out in the cosmos. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded some other options—even Apple’s midnight or starlight tints would at least shake things up a bit, but I guess the mini is a “serious” computer.
Performance artsAll right, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. If you’re in the market for an M2 Pro mini, what you really want to know is: how does it stack up against the rest of Apple’s Mac lineup?
As the benchmarks bear out, the M2 Pro ends up exactly where you’d expect it to fall: in the same neighborhood as the M2 and M2 Max for single-core operation (because the cores are pretty much the same) and about 68 percent faster than the M2 on multi-core tasks, largely by virtue of having an additional four performance cores.
Graphics performance was likewise predictable: the M2 Pro blew the vanilla M2 out of the water, thanks to having more than twice as many GPU cores, but can’t match up to the 38 cores of the M2 Max (or, for that matter, the 32-core M1 Max). In short, while it’s a very capable machine for graphics work, if that’s your bread and butter, it may be worth the investment to look at a more powerful machine—or wait until Apple likely takes the wraps off an M2 Ultra.
But those are benchmarks, which are by their nature an unrepresentative (if easily quantifiable) measurement. What prospective buyers really want to know is real-world experience.
In my everyday usage over the better part of a week, the M2 Pro mini delivered as expected: everything from loading web pages in Safari to crunching spreadsheets in Numbers was fast and fluid, with no significant hiccups.
For fun, I fired up Ghost of Tsushima, which I’m currently playing on my PlayStation 5, via Sony’s PS Remote Play app, and the gameplay was excellent (with occasional graphics artifacts because it’s still streaming over the network, and even via a wired Ethernet connection these things happen).
Apple has also touted the performance of games that take full advantage of its Metal graphics framework, such as Resident Evil: Village,2, and in that case, the mini performs admirably. I played the first bit of the game, which Apple provided, and gameplay was smooth and impressive looking: with the Prioritize Graphics settings on, the framerate stayed steady at around 60fps—the same happened even when I activated the MetalFX upscaling feature that improves graphic quality. It’s clear that Apple silicon can be an impressive platform for gaming—if developers embrace the tools that the company is providing to help get the most out of its hardware.
However, the big caveat to that statement is that there simply aren’t that many games that are designed with Apple’s tools in mind. One of the titles that Apple demoed in its video announcing the latest M2 Macs was No Man’s Sky, which it described as “demanding”—and though it may be, it’s also a title that debuted in 2016 and just this past year came out for the Nintendo Switch, not a console usually lauded for its graphics performance. Is the M2 Pro a very capable gaming machine? Absolutely. Does it change the state of the gaming market on the Mac? Sadly, no—but that’s about way more than just Apple’s hardware.
Of particular interest to me in the performance realm was video streaming. I have, in the past, broadcast many episodes of Total Party Kill, our live play Dungeons & Dragon podcast at The Incomparable, to YouTube. That involves sharing a browser window as well as video and audio of six participants via Zoom. On my old Intel iMac, using the popular free streaming app OBS, this was an extremely intensive task that chewed up a lot of my CPU and didn’t perform particularly well to boot. Video was often bad quality with low frame rates or dropped frames entirely. In later streams, I switched over to Ecamm Live on my M1 MacBook Air, which had the benefit of being a native app; managing it on a separate computer added a degree of complexity, but the performance was much better.
However, OBS has come a long way in the year or so since I moved away from it. It’s now native to Apple silicon, takes advantage of hardware encoders, and has fixed a bug with display capture (thanks to Apple itself). The difference was immediately apparent. Streaming some of my PS Remote play of Ghost of Tsushima along with video of myself via Continuity Camera was smooth as silk, and the CPU never went over 5 percent. After my experience on the Intel Mac, it was night and day. I cannot overstate how impressive I found this after all my streaming struggles on Intel Macs; it just goes to show, as with gaming, how much of a difference optimizing for Apple’s platform makes.
I also put the M2 Pro mini to the test with another processor-intensive task that I do on the regular: exporting a podcast from Logic Pro. For my test project, I chose an episode of my nerdy game show, Inconceivable!, because it’s among the most complex podcasts I produce: an hour-long show with eight people, lots of cuts, and a few filters to even out rough audio. In a bake-off test, Logic on the M2 Pro bounced that project to a WAV file in 4:15; my M1 MacBook Air took 6 minutes flat. Granted, that’s a task I’d usually do in the background or even walk away from my computer, but at the end of the day, it’s still time saved.
Oh, and since I know fan noise is of particular concern to segments of the market that might be interested in the M2 Pro mini, I’ll say this: I could not hear the machine’s fan. Ever. I fired up all the cores and left them going for a while, and still nothing. I held my Apple Watch’s decibel reader near the back of the mini, and I noticed no appreciable change. I even installed Fanny, an app that reports fan data, to make sure there was indeed a fan inside. (There is, but apparently it is very quiet.) Apple’s not blowing smoke when it says low power consumption is a cornerstone of how it develops its chips.
Gap, filledFor those users who have been waiting for a Mac desktop that can offer a step up from the M1 mini or M1 iMac without breaking the bank, the M2 Pro Mac mini delivers. While I can’t speak to the non-Pro model’s performance, one can extrapolate pretty well from the benchmarks of the M2 MacBook Air, given that the chips are basically the same.3 Moreover, at a $599 price point, the entry-level mini continues to fill a niche as pretty much the only sub-thousand-dollar Mac that Apple sells4, even if it might require additional outlay in the form of peripherals.
Perhaps the most interesting comparison for the M2 Pro Mac mini is putting it up against the Mac Studio. Yes, even the $1999 M1 Max Mac Studio—and isn’t that a mouthful—continues to offer some advantages, namely superior graphics performances, faster memory speed, and, of course, ports on the front. But on pretty much anything but graphics performance, the M2 Pro Mac mini not only outpaces the Mac Studio but definitely offers more bang for the buck.
In short, the M2 Mac mini is extremely good at what most users will want to do, and the M2 Pro Mac mini will satisfy the section of the market that needs to do tasks that require a little more oomph (or a couple more ports). The only real question, to my mind, is how much of an audience there is for an inevitably more powerful desktop Mac model, whether it be an M2 Mac Studio, the promised Apple silicon Mac Pro, or both. It’s a lot of products at the faster (and more expensive) end of Apple’s product line.
But for now, the M2 Pro Mac mini ably fills the mid-level gap in Apple’s desktop range, which will be a relief to the many people waiting for such a machine—myself included. Apple silicon continues to impress in this second generation, there’s no question, but it’s hard not to feel like the company’s resting on its laurels somewhat, especially where the mini’s design is concerned: it’d be nice to see the outside of the product keep up with what’s inside.
- Yes, there’s a model in between: the $799 Mac mini. But it’s not really a different product: it’s just the $599 M2 mini configured with a 512GB SSD instead of 256GB. In fact, you can get the same exact thing by ordering the base-level mini and configuring it with the larger SSD. So why does it exist? My guess is that somebody at Apple marketing really wanted it to feel like a “good, better, best” lineup, despite the fact that both the MacBook Air and Mac Studio lines offer just two stock configurations. ↩
- A game written by our pal and Incomparable panelist Antony Johnston! ↩
- It’s worth noting that the base-level mini comes with the same M2 core configuration as the more expensive $1499 MacBook Air. It seems safe to assume that the Mac mini would have a slight performance edge, given that there are no concerns about prolonging battery life and the mini, unlike the Air, has a fan. ↩
- No, I am not counting the M1 MacBook Air. $999 is under a thousand dollars in only the most pedantic sense, sorry. ↩
Bear with me: this is, on the face of it, a weird idea. But is it possible Apple is making its Macs too powerful?
Okay, okay, I know: how could having a computer that’s too powerful be a bad thing? But after this week’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini, I found myself wondering whether the company has painted itself into a corner, vis-a-vis its impressive hardware.
It is, admittedly, a strange state of affairs when you find yourself wondering if Apple has maybe gotten too good at making computers that are so powerful they are overkill for the purposes of most tasks, but you don’t have to look too far to see another example of this same phenomenon.
This is a struggle that Apple’s long contended with on the iPad. Ask any user pushing the envelope of an iPad Pro and the consensus will likely be that the hardware is awesome and incredibly powerful–if only the software could keep up.
Continue reading on Macworld.
This week answered the philosophical question: what if they held an Apple event and nobody came? Even if it was because nobody was invited. And speaking of not invited, some favorite apps have been uninvited to the Twitter party.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Sean Heber of The Iconfactory makes the death of Twitterrific official:
Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!
With the silent retroactive banning of Twitter clients, this is the end of the road for an app that I’ve used for fifteen years, first on macOS, then on iOS. I know that Tweetbot is the golden child of the indie Twitter app world, but for whatever reasons, I always preferred Twitterrific. It just worked the best for the way I wanted to use Twitter.
I’ll miss it, and I look forward to the work The Iconfactory does out from under the service that never seemed to love it as much as it should have.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Hansen Hsu, Curator of the Software History Center at the Computer History Museum, in a press release:
The release of the Apple Lisa was a key turning point for the history of personal computers. Without the Lisa, today’s computers might not use mouse-driven GUIs, and perhaps the Macintosh, and even Microsoft Windows, might not exist either. We’re thrilled to publicly release the source code for the Apple Lisa—for the first time—and thank Apple, Inc. for their permission and support that led to this release.”
Hsu also wrote a blog post about the Lisa, which turns 40 today. The source code is available under an Apple academic license agreement, which limits its use to “non-commercial, academic research, educational teaching, and personal study purposes only.”
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Whether we’re using AirTags and other item-tracking tech, how we have (or haven’t) used ChatGPT for work, our thoughts on a touchscreen Mac, and the discontinued tech we’d like to see revived.
Go to the podcast page.
The HomePod…lives! In a surprise announcement on Wednesday, Apple announced the second-generation HomePod with support for spatial audio, smart home automations using Siri, and a slightly refined design. Apple’s powered up the second-generation HomePod with an S7 chip, the same model that powered the Apple Watch Series 7. (The first-generation had an A8 processor.)
The full-size speakers also borrows some features from its smaller sibling, the HomePod mini, adding Ultra Wideband technology to allow you to hand off audio between your iPhone and the speaker and a Thread radio for connecting to smart home devices. Apple’s also added temperature, humidity, and accelerometer sensors to the device. Like previous HomePods, the second-gen model can be paired with a second speaker for a stero pair, and can share audio throughout a home via AirPlay.
And, in a feature that I’ve been advocating for, Siri on the HomePod can now use Sound Recognition to listen for specific noises, like a fire alarm or carbon monoxide detector going off, and alert you—though Apple says that feature will arrive in a software update later this spring and requires the new Home architecture (which the company has temporarily suspended).
Of course, one of the tricky selling points of the previous HomePod was the price—it debuted at $349, though it could often be found for cheaper. The second-generation HomePod starts at $299, but there are apparently some tradeoffs to hit that point: for example, the new model includes five tweeters to the first-generation’s seven, four microphones as opposed to the previous six, and (strangely) the older 802.11n Wi-Fi, as opposed to the 802.11ac found in the first model.
Like the first-generation model the second-generation HomePod is available in two colors: white, and what Apple is calling “Midnight”, which the company says is made from 100 percent recycled mesh-fabric. The new model is shipping on February 3, and is available to order today.
TidBITS’s Adam Engst does yeoman’s work in breaking down what looks suspicious about emails with annotated screenshots:
I’ve been examining phishing attempts for so long that it’s hard for me to imagine what might fool someone else, so I wanted to share some recent attempts that slipped past Gmail’s filters. For each message, I’ve called out some of the ways I identified it as phishing. I suspect that most of you will assume that you would also easily have identified the message as fake, but remember, many people move rapidly through their email without reading carefully. Perhaps my calling out of some of the hallmarks of phishing attempts can help you or the people to whom you forward this article avoid being drawn in.
This is fantastic. Many of us probably deal with these attempts at getting our personal information all the time and have grown used to discounting them, but we also all have people in our lives who may just not know what to look for. Moreover, as Adam points out, phishing attempts are only getting more complex, sophisticated, and tricky, thanks to innovations like AI-written copy. Adam’s piece is a great overview of what to look for, and definitely one that I’ll be bookmarking to send to some people in my life.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
You may be surprised to discover that inside each of these buttons is a different button.At some point, when I was reconstructing the automation that turns on and off the floor lamp in my living room for the third or fourth time, it dawned on me that I was sold a bill of goods regarding HomeKit.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
As expected, Apple on Tuesday took the wraps off updates to its MacBook Pro and Mac mini lines, featuring as their centerpiece the new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors.
The MacBook Pro update is basically a speed bump: the base level $1999 14-inch model moves to a M2 Pro 10-core CPU/16-core GPU configuration, with build to configure options for M2 Pro 12-core with a 19-core GPU, or to M2 Max with 12 cores and either 30 or 38 cores of GPU. Options at $2499 and $3099 come with the higher M2 Pro and the M2 Max, respectively. Meanwhile, the 16-inch model’s base configuration, at $2499, starts with a 12-core CPU/19-core GPU M2 Pro, while the $2699 and $3499 models feature the 12-core/19-core M2 Pro and 12-core/38-core M2 Max options.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a hair thinner at 0.6 inches, compared to the previous generation’s 0.61 inches, and while the M2 Pro configurations weigh the same, the 14-inch M2 Max adds 0.1lbs. There’s also a skosh more battery life, with Apple reporting an hour more for both Apple TV app movie playback and wireless web across all models. Specs are otherwise unchanged across the line.
On the Mac mini side, Apple has finally axed the Intel Mac model and now offers three configurations of mini, starting with the same 8-core CPU/10-core GPU M2 configuration in the MacBook Air at $599—$100 less than its M1-powered predecessor.1 While a $799 model features more storage with the same chip configuration, there’s also for the first time an option for Apple’s more powerful M2 Pro chip, in a $1299 10-core CPU/16-core GPU option, with a build to order configuration also offering a bump to a 12-core/19-core GPU M2 Pro. The M2 Pro configuration also offers four Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back, up over just two on the M2 configurations.
Apple’s clearly positioning the M2 Pro mini as a replacement for the 27-inch iMac, as in its press release it specifically stacks up the M2 Pro’s performance against a 27-inch Intel Core i7, suggesting once again that a larger iMac isn’t likely to appear anytime soon.
Interesting, the new mini is slightly larger than the old model: 7.75 inches on a side and 1.41 inches high, as opposed to 7.7 inches and 1.4 inches for the M1 model. And the M2 Pro model just a bit heavier too, at 2.8 pounds instead of 2.6.
While the M2 Pro chip still supports up to 32GB of RAM, the M2 Max offers both 64GB and now—in the highest, 38-core GPU configuration, 96GB of RAM. The external display support of the MacBook Pros have been improved as well, with both the M2 Pro and M2 Max now supporting a single external display at 8K resolution at 60Hz over the HDMI port as well as 4K displays up to 240Hz. In the case of the M2 Max, that’s in addition to two two external displays at 6K.
In addition, there’s a slight bump in wireless capabilities as well, with all new models getting Wi-Fi 6E support and Bluetooth 5.3.
The new models go on sale today, and will arrive starting next Tuesday, January 24 in most regions, including the US; Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, and Singapore won’t see them until February 3.
- Education markets can get the M2 mini starting at $499 and the M2 Pro starting at $1199, a savings of $100. ↩
Does the report that Apple may build a touchscreen Mac laptop mean that the futures of the Mac and iPad are about to converge—or is nothing much really going to change? Then Jason and Myke then pour one out for third-party Twitter apps. It was a good run.
Go to the podcast page.
Last Thursday evening, Twitter shut off API access to many of the most popular third-party Twitter client apps. It’s an unsurprising, but ignominious, end. Here’s The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry, who thought up the now-disabled Twitterrific app and materially contributed to fundamental concepts of Twitter:
What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.
As Ben Thompson wrote on Monday, allowing third-party clients that don’t show ads is something that doesn’t make business sense, so it’s not surprising that Twitter’s new management decided to pull the plug. (The company could’ve decided to build on a concept involving third-party clients and an API, but it would require a level of technical commitment it has never really been able to spare—and there are few if any examples of peer social-media companies offering unfettered APIs to create alternate interfaces to their services.)
What’s infuriating is how clueless, classless, and cowardly this move was. Not only does pulling the plug without any announcement or explanation—let alone any warning!—disrespect the developers who worked with Twitter for years, but it directly disrespects Twitter’s own customers, many of whom contribute a lot of free content to the overall platform. Why do this quietly one evening and never make a public announcement? Why not just announce that the API would be shut off for client apps next week, or at the end of the month?
And they couldn’t even do it right. Numerous third-party client apps are still functional… just not the biggest names on the biggest platforms. A classless operation, an unnecessary PR own-goal, and a botched technical roll-out. Sounds par for the course for today’s Twitter.
Here’s a moment of hope, again from Hockenberry:
One thing I remember from these early days: no one had any idea what they were doing. It was all new and things like @screen_name, #hashtags, or RT hadn’t been invented yet. Heck, we didn’t even call them “tweets” or use a bird icon at first! The best ideas came from people using the service: all of the things mentioned above grew organically from a need.
That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community.
I hope to see what was great about Twitterrific turn into something new and exciting and interesting. I would love to see Craig, developer Sean Heber, and the rest of the Iconfactory help define the next generation of social media as much as they did the last generation.
(And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a replacement for a third-party Twitter app, I recommend investigating Ivory by Tapbots, which builds on that company’s Tweetbot app—now shut down, of course—to build a world-class Mastodon/fediverse client.)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Apple headset cometh (but later-eth), Eddy Cue wants to sell you some hot Apple content, and get your dirty fingers off my screen!
Headset-ing into 2023If Apple has its way, 2023 will be the year of the Apple headset. (Maybe next year, Linux on the desktop.)
Mark Gurman tells us that the company will reveal the headset at an event in the spring, before WWDC, and then release it in the fall.
It’s very exciting (whatever the heck it is) but I hope you weren’t hoping for new AirPods, iPads, Apple Watches, or Apple TVs this year because Gurman also says Apple has moved resources from those products to the headset to make sure it launches on time.
Well, maybe you can take the money you were going to spend on those products and buy… uh, half a headset, if it’s really going to be sold at the rumored $3,000 price point. Surely they’ll sell them that way.
Maybe by canceling everything else, Apple thinks it’ll be the year of the Apple headset by default. That could work.
Thank you for your servicesLiterally everyone: “…”
Eddy Cue: “Hey! I still work at Apple!”
Literally everyone: “Oh. Uh… OK. Cool.”
Yes, Eddy Cue would like you to know that Apple services are a very big deal, thank you very much, and they’re doing super great, K? Thanks, bye.
Cue gushes:
It’s remarkable how much great content is at our fingertips…
Please do not touch the content! The content is for the eyes not the fingers! Animals.
Last week marked my 34th anniversary at Apple…
Being at the same company for 34 years in the tech industry is like saying “I was formed on the great island of Pangaea during the Triassic period.” But it is a great testament to Cue’s utility to Apple and his devotion to the company.
Jason wonders if this note was posted in advance of Apple’s quarterly results, which look to be rough this time around. Probably, but also the timing might have to do with the Golden Globe Awards coming out this week, which saw a few Apple productions nominated, with Paul Walter Hauser winning best supporting actor for “Black Bird”.
Because in Hollywood, if you don’t stand up and take credit for something, did it even happen?
I want to touch you all overFriends, I have spent the better part of the last 20 years trying to get my wife and son to stop touching my laptop screen and now Mark Gurman is telling me it’s all for naught?
Apple Inc. is working on adding touch screens to its Mac computers, a move that would defy long-held company orthodoxy and embrace an approach that co-founder Steve Jobs once called “ergonomically terrible.”
OK, Steve said a lot of things. He said “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” He said “You’re holding it wrong.” He said “You’re fired.”
A lot, apparently. Often in elevators.
There’s a big difference between the things Apple says publicly and what it’s working on behind the scenes. You can decry the filthy marketing aspect of it, but don’t necessarily think that they’ve changed their minds.
Not gonna lie, though, there have been times since the introduction of the iPad when even I’ve started to reach for the screen. Some of us have been saying for 10 years that Apple might eventually make a touchscreen Mac but that, to do it right, it would have to “reinvent user interaction on the desktop”. Since then, it’s gone a long way toward making trackpad gestures a convenient way of interacting with macOS. Is that enough? Probably not by itself, because there are still so many touch targets that are too small for a finger. But when you think about how the cursor on iPadOS works, you can imagine a system that lets you activate a small touch target with your finger without having to hit it exactly or by making a completely different set of interface elements like Microsoft did on Windows.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy a bunch of those touch-enabled gloves for my family before they grease up my screen.
One can only imagine the kind of content Eddy Cue is preparing for the Apple headset. I can’t wait for my family to point it all out by reaching in and touching the screen on mine, if I can ever afford one.
To change text size for notifications, open Control Center’s Text Size option on the Home screen or Lock screen,and choose Home Screen Only.There’s a joke I tell a lot: if you encounter an article whose headline includes the words “secret features” and “iOS”, chances are you’re about to be taken on a whirlwind tour of your phone’s accessibility settings. “Did you know you could….?” Or. “Buried deep in iOS settings, you’ll find…”
Truth is, these aren’t secret features at all; they’re just unfamiliar to people whose eyes, ears and hands operate in a typical way. And these “secrets” are rarely written about, even in comprehensive coverage of iOS. “Invisible” might be a more honest way to describe these tools.
I can make a better case for the secret feature moniker when it comes to little-known ways you can use the accessibility suite to do typical iOS tasks, whether you have a disability or not. iOS accessibility has layers, is what I’m sayin’. So let us peel some back.
Shortcut triggersLike shortcuts themselves, some tools within the iOS accessibility suite exist to make it quicker or easier to do a thing on your device. But you can combine them: instead of yelling (or typing, which is a thing you can do if it’s difficult for you to speak) at Siri to launch a shortcut, try double-tapping the back of your phone or assigning a VoiceOver gesture. Back Tap lets you assign all sorts of system tasks to a double or triple-tap of the phone, and that includes shortcuts. When you go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap, you’ll find all of your installed shortcuts among the many things you can assign to one of the two available taps.
Through VoiceOver commands, you can use a touch gesture (three-finger single-tap, for example) to run a shortcut. Or you can assign a keyboard command to do it.1 In Settings, go to Accessibility > VoiceOver > Commands, then choose Touch Gestures or Keyboard Shortcuts to assign one to a shortcut (or any number of system options.) I’ve assigned a three-finger single-tap to call a shortcut that enables the Overcast podcast app’s sleep timer.
I’ve added a couple of shortcuts to the AssistiveTouch main menu.You can also kick shortcuts off with AssistiveTouch. Doing so is much like using a Home screen widget, but might appeal to someone who’s already using the AssistiveTouch feature because swipes and pressing gestures are challenging. AssistiveTouch puts gestures like summoning Control Center or returning to the Home screen into a grid of buttons. You can also create your own gestures by drawing them, then assign them to system tasks, including shortcuts.
To add a shortcut to the AssistiveTouch menu, configure it with a trip to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch. To add a button for a shortcut, choose Customize Main Menu, select a button from the grid, and choose a shortcut from the list. When you turn AssistiveTouch on, a semi-transparent button appears on the Home screen. When you select it, you’ll see the AssistiveTouch menu, including your shortcut buttons.
Per-app text size settingsNow we’re going to choose the size of text for individual apps, rather than the system as a whole. The first thing to know about text size choice in iOS is that there are two scales – the Text Size slider you’ll find in Display & Brightness settings, and the options you’ll see under Accessibility > Display & Text Size. The largest standard text size (135%) is a little under the midpoint of options within accessibility size settings. The max accessibility size gets you to about 310%. These sizes are presented in percentages because that’s how dynamic type works – sizes are relative, not expressed in absolute point sizes. If you can’t adjust text size in a particular app, it’s because that app’s developer has chosen to not support dynamic type.
But back to per-app sizes!
The ideal dynamic type size for me is usually that top standard setting, 135%. In text-heavy apps, like Mail, or a social media app, I want something a little larger. In Messages, I want the text to be larger still, so I can glance at a text quickly.
App-specific text sizing is a one of iOS’s per-app settings. The rest have to do with contrast, use of color, and the visibility and transparency of visual elements. In other words, they’re focused around features that assist people with low vision. When you add an app to the list in per-app settings, you can customize a number of appearance settings, based on your specific visual needs, and any issues the app presents that prevent you from using it.
The Mail screen on the left has text size cranked up to 135%. Using the Text Size Control Center item in per-app mode, I’ve boosted text size into the accessibility range, at 160%.
The iRobot app, which I use to boss my Roomba vacuum around, does not support dark mode. So I use per-app settings to enable smart invert colors instead. I no longer need to jump in and out of invert colors, based on whether an app supports dark mode.
To enable per-app settings, you add the app to the list in Settings > Accessibility > Per-App Settings, then configure the iOS options you need for this app. Options here include text size, but you don’t actually need to configure per-app settings to tweak the text size you see in a specific app. That’s because Control Center offers an express train to text size adjustment.
First, add the text size control to Control Center, if it’s not already there. Now open an app whose text size you want to change, and keep changed. I’ll use Mail. Open Control Center and then Text Size. Flip the toggle below the vertical slider to Mail Only. If you haven’t changed text sizes before, the slider probably shows 100% (default). I’ll raise mine to 160%, which is within the range of accessibility text sizes. When I return to Mail, list text and individual message text will reflect the change.
Try this with any app that would benefit from larger (or smaller, for that matter) text than usual. If you do this on the Home screen, notification text will change. as will some text in Today view. You can’t enlarge lock screen widget text, unfortunately, or even media player text on the lock screen. And if an app doesn’t support dynamic type, none of this will work.
Speak the screen to meI don’t use the VoiceOver screen reader on a daily basis, but I do often like to consume text in audio form. And I like to continue using my phone for other tasks while I’m doing it. With VoiceOver on, reading pretty much takes over the device. With the Speak Screen feature enabled instead, a two-finger flick downward starts my phone reading an article or message aloud.
Like VoiceOver, Speak Screen can draw on a robust set of included voices – far more than are available to Siri – and you can make adjustments to pitch and speaking rate as you set it up. Do that in the Spoken Content section of accessibility settings. Turn Speak Screen on, and configure voice settings, if you like. But really, all you need to do is find something you’d like to read, and do that two-finger flick downward from the status bar. If you’ve chosen the Show Controller setting, you’ll see the controller onscreen, and be able to stop and start speech, change the speaking rate in real time, or dismiss Speak Screen altogether.
Building on what’s thereThis isn’t a comprehensive list of cool invisible features or configuration options based in the accessibility suite. What I take from these, and the others I document when I write about iOS accessibility, is that there are usually more ways to accomplish a thing than you think, and that some of the cleverest accessibility bits in iOS can be found a few layers below the surface.
- Note that the VoiceOver screen reader must be running for these commands to work. ↩
Bloomberg’s very reliable reporter Mark Gurman says that Apple is working on touchscreen Macs:
Apple Inc. is working on adding touch screens to its Mac computers, a move that would defy long-held company orthodoxy and embrace an approach that co-founder Steve Jobs once called “ergonomically terrible.”
Apple engineers are actively engaged in the project, indicating that the company is seriously considering producing touch-screen Macs for the first time, according to people familiar with the efforts. Still, a launch hasn’t been finalized and the plans could change.
The plan is, apparently, to start with a revision to the MacBook Pro in 2025. So we’re talking at least two years from now. Still, this is big, since it will probably require design changes to macOS to make it more appropriate for touch. I have to wonder if the entire interface will just be made to even more resemble the iPad. Of course, apps built for touch (for the iPad and iPhone) would be able to support touch right out of the box, presumably.
I don’t think this is quite as big a deal as everyone will undoubtedly make it out to be. I frequently use a Mac via a touch interface (using Screens to control a Mac mini from an iPad), and while it’s not ideal, it works just fine. When my daughter used a Chromebook with touchscreen as her main computer, I found myself reaching for the screen to quickly tap an item or scroll something, even though the laptop had a standard trackpad.
And the best example is the one closest to home: The iPad Pro, in a Magic Keyboard, is essentially a touchscreen laptop. I use the keyboard and the trackpad a lot… but I also reach up and touch the screen. Of course the context of using a touchscreen in a laptop configuration is very different than a phone or a tablet. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful. (And it opens the doors for different designs, like a tear-off or fold-away keyboard that would make the Mac feel more like an iPad. And Apple Pencil support starts to make more sense in those scenarios, too.)
And the Mac and the iPad continue to move closer together…
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
After years of swirling rumors, it seems like Apple’s first proper foray into virtual reality might actually be happening this year. But as the company prepares to unveil the hardware and software it’s been working on for years, reports are unclear about a lot of the details.
According to Bloomberg’s authoritative Apple reporter Mark Gurman, Apple still has to work out “many kinks” with the device, involving “hardware, software, and services, as well as how it will be marketed and sold.” Call those kinks if you want–I’m not going to kink shame you–but don’t they seem to cover literally every aspect of the device?
What I’m saying is, if the device isn’t in flux, our ideas of what it might be certainly are. And yet there are really two paths for Apple to take based on what we think we know. Is this going to be a product that regular people are expected to buy, or is this an expensive preview of technology that won’t appeal to the masses until a few years from now?
What path Apple chooses will have a major impact on how the product is received and whether future Apple products in the category will have a chance to succeed.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Starting in iOS 15, you can adjust accessibility settings on a per-app basis. Here’s a quick walkthrough of how the feature works and why you might want to use it.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Our overpowered tech devices, the return of personal blogging, the last time we took our tech in, and the Apple services we subscribe to.
Go to the podcast page.
If you’ve spent any time at all over on Mastodon, you’ve probably heard about Ivory, a new client for the social network from Tweetbot developer Tapbots—probably in the context of “Man, they opened like two thousand new testing slots for the Ivory beta and they were all gone within five seconds!”1
Whether you’re using Ivory’s current pre-release version or not, you may be interested in what lies ahead for the client. Well, your curiosity is being rewarded: Tapbots has gone ahead and posted a road map for the app, laying out what exactly is in the works for the near future. Currently on the list, which Tapbots plans to update as it goes, are the ability to create content warnings on posts, enahnced profile features, and a filterable navigation bar, among others.
While the list on the Tapbots road map is limited and, as it proclaims, in no particular order, there’s at least one significant feature that’s nowhere to be found: Mac compatibility. Tapbots has said it’s developing a Mac version of the client as well, but so far that has not materialized even as an Early Access option on par with the iOS client. Personally, it can’t come soon enough, as the current state of Mastodon clients on the Mac is pretty underwhelming.
- Having used Ivory and many of the other popular Mastodon clients out there, I’m firmly in the camp of Tapbots’s app currently being the best offering out there. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s a new year, so it’s time to consider the lessons of 2022 and make some predictions for streaming trends in 2023. Plus: was “Glass Onion” a success for Netflix? Is your next workout coming from Netflix? And to Julia’s delight, Sports Corner is back!
Go to the podcast page.
Apple SVP Eddy Cue, in a post on Apple’s Newsroom site:
2022 was a groundbreaking year for entertainment. At some point over the past year, you probably discovered a new app, a new song, a new TV show or movie, or game. An experience that made you laugh, taught you something new, or helped you see the world in a new way — and moved you to share it with others.
Cue’s—press release? blog post? open letter?—is a bullet-by-bullet summary of everything Apple’s been doing in its services business this past year. It’s an interesting view into that part of the business.
I have to wonder what prompted this format for all of this information. A lot of this feels like an expanded version of the sort of discussion Tim Cook makes in the scripted portion of his phone call with financial analysts when Apple’s corporate results are released.
Apple’s results for the last quarter of the calendar year, due to be released on February 2, are probably going to be a bit of a bloodbath due to limited iPhone inventory due to factory shutdowns in China. I wonder if the idea of spotlighting Apple’s services success right now is to get it out of the way of the bad news narrative that’s going to form closer to the results release. There’s also probably some ego boosting going on here, as a senior VP gets to personally trumpet all the successes of his division.
Either way, it’s an interesting document for a year where Apple set records and, oh yeah, released the movie that won the Best Picture Oscar.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
As the new year begins, reports about Apple’s forthcoming headset product arrive to confuse and perplex us. We also discuss a potentially quiet year for the rest of Apple’s product line, the fundamental dignity of a circular pizza, and a handful of things we cared about at CES 2023.
Go to the podcast page.
Too often technology companies get focused on the new, shiny features that get added to every release, touting the latest and greatest capabilities of their products. And, sure, who doesn’t love new and shiny?
But when you’re a huge tech company with multiple platforms, tons of products, and a long history, that prioritization of the new can have a deleterious effect on all those features that are, frankly, a little more well-worn.
As Apple gets started on its 2023 agenda, there are a few existing features that could really benefit from some love and attention, rather than the traditional approach of the company patting itself on the back for a job well done as it focuses its sights instead on the future.
Continue reading on Macworld.
This week Apple would like you to get physical (HARD PASS) while we take pity on the lost souls at CES and look aghast at Apple AR headset rumors.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. It’s all about helping customers meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their end users with a structured, message-based approach.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is getting the “average” person involved—and so do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to their employees directly in Slack via Kolide’s app.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.
Speaking of Shortcuts, last weekend my pal Lex Friedman (who just started his own consulting business!) asked me to see if I could help him solve an automation program.
Lex wanted to use this shortcut to quickly generate a list of times where he’s available for meetings. This is a great use of automation—I wish I’d thought of it. Unfortunately, the shortcut only checks a single calendar, and Lex wanted his availability judged based on entries in two different calendars.
I thought of a million ways to attack this problem, but in the end I tried to keep it simple and just modified the existing shortcut. But here’s the problem: While there’s an action in the Calendar app that lets you filter calendar events based on criteria you choose, it doesn’t support both and and or logic.
So how do you find all (for example) all all-day events in a date range, in a specific calendar, containing some specific text in their title? You can’t just add a second calendar there, because the events are generally on one calendar or the other, not both.
I thought the solution was to first find all the events that match the criteria, regardless of calendar, and then place a second filter action that limits to one of the two desired calendars. Seems like it should work, but I just couldn’t get it to. Something fishy is going on there.
Here was what worked: I duplicated the Find Calendar Events action, making two separate actions, one for each calendar. I placed the results of both actions in a variable, and used the variable for the rest of the script. (In the case where I needed to sort the two sets of items together, I added a third filter action that takes all the events in the variable and sorts them together.)
This is pretty unwieldy. I don’t understand why my attempt to filter the filtered items failed, nor do I understand why Apple hasn’t allowed more sophisticated filtering actions. (To be fair, I also don’t understand how Fantastical—the app that Lex and I both use on macOS and iOS—doesn’t offer any actions like this one!)
In any event, if you need to get in touch with Lex, here’s how. I’m sure he’ll tell you when he’s available.
Earlier today, I was complaining to Shortcuts expert Matthew Cassinelli about how there’s no really good way to view progress of a running Shortcut on macOS. Yes, the Shortcuts menu item in the menu bar sort of tries to display progress, but… it doesn’t provide any information I find particularly valuable.
I’m frustrated because I do have some Shortcuts that take time to run, yet unless I have them beep or display a notification when they reach a certain point in the process, I have no idea what they’re doing or if they’re even working.
Based on a recommendation from Matt, I managed to come up with my own little notification system. It uses SwiftBar, my favorite utility for ambient data in my Mac’s menu bar, but you could also adapt it to work with BitBar or One Thing or any other utility you’re comfortable with.
Step one is a python script, echo, that serves as my SwiftBar plugin. It reads the contents of a text file and converts them into a format SwiftBar wants: The first line is displayed in the menu bar, and if there are additional lines, they’re displayed when you click on the first line. The script also inserts a timestamp so you know the last time the status was actually updated. (Like I said, some of my Shortcuts take a very long time to run.)
Step two is writing to that text file from Shortcuts and telling SwiftBar to update the menu bar immediately. That’s pretty easy. First, I use SwiftBar’s “enable plug-in” action to turn on my plug-in. Then I create a text field containing my status, save that to my file, and use SwiftBar’s Reload action to immediately force the new data to appear in my menu bar.
The result is just what I want—an indicator of where we are in the process, and when I click, a little more information about what’s going on.
Then at the end of the job, I just need to remember to tell SwiftBar to deactivate the plug-in until I need it next. And that’s it! It might not be the ready-made solution I wanted, but it’s better than not having any idea what’s happening.
It’s that time of the year once again: the time when we talk about numbers.
Wooo! Numbers! Nothing gets the crowd riled up like good old math, especially when it comes from someone whose specialty is nominally words. But what, I ask you, are words but equations with letters?
Don’t answer that.
Anyway, every January I post details about my finances for the past year. I’ve been doing this since 2018; it originally started out as a way to talk about the business of writing fiction, but since that has historically been a small chunk of my income, it’s more about how I earn my living as a freelance writer and podcaster.
As per usual, I’ve been inspired by several other writers, most notably Jim C. Hines, who’s been documenting his writing income for much longer than I’ve been in this game. And, as is also custom, I want to make it clear that this is just my personal experience, and all self-employed individuals (by nature) differ wildly. So don’t bother using this to extrapolate what your favorite writer or podcasting personality makes, because I guarantee you, it won’t hold water.
Continue reading on dmoren.com.
Your next audiobook from Apple may not be narrated by a human. Leyland Cecco, writing at The Guardian:
Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators.
This has been an issue brewing for some time. Some may remember that Amazon tried a few years ago to offer a blanket ability for books to be read aloud by text-to-speech, only to get sued by the major publishers.
Apple’s feature doesn’t seem to be quite the same: for one thing, it’s currently limited to certain genres of books, as The Verge points out:
The service is only available in English at present, and Apple is oddly specific about the genres of books its digital narrators are able to tackle. “Primary category must be romance or fiction (literary, historical, and women’s fiction are eligible; mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported),” its website reads.
The company seems to be tuning specific voices to specific genres, with two others for nonfiction and self-development coming soon.
For another matter, Apple’s website advertising this feature describes it as “Empowering indie authors and small publishers.” The titles must be nominated by rights owners, who retain the rights to audiobooks and—this is important—can still produce and distribute other versions of the audiobook if they want.
That obviates one of the main criticisms of Amazon’s previous attempt in this direction: secondary rights like audio can be a valuable source of income for authors1. Apple’s play seems targeted more at books that otherwise wouldn’t have audio versions, because the rights holders don’t have the money or inclination to have them produced. Apple is also doing quality checks (a good idea, given that it’s not hard to imagine AI getting tripped up by some words)2 so turnaround time is listed at a couple months.
The advantage of this, of course, is that it’s a big win not only for those who prefer audiobooks, but for accessibility as well. There are millions of titles out there that aren’t available to individuals with disabilities that make it difficult or impossible for them to read ebooks or print books. The addition of easy-to-produce audio versions could open up a wealth of content.
Finally, there’s the question of the impact on audiobook narrators. It’s a tough business already, and while there are certainly narrators so big that they have their own followings3, it does potentially squeeze out those who are just eking out a living book-to-book or those who are trying to break into the industry. Certainly it’s not hard to imagine a cost-conscious publisher wondering why they should shell out for a human narrator when an AI one is much cheaper.
That’s part of a larger trend, of course, of AI coming for various creative professions, from art to writing. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to find that audiobook narrators are at risk as well. It’ll be interesting to see if this becomes a point of contention, or whether it can co-exist peacefully alongside the existing audiobook market.
- Though increasingly difficult for authors to retain, since publishers want to gobble up more rights wherever possible, even if they, say, don’t intend to produce an audio version. ↩
- Which is probably why sci-fi and fantasy aren’t currently eligible. 🤣 ↩
- Putting my sci-fi novelist hat on, I can say with certainty that there are books that sell well because of who narrates them. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
‘Tis the season for people to replace the Dark Sky weather app, as Dan did with Carrot Weather. Our pal Scott McNulty downloaded a dozen weather apps in order to find the one that was right for him:
It is important to know what I’m looking for in a weather app, so you can figure out if this blog post will be helpful to you. Here’s what I need in my weather app:
- An easy-to-read hourly forecast for the day.
- A little bit of personality, but not too much personality.
- An attractive design.
- A reasonable price, and if it is free not too many ads.
As you can see, all of these attributes are highly subjective, but that’s the way of the world.
Scott’s thought process is very interesting, and I encourage you to read his post. But the TL;DR is, he chose Hello Weather, but thinks true Dark Sky fanatics might prefer Carrot Weather.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Channels AppleTV app is excellent.Though I had heard a lot about Channels from various people—mostly Casey Liss—I never really thought it would be relevant to me. Channels is a server that runs on a device in your house and records TV shows to your hard drive, which you then play back via a web browser or the Channels app on your mobile device or TV streamer box.
In short, Channels is largely intended for people who want to build their own DVR by connecting a local device to an over-the-air antenna or a box containing a CableCard. I don’t get over-the-air channels and cut the cord in 2021—so it was never really on my radar.
Funny thing about that. A few weeks ago, after a month-long free trial, I signed up for an $80 annual subscription to Channels. It’s that good. Let me explain how I’m using it.
TV Everywhere and Virtual ChannelsThe moment when Channels became instantly relevant to me was when I discovered that it supports TV Everywhere, a system where you provide your credentials from your cable, satellite, or over-the-top streaming provider and gain access to live streams of some cable channels directly from the channel provider itself.
Using the TV Everywhere support built into Channels, I could authenticate with FuboTV and give Channels access to more than 150 different streams, including my local broadcast channels. Channels can tune these streams in without using anything but my Fubo login, and I can view or record them within Channels. Recordings are saved to the hard drive of the Mac mini I’m using to run the Channels server and can be played back later. (Unfortunately, not all cable channels support TV Everywhere, but most of the ones I watch do.)
The next revelation was when I discovered Channels’ Virtual Channels feature. Using existing recordings you have—I used the contents of my Plex library, which integrated easily with Channels—you can program faux “linear” channels yourself.
I realize Virtual Channels may seem like a perplexing concept when I’ve got access to any episode of any show, or any movie, for playback via Plex itself. But sometimes you don’t want to pick something specific. Sometimes you want that old-school feeling of serendipity or randomness that you used to get when you flipped on the TV to see what was on. Streaming services are realizing this—there are now a bunch of streaming linear channels programmed like TV stations of old for this very reason.
There’s always something to watch on Miyazaki+.But Channels lets you use your video archive to build linear stations of your own. So I created Miyazaki+, which shuffles through my entire library of the works of Hayao Miyazaki. When I tune in Miyazaki+, I’ll get something by or related to the great Japanese animation director, but I won’t know what. (Right now, it’s showing “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”, followed by “Porco Rosso.”) I’ve got channels devoted to Marvel, Star Trek, Doctor Who, “NewsRadio”, “MASH”, and “Stargate SG-1.”
Now, these channels aren’t really streaming live, 24/7. Instead, Channels builds a schedule based on rules you set, including whether you want shows to run linearly, shuffle randomly, or appear in “mini-marathons.” When you tune to a virtual channel, Channels drops you into the show that’s been scheduled for that particular time—and the stream begins. You can back up to the beginning of the movie or episode or just take it where you came in and watch through the next couple of episodes as they appear.
It’s really a clever idea. I love it.
Where Channels wins outSo why should I care about getting a subset of my Fubo-provided channels inside the Channels app? After all, doesn’t Fubo offer a cloud DVR feature and access to my TV content wherever I go?
Wellll…. sort of. There are a bunch of catches. First, cloud DVRs just can’t offer the same latency that playing back a file that’s sitting on a hard drive on your home network can. When I want to skip commercials in “Jeopardy!” on Fubo, I’m awkwardly battling streaming lag and latency. The jumps and seeking in the Channels DVR are instantaneous, like I’m back using my TiVo.
Also, there’s the fact that the shows I record on Channels are resident on my hard drive—and I can save them forever. There are no storage limits other than the size of my drives, and if I want to take a movie and copy it to my Plex library to keep forever, I can.
Then there’s the issue of region changes. When I leave the Bay Area, Fubo knows it—and it adjust itself accordingly. When I was visiting my mom in Arizona over Christmas vacation, the 49ers game was on back home—but in Arizona, they were showing a different NFL game. And Fubo would only show me Arizona local channels, since that’s where I was.
Here’s the clever part: My Channels server was back home, in the Bay Area. And it could tune in the 49ers game on my local Fox affiliate, which I could then stream back to my iPad in Arizona. (Or pretty much anywhere else.) Changes in region don’t matter with Channels so long as your server is in the right region.
And then there’s the truth that sometimes these over-the-top streaming services are unreliable. The other day, Fubo got really laggy and slow for a few hours. I have no idea why! I got frustrated with it and switched to watching the football game on Channels (via TV Anywhere, which you’ll remember isn’t served by Fubo but by the original source of the programming). It worked like a charm. (Yes, I could probably also have used the Fox Sports app, the Paramount+ app, or the ESPN app.)
Worth it to meQuite frankly, just the ability to reliably DVR the few linear TV shows I watch that are unavailable (or delayed) on streaming was enough for me to pay for Channels. The Virtual Channels feature is a delightful bonus.
The Channels apps are really good, too. I’ve been relying on the tvOS app for a few months now, and it’s got a solid interface and is remarkably responsive. The iOS app is similarly good. (I do wish the Channels commercial-skip detection feature was a little more accurate, though.)
This isn’t an app that’s for everyone, but if you’re like me—or, even more, if you’re still using cable or an over-the-air antenna to watch TV—Channels can help bring everything you want to watch into one place.
The frustrating tech we own, our tech-related goal or theme for the new year, the tech we’d buy if money were no object, and our thoughts on and usage of Apple’s MagSafe technology and the upcoming Qi2 standard.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s ways can be mysterious. It often makes moves that don’t quite make sense when viewed from the outside. Why add USB-C to the low-end iPad but use the old Apple Pencil? Why release an M2 MacBook Air and keep the M1 MacBook Air around? Why keep selling that 13-inch MacBook Pro that still has the Touch Bar and doesn’t resemble any other current MacBook models in any way?
When viewed from inside Apple, these decisions obviously make sense. It’s left for us on the outside to try to figure out why the company does what it does. (I’ve spent years playing this game.) Here are a few major reasons why Apple makes decisions that don’t seem to make sense on the surface.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Chi 2, the Apple headset rumors and editing a note live on the air.
Go to the podcast page.
The Wireless Power Consortium:
WPC member, Apple®, provided the basis for the new Qi2 standard building on its MagSafe® technology. Apple® and other WPC members developed the new Magnetic Power Profile, which is at the core of Qi2. Qi2’s Magnetic Power Profile will ensure that phones or other rechargeable battery-powered mobile products are perfectly aligned with charging devices, thus providing improved energy efficiency and faster charging.
MagSafe is so good that apparently it’ll be the new standard going forward for Qi charging devices. That’s a plus for not having to carefully align your phone on a charging pad (I recently bought a new iPhone case that actually has a magnet in it, and my chargers work much better now). It also suggets that other devices and accessories that want to advertise Qi compatibility will also be MagSafe/iPhone compatible.
No word, however, on whether or not this means new life for the conspiracy theories that AirPower isn’t really dead…just biding its time.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
January 1st, 2023 has come and gone, and with it the demise of my weather app of choice, Dark Sky. Goodbye, old friend, you will be missed!
But when Apple closes a door, it opens a space on your home screen. Opportunity awaits! It’s been a long time since a new contender got a shot at some prime real estate on my iPhone.
Despite my allegiance to Dark Sky, I’ve stayed in the weather app game. Over the last several years, I’ve downloaded and tried a number competitors and while none had dethroned Dark Sky, there were a couple others in heavy rotation. Apple’s iOS 16 Weather app is significantly improved on previous versions, though it still seems to prioritize flashy form over function (see “animated weather graphics that take up a big chunk of the screen”). Say what you will about Dark Sky, but its interface was simple and straightforward.
Dark Sky’s interface, largely recreated in CARROT Weather.CARROT Weather has been my other go-to app, thanks largely to its incredible power and versatility. So when I saw my old Macworld colleague Chris Breen1 point out that you can actually recreate Dark Sky’s interface in CARROT Weather, well, my interest was piqued, to say the least.
There are, however, some caveats. I’ve been a CARROT Weather subscriber for many years and am still on one of its older (no longer available) subscription plans.2 While that does get me access to many of the app’s features, some are reserved for the more expensive tiers. So, for example, I can still get access to the radar via the toolbar, but I can’t put a little radar widget on my CARROT Weather home screen, à la Dark Sky. For that, I’d need to pungle up $30 per year, or $50 for the family plan. I think I’m okay without it for the moment.
To do this for yourself, open up CARROT Weather, go to Settings > Layout > Layout Gallery and choose the Inline style. Give it a name—oh, I don’t, know maybe, “Dark Ski”?—and you’re done. From there you can customize the layout further if you’d like.
For me, the result is close enough: it apes Dark Sky’s easy-to-read vertical chart of the hour-by-hour forecast, including a pop-up menu that lets you choose from temperature, precipitation, UV, and so on. I was also able to customize it a bit further, adding a summary line to give me the day’s high and low temperatures, as well as including CARROT’s trademark snarky robot for my own amusement. And, of course, CARROT already provides precipitation alerts, one of Dark Sky’s best features, and even uses the new Live Activities API to put them on your home screen.
Should I have used this opportunity to try something different, maybe find something better? Perhaps! But I’m a creature of habit, and this creature likes to know what the weather’s going to be like at a glance, without having to work too hard. I’ll keep playing with Apple’s Weather app, too—it remains a solid contender, but it still has some work to do. Maybe in iOS 17.
- Two mentions in as many weeks, Chris! It’s like you never even left us. ↩
- $2.49 per year which is hard to beat. 😬 ↩
It’s a new year, and Jason has made his fearless predictions about what will happen in 2023! (Myke has questions.) We also consider the fate of the iPhone Plus, discuss Apple pausing its HomeKit architecture roll-out, and pour one out for Dark Sky.
Go to the podcast page.
I like big books, and I cannot lie. Trade paperbacks and hardcovers are my preferred format when it comes to physical books. Admittedly, they do not offer the best reading experience anywhere other than in a nice comfy chair. (Yes, sometimes I have to leave the confines of my home. I don’t like it.)
This preference extends into ereaders as well. I’ve always been a fan of the Kindle, though the folks at Amazon seem to think that the “paperback” size is the way to go. I assume this is based on the fact that very few people bought their previous giant Kindle variants: DX and DX Graphite (I have both, and I really liked them. If only they had chopped off the keyboard, they might have created my ideal Kindle. Hey, wait a minute…).
Enter the $339 Kindle Scribe. There’s now a market for note-taking tablets, and it would seem Amazon would like to dominate it. While the Kindle DX was sold as a Kindle that you could take notes with, it really sucked at taking notes. Can the Kindle Scribe improve on that experience?
Well, it would be hard-pressed to do worse… and I have to say the note-taking aspect of the Kindle Scribe is the least interesting thing about it to me. And yet I bought one immediately.
Why? That glorious screen. This is the best Kindle screen I’ve ever read on—I’ve read four books on it so far—and I’ve used a few Kindle screens in my day. I could list all the tech specs, but I’m not going to because they don’t matter to me1. I’ll just say that the crispness combined with the even lighting and size make it a joy to read on.
If you’ve read anything on a Kindle, imagine that slightly crisper and much bigger. Nice, isn’t it?
Now, I know there will be people who say, “I don’t want to lug around a giant ereader, Scott.” To them, I say, “You shouldn’t!” This product really isn’t for everyone. If you want to pocket your Kindle when you’re out and about, you’ll either need to get massive pockets or embrace disappointment.
I brought the Scribe along on my commute, and I was worried that it might be uncomfortable to hold for extended periods of time. I found it well-balanced, and best of all, it didn’t feel like I was holding a novelty-sized Kindle.
The Amazon folio cover is a nice addition and allows you to fold back a bit and stand the Scribe up or have it pitched at an angle (there’s only one angle, which is a shame, but that one angle works for me). It does take a bit of getting used to folding the cover the way it is meant to be folded. It just didn’t work the way my brain thought it should—though, to be fair, very few things do. Also, the cover sort of overhangs the sides of the Kindle for some reason. I’m guessing that’s so the power button is protected from errant collusions. I don’t like how that looks, but I hardly ever notice it, and I would like the Kindle turning off and on in my bag even less.
The Scribe feels solid and well-made. There’s none of that creaky cheap plastic feel that you might find with other ereader top models. The power button’s action is satisfying, and while the placement was a worry for me before using it (on the side of the Kindle instead of the top), in practice, it has made no difference.
Right below that power button is a USB-C port. USB-C charging is welcome and means I can responsibly recycle most of my micro-USB cables and remove them from my travel bag.
The one thing (or, technically, two things) missing from the Scribe are its page-turn buttons. Even the flippin’ DX(s) had them, so I am slightly perplexed by their absence. It doesn’t keep me from loving the Scribe, but it keeps me from truly madly loving it. Come on, Amazon, give us buttons! Give love a chance!
This feature, it’s not for me.What about note-taking? Well, as I said, I didn’t buy the Scribe with that feature in mind, but you know, I tried it out. I’m very impressed with how much writing on the Scribe feels like jotting a note on a piece of paper. Every stroke from the pen pretty much appeared on the screen in real-time.
If I could read my handwriting, this thing would be a game-changer—or if it could read my handwriting, for that matter. Unfortunately, the Scribe doesn’t do OCR, it only syncs your notebooks to Amazon, and you can’t search your handwritten notes. You can use the stylus to highlight and annotate in books, though, if you’re into that. (I was raised never to “deface” a book, so I never got into the habit of writing/highlighting in books.)
I bought the model with the basic pen, and it is a basic pen. Feels nice in hand and has a flat side so it won’t roll off your desk. It makes a satisfying click when magnetically attached to the side of the Kindle too.
Who should buy the Scribe? People who want a giant ereader or those who don’t mind getting started on the ground floor with Amazon’s note-taking plans. I’m sure they’ll be adding many more features to the note-taking aspect of the Scribe, but it is pretty basic at the moment. What’s not so basic is getting the best ebook reading experience on the largest and nicest E-Ink screen I’ve used.
- It’s got a 10.2-inch diagonal, 300 ppi screen.-Ed. ↩
You know the old thought experiment about the AI designed to make paper clips, that quickly decides that in order to maximize paper clips, it will have to get rid of all the humans?
A lot of security teams have a similar idea when it comes to meeting compliance goals: it would be so much simpler if it weren’t for all the pesky users.
That way of thinking has brought us to the current state of endpoint security, which is dominated by MDMs that hamper device performance and turn every laptop into Big Brother. This approach to security is bad for culture and morale, and moreover, it doesn’t actually work. If it did, then no company with an MDM and an annual security training would have a data breach.
Kolide is an endpoint security and fleet management solution that takes a different approach. We help our customers meet their compliance goals–whether that’s for auditors, customers, or leadership–by enlisting the support of end users.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
By reaching out to employees via a friendly Slack DM and educating them about company policies, Kolide can help you build a culture in which everyone contributes to security, because everyone understands how and why to do it.
For IT admins, Kolide helps you prove compliance via a single dashboard. From there, you can monitor the security of your entire fleet, whether they’re running on Mac, Windows, or Linux. (You read that right; Kolide can finally provide visibility into your Linux users.)
At a glance, you can see which employees have their disks encrypted, OS up to date, and password manager installed, among a host of other issues. And this data collection isn’t happening in the shadows; end users can see exactly what data is being collected and why in the User Privacy Center.
f you’ve read this far, it’s because you’re intrigued by an approach to endpoint security that gets end users involved. Click here to learn more about how it works. If you like what you see, you can sign up for a free trial, no credit card required.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide knows how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third-party auditor—they just went through it themselves. They learned firsthand something their customers had been telling them for a while: that they couldn’t have gotten their SOC certification without using their own product.
Kolide is an endpoint security solution for Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Kolide gives IT admins a single dashboard, through which you can prove that your fleet has the security measures in place that auditors care about.
You should check out Kolide today.
See ya later, 2022—2023 is where it’s at!
Jason has already detailed his favorites from the year that was, but I suppose I owe it to you—to myself really—to see if I can remember the stuff that I loved over the past twelve months.
GamesMy gaming habits basically lie in one of two directions: mobile puzzle games or incredibly high-budget blockbuster titles.
Jason’s already extolled the virtues of Knotwords, which despite my usual frustration with anagrams and my love of crosswords, I absolutely adore. I only really do the Daily Puzzle, but I do it pretty much every day. (And the feature that lets you get your broken streaks back if you complete another seven days straight is 😙👌.)
What can I say? It’s compelling!I’m also one of the people still playing Wordle most days—it helps that it’s built into the New York Times Crossword app, which is another of my daily habits. I just don’t post my scores, because nobody needs to see that anymore.
On the other end of the spectrum, my lovely wife gave me a PlayStation 5 for my birthday this year; it’s the first of the Sony systems I’ve ever owned, so I’ve been working my way through a backlog of great titles that I haven’t been able to play over the years.
Marvel’s Spider-Man was at the top of my list and it was everything I’d hoped for from a game about one of my favorite superheroes. I’ve previously enjoyed the Arkham series of Batman games, which managed to capture the feel of embodying the dark knight, and Spider-Man (and its spinoff featuring Miles Morales) are just as good at nailing the essence of the webhead. In particular, swining through New York and running up buildings? A freaking delight. There’s a sequel reportedly coming later next year and I am here for it.
I also played through the entire Uncharted series, which several people had told me over the years that I’d really enjoy—and guess what? They were right! Yes, they’re highly linear to the point of being basically interactive movies, but they’re done well: extremely fun, solid writing, great voice acting performances.1 Some might be a little dated technologically (even with the remastered versions I played), but at this far a remove, they’re refreshingly spartan: no giant skill tress or endless fetch quests. By comparison I’m currently playing Ghost of Tsushima which, while beautiful and expansive, is riddled with that type of content.
BooksI read somewhat fewer books this year than last, but I second Jason’s praise for Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series (which I read the entirety of this year) which was among my favorites. I’ve enjoyed many of Novik’s previous works, but Scholomance is probably her best yet.
Likewise Daniel O’Malley’s Blitz; The Rook is one of my favorite books of the last decade, and while its sequel Stiletto was still pretty good, something about this temporally bifurcated tale of people with supernatural powers in London nailed the vibe even better. It’s also a great entry point to the series that kind of stands on its own.
Locklands brought to a close Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders trilogy and it was quite a ride. The first book in the series, Foundryside, was one of the best books I read in 2018, but the second—2021’s Shorefall—left me a little cold. As a result I wasn’t sure what to expect from the finale, but it ended up being an incredibly moving and heartwrenching conclusion to the story. It wasn’t an easy book to read, but I do think it was worthwhile.
Finally, on a recommendation from Jason I picked up Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series, which is a wild blend of sci-fi and fantasy. The first couple books were published back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, while the two more recent ones came out in the early 2000s. Supposedly there are a few volumes still in the offing, but who knows when they’ll appear—still, I enjoyed them quite a bit.
TVThe one thing I’ve still managed to squeeze in plenty of this year is TV watching, which is good because there was a surfeit of great television.
Andor (Disney+) is my show of the year. I know there are other shows that might technically edge it out, but come on: it’s Star Wars. Or is it? I’m not sure it matters. Somehow a show about a secondary character in a recent one-off prequel turned into something much bigger. Unsurprisingly, the moral gray areas of spies and resistance fighters in space is right in my wheelhouse. I can’t wait for the second (and final 😭) season, whenever it actually shows up.
It was a great year for mysteries on TV: Only Murders in the Building (Hulu) season two managed to capture everything about the first season that I loved and somehow take its weird energy to new and delightful places. The Afterparty (Apple TV+), where a murder at a high school reunion features episodes each shot in a different film genre was a fun and engaging puzzle. And Reacher (Prime Video), while pretty brutal, was an engaging adaptation that demonstrated why the original is a page-turner.
Spy stories had some solid entries as well: Slow Horses (Apple TV+) put out two quality seasons about the disgraced operatives of Slough House, anchored by a fantastic performance by Gary Oldman. A new adaptation of The Ipcress File (AMC+/Sundance Now) was also fantastic, and needs to be seen by more people: Joe Cole’s version of Harry Palmer somehow manages to channel Michael Caine while also making him a far more interesting and sympathetic character than the original.2
On the sci-fi side, I’ll echo Jason’s thoughts about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) and the latest season of For All Mankind (Apple TV+), which we of course covered over on NASA Vending Machine. The former manages to capture the fun of original Star Trek, with a great cast and excellent production values. The latter is an edge-of-your-seat affair that’s just gotten better with every season.
I liked all of the Marvel series that aired this year, but if I had to pick one, I think it’d be Ms. Marvel (Disney+). Iman Vellani is a bonafide star and absolutely perfect casting for a character who deserves to be at the center of the MCU. The family dynamics were well drawn and the interweaving with the painful history of the partition of India was not a thing I ever expected to get from a comic book adaptation.
If there’s a contender with Andor for the best show of the year, it’s clearly Severance (Apple TV+), which came out of nowhere to absolutely captivate. The moments of dark comedy and tension elevate what is already a beautifully crafted story, all while critiquing our society’s fixation on work culture. Really just fantastic.
Now for my guilty pleasure: Blood & Treasure (Paramount+) finally aired its second season in 2022, three years after its first finished. Is a great show that deserves to be spoken in the same breath as Severance or Andor? No, but it is super campy and fun. This season wasn’t quite as strong as the first, but it still managed to deliver an entertaining story with no shortages of scenery-chewing and ridiculousness. If you, like me, felt the Uncharted movie left you wanting, this might scratch that itch.
Finally, a pending asterisk on my last pick, since its first season isn’t yet complete, but it’s in the weird position of airing from 2022 into 2023, so which year list should it go on? Anyway, I’ve found myself really enjoying Willow (Disney+), the continuation of the 1988 George Lucas/Ron Howard fantasy adventure, starring Warwick Davis. There’s been a bumper crop of fantasy on TV in the past year, but if you found House of the Dragon too grim and Rings of Powers good but overly earnest, Willow is a breath of fresh air. It’s not only fun but extremely funny, with a great cast—a particular call out to the comic chops of Amar Chadha-Patel as Boorman, an actor I’d seen in very little before this and I now want to see in everything.
MoviesLooking back, I watched more movies than I thought this year, but many of them were very very bleh.3 Here are my picks for the ones I enjoyed the most.
I’m sure you’ve heard someone rave about Everything Everywhere All At Once and it’s well-deserved. If nothing else, this movie reminds us why Michelle Yeoh is a star and marks the far-too-long return of 1980s child star Ke Huy Quan (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Goonies) in a sci-fi/action/family drama that I found fun and touching.
What was I just saying about it being a good year for mysteries? Glass Onion, the follow up to Rian Johnson’s surprise smash hit Knives Out debuted just last week, and while it may be hard to capture the je ne sais quoi of that first outing, I still found it a worthy successor. Daniel Craig is always watchable, and Janelle Monáe is a standout amongst a cast of standouts.4
Whatever you may feel about Tom Cruise personally, the man’s a movie star and Top Gun: Maverick is the perfect vehicle for him. I’m not really sure how this movie was this good—the original Top Gun is very of its era, and that era is long over, but the movie leans into that, and, man, it works.
Turning Red was yet another delightful Pixar movie, a coming of age story about a teenage girl who turns into a giant red panda. There’s so many layers to this metaphor and this movie lands all of them. You’re going to cry. You are.
A movie that deserved to be seen by more people, The Outfit is almost a play, taking place pretty much entirely in one location: a Chicago tailor’s shop in 1956. And yet it is utterly riveting. That’s most attributable to the star performance of Mark Rylance as the tailor in question, who finds himself embroiled in a mob war. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it is worth a watch.
TechWhy yes, we do talk about technology here! I made a bunch of changes to my tech setup this year, and I feel like I should at least call out a few of them.
My desk now has a Studio Display after my iMac died. I really like it, despite the meh webcam, though that’s probably no surprise given that it’s almost exactly the same display that was in my iMac.5
I finally upgraded my iPad Pro this year and got a Magic Keyboard to boot and it has changed my experience of using that device. Which is good because with my M1 Air acting as my de facto desktop, the iPad has become my around-the-house computer.
After my Series 4 Apple Watch bit the dust, I upgraded to a Series 7 and I’ve been delighted by the big beautiful display. I’ll probably be holding onto it until the Apple Watch Ultra improvements start trickling down into the main line.
And it was a great year for me when it came to programming. Whether it was building an On Air sign from an e-ink display or slowly learning Python to build Discord bots, I really took great pleasure from solving these technological puzzles. It may be the only real hobby I have left! (The rest of them have somehow turned into jobs. 🤔)
The best of them allI’ve saved the best of the best for last. Weirdly the two biggest moments of my year happened within a week of each other: my most recent novel, The Nova Incident, came out on July 26, adding to the Galactic Cold War series, and I’ve been delighted that people seem to be enjoying it. (More than a few folks have called it my best book yet, which is very flattering and also really ramps up the pressure for my next book. 😅)
And, of course, my wife and I welcomed our first kid into the world just a few days before the book came out. I lack the words to describe the experience of parenthood other than to say that it’s the biggest, best, and most daunting thing to ever happen in my entire life, and I’m immensely looking forward to seeing all the amazing things this next year brings.
- They even got me to watch the Uncharted movie, which…well perhaps the less said about the better. ↩
- And yes, I watched the original—which I had to go to my library to get on DVD because it’s not available anywhere online—and here’s my hot take: skip it and watch the TV series. It’s better. ↩
- I’m looking at you The Gray Man. How do you make a movie with Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling just flat out boring? ↩
- I know we’re talking favorites and not bagging on things, but as long as we’re on the subject of mysteries, we also watched Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile which was very very bad and should feel bad. ↩
- Now if Apple would just hurry up and ship the M2 Pro Mac mini I’ve been waiting for to compliment this. ↩
It’s the end of the year, but before we turn the page (or mount a new calendar) and move on to 2023, I thought I’d make a quick list of some of my favorite fun things from the year almost entirely gone by…
GamesI am not great at games. I want to play them… but never quite enough to play them as much as I’d like. Still, I did play and enjoy some games this year.
At the top of my list is Knotwords, which took a lot of my game time this year. It’s a crossword-puzzle-themed game that isn’t a crossword puzzle. It’s a word game, though. I love it.
I still adore the Apple Arcade game Mini Motorways, which got a nice update this year that added more game styles, including an endless mode—for when you just can’t say goodbye to the delightful city you’ve developed from nothing by laying roads, highways, and roundabouts. This one made my list last year and I kept playing it this year.
I spent many hours this year playing Alto’s Adventure: Spirit of the Mountain, an Apple Arcade release that extended my favorite iPad game franchise in new ways. (This was the second Alto’s extension, after last year’s Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City.) It’s an endless snowboard game with challenging tricks, a very simple control scheme, beautiful graphics, and soothing sounds.
This year I got my Panic Playdate, a delightful handheld game toy gadget that I haven’t played nearly enough. But I do want to highlight my favorite Playdate games: Vertex Pop’s HyperMeteor, a spectacularly fun take on Asteroids; and Nic Magnier, Arthur Hamer and Logan Gabriel’s Pick Pack Pup, a delightful match-three puzzle game that manages to also be a critique of Amazon warehouses.
BooksThis year I’ve managed to meet my Goodreads goal of reading 50 books. Here are the four I liked the best:
Adrain Tchaikovsky’s novella Elder Race is a stunning mix of science fiction and fantasy, all in the same story, all happening at the same time—which genre it’s in depends entirely on the perspective of the story’s two main characters. I didn’t want it to end.
Stephen King’s Fairy Tale is by my favorite Stephen King, the one who wrote 11/22/63 and The Dark Tower. It’s right there in the title: This is mythic fantasy King, not horror-meister King. And, as with “11/22/63,” it’s also today’s older and wiser Stephen King, who sees the beauty and melancholy in the relationship between the story’s youthful protagonist and his older but not-quite-wiser adviser. It also manages to be a story about storytelling, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read The Dark Tower.
Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves is the third book in her Scholomance trilogy. (Start with the first book, “A Deadly Education.”) The entire trilogy is superb, a riff on a lot of Harry Potter tropes—it’s set at a school for magical teenagers, but most of them don’t survive the experience!—that becomes a whole lot more than that. The third book expands the world of the trilogy in a bunch of interesting and surprising ways, and the parallels it draws with our own world couldn’t be more striking.
Daniel O’Malley’s Blitz is the third book in the Checquy Files series that began with The Rook. That first book is one of my favorites of the last decade or so, and while “Blitz” doesn’t quite live up to it, I couldn’t have enjoyed it more. O’Malley is so inventive in describing the various super-powered individuals who work for a secret British agency that protects the general public against supernatural threats. “Blitz” itself is just overflowing with ideas and details—perhaps to a fault, in that it’s really two books in one, with surprisingly little connecting the two storylines. On top of that, O’Malley is almost Neal Stephenson-like in going off on digressions that don’t have anything to do with the plot. But the digressions are so good, I didn’t care.
TVThere are so, so many TV shows. You can’t watch ’em all. Not even professional TV critics have time to watch ’em all. In fact, I haven’t yet gotten to my wife’s favorite TV show of the year, Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs.” She says she liked it so much she’ll re-watch it with me, so I guess that’s next up. In the meantime, of the stuff that I got to, here’s my favorite:
- “Severance” (Apple TV+) was the best show I watched this year. The creepy sci-fi scenario, the deconstruction of workplace culture, the amazing sets, the great performances by a stacked cast of actors… the whole thing, really. It doesn’t get much better than this.
- “Andor” (Disney+) is a “Star Wars” show but it’s really just a great TV show, period. Tony Gilroy’s slow-burn story about the growth of the rebellion against the empire uses what we know about the setting of “Star Wars” as a backdrop to tell a very specific story about what makes people choose to risk their own lives to rebel.
- “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Paramount+) does right by the classic “Star Trek” formula, re-using the original series’ optimistic, episodic format while instilling it with modern storytelling techniques and special effects. Anson Mount’s Captain Christopher Pike is just the best. By going back to the original “Star Trek” pilot of nearly 60 years ago, modern “Star Trek” has found its best iteration.
- “The Bear” (Hulu) shows that both character drama and intense action can sometimes be found in the most unlikely of places: in this case, a family-owned sandwich restaurant in Chicago. Yes, chef.
- “For All Mankind” (Apple TV+) went to Mars in its third season, and while it wasn’t quite as solid as the previous seasons, the show still manages some amazingly intense sequences. A bit too much time was spent on the ne’er-do-well Stevens brothers, but I’ll forgive it because of everything else, including the single most surprising plot twist I saw this year.
- “Station Eleven” (HBO Max) aired late last year and into this 2022, and I loved it. It’s a story about the end of the world, but with Shakespearean actors instead of zombies.
- “Slow Horses” (Apple TV+) is a British spy series based on a popular set of novels. The season-long stories are twisty and turny, the spies are failures trying to find redemption, and the spymaster is played by Gary Oldman. I can’t even begin to describe Oldman’s character, Jackson Lamb, other than to say that he’s smelly and awful and disgusting and also sharp as a tack and loyal to his people and his ideals.
- “Mythic Quest” (Apple TV+) returned this year with a new season that twists the original series’ premise by putting a couple of characters out on their own, sort of? It’s not really about the video games—it’s about the people who work on the video games. It’s sweet and charming and ridiculous.
- “Welcome to Wrexham” (Hulu). When Rob McElhenney isn’t doing “Mythic Quest” (or “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) he’s busy doing things like convincing Ryan Reynolds to buy a fifth-division Welsh soccer team. It sounds like a setup for a fawning documentary vehicle, but this series ends up being more about the town of Wrexham and how the people who live there have invested so much of their spirit into the local, down-on-its-luck football club. The stuff with Rob and Ryan is fun, but it’s the people of Wrexham (and the people who work for the club) who are the real stars.
MoviesI didn’t see very many movies this year, but three stood out:
- “Turning Red,” Pixar’s coming-of-age story that involves a teen girl in Toronto getting super red-panda powers.
- “The Tragedy of MacBeth,” featuring a great Denzel Washington performance, stunningly directed by Joel Coen and photographed by Bruno Delbonnel.
- “Wakanda Forever,” in which Ryan Coogler once again shows he can somehow make relevant art while working within the constraints of franchise machinery—and it’s a moving tribute to Chadwick Boseman and a fun superhero movie, too.
The legacy of 2022 in tech, the tech gifts we’re buying ourselves, the best third-party app replacements, and Apple products we’d like to see but they’ll never make.
Go to the podcast page.
I left an easter egg in this week’s Macworld column:
People who want the most cutting-edge iPhones will need to pungle up for the privilege. And guess what? A whole lot of people will.
The first time I came into contact with the phrase “pungle up,” I knew what it meant—it was clearly used in the same way as a phrase I was familiar with, “pony up.” It means that you’re going to have to put your hard-earned money on the table, that whatever you’re getting is going to come dear.
My introduction to “pungle up” came from Chris Breen, who was a freelance writer at MacUser and Macworld—later, I hired him full time as a writer at Macworld. Chris used it a lot.
As he explained today:
“Pungle” was a word that was thrown about freely when I was growing up, so I was surprised when editors questioned me about its use. I believe Macworld’s copy editors added it to the style guide so future editors wouldn’t query me about it.
True story. And my use of the term on Macworld this week is absolutely intended as an homage to Chris. (Chris works inside at Apple these days, though he does blog occasionally on non-tech topics and is the author of the theme songs for many, many podcasts.)
Anyway, it’s in the dictionary and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Macworld style guide, and that’s good enough for me.
Apple’s 2022 was a little slow on the Mac side, but there are brighter days ahead in 2023 if you ask me. But what about the iPhone, Apple’s most important product? And what about the rest of Apple’s product line-up–including product lines not yet introduced? 2023 promises to be a big one. Here are my predictions for the iPhone, AirPods, HomePod, and Apple foray into an AR/VR headset.
Continue reading on Macworld.
In a very special (and silly) end-of-year episode, Julia and Jason create tier lists for everything with a plus. Happy new year!
Go to the podcast page.
As technology enthusiasts, we’re all too often accustomed to looking forward to the next thing, to the feature that’s just over the horizon. And sometimes that means forgetting the amazing things we’ve already got—until they pop up, perfect for the job at hand.
When the original Apple Watch came out, one of its many (perhaps too many) whizbang features was the ability to look through the camera of the paired iPhone and take a photo with it. But the real-time image was jerky and imprecise and the screen was so small and grainy that it felt like more of a novelty than a real utility.
Fast forward to the year 2022 and I’m trying to take a picture of myself, my wife, and our kid in front of the Christmas tree. There’s only the three of us, so how to best capture the shot? I guess I could prop the phone up, hit the timer in the Camera app and scurry over in the hopes that I’ve posed correctly. But that sounds like a nightmare, especially with a squirming baby.
Happy holidays to all! Photo courtesy of the Apple Watch’s Camera app.To the rescue flew the Apple Watch’s Camera app. I’ve probably used this feature a handful of times since the first Apple Watch, and probably not at all since I got my Series 7, and frankly I was blown away with just how much better the experience is than I remembered. A modern Apple Watch is now more than capable of showing a live, full-frame video stream with almost zero lag, and the screen is large enough that you can actually use it to tell if everything’s framed the way you want. You can easily take a shot and quickly check it on the watch to make sure that everybody’s eyes are open.
The current version even provides an icon indicating whether or not the pictures will be going into your iCloud Photos Shared Library. If I have a complaint about the feature, it’s that I wish it would let me toggle between the camera’s various zoom levels. You can switch between front and rear-facing cameras, activate or deactivate features like the flash, HDR, and Live Photos, but not choose the ultra wide lens or a 2x or 3x zoom.
This still isn’t a feature I’m going to use everday, or even every month, but it’s absolutely perfect when the need arises. Honestly, it kind of makes me wonder what other things the Apple Watch can do that I haven’t checked in on in a while.1
- Have I missed out on not sending people my heartbeat in seven years?! ↩
We’ve made it to the end of 2022! Well, nearly. And barring any more last-minute announcements out of Cupertino, we’ve seen everything that Apple has to offer for the year that was. Which, of course, means that we can turn our eyes to the horizon, to the undiscovered country that is…2023.
With the biggest moves of 2022 in our rearview mirror, it’s time to pontificate on what Apple might have in store for the year ahead. What will we be looking back at, a year hence, as the company’s biggest moves in 2023?
Here then are my picks for the areas that most deserve your attention over the next 12 months.
Continue reading on Macworld.
As the year comes to an end, it’s time for the Ninth Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2022, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
Go to the podcast page.
In 2021, our company went through the SOC 2 Type 1 audit, and we found out just how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third party auditor. We also learned firsthand something our customers had been telling us for a while: that we couldn’t have gotten our SOC certification without using our own product.
That product is Kolide, an endpoint security solution for Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Kolide gives IT admins a single dashboard, through which you can prove that your fleet has the security measures in place that auditors care about.
With Kolide, you can instantly see whether:
- Firewalls and screen lock are enabled
- Operating systems are up-to-date
- Password managers are installed
Kolide also provides visibility into nuanced issues that MDMs can’t address, like whether developers have unencrypted SSH keys or plaintext two factor authentication backup codes.
What’s more, Kolide balances this visibility with respect for user privacy and autonomy. Users can visit the Privacy Center to see exactly what device data is being collected and why. And when Kolide detects a vulnerability on a user’s device, it reaches out via Slack to notify them of the problem, and provides step-by-step instructions on how to solve it.
At Kolide, we’ve helped hundreds of customers achieve compliance–whether it’s for SOC 2, ISO27001, or their own internal security goals. And we’ve done so in ways that go beyond “checking the boxes,” and that actually increase transparency and collaboration between IT and end users.
If you want to know how you can get compliant without compromising your values, then we want to talk to you.
Try Kolide for 14 days free; no credit card required.
The 30th birthday of PCalc makes us consider how long-lived tech products must constantly change and adapt, Dan is forced to power cycle a Caseta hub, and we celebrate some holiday traditions.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors last week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to also block video ads.
With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
Speaking of James Thomson, he and John Voorhees and I celebrate the holidays with our annual gift exchange, and then it’s time to make predictions for what will happen in 2023—but first, it’s time to score our picks from the past year and crown a new champion. Typical episode of Connected.
Go to the podcast page.
My friend James Thomson is celebrating the 30th anniversary of PCalc, his calculator app:
The built-in Mac OS calculator of the day was a very simple affair, and so I decided I would write a calculator that could do binary and hex, to help me with my programming. And so the idea for PCalc was born. I bought the books Inside Macintosh, Volumes I, II, and III, and sat down to figure it all out. We didn’t have the Internet back then – well, no web at least – so that was basically all I had to go on. Eventually, I started to get the internal logic working, and built a user interface around it all. System 7 was new, so I eventually got a copy of the massive Volume VI to see what had changed there. I didn’t think I needed any of the stuff in the middle.
In its life PCalc has been many different code bases, lived on a huge number of Apple platforms, and gone from being just for fun to a major moneymaker to a low priority to the highest priority to an incubator for a driving game. A lot can happen in thirty years.
(Disclaimer: I appear in James’s story as the guy who made an innocuous suggestion that turned into a PCalc spin-off app.)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We’ve reached the end of the year, and just like last year that means it’s time for me to look ahead at what’s coming for us in 2023. These are my fearless predictions! Okay, maybe there’s a slight bit of fear. Don’t look directly into my eyes. I’m sensitive that way.
While this year’s Mac lineup was a little less than I expected–probably due to supply-chain issues–I suspect that’s going to result in a huge 2023 for the Mac. And on the iPad side, while I expect a quiet year, there’s still a wild card that might make a bit of noise.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Someone bought the bar we were all hanging out in, and they started interrupting the music with edicts about bar rules, fired most of the staff, aren’t paying their bills, installed a velvet rope where VIPs can spit on the other bar patrons, had bouncers start to randomly remove people, and are bricking over the fire exits.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Eric Slivka at MacRumors:
Upgrading the Home architecture requires that all devices accessing the home be updated to the latest operating system version, so many users have yet to take the leap, but users who have upgraded have reported some issues. Amidst those reports, it now appears Apple has removed the option for users to upgrade their Home app architecture.
I hadn’t yet taken the plunge, mainly as I was waiting for my wife to update her Apple devices. But reports seem to be that the upgrade has not been smooth sailing for many folks.
The improved Home architecture has been touted as a major feature of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, even though it didn’t arrive until the latest updates. It’s one that I’ve been looking forward to, since we’ve been a HomeKit-only household for some time, and the reliability has been less than stellar. Just the other day, I ran into an issue where none of my Lutron Caseta lights would respond in HomeKit until I restarted the hub (the first time I’ve ever had to do that).
I’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this story when and if they reply.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Whether TikTok’s algorithm explanations will ruin the magic. How we collect and share our holiday gift ideas. The weather app(s) we’re using in light of the end of Dark Sky. The coolest gifts we’ve bought for ourselves this holiday season.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s self-repair program, which was announced last year, arrived in April, and came to the Mac in August with support for the M1 MacBook Air and all three M1 MacBook Pro models, has now been extended to support Mac desktops and the new Apple Studio Display. Newly supported Macs are the M1 iMac, M1 Mac mini, and Mac Studio.
While the repair program expanded to Europe earlier this month, these models are currently only available for repair in the United States.
The self-repair program is generally intended for tech savvy people who would prefer to fix their devices themselves. For most of us, I’d expect the best option is to take your device to an Apple Store, mail it in to Apple, or visit a local repair center. But not everyone has those options—and Apple will sell or rent you everything you need to do the job yourself, if that’s the right option for you.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Earlier this year, Belkin released the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Notebooks, a $30 adapter that lets you attach an iPhone to the top of a MacBook screen and use it as a webcam via macOS Ventura’s Continuity Camera feature.
Now there’s the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Desktops and Displays, a $40 adapter for other displays. I’ve had a preproduction version for a while now, and took possession of the final shipping version this week. (It seems more or less identical.)
While I like the MacBook adapter with some reservations—which mostly have to do with the weight of an iPhone adjusting your MacBook’s display when you don’t want it to, and it’s hard for Belkin to ignore the laws of physics—I have very few reservations of this new adapter. It works well on my Apple Studio Display but would work just as well on an iMac, a third-party display, or even a television.
The adapter can be folded up compactly (left) but unfolded into a three-piece configuration for placement.The adapter is essentially three separate fold-out pieces (meaning you can fold it down to make it compact for travel or storage purposes): There’s a magnetic puck you attach to your phone, a stand that goes over the top of your display with a lip to keep it attached to the front, and a leg that goes against the back of the display to provide leverage. You can slide the puck forward about halfway if you want to get the phone a little closer to you (and to be sure it’s not picking up the edge of your display).
You can slide the MagSafe puck forward to get it right above the display.The leg piece also has a threaded tripod mount, so if you’ve got a tripod handy, you can pretty much attach any MagSafe-compatible iPhone and use it anywhere. It’s a nice alternative to something like Studio Neat’s venerable Glif. You can also tilt the adapter, of course—Belkin says the range is from fully vertical to 25 degrees downward—so you can make sure your shot has just enough, but not too much, headroom.
It’s probably because of the metal magnet required in order to offer MagSafe support, but the whole adapter feels solid, a bit more like a piece of camera equipment than a cheap and fragile computer accessory.
Continuity Camera is a great feature. If you’ve got an iPhone 12, 13, or 14 and need a good webcam, you basically shouldn’t buy one—it’s already in your pocket. While mounting one to the top of a MacBook is a little awkward, there’s no such awkwardness on a larger display. I highly recommend the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Desktops and Displays for anyone who wants to put that excellent iPhone camera to use on their Mac.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but the news doesn’t stop! We discuss next year’s Mac lineup, the end of Apple’s NFL Sunday Ticket negotiations, and reports that Apple is planning to open up the iOS app ecosystem in response to new rules from the European Union. But before we’re done, we also take a little time out to re-tell our Apple origin stories. Happy holidays to all Upgradians!
Go to the podcast page.
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 200,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by it’s community of users.
Download for free today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.
The end of the year is nigh, and with it comes a host of pieces looking both back at the year that was in Apple news, and forward to the year that will be. And who am I to eschew such a trend?
2022 was dominated perhaps, more than anything else, by economic challenges for Apple, including the disruption of the global supply chain, continued pandemic-related problems, and of course, inflation. But despite what is charmingly termed “headwinds” by market watchers, the company persevered and delivered yet another impressive slate of products, with the financial performance to back it up.
When it comes to major moves the company itself made in 2022, they may not always be obvious at first glance. You can’t always directly tie these decisions to Apple’s ongoing success. They’re more often the kind of small moves that lead to big changes later on down the road.
Continue reading on Macworld.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.
Here’s Kolide’s secret sauce: It communicates security detection and compliance issues to users via Slack messages, reaching them directly and providing them with the information they need to help make their organization more secure. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance.
You should check out Kolide today.
Whether we’d install a third-party app store on our phones, our most anticipated Matter devices, the tasks we’d pawn off onto an AI chatbot, and our non-holiday holiday traditions.
Go to the podcast page.
(Shutterstock)Lawsuits, new laws, and proposed regulations have been swirling around Apple and some of its core business practices for years now. But on Tuesday came the first report—from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, perhaps the most reliable breaker of secret Apple news—that Apple’s planning on changing its App Store policies in major ways.
This is a report with a lot of details, portraying Apple’s reaction to a complex and evolving set of circumstances around the world. But Gurman’s track record strongly suggests that this is real—and it means big changes are afoot for many users of iPhones and iPads.
I have lots of questions, as I know most of you have. Here’s what I think this all means, at least based on what we know right now.
What did Gurman report?According to Gurman, Apple recognizes that the Digital Markets Act, recently passed by the European Parliament, will probably require major changes to Apple’s business beginning in 2024, and has begun to mobilize its software engineering groups to alter its software and policies to adapt to those new rules. The changes would be a part of the iOS 17 cycle sometime in late 2023 or early 2024.
The highest-profile aspect of the changes would be the ability to install apps on iOS and iPadOS devices outside the auspices of the App Store. Apple might also need to make iMessage interoperable with other messaging systems, though Gurman reports that Apple hasn’t decided if it feels that is necessary. Apple is also moving to provide broader third-party access to various underlying interfaces that are currently reserved for Apple’s own use.
When and where would these changes occur?The European Union is driving the changes, and most of the rules that impact Apple will take effect in 2024—but Apple’s software-development apparatus is enormous, and it needs to begin moving now in order to be ready when the laws come into effect.
I would expect that many of the changes Apple would make, specifically third-party access to software interfaces currently limited to Apple, would be available to everyone worldwide. It seems unlikely that Apple would prefer a patchwork of rules—instead, it will probably just announce that access as new developer features of iOS 17.
Some specific features—like the ability to add non-App Store software—might not be enabled outside of regions where it is required. I seriously doubt that any dedicated user in, say, the United States will be unable to enable that feature if they really try, but it’s possible that Apple will make such a feature invisible, unofficial, and unsupported outside of the EU. It all depends on just how quickly Apple wants its entire world to change and how worried it is about potentially losing App Store revenue.
One advantage of slow-playing the loosening of restrictions is that if something were to go catastrophically wrong in the EU, Apple might be able to make the case to other regions that it was a mistake. Of course, the other possibility is that none of its warnings about the evils of sideloading come into existence, and it would be left with no cogent arguments about why it’s restricting that freedom from the rest of its users.
Of course, it’s in the best interest of Apple’s users worldwide to have their devices work the same anywhere in the world. Apple knows this. The question is, how much pain is it willing to put itself and its users through in order to not allow the Digital Markets Act to wreck its existing business model in the rest of the world?
How would this work in practice?It’s one thing to say, “no more App Store exclusivity.” It’s another thing to walk through exactly how that would work in reality—something that it seems everyone at Apple has been doing or is doing right now.
My guess is that Apple will add a switch to the Settings app (probably buried down deep, behind a sign saying Beware of the Leopard) that enables the installation of non-App Store apps. (This is what Android does.) Apple will probably give it a name like “Allow Untrusted Apps” or something similarly scary and will undoubtedly follow any attempt to turn it on with a scary alert on the level of “This App May Kill You“.
Once all the ooga-booga is done, you will be able to install software from third parties. This will probably primarily come via downloads in Safari, and when tapping on an app download link, you’ll probably see yet another warning. I’d also bet on an additional warning when you tap to install the app on your home screen and when you first launch the app. Apple will probably warn you, a lot, and probably ask you to authenticate via password or biometric identification, too.
(While I’ll entertain the idea that Apple will be forced to allow alternative app stores into its own App Store, I kind of doubt it will do so unless it’s literally required in the law. It will make it as inconvenient as possible for users to get to the point where they can leave the App Store—but they won’t stand in their way if they want to do it.)
Once you’ve got an alternative App Store installed, I would imagine that installing a new app will display a warning or demand to authenticate. But beyond that, you’ll be in a new world—installing apps from somewhere else, with your credit card connected to someone else’s payment system.
But what about security?I don’t know if Apple’s higher-ups considered the evolution of the Mac over the last few years as a testbed for iOS and iPadOS, but I’m sure many people at Apple noticed that macOS has been trying to create a system of guardrails for third-party apps on a system that fundamentally will let users install any software they want. As of today, that’s valuable research that can be repurposed for iOS and iPadOS.
On the Mac, Apple offers a tiered system of security permissions. One setting allows only apps from the App Store. But if your Mac is set to allow software from outside the App Store, Apple does not abandon its responsibilities as the platform owner.
Non-App Store apps are checked to see if they are notarized, which means they’ve been cryptographically signed by a valid Apple developer, uploaded to Apple’s servers, processed by an automated system that’s scanning for particularly bad stuff, and then given a seal of approval by Apple.
Apple makes no real attempts to get in your way and warn you about notarized apps—there’s a warning message the first time you launch it, and that’s it. They just work, though Apple does have the power to kill them (and, in fact, kill all apps on the associated developer account) if they detect dangerous behavior. I would imagine that Apple would want to keep this sort of power on iOS, within legal restrictions.
So what about apps that aren’t notarized on macOS? As an Apple representative said on stage at WWDC back in 2019, Apple wants you to be able to run any code you want on the Mac… eventually. But non-notarized apps have to go through some extra hoops.
If you double-click on an app that hasn’t been notarized, you will get a scary message that says, “This app cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.” You’re given two options—Cancel and Move to Trash. Harsh! This is designed to stop gullible people from being talked into installing malware.
But of course, there’s a workaround: If you control-click on an app and choose Open from the contextual menu, you’ll be prompted by a different message:
macOS cannot verify the developer of this app. Are you sure you want to open it? By opening this app, you will be overriding system security which can expose your computer and personal information to malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.
In addition to the textual difference, you’ll be given three options: Move to Trash, Cancel, and… Open. Click Open, and the app is blessed by the system and will run without complaint thereafter.
I imagine that Apple’s approach on iOS would be similar: signed apps would be launched with ease, while unsigned apps of unknown provenance would be installable only after some serious rigamarole. (It’s also possible that Apple would omit support for unsigned apps altogether—but only if it’s not legally untenable to require notarization! It might be.)
macOS also has an active malware scanner and the ability for Apple to rapidly release new malware rules to stop the spread of any app it deems to be malware. I would imagine the same system would be built for iOS.
Opening iOS up to apps beyond the App Store will likely expose some security flaws in iOS that Apple will have to address. The simple fact that apps will be running that were never a part of Apple’s approval process will mean that Apple may need to lock down its security in ways that it never did when it was rejecting any app that misbehaved in certain ways. (Yes, it turns out that the App Store approval process does have a reason to exist beyond just being a way for Apple to exert control over developers and users.)
With all of this, it’s still inevitable that there will be stories about rogue apps on the platform. Apple will probably need to use its kill switch. There might be debates about Apple using that switch irresponsibly—though on the Mac, Apple has been extremely light-handed with the kill switch, as it should.
Won’t this cost Apple money?Almost certainly, though Gurman’s report suggests that European App Store revenue is probably less than 2% of Apple’s overall revenue. And I’m still convinced that there won’t be an exodus from the App Store or even Apple’s In-App Purchase system due to the convenience offered by the platform owner’s defaults and the power of Apple’s own payment ecosystem.
Also, Apple has shown it has other ways to extract revenue from developers on its platforms. In regions where third-party payment systems were mandated earlier this year, Apple just instituted a royalty for using its platforms, forcing companies to pay 26% of all in-app payments to Apple. Congratulations, you’ve made it outside—now pay us.
There are plenty of ways this could go, so long as the new laws don’t make it illegal. For example, perhaps Apple revamps its developer membership system to change the annual fee to use its tools based on total app revenue (less the official channels) so that a small developer might only pay $1000, but Epic Games might pay $1,000,000. (Bloomberg suggests Apple might charge companies a cut of revenue in return for notarization.)
It remains to be seen what Apple can get away with in this regard, but I would not expect a world where companies are able to make a business out of Apple’s platforms without Apple finding some way of extracting payment. Apple will get its money if it can legally do so.
What about in-app purchases?An open question is if apple will allow (or be forced to allow) App Store apps to offer third-party payment systems. It depends on the law—I don’t know if Apple has to open up payments within its own silo or if allowing apps to be installed outside the silo is enough. I can imagine Apple telling Amazon that if it wants to write an iOS app that lets users buy Kindle books directly from Amazon via in-app purchase, it’s welcome to—but that version of the app can’t be in the App Store.
The alternative is that we’ll see something like what Apple has implemented in a few countries in a few app categories: A strict warning message followed by the ability to circumvent Apple’s payment systems. Apple might try to charge a fee for all those transactions, and most developers might opt to keep using Apple’s system because it’s just more convenient and offers less friction for users. But some developers—who make a killing on in-app game purchases or who are reselling digital content with tiny profit margins—will probably take advantage of whatever is offered.
What’s the world going to look like after this happens?You know. Round… blue. Pretty much the same as now. I really have a hard time seeing most members of the public turning off App Store protections and installing separate App Stores. Yes, it will happen, but the Play Store is still the place to be on Android, despite its long-time support for sideloading. In fact, Android developers have found that leaving the Play Store and going it alone is quite bad for business. Bet on the status quo.
But of course, there are those who will be motivated—either by the possibility of an enormous revenue boost or because their apps simply wouldn’t be allowed on the App Store—to go it on their own. Third-party developers will offer apps for download, with FAQ pages on their websites showing how to install their apps.
Some entrepreneurial types will build alternate App Stores. Count on that. Epic Games will absolutely do it, and I’d expect Steam, maybe Amazon, and also services like SetApp to take advantage of this approach.
While so much attention has been given to the squabbling of large tech companies over their cuts of millions of dollars, I’m much more excited about the idea that there are numerous apps that currently can’t exist on iOS because Apple has deemed them unacceptable for policy reasons, many of them inscrutable.
I keep thinking about emulators. Emulators aren’t allowed on iOS, basically. Not only does this cover legally murky video-game emulators (which still exist but are very inconvenient to get up and running), but also legitimate emulators like Parallels and VMWare. You know, an M2 iPad Pro probably can do a good job of emulating Windows 10… and macOS, come to think about it! How about that?
But let’s not forget the chilling effect Apple’s policies have had on iOS software development. How many amazing, groundbreaking, platform-changing apps have simply not been pursued by developers because if they’re rejected by Apple, there’s nowhere for those apps to go? Today, a final rejection by the App Store is a death sentence. In 2024, a developer might create a new app with the hope that it would be approved by the App Store—but would be willing to distribute it themselves as a fallback. And who knows, maybe Apple might adjust its own arbitrary policies to allow a broader selection of apps in the App Store rather than lose those apps to the outside. (It’s happened on the Mac.)
What else might change besides the App Store policy?Gurman’s report says that Apple is planning on opening up other APIs on the system as a result of the pending EU rules. That means that even if you stay within the App Store ecosystem, you may see apps with more power and access than they had before.
Gurman suggests that Apple is considering not requiring that every app on iOS use the WebKit browsing engine. Currently, every webpage view on iOS is parsed by Apple’s WebKit engine—even if you run Chrome on iOS, you’re running WebKit, not Google’s Chromium engine. If this rule changed, Chrome could be a true alternative browser, not an alternative wrapper around the same browser.
Other areas of hardware access include more app access to Apple’s camera subsystem and to the NFC hardware used for Apple Pay, HomeKey, and other systems. (Apple currently restricts NFC use to its own apps, primarily Wallet.) Some of these changes might be esoteric, but others might be huge! It’s hard to tell right now.
Will this change the iPhone as we know it forever?Yes, probably. This is a big deal. But I suspect things will change less radically than you might expect in some ways. Apple has benefited from a huge home-field advantage as the platform owner. While those advantages may be watered down, they will still exist. Apple’s in-app purchase system will probably still be the most convenient way for app developers to take payments—but it will now have competition. In the end, most developers might end up staying with Apple while reaping the benefits of Apple having to change its own policies in order to compete with the alternatives.
Perhaps counterintuitively, changes like this may also ultimately improve Apple’s products, making them even more successful than before. Thus far, Apple has chosen guaranteed revenue via exclusivity instead of allowing more competition—even if the competition might make the experience of using an Apple product better. It may discover that some of the things it has been fighting against actually accrue value to its devices. If an iPad can emulate Windows 10 or a Nintendo Wii, or even a Mac, doesn’t that make the iPad a more desirable product?
If Apple has been insisting on complete control merely to protect itself from competition it knows it can’t win, it will be in for a rough ride. But I suspect that Apple’s motivations have been much more about maximizing revenue and control—key tenets of Steve Jobs’s philosophy, which has become a core of Apple’s own corporate culture—and not about feeling it’s unable to compete. That said, there are some areas where Apple has not yet had to compete, and in those areas, it will now need to make more of an effort. That, too, will benefit users—and ultimately, make the iPhone and iPad better.
What’s the point of HBO Max if it doesn’t have all the HBO shows on it? Julia ponders the strange goings on at HBO and WarnerMedia. We also discuss Jason Kilar’s predictions for the future of streaming, the BBC, and how studios handle self-dealing.
Go to the podcast page.
The usually well-sourced Mark Gurman at Bloomberg with the scoop:
Software engineering and services employees are engaged in a major push to open up key elements of Apple’s platforms, according to people familiar with the efforts. As part of the changes, customers could ultimately download third-party software to their iPhones and iPads without using the company’s App Store, sidestepping Apple’s restrictions and the up-to-30% commission it imposes on payments.
If this pans out, it’s not only a groundshaking change to a major chunk of Apple’s Services revenue, but also a 180-degree change to what has been probably the most contentious element of the company’s business. Apple hasn’t, of this writing, confirmed the plan.
The rationale behind such a change is the Digital Markets Act, a European law that comes into effect in 2024, which mandates more control in the hands of users instead of platform owners. Critics have taken shots at some of the aspects of this law, such as interoperability between messaging protocols, but there’s no getting around that the European Union is a major market for tech companies, and its laws have a way of enforcing sweeping changes—for good or ill. (See the similar law enforcing the use of a standard charging connector on smartphones which is reported to helped spur Apple’s decision to shift the iPhone from its proprietary Lightning connector to USB-C.)
But Apple has been a staunch defender of its App Store approach, on the ground of security and privacy—not to mention protecting its 30-percent cut. That’s proved unpopular with developers, including major opponents like Epic Games and Spotify, both of which have taken shots at Apple for its restrictions.
Changing this would be no small deal for Apple, which has been pinning its hopes for growth on revenue from its Services division, of which the App Store is a substantive chunk. But it would also probably get positive reactions from the company’s developer community which have seen Apple’s 30-percent commission as an expensive cost of doing business.
Gurman also reports that as a result of this law, Apple is also considering opening technological aspects of its platform, paving the way for other web browser engines and more access to its private APIs. Such changes would likely appear in next year’s iOS 17, putting it into action before the 2024 law takes effect.
It’s increasingly seemed like this kind of major sea change was inevitable, with Apple coming under fire from a variety of governments around the world for what’s been viewed as monopolistic behavior. In the past year or two, the company’s been forced to make changes to its rules in a variety of markets, including Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands. Regulators in the US have discussed the company as well, though there’s been no coalescing on action.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
It’s not every week that Apple releases a new app, but this is that week. As a part of rolling out iOS 16.2 and macOS Ventura 13.1, Apple’s introducing the world to Freeform, an app it introduced back in June as a part of a WWDC keynote segment about iPad collaboration features.
Freeform is fun. It’s got a bunch of rough edges that I hope can be sanded out over time as it grows and evolves, but I love the idea that Apple decided that its collaboration tools (and, by extension, its platforms) really needed a free space for individuals and groups to use as an infinite sheet of Internet-connected note paper.
It’s all in the name, really. Freeform is a place for you to share “Boards” with other users—you invite them via iMessage, and can quickly bring up a chat or audio or video call with collaborators who are active in the document.
Freeform also offers text tools, sticky notes, image and video support, and a clip-art library.Freeform feels like an app that was built on Apple’s existing markup tools, since if you open a Board and start sketching with Apple Pencil, it all just works exactly as you’d expect. But beyond the obligatory pen/pencil/eraser tools, Apple has loaded in a bunch of other media types: text blocks, sticky notes, a very large library of vector shapes and other clip art, and quick access to import photos or videos from your library, capture them with a camera, import links from the web, and more.
The result can be a free-for-all where all these media types live together, though even if all most Boards end up being is a shared whiteboard, that’s not the end of the world. Apple’s iPad drawing tools are pretty good, and getting them out of places like Notes and into an app like Freeform really gives them a chance to shine.
My complaints about Freeform are mostly about how it frequently just didn’t do what I wanted it to do. Sometimes tapping an object and dragging would move it on the canvas, while other times it would lift a copy of the item for me to drag around… but when I dropped it elsewhere in the app, nothing would happen. Sometimes I could drag an image on a shape to automatically use the shape as a mask for the image… other times it just didn’t work. I can crop imported photos, but not videos.
Freeform offers Apple’s great drawing tools, but you can’t use the Appe Pencil for anything else.Most frustratingly, Freeform needs to work better for iPad users who are using both an Apple Pencil and their fingers. One of my favorite iPad apps, Ferrite, lets me use pencil gestures for some tasks (cutting audio clips) while I can also use my fingers for other functions (moving and selecting objects).
Freeform doesn’t seem to want to differentiate, so if I’m drawing with the Apple Pencil and then tap to move something on screen, I end up just drawing with my finger. Instead, I need to tap the drawing tools, then tap to move an object. I also don’t love Freeform’s insistence that the Apple Pencil is only a drawing tool; I can’t use it to select objects or drag them around on the Board.
In summary, Freeform feels like an app that Apple realized it needed to make in order to test its new integrated collaboration features. I’m glad it did; it’s not going to change the world, but even Apple may be surprised at the different ways that users take advantage of that. It’s fitting that the future of the app is itself a blank canvas, waiting to be filled in.
Myke has returned, and so have the Apple Car rumors. But before we try to figure those out, we’ve got to consider Apple’s encryption announcements, Tim Cook’s appearance at a chip factory in Arizona, and John Siracusa’s appearance in our shared show document.
Go to the podcast page.
“When was the last time you restarted it?”
If you’ve ever worked at a service desk, you’ve probably wanted to tattoo this question on your forehead.
Ditto for: “What device drivers do you have installed?” and “What do you MEAN you wrote the password on a sticky note and then you lost the sticky note?!”
These are the types of issues that make up the majority of help desk tickets at many companies.
In order to help users through them, you need visibility into your fleet of devices. But that’s a challenge, especially when your company is spread across Mac, Windows, and (especially) Linux.
Kolide is the endpoint security and fleet management solution that provides cross-platform visibility via a single dashboard.
With Kolide’s open-source agent, the IT team can run checks that get to the heart of problems, whether that’s checking available disk space, searching for suspicious browser extensions, or, yes, checking the time since the last restart.
Best of all, Kolide can actually prevent these issues, by notifying users via Slack when their device is at risk, and giving them step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue themselves.
Unlike the legacy approach of MDMs, Kolide takes a user-first approach that relies on people to fix problems that can’t be automated. That’s good for both morale and productivity, since Kolide doesn’t slow down a laptop’s performance by installing intrusive agents to surveil and control devices. At Kolide, we’re committed to giving IT and security teams the visibility they need, and equally committed to keeping things like browser history and personal photos off-limits.
Want to see how it works for yourself? Click here to learn more and sign up for a free trial, no credit card required, and let us show you what we’re all about.
Security and privacy have been two of Apple’s main selling points in the modern era, especially as the company positioned itself against rivals like Google, Meta, and Amazon, all of whom offer a variety of free and cheap products and services, generally because user data is the real treasure trove.
With the announcement that it will be rolling out Advanced Data Protection for iCloud in the latest updates to its software platforms this week, Apple took another step forward in the realm of security and privacy, closing loopholes that could still allow access to your data by third parties, whether they be malicious hackers or law enforcement.
But as good as those protections are, there are still a few more places where the company could enact additional security and privacy measures to help make sure that your data stays in your control.
Continue reading on Macworld.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. It’s all about helping customers meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their end users with a structured, message-based approach.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is getting the “average” person involved—and so do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to their employees directly in Slack via Kolide’s app.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.
One of my favorite iPad apps of all time is Wooji Juice’s Ferrite Recording Studio, a complete multi-track audio editor that I prefer to the likes of Logic and GarageBand for editing podcasts. I use Ferrite primarily with an Apple Pencil, though it also works with your fingers, a keyboard, a pointing device, or a combination of any of those.
Four years after the release of Ferrite 2, version 3 has just been released. It’s a major update that modernizes the app’s interface, organizes its file structure, and updates its audio engine to supercharge editing productivity.
The customizable toolbar now includes multiple options for variable-speed playback.The banner feature in Ferrite 3 is variable-speed playback and timeline scrubbing. Just as many podcast listeners consume them at more than 1x speed, it can be a huge time saver for podcast editors to play back the program they’re editing at speeds up to 2x. (I tend to listen at 2x while editing until I hear something I need to drill down on, at which point I’ll slow down to 1x to do the detail work.)
Ferrite 3 now supports speeds other than 1x, and users can populate the app’s toolbar with icons to play back at normal/fast/faster/2x speeds, as well as an icon that toggles between the currently selected speed and 1x. And you can hear audio play back while scrubbing the playhead, in order to identify just where a certain sound is coming from. This is a huge step forward.
Ferrite 3 is also all about organization. Because of a lack of a real filesystem on the iPad back when Ferrite was first conceived, the app organizes its files its own way. While today files are common enough on iPad that Wooji Juice might not make that same decision, having control over its file space does offer some real advantages. Ferrite has a template system, which has been updated with improved previews, and has added per-file tags and improved search, as well as rules-based Smart Folders.
I keep a couple dozen audio files in Ferrite on my iPad, mostly podcast theme songs, common sound effects, and stock background music that’s used in a few podcasts I edit. With Ferrite 3, I can tag those audio files appropriately—say, “themes,” and then tap on a Themes Smart Folder to quickly find the file I want to insert in my project. Or I can just search for “themes TPK” in the Ferrite search box to quickly display all Total Party Kill theme files.
A more modern interface includes a sidebar and a Sharing Extras dropdown menu.The entire app interface has been modernized, with new fonts and control icons. A new Library sidebar also helps with organization, providing quick access to folders, import tools, templates, and documentation. Slide-over effects controls are easier to control, with knob-style radial controls replaced with much more straightforward sliders.
A new Sharing Extras dropdown also organizes a bunch of features that were previously scattered throughout the app into one location, to quickly export, convert, or duplicate the output of a project.
Ferrite is free to try, but the full feature set is unlocked via a $30 in-app purchase. Given the cost of most multi-track audio editors, it’s perhaps the best deal ever. Users of Ferrite 2 Pro will need to pay $15 to unlock the new Ferrite 3 Pro features.
Sometimes it’s easy to think of Apple as above it all. The company is so big, so beloved, and so successful that surely it can’t be touched, its momentum can’t be slowed. But of course, that’s not true. Apple is of the world, not above it, and when the company warns all of us that it can’t predict the future in the era of COVID, we really ought to take it at its word.
Last year, when I predicted what 2022 would be like for the Mac, I clearly didn’t foresee how the company’s ability to assemble Macs would be sidelined by a spring pandemic lockdown. The result was that my predictions for the Mac’s ahead-of-schedule transition to Apple silicon were entirely wrong–but to be fair, Apple was taken by surprise, too.
Continue reading on Macworld.
How we’ve used or could use OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the silliest and/or most time-consuming automations we’ve created, our thoughts on Apple’s new App Store price points, and our plans to own an Apple Car.
Go to the podcast page.
On Wednesday Apple announced some major new security initiatives that the company will be rolling out from now through later in 2023. The biggest one is the addition of nine Apple services to end-to-end encryption, meaning that Apple can’t access cloud data even if authorities demand it:
iCloud already protects 14 sensitive data categories using end-to-end encryption by default, including passwords in iCloud Keychain and Health data. For users who enable Advanced Data Protection, the total number of data categories protected using end-to-end encryption rises to 23, including iCloud Backup, Notes, and Photos. The only major iCloud data categories that are not covered are iCloud Mail, Contacts, and Calendar because of the need to interoperate with the global email, contacts, and calendar systems.
iCloud Backup is the centerpiece of this, because unencrypted iCloud Backups have been used to provide access to data (like Messages conversations) that are otherwise encrypted. Other items that can be end-to-end encrypted are iCloud Drive, Notes, Photos, Reminders, Safari bookmarks, Shortcuts, Voice Memos items, and Wallet passes.
While it’s certainly been convenient that Apple has been able to provide law-enforcement entities with unencrypted data under subpoena, another reason Apple has fought against encrypting all the things is that it has some serious side effects for users, most notably that Apple can’t unlock your data if you no longer have the password to your Apple ID. To solve this problem, Apple is placing these new nine encryption services in a new feature called Advanced Data Protection that isn’t on by default and, according to Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, requires that users generate at least one additional method of unlocking their account. (Methods include a printout of a very long string that can be stored somewhere secure, or the designation of a different Apple ID as having the authority to unlock the account.)
Stern’s interview with Apple’s Craig Federighi also suggests that the company has entirely given up on its plan to scan for child sex-abuse media in iCloud Photos.
According to Apple, Advanced Data Protection will be available for OS beta users today and will be available to everyone—including in China, according to Stern—by the end of the year. This is a big step with potentially huge ramifications for Apple’s relationship with governments around the world that might expect Apple to provide access to data on its users devices. (A slight mitigating factor is that the feature is off by default.)
Finally, let’s not gloss over the two other security additions Apple plans on adding in 2023, which—like Lockdown Mode—are more focused on potential targets such as journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats. iMessage Contact Key Verification appears to alert users when unknown devices are added to an Apple ID, which might indicate that some other party has breached one of the IDs and may be monitoring an iMessage conversation. And Security Keys adds support for hardware security keys such as a Yubikey for Apple ID authentication.
If you’ve been blogging on the Mac for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with Red Sweater Software’s excellent MarsEdit blogging software.
The new microposting feature lets you write blog posts as easily as social media.Version 5.0 of the app debuts today, following a public beta, and brings a number of much anticipated features, including a microposting interface accessible via a global keyboard shortcut that makes it easy to quickly dash off a blog post—though I do wish it had an “Advanced” mode for specifying some additional metadata for a post. There’s also a revamped rich text editor that provides better performance, a schmancy new icon, and—at long last—syntax highlighting for text written in Markdown.
In addition, developer Daniel Jalkut has made tweaks an enhancements throughout, adding a bunch of improvements that bring the app into line with the latest versions of macOS. It remains the best-in-class Mac blogging app that it’s been for more than fifteen years.
MarsEdit 5 runs $59.95 for a new license, though owners of MarsEdit 4 can upgrade for just $29.95. Family packs are also available for up to five people in a household.1
- In the interest of full disclosure, developer Daniel Jalkut is a friend and provided a license for MarsEdit 5 for evaluation. ↩
Yang Jie and Aaron Tilley, reporting over the weekend for the Wall Street Journal (Apple News link):
In recent weeks, Apple Inc. has accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside China, long the dominant country in the supply chain that built the world’s most valuable company, say people involved in the discussions. It is telling suppliers to plan more actively for assembling Apple products elsewhere in Asia, particularly India and Vietnam, they say, and looking to reduce dependence on Taiwanese assemblers led by Foxconn Technology Group.
The challenges detailed in the story will be very difficult ones for Apple to solve. Can Vietnam and India step up in terms of producing Apple products at the level that Chinese factories can? It’s an open question. Vietnam is not very large, population-wise, and India has a system of federated regional governments that complicates the issue.
But nobody said this would be easy. It’s telling that, seemingly after years of denial, Apple has accepted the fact that it needs to not have almost all of its manufacturing and assembly happening inside a single country.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
On Tuesday, Apple announced a new Music feature for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV (but not Mac!) that combines Apple Music’s live lyrics with the ability to adjust the volume of vocals to create a singalong mode it’s calling Apple Music Sing:
Apple today announced Apple Music Sing, an exciting new feature that allows users to sing along to their favorite songs with adjustable vocals and real-time lyrics. Apple Music Sing offers multiple lyric views to help fans take the lead, perform duets, sing backup, and more — all integrated within Apple Music’s unparalleled lyrics experience. Coupled with an ever-expanding catalog that features tens of millions of the world’s most singable songs, Apple Music Sing makes it fun and easy for anyone to participate, however and wherever they choose.
Background-singer lyrics are also supported, and there’s a Duet View so you can fulfill your dream of singing half of a song with a legendary musical artist.
I assume that this feature is at least tangentially related to its support for multi-channel audio via Dolby Atmos, in that multiple streams of audio have to be packaged together in order to allow users to adjust the volume of the vocals in the overall music mix.
Unfortunately, my go-to karaoke track, the original theme from “Spider-Man,” will probably not be available. But maybe I can mournfully sing along to some Death Cab for Cutie when this feature arrives later this month.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Twitterrific for Mac—still going strong.My explorations with Mastodon have thus far been undertaken largely with the service’s web app. It’s fine, as far as things go. But it’s definitely lacking something.
As I’ve been exploring, I’ve been thinking of how I use social media services—and how the only service that I really connected with, Twitter, is the only one with a Mac client app. While most services only offer mobile apps—Facebook, Instagram, the list goes ever onward—I use my Mac all day, every day.
And for better or worse, Twitter has always been there for me because Twitter—or more precisely, Twitterrific—has always been an app in my Dock or a bird icon in my menu bar. The same has never been true of Facebook or Instagram or any other network that has shunted its desktop users into a web-browser window.
Those services are out of sight and out of mind when I’m using my Mac. Even in the days when I actually used Facebook, I only remembered to visit the Facebook website every day or so. The extra leap of having to open a browser window and then visit the site was a leap I rarely made.
Likewise, my use of private social apps like Slack and Discord is magnified by their availability on my Mac as discrete apps rather than bookmarks in Safari. I can launch them or quit them or hide them on their own, and they’re there in my Dock when I want them. If there was no Slack app, and I had to use the web to check my Slack communities, it would be the Facebook situation again. I’d pop in occasionally but not regularly, just as has been the case with Mastodon and me.
There’s something healthy about that. But if Mastodon gets enough community gravity to make me want to pay more attention, I’ll need an app. There are a lot of Mastodon client apps out there, and I’ve tried several of them, but none of them are really good enough or polished enough for me to use regularly. The truth is that modern Twitter clients have set the bar pretty high.
Tapbots is currently beta-testing a Mastodon client based on Tweetbot for iOS and Mac, and early buzz is that it’s very good. I don’t know if I’m going to commit to using Mastodon nearly as much as I used Twitter back in the day, but if I use it at all regularly, it will only be because someone wrote a Mac app that was good enough for me to embrace and put in my Dock.
John Siracusa returns to the show to chat about Jason’s recent visit to his house, Mac app development, Apple’s brain drain, TSMC breaking ground in Arizona, the problems with AI training models, the current state of macOS, and what makes a Good Product.
Go to the podcast page.
You know the old thought experiment about the AI designed to make paper clips, that quickly decides that in order to maximize paper clips, it will have to get rid of all the humans?
A lot of security teams have a similar idea when it comes to meeting compliance goals: it would be so much simpler if it weren’t for all the pesky users.
That way of thinking has brought us to the current state of endpoint security, which is dominated by MDMs that hamper device performance and turn every laptop into Big Brother. This approach to security is bad for culture and morale, and moreover, it doesn’t actually work. If it did, then no company with an MDM and an annual security training would have a data breach.
Kolide is an endpoint security and fleet management solution that takes a different approach. We help our customers meet their compliance goals–whether that’s for auditors, customers, or leadership–by enlisting the support of end users.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
By reaching out to employees via a friendly Slack DM and educating them about company policies, Kolide can help you build a culture in which everyone contributes to security, because everyone understands how and why to do it.
For IT admins, Kolide helps you prove compliance via a single dashboard. From there, you can monitor the security of your entire fleet, whether they’re running on Mac, Windows, or Linux. (You read that right; Kolide can finally provide visibility into your Linux users.)
At a glance, you can see which employees have their disks encrypted, OS up to date, and password manager installed, among a host of other issues. And this data collection isn’t happening in the shadows; end users can see exactly what data is being collected and why in the User Privacy Center.
f you’ve read this far, it’s because you’re intrigued by an approach to endpoint security that gets end users involved. Click here to learn more about how it works. If you like what you see, you can sign up for a free trial, no credit card required.
Apple tends not to be a first mover when it comes to new technologies, which often leads to the popular phenomenon of pundits declaring that the company “needs” to make such-and-such a product. But the real issue when it comes to Apple’s devices is that it often seems like the company dips its toe in the waters of a product category…then quickly pulls back as it feels the icy waters.
Perhaps the best example in recent years is the HomePod. Smart speakers were a category that Apple entered well after other companies like Amazon and Google had rushed to market, but it proved to be a case where not only did Apple’s entry not dominate–the original HomePod was discontinued three years after it was first released, replaced by the cheaper HomePod mini. But the category itself has proved simultaneously popular and yet, in some high-profile cases, unprofitable.
Still, the HomePod mini’s second anniversary has come and gone with no updates to the device, making me worry about its future. So I’m here to plead on behalf of the smart speaker: not only do I hope Apple doesn’t send the HomePod mini to a farm upstate like its big sibling, but I’d like to see Apple invest more in the category. Specifically, I’d like to see Apple ship a HomePod with a screen.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Jason joins Dan in person at Dan’s desk to discuss projects in progress, automations, and Twitter and Mastodon.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow employees your enemies. I’ve seen it happen. It’s not good.
Kolide is different. (Really.) It’s an endpoint security and device management product that treats users as allies, not enemies.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
Check out Kolide today.
Fun story from Macworld contributor Benj Edwards over at Ars Technica about running a BBS1 when he was 11, which he still runs over the Internet now:
Even before I was fully ready, I jumped the gun and began advertising my BBS phone number on other BBSes. I started getting calls on the BBS phone line at night, which disturbed my parents. For some reason, I still had a conventional telephone (with the ringer turned on) sitting in my bedroom.
One night, the second line rang and my mom answered it. The caller heard her talking over their modem speaker and picked up the phone as well. I remember my mom telling the caller that I was only 11 years old and I was going to bed. It was very embarrassing, and of course, that person would mention the episode later to rib me: “I talked to your mom, and she said you had to go to bed!”
Benj is about my age, and there are echoes of a lot of my early computing history in his story—including the parents frustrated with me using the phone line. I frequented many a BBS back in the ’90s2, and even briefly helped my friend run one. That’s even where I got my start as a fiction writer, distributing the e-zine that said same friend and I ran for a few years. Quite the nostalgia trip.
In some ways, it kind of feels like the current fragmentation of social media harkens back to the day of the BBS, when you had small communities organized around particular interests (and, in those days, geography). Is Discord just a modern day BBS? Discuss!
- That’s Bulletin Board System, a computer you could log into by dialing via your modem, for you young whippersnappers among us. ↩
- Most prominently 4th Dimension and BCS here in Boston. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Annual streaming music retrospectives, our favorite thing about niche software, whether child us would be blown away by today’s tech, and our pitches for social media networks.
Go to the podcast page.
Apple has made TV streaming deals with Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer and is rumored to be negotiating with multiple other leagues, including the NFL and the Dutch Eredivisie (first-division soccer). Clearly, Apple thinks that live sports are a way to get people who have avoided embracing streaming TV to finally make the jump. (Amazon feels the same, which is why it bought the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package.)
I think it’s a smart strategy. An old boss of mine often shared the adage that in order for your product to be bought, it must first be considered. (Yes, he used to sell advertising for a living.) Lots of tech-savvy people embraced streaming long ago, and Netflix has managed to put its apps on almost every electronic device manufactured in the last ten years, but there remains a very large audience–older and not as tech-savvy–who are comfortable watching cable TV but decidedly uncomfortable finding Apple TV or Prime Video.
Sports are a great motivator to get many of them to learn. The big issue is that I’m not sure Apple’s TV platform is ready for them to arrive.
Continue reading on Macworld.
This one not-so-simple shortcut removed 62 percent of the data from this folder!Earlier this week Dan wrote about building an automation to archive a bunch of podcast projects. I’ve been using a shell script written by a friend to do something similar, but Dan inspired me to up my automation game and build a Shortcuts-based podcast-archiving tool of my own.
Dan’s shortcut, while great, has a big limitation: it uses Zip archives, and compressing audio files—especially the huge uncompressed audio files used in podcast editing—is not its strength. The files take a long time to compress, and they don’t compress the files as much as lossless audio formats like FLAC and Apple Lossless do.
I built a new Shortcut that accepts folders as input (via the Quick Actions option in the Finder) and then walks through each folder one by one, looking for lossless audio files—WAVs and AIFFs—and encoding them in the lossless FLAC format.
I had assumed that Apple would provide a way for Shortcuts to encode media into Apple Lossless format, but it doesn’t. The Encode Media action can encode audio, but only to M4A or AIF formats1. Instead, I retreated to the command-line, since Apple provides a utility called afconvert that will let you convert audio files between an enormous number of formats, including not just Apple Lossless but the even more widely supported (and slightly more efficient) FLAC.
The trickiest parts of the entire shortcut involve properly composing the Run Shell Script command that will kick off the file conversion. To do so, I have to use the file’s File Path attribute twice—once as the source file, and a modified version (using the Replace Text action) as the destination location. I chose to rewrite file.wav as file-wav.flac so that I could return the file to its original format with a corresponding decompression shortcut.
Almost nothing else in my podcast project files actually needs to be compressed—it’s mostly tiny text files and compressed audio files (like MP3s and M4As) that can’t really be compressed any smaller. The only outlier is the Logic Pro project package itself, because that can be pretty large—so my shortcut looks for any Logic projects and zips them up.
The final step is just to provide a way to tell that a folder has been compressed: I append a parenthetical “(compressed)” to the end of the folder’s name and give it a colored label in the Finder.
The results are pretty impressive. My 5.85 GB project was reduced to 2.2 GB in about a minute, compared to about five minutes to make a 3.2 GB Zip archive.
As I mentioned above, I also wrote a corresponding shortcut that looks for any of my FLAC files, as well as the zipped-up Logic file, and undoes the compression. The resulting Logic projects open normally, and find all their accompanying audio files, making this a successful experiment—and freeing up a lot of space on my home server.
You can download the Compression and Decompression shortcuts if you like. Thanks for the inspiration, Dan!
- This action really needs an update! ↩
Bob Chapek is out and Bob Iger is back in! What does this mean for the future of Disney? We don’t have the answers, but we have lots of questions!
Go to the podcast page.
Like many people, I’ve been exploring Mastodon while being concerned about the future of Twitter. But federated social media is tricky, especially when it comes to simple things like replying to a post made by someone on a different server. It was not easy, as Federico Viticci explains:
This is where my friend Jason Snell comes in: a few days ago, he shared a post in which he noted that the default method for redirecting a post or profile from another Mastodon instance back to yours is, well, somewhat convoluted. If you come across a profile or post from a different Mastodon server, you have to copy its original URL, go to your instance, manually paste it into the search box, find the result you’re looking for, and only then you can interact with it. That works, but it’s not intuitive, and I figured I could improve this aspect of the Mastodon experience with a shortcut.
You can guess what happened next. Federico built a shortcut that makes the process of jumping to a local version of a remote profile or post easy. If you use Mastodon, it’s worth installing this shortcut and saving yourself the time.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
John Gruber joins Jason on Upgrade for the first time. Topics include eWorld, Apple’s iPhone production problems in China, FIFA and Qatar and the World Cup, the reasons behind Apple’s sports ambitions, BBEdit, regular expressions, Perl and Python, MarsEdit, nanotexture displays, webcams, and the state of the art in ADB-to-USB adapters. Happy Cyber Monday to all those who celebrate!
Go to the podcast page.
“If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow-employees your enemies.”
That’s a quote from Honest Security, Kolide’s mission statement and North Star. It was written by our CEO, Jason Meller, who spent his career in cybersecurity before founding Kolide.
He was troubled by the widely-accepted idea among cybersecurity professionals that end users should be treated, first and foremost, as threats. This way of thinking informs the traditional approach to device management, which relies on MDMs that take control of devices and come with surveillance capabilities that most companies don’t need, or even really want.
Kolide is different. (Really.) It’s an endpoint security and device management product that treats users as allies, not enemies.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
Kolide’s open-source agent collects data across 43 categories on Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. It can answer questions like:
- Do any of my developers have unsecured SSH keys floating around?
- Does everyone have disk encryption, screen lock, and password managers set up?
- Are there any Macs in my fleet in need of a new battery?
And while Kolide can provide insights that MDMs can’t, what really sets us apart is our commitment to transparency. Employees can visit the User Privacy Center for an explanation of exactly what data is being collected, by whom, and for what purpose.
For IT teams, having all this cross-platform data in a single dashboard is a godsend. And on a psychological level, it’s a relief to stop surveilling employees in ways they might not even be aware of.
If you’re nodding along right now, you’ve probably also felt stuck between your commitment to cybersecurity and your desire to protect employee privacy and autonomy. It can seem like you’re the only one with these concerns, but you’re not alone. Hundreds of customers have chosen Kolide to secure their fleets without compromising their values.
Want to see how it works for yourself? Click here for a free trial, no credit card required, and let us show you what we’re all about.
Ever since I moved into my new house a year ago, I’ve been looking for a fun way to designate when I’m recording a podcast. Yes, I could just close the door to my office—but sometimes when I do, I’m just working on something where I don’t mind being interrupted. I could also use a low-tech method like a door hanger, but then it’s one additional piece of cognitive overhead to remember to put it out when I’m recording.
No, if ever a problem cried out for a ridiculously over-engineered solution, this was clearly it.
At first I considered something simple, like a red smart bulb I could put up next to my office door. But it’s in a small hallway, and there are no electrical outlets nearby. Which meant that whatever solution I came up with had to be battery-powered and, ideally, last a long time. Likewise, there’s no place for a table to put anything bulky; it would have to be light enough to be mounted on the wall or door.
What I really wanted was an On Air sign, like at radio studios, and Jason’s dabbling in e-ink status displays made me think that I’d finally found the right technology for the job. When Six Colors member Mihir mentioned the Inkplate 6COLOR, I didn’t hesitate in ordering one.
The 6COLOR has a number of things going for it: for one, it’s a complete system, including an e-ink display, controller board, Wi-Fi, and so on. For another, you can pay a little more to have it shipped with a 3D-printed frame—not pretty, but it gets the job done. Finally, though it’s not battery-powered out of the box, an under-$20 Adafruit battery is simple to install.
But that was just the beginning; putting this project together ended up requiring a bit more hands-on time than I’d expected.
The hardwareThe Inkplate 6COLOR is, as the name suggests, a color e-ink display. Don’t go in expecting a Super Retina XDR experience, because you’re not going to get it: we’re talking 600-by-448 pixels with seven colors (black, white, red, yellow, blue, green, and orange) at 128 dots per inch. Dithering does let you show most colors, but it’s still not going to provide you with an amazing image.
Fortunately, while color was a nice perk, it wasn’t a requirement for my sign. But the color technology does add one major drawback to the 6COLOR: its refresh time—the amount of time it takes to draw a new image on the e-ink display—is slow. And I mean slow. A sloth could drink molasses out of a sippy cup faster. It takes at least 10 full seconds to draw a new image; sometimes that seems closer to 20. It’s one place where a black-and-white screen actually might have served me better but you live and you learn.
Beyond that, the hardware is fairly basic. There’s a sleep/wake switch, a microSD slot for onboard storage if you need it, and a USB-C connector for power and data. Installing the battery required opening the back up with a small screwdriver1 and then connecting the battery to the correct terminals, using the board schematics. There’s no place to mount the battery really so I just left it loose inside the case and sealed the whole thing back up.2
Satisfied that it was now able to run on its own power—though for how long I wasn’t sure, since there’s no built-in way to check the battery level until it basically dies—I set about for what would end up being the far more challenging part of the project: the software.
The softwareThe Inkplate 6COLOR’s microprocessor is Arduino-based, though it also supports the MicroPython programming language. While I have more familiarity with Python, it was unclear to me just how many of the built-in features would be easily addressable in MicroPython, so I decided to stick with the default, and downloaded a copy of the Arduino IDE.
It was here that I was forced to dust off some meager 20-plus-year-old programming knowledge. While I’ve spent a lot of time as a PHP web programmer and dabbled in other languages, programming an Arduino relies on C/C++, languages that I only got passing familiarity with while taking a course on Java back in freshman year of college.3
Fortunately, the Inkplate docs include a helpful Get Started guide that includes a ton of built-in examples accessible via the Arduino IDE that you can peruse to figure out how things work.
In thinking about how to architect my program, I had concluded that I would try to just have the On Air sign grab an image from a web server and display it, so I picked the closest example in the library, the Web Pictures project.
I created a couple of basic On Air/Off Air images using Acorn: just solid-colored text on a solid colored background (white on black for Off Air, white on red for On Air4), at the exact resolution of the Inkplate’s display.
Once I’d gotten the hang of how the Arduino IDE worked, subbing in my images for those in the example was easy enough, and the proof of concept was up and running.
Ah, C.At that point, the challenge became how to maximize energy efficiency. In an ideal world, I would have had a ping sent to the Inkplate display telling it when to change images, but that would require it be awake or be woken by the ping, which proved to be a more complex solution that was somewhat beyond my skills.
Instead, I ended up loading the images locally on the device, encoding them into a byte array using Inkplate’s online tool so that they could be bundled into the program itself—fortunately they were small enough to not use up too much of the limited onboard memory. That way I could simply have the Inkplate check a public URL to see if I was on air and load the appropriate image, rather than downloading it every time.
To make it even more efficient, I opted to use the display’s deep sleep feature, which shuts down most of the onboard systems to conserve memory. I had it store the current on air status in the tiny bit of RAM that gets preserved while in sleep, then wake every five minutes to see if the status had changed; if so, it switches the image and, if not, it just goes back to sleep.
The resulting program actually ended up being fairly simple: the meat of it is only about 60 lines of code or so. But in my testing it works pretty darn well.5 I’ve gone ahead and made it available as a GitHub project for any interested parties.
All I needed now was a way to toggle it on and off.
The shortcutTo register my on air status, I’d created a text file on my web server that contained either a 1 if I was on air or a 0 if not. What I needed was a way to toggle that back and forth and I settled on creating a shortcut.
This also ended up providing me my first best opportunity to use Apple’s Focus system, which I use as a local proxy for my on air status.
The shortcut checks to see if my current focus mode is already set to Podcasting and, if so, deactivates the focus mode and then sets my on air status to 0. Otherwise, it turns on the Podcasting focus mode and sets my on air status to 1. Then I use the Run script over SSH action to echo that status variable to the text file on my server.
I can trigger the On Air shortcut via the menu bar or my Stream Deck, but I decided to take it a step further in automating it and use Audio Hijack’s own automation features to trigger the shortcut every time I start or end a recording session.
Apple’s Shortcuts implementation on the Mac unfortunately does not offer automation features, meaning I can’t automatically have a shortcut launched when the feature is activated or deactivated, as I can on the iPhone.6
If you’d like a copy of the shortcut, you can download it here.
The resultWith the code working and my shortcut hooked up, I took the last step and attached the on air sign to my office door using some 3M Command Strips, allowing me to easily remove it when I need to charge it.
The battery life has been truly impressive: even checking as frequently as it does, the Inkplate goes several days without needing to recharge.
Yes, I do wish that there weren’t potentially a five-minute lag time between going on air and the sign updating; it would be nice to be able to ping the e-ink display directly to have it update, removing the remote server from the equation entirely.
But all that really means is that I’ve left myself some work for an eventual version 2.0.
- My trusty old iFixit driver kit to the rescue. ↩
- Was that a good idea? Who knows! If not, I guess we’ll find out eventually. 😅 ↩
- Hey, Java was the hot new thing in 1998! ↩
- I started with red on black for the On Air image, but Mihir rightly pointed out that white on red is much easier to distinguish at a glance. ↩
- If there’s a problem with it, it’s that I occasionally see the board balk at re-connecting to Wi-Fi after waking from sleep, but it seems to happen inconsistently and may be more of an issue of the Wi-Fi network strength than anything. ↩
- I could, of course, set the automation to run on the iPhone instead, since my Focus modes are mirrored on my devices, and I may do so eventually, but I haven’t yet decided if that makes sense. ↩
Sometimes you stare down the barrel of a stupid, repetitive task and think: hey, my time’s worth more than this!
Then you spend longer than the original task would have taken to create an automation for that task.
Having concluded our current season of A Complicated Profession, our Star Wars TV podcast over on The Incomparable, I decided I ought to archive all the project files to save some space on my MacBook Air’s drive. In the past, I’ve had an automated workflow to do this, using Hazel, but I hadn’t set it up again since switching to my laptop as my main work machine.1
However, rather than clicking on each individual project folder and choosing Compress…, it seemed likely that I could create a simple automation to do the work for me. And so I did!
Shortcuts is well suited to this task, allowing me to create a workflow I could launch from the Finder’s Quick Actions menu. I selected the top-level folder for the podcast and had the shortcut iterate through the contents of that folder. If it encountered a file with no file extension (which was the best idea I had for detecting if something was a folder), it would zip that up into an archive with the same name as the folder, then save it to the top-level folder2. Done.
It took a little bit of trial and error to get the save paths and naming correct3, but the end result was exactly what I’d hoped: a folder full of archives of each individual episode, which I could then drag over to my NAS before deleting them all from my drive.
Perhaps you’ll find this shortcut useful, in which case, have at.
- Once again, I’m reminded that macOS’s version of Shortcuts lacks the Automation features of the iOS version—which continues to be a glaring oversight. ↩
- That Save File action is a crucial step: otherwise it just makes a zip file and…throws it away? How strange. ↩
- I did accidentally make an earlier version recursive, where it dumped an infinite loop of folders inside the Shorcuts folder in iCloud drive. Whoops! ↩
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 250,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.
The third edition of my book Take Control of Photos has been released! If you bought a previous edition, you should’ve gotten an email with options to upgrade to the new edition.…
Finding a Twitter replacement (or leaving it all behind), our Read-it-Later services of choice, the tech we’re most thankful for, and the apps we’re most thankful for.…
When Apple announced Universal Control as a feature of macOS Monterey and iPadOS 15, I wasn’t sure what to think. It seemed like a feature nobody had asked for, but one that Apple had realized might actually be incredibly useful.…
A new version of the excellent flight-tracking app Flighty was just released. I can’t endorse this app enough, but its support for Live Activities (and the Dynamic Island) on iOS 16 has made it even cooler.…
Ben Dowsett at FiveThirtyEight details the high technology being used on the field at the World Cup:
All tournament long, match balls will contain a sensor that collects spatial positioning data in real time — the first World Cup to employ such a ball-tracking mechanism.
…
There’s some huge news from the world of streaming, as Disney switches bosses and Apple plans its next wave of sports-streaming products. Meanwhile, Myke’s busy building out his smart home while Jason has been reminded of the fragility of smart-home networking.…
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.…
Apple is a bit like Superman. Wait, wait, hear me out. Sure, it only gets a chunk of its power from the yellow sun (thanks, solar), and maybe not even its rumored smart glasses could disguise it as Clark Kent, but the company certainly isn’t short on superpowers: selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products, commanding a prominent position in multiple technology markets, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide knows how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third-party auditor—they just went through it themselves.…
In a blog post on Thursday, 1Password outlined its plans to support Passkeys, a new standard embraced by all the major platform owners that promises to eliminate passwords forever by replacing them with cryptographic authentication.…
How we positively integrate tech in our kids’ lives, whether we display vintage tech, sharing streaming service logins, and do standalone cameras still trump smartphones?…
St. Louis City SC is the first MLS team to unveil a shirt with an Apple TV sleeve patch.It’s about three months until the start of the next season of Major League Soccer, and Apple’s 10-year, $2.5B deal with the league is starting to come into focus.…
Disney’s latest financial results lead us to ponder where we are in the dramatic change from old-school media to the streaming world. Also, Warner Bros. Discovery claims to have all its franchises in order, but that doesn’t seem remotely realistic.…
Promised “later this year” when it was introduced in September, Apple announced on Tuesday that it has turned on its Emergency SOS via Satellite feature on iPhone 14 models in the U.S.…
Let’s get real about the Apple VR headset. Is it really coming next year? What’s it going to look like? What features should it have? What lessons can Apple learn from Meta’s foray into VR products?…
For a while now, I’ve been frustrated by the fact that some local reporters I follow on Twitter invariably tweet links to their stories at mercurynews.com…
In 2021, our company went through the SOC 2 Type 1 audit, and we found out just how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third party auditor.…
Brace yourself for a scary fact: 2022 is coming to a close. Yes, there’s a little time yet before we have to flip the calendar over to an entirely new year with, no doubt, its own strange challenges and unpredictable events.…
My classic movie podcast, Lions, Towers & Shields over at The Incomparable, uses a standard show-notes format. On each episode, we talk about one old movie, and I always link to places where you can stream it, buy physical media, and learn more about the film we’re watching.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.…
Last week on the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa bemoaned the fact that Smart Albums in Photos on the Mac don’t take advantage of the sophisticated searches you can do from the app’s Search box, which include face, object, and scene detection.…
Our thoughts on all-in-one work platforms in regard to Zoom One, the mapping app(s) we use, our predictions for the future of social media, and our tech-buying habits when faced with supply-constraint delays.…
Apple has done such a good job of improving the iPhone, iPad, and Mac upgrade experience in the last few years that I’ve come to take it for granted that when I buy a new piece of Apple hardware to replace an old one, I will be able to fairly quickly transfer all my stuff and go about my business.…
For a long time, Apple has placed itself in opposition to Google. Google is fundamentally an advertising company whose customers are ad buyers, while Apple’s customers are people who buy Apple devices and services.…
Jay Peters at The Verge:
Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray “Official” check mark, according to a thread from Twitter’s Esther Crawford, who is heading up the new Twitter Blue initiative.
…
Much to my friend Stephen Hackett’s frustration, there’s no way to share albums in iCloud Shared Photos. All the photos can be shared, but the concept of an album is currently limited to a single Apple ID.…
While I was writing my book about Photos, I spent a very long time tapping around in the new iOS 16 lock screen editor, and I thought that perhaps it was worth making a video about.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The strong dollar is helping to drive up Apple’s prices around the world, but is it teaching the company that high prices don’t matter? Also, Apple downgrades our favorite tvOS feature, Apple gets into the TV ad game, and iPhone production grinds to a halt.…
“When was the last time you restarted it?”
If you’ve ever worked at a service desk, you’ve probably wanted to tattoo this question on your forehead.…
Apple’s most recent financial quarter has come and gone, and the company posted (yet again) record revenues, pulling in a zillion dollars and ending its latest fiscal year with just shy of $100 billion in profit alone.…
Social networking in the modern era is more than just a double-edge sword: it’s a spinning wheel of blades that provide only occasional respites of joy amongst a thousand paper cuts of indignity.…
Today I fired up my Apple TV and opened the Apple TV app to be greeted with a revised Watch Now tab. Much to my shock and horror, they made it worse than it was before!…
Before (left): What I want to watch is at the top level! After: Nope.Apple is apparently beta testing some changes to the Watch Now tab of its TV app on Apple TV.…
It’s pretty rare to see new hardware features unlocked by a firmware update, but smart lock maker Level is doing just that: its entire existing line of devices will be getting both Matter and, more interestingly, Thread support in an upcoming release.…
Sam Hancock, reporting for the BBC:
Workers have broken out of Apple’s largest iPhone assembly factory in China after a Covid outbreak forced staff to lockdown at the workplace.
…
Last week Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, setting another quarterly record amid a lot of concern on Wall Street about the standing of the tech industry.…
Dave Zatz, media blogger and former Sling employee, is the perfect person to mark its passing:
Welp. It’s come to this. Slingbox servers will be shut down forever come November 9th.
…
Services and products we just can’t quit, our cringiest status splurges, whether advertising works on us, and the fate of Twitter under its new management.…
Matt Haughey trained an AI model on his own face and ended up with dozens of impressive images of himself:
In total, this cost me about $3 in Google Collab compute time to produce over 200 images from 70-80 prompts over the course of a couple hours.
…
There’s a line I like to use a lot when I’m responding to people who expect Apple to release low-cost products that appeal to the widest swath of the masses: “Apple’s never going to be the low-price leader.”…
Peacock pivots, Netflix gets to know itself, “Doctor Who” is on the move, “Andor” teaches some important lessons, and Sports Corner returns!…
Once again, it’s the sPOooOOkiest time of year at Apple Park: Yes, the end of the fiscal year. WooooOOoOoO! When financial analysts haunt Tim Cook and Luca Maestri in order to find out how much cash Apple has taken home from customers in its oversized plastic jack o’lantern: apparently around $90.1 billion dollars worth of fun-size Milky Ways and M&Ms.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple and the Mac had another record quarter, but there are some serious questions about slowing growth in services and what it means for Apple’s future strategies.…
It’s only fairly recently that I’ve delved into the world of recording podcasts with multiple in-person participants1, but that’s what finally opened the door for me to switch from a USB microphone to a dedicated audio interface.…
You know the old thought experiment about the AI designed to make paper clips, that quickly decides that in order to maximize paper clips, it will have to get rid of all the humans?…
My thanks to Daylite for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
For small businesses, acquiring new business often means juggling multiple priorities at the same time, as each deal has its own time frame and different client requirements.…
On Thursday, Apple announced its fiscal fourth-quarter results, and the results were predictable–another record quarter. But of course, Wall Street had already anticipated all of this and had moved on to deciding that a lot of Apple’s growth was not quite as growy as they expected.…
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spend an hour talking to investment analysts about the company’s just-completed quarter. And as always, we’ve got a transcript!…
Apple announced results for its fiscal fourth quarter on Thursday, with a fourth-quarter revenue record of $90.1B in revenue. Mac revenue was way up (to an all-time record!),…
Mixing tech with Halloween, the show or film we’d bring to Apple TV+, our thoughts on an Elon-run Twitter, and our low-tech habits.…
Apple makes plenty of big moves: releasing new products in new categories, creating whole new chip architectures, and offering slews of major updates for its software platforms in a matter of weeks.…
Jason’s got new reviews of macOS Ventura, the tenth-generation iPad, and the M2 iPad Pro. We discuss Stage Manager, System Settings, the Magic Keyboard Folio, and the curious pace and nature of iPad innovations.…
In recent years we’ve had some macOS releases that were disruptive, in the worst way. Whether it was bugs or incompatibilities or broken features, nothing makes the excitement of a new OS update evaporate faster than not being able to use your Mac as you’d prefer.…
Unlock your sales potential with the new Daylite Opportunities Board
For small businesses, acquiring new business often means juggling multiple priorities at the same time, as each deal has its own time frame and different client requirements.…
Viewed individually, the 10th-generation iPad and the M2 iPad Pro don’t seem strange at all. In fact, the new iPad Pro is extremely familiar—it’s a look that hasn’t changed much in four years.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow employees your enemies.…
The iPad lineup’s squishy middle, why Apple pros aren’t allowed to have fun, our Apple Pencil usage, and whether we get cellular-enabled iPads.…
The new iPad and the new Magic Keyboard Folio.On Tuesday morning, Apple announced new iPad and iPad Pro models via press release. On their own, they are reasonable and understandable upgrades over the previous-generation model.…
Is “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” the real winner of this fall’s battle between Dragons and Elves? Also: Netflix opens itself up to ratings, Sports Corner covers Apple’s negotiations with the NFL, and we discuss the merits of Paramount and Hulu.…
In addition to new iPads, Apple unexpectedly revamped its Apple TV line Tuesday, offering two configurations: a 64GB model with Wi-Fi only for a lower cost of $129, and a 128GB model that also has Gigabit Ethernet and Thread for $149.…
Changes are afoot in Apple’s lineup of tablets, as the vanilla iPad gets a brand new design on par with the rest of the company’s iPad models, and the high-end iPad Pro adds the new M2 processor and a new Apple Pencil “hover” experience.…
This week we praise trackpad gestures, condemn Google’s Matter strategy, ponder whether looks matter when it comes to VR headsets, and think big thoughts about the AirPods Pro 2.…
Via Paul Kafasis, here’s the remarkable story of a man who made a basic site planning website for homeowners who are working on simple renovation projects.…
“If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow-employees your enemies.”
That’s a quote from Honest Security, Kolide’s mission statement and North Star.…
Apple’s at the top of the world–and from this standpoint, it’s hard to see how the company could be anything other than the market leader and tastemaker that it’s been in recent memories.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide knows how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third-party auditor—they just went through it themselves.…
Smart home tech is having a moment, thanks in no small part to the newly released Matter standard, which promises better interoperability between devices from various manufacturers.…
While I’m linking to articles from this spring that I only read today, Matt Birchler wrote a piece for The Sweet Setup about using Shortcuts with the Stream Deck that provided a great workaround for the limited and buggy third-party Shortcuts plug-in for Stream Deck:
Did you know that you can create shortcuts that launch like normal apps?
…
I missed this Verge interview with Michele Turner, the senior director of Google’s home ecosystem, from back in May. It’s an interesting dive into the forthcoming Matter standard, how it works, and Google’s approach to the whole thing.…
Apple announced a new series of developer-focused events, Ask Apple, this week:
Ask Apple will be an ongoing series, with the first round of opportunities coming October 17-21.
…
Samuel Axon of Ars Technica reports on an announcement Wednesday that pushes two tech giants a little closer together:
Microsoft and Apple announced a number of deeper integrations of Apple services on both Windows PCs and Xbox game consoles, including Music and TV apps for both platforms and the ability to browse your iCloud Photo Library within the Windows 11 Photos app.
…
Microsoft and Apple’s are friends now? Plus, Apple pulls away Charlie Brown’s football, Meta’s got a new VR headset, and Stage Manager still needs some work.…
There was a time when everyone thought they knew what an Apple product launch looked like. The archetypal Apple product launch was Steve Jobs standing on a stage in San Francisco in front of a large crowd, announcing another world-changing product.…
Every autumn it comes, as predictable as the turning of the leaves: a slew of Apple products get brand new updates. Some, like the iPhone or Apple Watch, have become annual affairs that require little in the way of prognostication.…
What’s in a name? Myke and Jason wrestle with what to call a rumored new Apple display and whether “laptop” is better than “notebook.” Also, Matter is almost here to save us from our smart homes, the USB-C iPhone approaches, and Jason tries to keep mini magic alive.…
Here’s a quick look at how iCloud Shared Photo Library—coming soon!—works on macOS and iOS.
…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
In 2021, our company went through the SOC 2 Type 1 audit, and we found out just how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third party auditor.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.…
When is a store not a store?
When it’s an Apple Store.
Since their mythic inception, forged in the crucible of Ron Johnson and Steve Jobs and their hippie-dippy retail ideas, the Apple Store has always been an anti-store.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apps we live in every day, whether we pay for premium-priced movie rentals, the smart speakers we use, and providing tech support for our parents.…
The Dynamic Island has nuances. As prompted by Jordan Krahn, I’ve been tapping and swiping on it to figure out some of the subtler gestures it accepts.…
With iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura threatening to arrive later this month, we’re on the precipice of the arrival of one of the biggest new features added to the iPad and Mac in recent years: Stage Manager.…
An accidental Sports Corner, understanding Peacock’s slow growth, EPIX becomes MGM+, a “House of the Dragon” / “Rings of Power” check-in, Apple’s “Luck”, Julia and Parrot provide data to creators, and a listener explains Canadian TV quirks.…
So my friend John Siracusa sends me a tweet that took me down a rabbit hole ending in something I worked on 26 years ago:
If you need to reach me, I'll be cybersurfing over at The Internet Mall.
…
It’s pretty late in the game, but Stage Manager on iPadOS keeps changing—most lately adding support for older iPad Pros while temporarily dropping support for external displays.…
“When was the last time you restarted it?”
If you’ve ever worked at a service desk, you’ve probably wanted to tattoo this question on your forehead.…
Of all of Apple’s major product lines, it seems like none has been the subject of such intense debate and scrutiny over the last decade as the iPad.…
Okay, Apple, listen up. I’m calling you on the carpet.
Stop stealing my gig.
Oh, sure, play innocent. But I’ve been watching for you for years.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I’m a big fan of the Kobo e-reader line, but it’s only fair that I post a link to a negative review of the Kobo Sage by my pal Scott McNulty:
If you’re looking for a premium ereader get a Kindle Oasis.
…
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
I love Rogue Amoeba’s apps. As a podcaster, I rely on Audio Hijack and Loopback to do my job.…
Our thoughts on a slidable, resizable laptop, our countdown events, our iPhone photography habits, and our favorite pinball games…
September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month, and once again, my friends at Relay FM are raising money for St. Jude. A lot of money. Members of our community have already given more than half a million dollars this month, and more than two million dollars since Relay began doing this four years ago.…
Jason reviews the iPhone 14, we speculate about how Apple could make an October Mac event worth having, Myke solves his iPhone migration problems, and we answer your Dynamic Island questions!…
Since the near-simultaneous arrival of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X in 2017, Apple has been on a mission to split the iPhone product line into two distinct sets of models: a more expensive set that incorporates all the cutting-edge features Apple can dream up, and a set that trades some of that high-tech flash for affordability.…
Since 2002, Rogue Amoeba has been making amazing audio apps for the Mac. Whether you’re a podcaster, musician, or just someone who listens to audio on their Mac, Rogue Amoeba can make your life better.…
There are dozens–if not hundreds–of new features strewn across the major software updates Apple releases every fall. But for every one that gets top billing (iOS 16’s new customizable Lock Screens, for example) there are a whole slew that get little, if any attention.…
Josh Renaud notes the 30th anniversary of a fixture in the pre-Web Internet:
Each newsgroup was like a messageboard dedicated to a topic: fans of Atari’s 16-bit ST computers would post messages in comp.sys.atari.st.
…
My thanks to Daylite for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
For small businesses, acquiring new business often means juggling multiple priorities at the same time, as each deal has its own time frame and different client requirements.…
Here’s the same location, shown in Explore, Driving, and Transit modes in Maps. Each screen is a bit zoomed in, and they’re all shown in Dark Mode.… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Julia’s under the weather, so Jason asked our editor, Steven, to join him to talk about Amazon’s NFL broadcast, Apple TV+ exclusivity of MLB record-breaking games, the insolvency of Bally Sports, and the mystery of NFL Sunday Ticket.…
Our computer and desk setups, the feature we’d add to iOS to make the biggest impact on how we use our iPhones, our device-protection habits, and whether the iPad is living up to its potential.…
Call it the Godzilla Problem. Apple is so big and influential that any move it makes will have enormous consequences for someone, somewhere. If Godzilla takes a walk, he leaves enormous footprints (and, let’s be honest, a bunch of crushed stuff) behind him.…
After reviewing the iPhone 14 Pro and discussing the pros and cons of the Dynamic Island and the new 48MP camera, Jason and Myke discuss the current pace of upgrades and innovation across all of Apple’s product lines.…
One fun thing to do while you’re out on parental leave is to redo literally your entire office technology setup.1
This came about for a few reasons, some of which were of my own volition, and others of which were borne out of necessity, but the end result is that my tech setup now looks substantially different than it did just six months ago.…
Unlock your sales potential with the new Daylite Opportunities Board
For small businesses, acquiring new business often means juggling multiple priorities at the same time, as each deal has its own time frame and different client requirements.…
With the launch of the new iPhones and Apple Watches, the annual fall season of the latest Apple tech is now fully upon us. But though the September event may be the first and most prominent in the run-up to the holiday season, there’s almost certainly more waiting in the wings.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow employees your enemies.…
Dries Depoorter built a project that captures the moment that an Instagram photo was taken and posts the results:
How does this work?
- Recorded a selection of open cameras for weeks.
…
Join me and Dan today at noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern for a live stream where I’ll be showing off the new iPhone 14, 14 Pro, and 14 Pro Max in advance of their arrival tomorrow.…
The tech we use to sleep and wake, the small changes to iOS 16 we’re excited about, our thoughts on an iPhone subscription plan, and our predictions RE: the end of iPhone and the last numbered iPhone model.…
There was a time when so much of the progress that came with a new iPhone could be encapsulated in its revolutionary new A-series processor, which added CPU cores, GPUs, or special processing engines to enable the model to be so much faster than its predecessor.…
We discuss the Dynamic Island and the new iPhones, the new Apple Watch, the Apple event, iOS 16, and more.…
Products on display in the hands-on area at the Steve Jobs Theater.John Gruber wrote a bit today about Apple’s in-person event presentation:
Media reaction to this was, at least from the peers I spoke with, mostly positive.
…
Five days later, we take stock of last week’s Apple announcements, disclose our pre-orders, ponder future changes to the iPhone product line, and discuss our favorite features of iOS 16.…
Oh what a widget-ful world.Fifteen years after the launch of the iPhone, you might be thinking that Apple gazes upon its domain and weeps for the lack of worlds left to conquer.…
“If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow-employees your enemies.”
That’s a quote from Honest Security, Kolide’s mission statement and North Star.…
New iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods Pro–oh my! It’s never a surprise when an Apple event involves updated versions of the company’s products; by now, we all know the pattern like clockwork.…
Steve Jobs famously induced John Sculley to quit his job at Pepsi and become the CEO of Apple by asking him if he wanted to keep selling sugar water or if he wanted to change the world.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide knows how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third-party auditor—they just went through it themselves.…
Our thoughts on the Apple Watch Ultra, whether we do clean installs on our Macs, which iPhone 14s we’re getting, and what we’d change about Apple’s event presentations.…
Jason and Dan answer your questions and talk a little bit about Wednesday’s Apple event.
Send in questions by typing /ask in the Members Discord… or by emailing us at subscribers@sixcolors.com.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
I’m not sure how you can underestimate one of the world’s most successful companies, but somehow we managed to do it with Apple regarding Wednesday’s “Far Out” event.…
On Wednesday at the Code conference, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Jony Ive, and Tim Cook announced The Steve Jobs Archive, a website featuring historical material (including audio and video clips) from Jobs’s life.…
Dedicated Garmin sports watch user Thomas Ricker, at The Verge, about the growth possibilities for Apple Watch Ultra:
By pricing the first generation of the Ultra at $799, Apple has a lot of ceiling to roll out new Ultra editions in the years ahead that differ in features and capabilities.
…
Apple has unveiled four new iPhones, new Apple Watches (including the new Apple Watch Ultra), and a new generation of AirPods Pro. Jason reports straight from the event—and still on the Apple Park campus!—as…
By now, we’re all familiar with the structure of an Apple event. The company trots out a coterie of executives to talk up its latest products, complete with slickly produced videos extolling the virtues of the latest technologies, all carefully constructed to get customers to open their Wallet apps.…
“The Rings of Power” has arrived, but do Amazon’s viewing numbers mean anything? Also: Netflix’s weird identity crisis, NBC might give up its 10pm time slots, the difficulty of making sitcom hits, and your letters!…
You might think that being away on paternity leave would mean 2am feedings, lots of diaper changes, and not a lot of spare time in which to muck about with silly technology projects.…
In 2021, our company went through the SOC 2 Type 1 audit, and we found out just how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third party auditor.…
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances—letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.…
A (redacted) look at my E Ink kitchen calendar. It’s paper recycling night.I’ve been fascinated with E Ink displays since I first used a Kindle.…
If there’s a constant in the run-up to the announcement of new iPhones, it’s probably theoretically tech-focused commentators complaining that the smartphone is boring. Occasionally that’ll be leavened with some “Apple has lost its way” nonsense, but the most common thesis is just that the smartphone, the most exciting invention of the past couple of decades, is now not very exciting.…
It’s been more than a year since I extolled the virtues of Keyboard Maestro so I think I’m allowed to repeat myself.
Today I needed to shut down the Six Colors Slack for members.…
Whether we’ll use Twitter’s new Twitter Circle feature, the least-exciting rumors for Apple’s upcoming September event, social media services we’re using more — not less — in the last year, and our thoughts on smartphones reaching their peak.…
Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company has observed that Apple’s macOS malware protection is now more active:
In the last six months macOS malware protection has changed more than it did over the previous seven years.
…
Jason and Myke predict what will happen at next week’s Apple media event. What new features will the new iPhones have—and will they be more expensive?…
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.…
So I joined in the beating on macOS Ventura’s System Settings app this week. It’s an update for an app that desperately needed a rethink… that doesn’t actually rethink things in any substantial way, just rearranges the proverbial deck chairs.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.…
Relay FM’s Myke Hurley joins Jason to discuss Jason’s new smart lock and the power of the media, Jason’s son’s college tech needs (which includes some Apple Self-Repair content for dad), and the annual Relay FM campaign for St.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
We discuss what the House of the Dragon premiere means for HBO, how Netflix judges the success of “The Sandman” and other shows, the business reasons behind Warner Bros.…
Whether we put all our tech eggs in one Big Tech basket, the skills and philosophies we gained over the pandemic that we’ll keep with us, our go-to pair of headphones or earbuds, and the consumer tech we’d take with us to space.…
The System Preferences app in macOS has been there since the very beginning, and it’s showing its age. A tiny, largely unchanging rectangle sized for the tiny displays of the early 2000s, it’s past time for Apple to create a new, modern settings app for the modern Mac.…
Open up.When I bought a Smart Lock I didn’t expect it would last less than four years. But I have to be honest: As much as I enjoyed the changes to my life that having a smart lock on my front door enabled, the Yale Assure SL was not stable enough for my family and me to rely on.…
Well, there we go. Apple’s having an event on September 7, the Wednesday after Labor Day here in the U.S., just as it did in 2016.…
Brian Heater of TechCrunch reports that Apple has made official what Mark Gurman reported early this month—that iPadOS 16 won’t be released at the same time as iOS 16:
In a comment to TechCrunch, the company notes, “This is an especially big year for iPadOS.
…
Before the sun sets on the Summer of Fun, Jason has rounded up three Apple automation experts—Federico Viticci, Rosemary Orchard, and Matthew Cassinelli—to discuss the present and future of user automation on Apple’s platforms.…
“When was the last time you restarted it?”
If you’ve ever worked at a service desk, you’ve probably wanted to tattoo this question on your forehead.…
Apple’s Self-Service Repair program, which was launched in April, provides Apple parts, manuals, and (optionally) tools so that anyone so inclined can repair their iPhone themself.…
Charlie Warzel used some AI art in a newsletter and it backfired spectacularly. To his credit, he used the experience to consider what the future of art on the Internet might be, and talked to artist and editor Matt Bors about it:
Bors argues that what seems most alarming (and this was borne out in a lot of the tweets I saw as well) is the speed at which the technology is improving.
…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. It’s all about helping customers meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their end users with a structured, message-based approach.…
Special guest Lex Friedman joins Jason to talk about the expanded Six Colors membership program and Apple Watch battery life, among other topics.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Developer and privacy researcher Felix Krause has dropped a couple of bombshells recently regarding apps that use their own built-in browsers:
Last week I published a report on the risks of mobile apps using in-app browsers.
…
Taking some tips from this GitHub project and John Calhoun’s SystemSix project, I built an E Ink calendar. It also led me down a path to use Craftcloud to 3-D print a stand.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
It’s time for a snap software update to address a bug that is apparently being exploited in the wild. Andrew Cunningham, reporting for Ars Technica:
Apple has released a trio of operating system updates to patch security vulnerabilities that it says “may have been actively exploited.”
…
Almost seven years ago, I announced the Six Colors membership plan. It started as a way to support the site and in return receive some “cool extras.”…
Our thoughts on BeReal and authenticity on social media, the state of console gaming and the cloud gaming future, our electric vehicle plans, and switching to a career outside of tech.…
Stephen Hackett is (like me) a big fan of the rock band Death Cab for Cutie. He leads off his review of the M2 MacBook Air with lyrics from the band’s song “Crooked Teeth”:
I’m a war of head versus heart
And it’s always this way
My head is weak
And my heart always speaks
Before I know what it will say
I’m not sure it is what Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla had in mind when they wrote the song, but this sums up how I feel about the new M2 MacBook Air.
…
Mark Gurman at Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is aiming to hold a launch event on Sept. 7 to unveil the iPhone 14 line, according to people with knowledge of the matter, rolling out the latest version of a product that generates more than half its sales.
…
Apple returns to work, macOS security flaws are revealed, and Apple gears up to make more money on advertising.…
I tried to buy a HomeKit lock this week. I couldn’t.
The Schlage Encode Plus got good reviews when it was released back in March. It supports Apple’s Home Key feature, which uses the same NFC technology used by Apple Pay to let you tap your Apple Watch or iPhone on its keypad to unlock it.…
I wanted to do a quick follow-up on my recent post about attaching an Apple Magic Keyboard with Touch to the underside of my desk, because I’ve now done what I threatened to do at the end of that piece: I’ve broken into the keyboard, removed the important bits, and then reassembled it into a little 3-D printed case that contains just the Touch ID button.…
What bothers Jason more, bad candy or App Store ads? Tough call. We also discuss some possible iPhone price hikes, Jason’s HomeKit (sort of) cameras, a return to macOS Ventura, and the pronunciation of Apple silicon.…
You know the old thought experiment about the AI designed to make paper clips, that quickly decides that in order to maximize paper clips, it will have to get rid of all the humans?
A lot of security teams have a similar idea when it comes to meeting compliance goals: it would be so much simpler if it weren’t for all the pesky users.
That way of thinking has brought us to the current state of endpoint security, which is dominated by MDMs that hamper device performance and turn every laptop into Big Brother. This approach to security is bad for culture and morale, and moreover, it doesn’t actually work. If it did, then no company with an MDM and an annual security training would have a data breach.
Kolide is an endpoint security and fleet management solution that takes a different approach. We help our customers meet their compliance goals–whether that’s for auditors, customers, or leadership–by enlisting the support of end users.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
By reaching out to employees via a friendly Slack DM and educating them about company policies, Kolide can help you build a culture in which everyone contributes to security, because everyone understands how and why to do it. …
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow employees your enemies. I’ve seen it happen. It’s not good.
Kolide is different. (Really.) It’s an endpoint security and device management product that treats users as allies, not enemies.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
Check out Kolide today.…
Network Locations in Mac OS X 10.0. (via 512 Pixels)Network Locations is a feature of macOS that, ever since version 10.0, has allowed users to switch between different sets of network configuration preferences in different environments and situations. It’s not visible in the redesigned System Preferences app of macOS Ventura—and Tyler Loch discovered that the disappearance is not an accident. Loch’s Feedback submission to Apple has been marked as “works as currently designed.”
Length of service in macOS is not reason enough to keep any feature around, but I’ve heard from several people who say they still use this feature and are upset that it’s seemingly been terminated. It’s useful in business situations where different networks have different properties. One colleague of mine says he uses the feature to debug network problems without messing up existing settings and to connect to specific devices when visiting a relative’s house.
If Apple’s truly done with this feature, it seems ripe for a third-party developer to jump in with a replacement.1
MarcoPolo had it going on.This story jogged my memory of Mac utilities past. Way back when, two apps filled a similar role: MarcoPolo and ControlPlane (itself a fork of MarcoPolo).…
We discuss the future of folding phones, the utility of wild Apple rumors, how parents monitor social media, and our travel charging strategies of the moment.…
John Moltz joins Jason to discuss being the person who fixes stuff, battles with IT departments, and the mystery of “TV ratings” in a streaming world.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
As a part of a longer piece (subscription required) about the Big Ten conference’s secondary and streaming college football rights negotiations, The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman writes:
Amazon Prime long was considered the favorite to pick up the Big Ten’s streaming rights, but Apple TV rejoined the negotiation following the USC/UCLA expansion announcement on June 30. NBC’s Peacock also could become a standalone streaming option if the linear network wins a Big Ten package.
Fox is the primary partner of the Big Ten, and reports are that CBS and NBC are likely buying in to split up secondary rights. With ESPN and its ESPN+ streaming service apparently out of the picture,
another streaming partner is probably required. CBS’s Paramount+ or NBC’s Peacock would seem to be be the most likely destination for streamed games, but Amazon and Apple are apparently in the mix as well.
With a deal with MLB, MLS, and rumors of an NFL deal, Apple’s been on a shopping spree for live-sports right. Adding college football would definitely drive another cohort of U.S. viewers to figure out how to view Apple TV+ content.…
The big story in streaming is Warner Bros. Discovery and David Zaslav’s cuts, cancellations, and the merger of HBO Max with Discovery+. Julia and Jason break it all down.…
Kayla Cobb of Decider interviewed Ben Stiller, executive producer of the excellent “Severance” on Apple TV+. Cobb asked Stiller how Apple shares data about the show’s viewership with the people who make it, and Stiller’s response was strange, but not really surprising:
…They don’t tell, it’s really weird. They sort of give you kind of an idea. But it’s not like ratings or box office numbers or anything like that. It’s like graphs and charts that are relative… The fun thing was going to [San Diego] Comic-Con and having a full house for a panel and seeing all those people there. That was the first time I was like, “Oh, wow, this is really like… There are people who are really watching this, like human beings to connect with on it.”
This is a common complaint from the creative people involved in streaming TV. Unlike the days of Nielsen ratings, today the relative success of streaming television is data that’s treated like a trade secret. Knowing that people are liking your show, that it’s a hit or even a word-of-mouth cult sensation, can be a big boost to the energy and motivation of the people who make the shows.
The fact that Ben Stiller still doesn’t have any idea how many people watched “Severance” is par for the course in streaming TV today—this isn’t about Apple, it’s about the entire streaming business—but it’s also kind of ridiculous.…
Thanks to the M2 MacBook Air, Myke has decided to live a two-laptop lifestyle. We ponder the rumored delay of iPadOS 16, whether it’s a good or bad thing, and what form a new iPad Pro might take.…
“If you build a dystopian and cynical security program born out of fear, mistrust, and suspicion, then you will inevitably make your fellow-employees your enemies.”
That’s a quote from Honest Security, Kolide’s mission statement and North Star. It was written by our CEO, Jason Meller, who spent his career in cybersecurity before founding Kolide.
He was troubled by the widely-accepted idea among cybersecurity professionals that end users should be treated, first and foremost, as threats. This way of thinking informs the traditional approach to device management, which relies on MDMs that take control of devices and come with surveillance capabilities that most companies don’t need, or even really want.
Kolide is different. (Really.) It’s an endpoint security and device management product that treats users as allies, not enemies.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
Kolide’s open-source agent collects data across 43 categories on Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. It can answer questions like:
- Do any of my developers have unsecured SSH keys floating around?
- Does everyone have disk encryption, screen lock, and password managers set up?
- Are there any Macs in my fleet in need of a new battery?
…
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is a great Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
I was struck by this section of a report by Politico’s Eric Geller involving the deletion of Secret Service messages related to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol:
The phone resets occurred as the Secret Service was implementing a new mobile device management (MDM) platform, a technology that employers use to centrally manage and preserve emails, photos and other data stored on employees’ phones. Apple’s iMessages cannot be backed up by this system, because they are encrypted and stored on users’ devices, unlike regular text messages.
This explanation seemed off to me, because while iMessage data is end-to-end encrypted in transmission and not stored by Apple as a part of the transmission process, it’s not actually encrypted on the device itself. Which is why iCloud backups, which are unencrypted, can contain the entire contents of iMessage conversations. (This is a workaround that has been used by law enforcement to obtain iMessage records in numerous occasions.)
Geller goes on:
Because of this issue, the Secret Service couldn’t store iMessages in a central location the way it managed its email system and other technologies. Thus, when individual agents failed to manually back up their data before their phones were erased and reconfigured for the new management system, the only copies of those iMessages were lost.
…
How we store and share files in the cloud, the streaming video services we go to when we’re looking for something new to watch, the one computer or tablet we’d use if we could only use one, and our webcam setups.…
My Downstream co-host Julia Alexander, writing for Puck News (subscription required) about the launch of the Apple TV+ series “Black Bird”:
Anecdotally, as someone who talks to a lot of executives in the industry, conversations about “Black Bird” all go a similar way. First, they agree, it’s great. Next comes the shared observation that they hadn’t known anything about the show at all…. Maybe it’s because Apple is used to a keynote presentation creating all the press the company needs—just wait until the next iPhone announcement likely happening this September—but entertainment marketing is different from tech product marketing.
…I was told there were concerns among producers about Apple’s commitment to marketing its shows—to the point that at least one explored hiring outside marketing gurus on their own personal dime to ensure the show got proper support…
As a former studio executive and I spoke more about their frustrations, they noted the obvious irony. Apple, worth a staggering $2.6 trillion, is the world’s most innovative product and marketing company. It seemed strange that this competency had yet to make it to the content group.
Marketing during the era of peak TV is hard, but as someone who lives dead center in Apple’s ecosystem, I hadn’t even heard about “Black Bird” until last week, when Tim Cook mentioned it on the analyst call and I saw an extended trailer for it on last week’s “Friday Night Baseball.”…
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. expects to delay its next major iPad software update by about a month, taking the unusual step of not releasing it at the same time as the new iPhone software, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
It’s unusual, but it makes sense. Not only is macOS already on a later timeline that’s not as tightly tied to the big iPhone release, but the addition of Stage Manager to iPadOS is an important moment for the iPad. The feature has been improving a lot in the summer betas, but there’s a lot more refinement to be done.
I’m glad Apple is apparently being patient with this update and not forcing it out the door when it doesn’t need to, just because that’s how it’s done it in the past.…
Mikah Sargent joins Jason to discuss smart home strategies.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Sometimes we go astray by confusing entertainment for value. In sports, it’s a draft or (in the case of this past Tuesday in Major League Baseball) a trade deadline that provides some entertainment-who will go where?!-but in the end, very little nourishment. The sound and fury you just witnessed don’t quite signify nothing, but what they signify won’t be known for months or years.
This happens in business, too. I’m thinking about it because of an exchange in last week’s Apple conference call with analysts. Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar asked Tim Cook if, since stock prices have crashed for a lot of companies, Apple was specifically looking to acquire companies to grow its services business.
“We always look and we ask ourselves how strategic it is,” Cook replied. “And we never buy just to buy or buy just for revenue purposes. But we would buy something that is strategic for us. To date, we have concentrated on smaller IP and people acquisitions. But I wouldn’t rule anything out for the future. And obviously, we are constantly surveilling the market.”
Now, Apple has a lot of money. It could buy just about anything if it wanted to. But its track record largely involves buying unknown companies and quietly swallowing them whole, leaving no trace of their existence.…
We told you a couple of weeks ago about the latest update to OmniFocus, the task manager from The Omni Group, which adds an interesting new way to control the app – with your voice. Now we’re going to take a closer look at how it works.
To import new voice commands, navigate to the Voice Control area of Accessibility in System Preferences. Here, a collection of OmniFocus commands has been installed.Speak to the Task Manager The Omni Group says that OmniFocus, plus Voice Control, plus custom voice command scripts you install on your Mac or iOS device, give you full control of the app with your voice. Create tasks, change their due dates, add information, export them, and use any OmniFocus menu item.
OmniFocus’ new voice commands rely on the Voice Control accessibility feature that’s built into macOS and iOS. Enable Voice Control, then use simple spoken commands to have OmniFocus do your bidding. Behind the scenes, OmniFocus uses the Omni Automation scripting implementation to make it all work on the Mac. On iOS or the Mac, voice commands can also trigger shortcuts.
Omni Automation is based on Core JavaScript in WebKit. All Omni apps support it, but OmniFocus is the first to allow control by voice.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Like seemingly everyone else, during the early days of the pandemic I tried to spruce up our outdoor space by buying some LED string lights. They were affordable, and with a simple kit I was able to suspend some nice lighting above my patio.
But plugging and unplugging the lights was no good, so I began my chase of an acceptable way to control the lights remotely—turning them on and off, yes, but also dimming them. I started with a radio-based remote dimmer, which worked—but the remote wasn’t very good, and frequently required multiple button presses to do the job.
I dreamt of an outdoor dimmer compatible with HomeKit. Lutron makes an outdoor smart plug that’s HomeKit compatible, and I tried it—but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer dimmer functionality, just on and off. I finally found the Treatlife outdoor smart dimmer plug, which did work—with Alexa and Google Home, but not HomeKit.
So it was Homebridge to the rescue! Turns out that Treatlife is just one brand name for the Tuya line of products, and there was a Homebridge app for that. After registering as a Tuya developer and getting an API key, I was able to get the dimmer to run somewhat reliably.…
This week Jason and Myke take a closer look at Apple’s weird quarterly results, which reassured Wall Street while not being altogether reassuring. Then automotive expert Sam Abuelsamid joins Jason to talk about what Apple’s WWDC 2022 announcement of a new integrated CarPlay might actually mean if and when it arrives late next year.…
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and free ad blocker. With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also now blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by it’s community of users.
So, join over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss the beta lifestyle, adapting to the Mac Studio, Apple’s financial results, and Stephen’s Kickstarter project.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide knows how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third-party auditor—they just went through it themselves. They learned firsthand something their customers had been telling them for a while: that they couldn’t have gotten their SOC certification without using their own product.
Kolide is an endpoint security solution for Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Kolide gives IT admins a single dashboard, through which you can prove that your fleet has the security measures in place that auditors care about.
You should check out Kolide today.…
Being a member of Six Colors means you get access to members-only posts, the Six Colors Podcast, and a whole lot more. For a few years we’ve also offered a community for members in Slack. Unfortunately, while we love Slack, it’s not really a product made for communities like ours. It doesn’t offer the tools we need to continue running our membership plans and building a solid, growing community.
So this week we turned on the lights at the new Six Colors Discord. If you’d like to join, you can click this link or visit the Six Colors member center and find the link there.
I hope to see you there!…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Inflation runs rampant. Threats of recession loom. And on Thursday Apple strolled right in, whistling a happy tune, turning in yet another record set of financial results. The company set a fiscal third-quarter revenue record, with $83 billion in receipts, up 2 percent from last year.
But look deeper, and you’ll see that this was an unusual quarter for Apple. The company was battered by a “cocktail of headwinds,” to quote Apple CFO Luca Maestri using a metaphor that wasn’t just mixed, but shaken and stirred. Mac sales were down, wearables took a beating, and even the seemingly invincible Services line showed some softness.
And yet, it was a pretty good quarter, considering. I realize that the word “considering” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but it’s true. Wall Street seemed relieved that Apple turned in a good, if not great, quarter. Here’s what jumped out at me in the numbers (and in the post-game phone call Apple’s executives traditionally do with financial analysts).…
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri are talking to analysts after revealing Apple’s quarterly financial results. Here’s an ongoing transcript.
Tim Cook’s opening statement Today, Apple is reporting another record June quarter, with revenue of $83 billion, which was better than we expected, despite supply constraints, strong foreign exchange headwinds, and the impact of our business in Russia. We set June quarter records in the Americas, in Europe, and in the Rest of Asia Pacific region. We also saw June quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets with very strong double-digit growth in Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and a near doubling of revenue in India. We saw great enthusiasm for our products and services, resulting in an all time record for our installed base of active devices. Our supply constraints were less than we anticipated at the beginning of the quarter, coming in slightly below the range we discussed during our last call.
We know that this is a time of significant challenge around the world. For all of us confronting new variants of COVID 19, to those experiencing a prolonged humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, and everyone dealing with the consequences of an uncertain economic environment.…
Apple’s fiscal results are out. The company generated $83B in revenue. Compared to the year-ago quarter, Mac sales were down 10%, iPad sales down 2%, iPhone up 3%, Services up 13%, and Wearables down 8%.
Here are all the charts!
…
The Apple Store Time Machine is a project by Michael Steeber, who has been a go-to authoring on Apple’s retail stores for many years. It’s a free Mac app called Shop Different, built with Unity, that lets you walk through four different Apple Stores as if you were in a video game. Steeber writes:
The Apple Store Time Machine is a celebration of the places and products that have shaped our lives for more than twenty years. This interactive experience recreates memorable moments in Apple history with painstaking detail and historical accuracy.
The stores are meticulous re-creations of the stores as they actually looked: The first Apple Store in Tysons Corner, Virginia in May 2001; the first “mini” store in Palo Alto in October 2004; the Apple Fifth Avenue store in New York in May 2006; and the Infinite Loop campus store in September 2015.
Steeber’s project brought up memories of my own. I covered the Palo Alto mini store opening for Macworld!
Steve Jobs (right) and Ron Johnson discuss the mini store concept before unveiling it.How accurate is it? I’ll let you decide for yourself – below is an image of the Time Machine and an actual photo from March 23, 2020—the day the store opened, seven months before Steeber’s scenario.…
We fear change. When I first saw that the Music app in iOS 16 had done away with its old controls for adjusting volume and scrubbing, I was confused and upset. It’s human nature. But now that I’ve used them a little more… I think I approve.
Here’s what it’s been like forever: both the volume and runtime of a track in Music are represented by a horizontal line, with a little dot on the line representing the current status. As your track plays, the little dot in the runtime area slowly progresses from the far left side to the far right. Likewise, the dot at the left side of the volume slider means your volume is all the way down, and on the right side it means it’s all the way up.
In iOS 16, the dots are banished. Instead, there’s just a line with a part of it that’s a different level of opacity. The big problem here is that the dots were very visible, letting you read the current status of the app pretty easily. I’ve got some concerns about the legibility of the two lines in iOS 16, though at least as of the latest beta, the contrast seems to be enough to make status clear.…
For those who didn’t hear the news, Jason is a regular panelist on TWiT’s MacBreak Weekly now. This week we discussed the Newton cameo in “For All Mankind,” Rene Ritchie going to YouTube (which is why Jason is now on MacBreak Weekly!), patents, and the M2 MacBook Air.…
Dan had a baby so we discuss tech advice for new parents and our favorite toys. But we also dig into invasive network video cameras, the ruination of Instagram, and if VR is ever going to be a thing.…
Time zones. I hate them. But without them, I’d be waking up with the sunrise at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. or some other outlandish times. I do, however, enjoy collaborating with people in different times zones and putting my stuff out there to be read by anyone, anywhere, regardless of time zone.
Fortunately, our devices can be faithful helpers when it comes to dealing with time zones. I use my calendar app of choice, Fantastical to convert many of my events to the right time zones. However, I’ve struggled to communicate times to others in places like this website and in Slack and Discord.
One app that can help is Elsewhen from The Lovely Developers, a fun group that sprung out of the Relay FM Discord. Elsewhen lets you quickly set a date and time and then translate it — either into a bunch of human-readable time zones, or into Discord’s time-code format.
I love the Discord feature, which lets me say that Apple’s quarterly results will be available <t:1659040203:f> and have the result — July 28, 2022 at 1:30 PM Pacific — be displayed to everyone in their local time. For communicating out of Discord, the Time List view in Elsewhen lets you pop things on the clipboard:
- 🇺🇸 – 1:30 PM Pacific
- 🇺🇸 – 3:30 PM Central
- 🇺🇸 – 4:30 PM Eastern
- 🇬🇧 – 9:30 PM BST
- 🇪🇺 – 10:30 PM CET
It’s a small utility (and I’d love for the Lovely Developers to make it more customizable), but it’s great to be able to quickly communicates times in Discord and elsewhere and make sure that everyone’s on the same page.…
Goodreads, overriden by Noir.One of my favorite Safari extensions is Noir, which applies a dark stylesheet to websites that don’t get satisfactorily dark when in Dark Mode. The $3 app, which is available for macOS and iOS, just got a big update.
Noir now offers a library of dark themes you can import, and if that’s not enough, you can create your own (and share them with your friends). Yes, you can configure different themes for different sites. iPhone and iPad users can now fully customize keyboard shortcuts, including a bunch of optional shortcuts.
I use Safari a lot on my iPad in the evening with Dark Mode enabled, and while I wish every website would properly implement a dark mode, Noir is the next best thing. (And yes, it will also let you override sites that offer “dark modes” that are either bad or stubbornly not dark.)…
Just imagine. (Mock-up by Joe Rosensteel.)In my previous column I wrote about the disappointment over the current state of tvOS and the lack of any significant forward movement with the platform. Now I want to focus on one area where I think Apple could substantially revamp and improve the Apple TV interface: a new home screen that unifies the existing home screen and the Apple TV app.
Revising and unifying navigation on tvOS has gone from being sorely needed to being absolutely critical to the platform. Even Amazon, which has had a pretty bad home screen experience for Fire TV users, just heavily refreshed its home screen.
(I wrote most of this this piece just before Amazon announced its revamp… and here it is basically doing what I what I had outlined. You’d think it would be frustrating, but it’s strangely validating. I wish Apple would follow Amazon down this path.)
Over the years, the demands we place on computers connected to our TV have shifted. Here’s what we need today:
- The ability to resume the last item watched.
- A collection of other items that are in progress, including shows that have new episodes, or media that was partially played on other devices.
… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Jason and Julia answer your letters. So many questions! We discuss live TV on Apple channels, merger mania, niche streaming, valuable hot-dog streaming rights, “it’s just an eight-hour movie”, and tactical release times.…
In 2021, our company went through the SOC 2 Type 1 audit, and we found out just how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third party auditor. We also learned firsthand something our customers had been telling us for a while: that we couldn’t have gotten our SOC certification without using our own product.
That product is Kolide, an endpoint security solution for Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Kolide gives IT admins a single dashboard, through which you can prove that your fleet has the security measures in place that auditors care about.
With Kolide, you can instantly see whether:
- Firewalls and screen lock are enabled
- Operating systems are up-to-date
- Password managers are installed
Kolide also provides visibility into nuanced issues that MDMs can’t address, like whether developers have unencrypted SSH keys or plaintext two factor authentication backup codes.
What’s more, Kolide balances this visibility with respect for user privacy and autonomy. Users can visit the Privacy Center to see exactly what device data is being collected and why. And when Kolide detects a vulnerability on a user’s device, it reaches out via Slack to notify them of the problem, and provides step-by-step instructions on how to solve it. …
In this special Summer of Fun episode, Jason and Myke welcome three special guests to discuss how development, accessibility, and widgets have been affected by Apple’s latest operating-system cycle.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.
Here’s Kolide’s secret sauce: It communicates security detection and compliance issues to users via Slack messages, reaching them directly and providing them with the information they need to help make their organization more secure. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance.
You should check out Kolide today.…
James Thomson officially declares Jason a developer. James just wants panda stickers.
- eInkCalendar
- SystemSix
- WeatherKit API woes
- Lametric Time
- Substance 3D Painter
- PCalc
- MiSTer
… Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
A keyboard lurks beneath my desk.I’ve wanted Touch ID on my Mac for a long time. Here at Six Colors, we’ve wished for it since the earliest days of this site. But when it arrived, it was a strictly laptop-only affair.
Finally, in 2021, Apple gave desktop users what we had wanted, in the form of a new Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. Hooray!
Except… for the last few years, I’ve been using a clicky mechanical keyboard at my desk. (Currently it’s a Keychron Q1 built for me by my pal Myke Hurley.) I want to have it all! I want a mechanical keyboard and Touch ID! Money is no object!
…Which is good, because the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID costs $149 (a little less if you buy it used). But hey, I said money was no object. I wanted the sweet, sweet power of Touch ID on the tip of my finger.
Which, great, money exchanged for goods. A couple of days later, I had the keyboard. So now what? I don’t really want two keyboards on my desk. Taking another cue from Myke, I decided to attach some velcro tape on the keyboard and the bottom of my desk, positioning the keyboard so that the Touch ID sensor was at the very front of the underside of my desk.…
We live in a wonderful era for Apple laptops. The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros provide desktop power and stunning HDR displays. The new M2 MacBook Air has now joined the family, with a similar striking design and the Air’s trademark smaller size and weight.
After a dark period where Apple struggled with flawed laptop keyboards, a painful transition to USB-C, and an increasingly frustrating relationship with Intel, things haven’t looked this bright in quite some time. That’s why, as Apple looks on proudly at the new line of laptops that it has fashioned over the past couple of years, I have only one request: More, please.…
How we pay online, in stores, and elsewhere. How we use (or wish we could use) our smartphones to aid in travel. The data we’d like to see on our iPhone Lock Screen. Our three favorite emoji and a new emoji we’re most excited about.…
The latest update to the Omni Group’s OmniFocus task manager has a mild-mannered version number – 3.13 – but it includes one pretty big new feature. You can now control the app (on iPhone, iPad, or Mac) using your voice, with an assist from JavaScript-based Omni Automation features and the Voice Control accessibility feature that’s built into macOS and iOS.
Voice Control is an accessibility feature designed for those with physical disabilities, like motor delays that make it difficult to use gestures or a keyboard. Once Voice Control is enabled, you can control the Mac or iOS interface and dictate and correct text. It goes well beyond what you can do with Siri. Voice Control works inside apps, too, but OmniFocus has beefed up that support with hooks to its own automation scheme.
With Voice Control enabled, and a set of scripts provided by Omni, you can speak commands to create OmniFocus tasks, update or refer them, or hear which tasks are due, among many other options.
You can also create custom commands, or use Voice Control commands to trigger shortcuts.
Omni says Voice Control support is coming to its other apps, beginning later this year. Besides OminFocus, the company’s productivity tools include OmniOutliner, OmniPlan and OmniGraffle.…
Myke and Jason both have new M2 MacBook Airs, so it’s time for our full review. Jason opens the Stocks app for the first time in ages. Jony Ive’s long fade-out from Apple is completed. And in honor of World Emoji Day, we select our favorite emojis in seven categories.…
“When was the last time you restarted it?”
If you’ve ever worked at a service desk, you’ve probably wanted to tattoo this question on your forehead.
Ditto for: “What device drivers do you have installed?” and “What do you MEAN you wrote the password on a sticky note and then you lost the sticky note?!”
These are the types of issues that make up the majority of help desk tickets at many companies.
In order to help users through them, you need visibility into your fleet of devices. But that’s a challenge, especially when your company is spread across Mac, Windows, and (especially) Linux.
Kolide is the endpoint security and fleet management solution that provides cross-platform visibility via a single dashboard.
With Kolide’s open-source agent, the IT team can run checks that get to the heart of problems, whether that’s checking available disk space, searching for suspicious browser extensions, or, yes, checking the time since the last restart.
Best of all, Kolide can actually prevent these issues, by notifying users via Slack when their device is at risk, and giving them step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue themselves.
Unlike the legacy approach of MDMs, Kolide takes a user-first approach that relies on people to fix problems that can’t be automated.…
Apple’s public betas are an opportunity for all of us—not just developers prepping apps—to get a peek into the future of the company’s software. Granted, we’re not transporting ourselves to a far-off year where no doubt we’ll all be wearing Apple-branded headsets and riding in Apple cars—this time travel jaunt is only a matter of months. But it’s still a chance to see what new capabilities we’ll be able to take advantage of come the fall.
If we zoom out a bit, though, we can also see the hallmarks of places where Apple is investing in the future, or—to use the classic adage that has become an Apple operating principle—skating to where the puck will be. Because Apple has a tendency to lay the groundwork for major changes years in advance, knowing it’s going to take some time for the rest of the world to catch up.
This year is no different. iOS and iPadOS 16, macOS Ventura, watchOS 9, even the latest update to the HomePod software are all about not just the year ahead, but the years ahead, with features that will change our lives in big ways—eventually. Just not necessarily right away.…
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. It’s all about helping customers meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their end users with a structured, message-based approach.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is getting the “average” person involved—and so do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to their employees directly in Slack via Kolide’s app.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.…
We discuss our favorite features of the public betas and Dan’s going on leave! (This episode also contains the complete audio of our hourlong YouTube live stream about the M2 MacBook Air.)…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The definitive Mac of the last decade was the 13-inch MacBook Air, introduced in 2010 and featuring a wedge-shaped design. It influenced all the Apple laptops (and let’s face it, a lot of PC laptops) that came after it. Its last major update in 2018 added a Retina display and shrunk its dimensions down a bit, but it still had all the classic traits of a MacBook Air.
The new M2 MacBook Air, introduced by Apple in June and shipping this week, is Apple’s first real attempt to reimagine that classic MacBook Air design. And since 2020’s M1 MacBook Air was a dead ringer for the Intel models that preceded it, it’s also Apple’s first chance to redesign the Air for the Apple silicon era.
The result is a laptop that feels very much like the smaller cousin of Apple’s top-of-the-line laptops and not the stuck-in-the-past 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro Apple announced alongside the new MacBook Air. This is the new standard bearer, the computer that will (due to the popularity of laptops in general and the MacBook Air in particular) most likely end up being the definitive Mac of this decade.
Fortunately for all of us, it’s a very good laptop.…
The 400th episode spectacular! Celebrate Prime Day! Discuss the public betas! And some important news from one of our hosts.…
Digital lending, when to install public betas, our favorite utility apps, and how we feel about TikTok’s algorithm changes.…
JWST images, Apple’s public betas, the fate of the Apple Car, Lockdown Mode, and MacBook Air orders.…
How do the creators of TV shows know how well their shows are doing when their streaming services won’t share meaningful data? Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe tired, or getting creative? And which streamer ranked tops in Vulture’s survey?…
Tripp Mickle, reporting for the New York Times:
Mr. Ive and Apple have agreed to stop working together**, according to two people with knowledge of their contractual agreement, ending a three-decade run during which the designer helped define every rounded corner of an iPhone and guided development of its only new product category in recent years, the Apple Watch….
When Mr. Ive left Apple in 2019 to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, the iPhone maker signed a multiyear contract with him valued at more than $100 million. That made Apple his firm’s primary client, people with knowledge of the agreement said… In recent weeks, with the contract coming up for renewal, the parties agreed not to extend it. Some Apple executives had questioned how much the company was paying Mr. Ive and had grown frustrated after several of its designers left to join Mr. Ive’s firm. And Mr. Ive wanted the freedom to take on clients without needing Apple’s clearance, these people said.
Some executive departures are sudden and shocking. Others are the long, slow goodbye. Apple and Jony Ive chose the latter path, with him gradually reducing his work at Apple, then becoming a highly paid consultant.…
Apple’s iOS, macOS, and iPadOS betas have gone public and we have our first impressions! Also, the M2 MacBook Air has gone on sale, the new “extreme sports” Apple Watch is coming into focus, and for the Summer of Fun we’re drafting favorite app icons.…
If it’s July, that can mean only one thing: it’s Apple’s public beta season. As has become de rigueur for this time of year, Apple has released the preview version of its upcoming software platform updates, giving the public its first chance at seeing the latest capabilities coming to their devices this fall.
iOS 16 was first announced at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference last month showed off a release with a handful of marquee features, including the biggest redesign to the iPhone’s lock screen in years, and a ton of smaller—but in many ways no less significant—enhancements. Some of those are the kind of slow-burn features that may end up having an enormous effect on the way we use our technology, but will take a while to come into their own. (I’m looking at you, passkeys. And CarPlay.)
It’s also worth noting that, of course, most of the new features in iOS 16 also apply to iPadOS 16, and many also to macOS Ventura. Such is the benefit of a unified platform architecture.
As always, installing the public beta is a highly personal choice. Some features may be buggy, others might not be complete yet, and there can often be issues with reliability and battery life.…
Apple’s macOS Ventura, an update due to ship this fall that has arrived Monday as a public beta preview, is full of both little feature refinements and big swings at improving Mac productivity. On the small side, it’s improved search in Spotlight and Mail, expanded Handoff support to include FaceTime calls, and provided some much-needed new features to Messages. There are dozens of small changes, and if one of them hits an app or feature you rely on, the change may make (or break) the entire upgrade for you.
Then there’s the big stuff. In Ventura, Apple has added an entirely new way to manage the many windows can can litter our screens. It has enlisted the optics of the excellent cameras on the iPhone to act as a substitute for often-lackluster Apple webcams. It’s recognized that families might want to share their iCloud Photo Libraries. And it’s thrown out the venerable System Preferences app, a part of Mac OS X since the early days, and replaced it with a new System Settings app that’s reminiscent of iOS.
In this first look at Ventura on the occasion of its release in a Public Beta, I’m going to focus on the big stuff.…
You know the old thought experiment about the AI designed to make paper clips, that quickly decides that in order to maximize paper clips, it will have to get rid of all the humans?
A lot of security teams have a similar idea when it comes to meeting compliance goals: it would be so much simpler if it weren’t for all the pesky users.
That way of thinking has brought us to the current state of endpoint security, which is dominated by MDMs that hamper device performance and turn every laptop into Big Brother. This approach to security is bad for culture and morale, and moreover, it doesn’t actually work. If it did, then no company with an MDM and an annual security training would have a data breach.
Kolide is an endpoint security and fleet management solution that takes a different approach. We help our customers meet their compliance goals–whether that’s for auditors, customers, or leadership–by enlisting the support of end users.
Kolide works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they’re important, and giving them step-by-step instructions to resolve them themselves.
By reaching out to employees via a friendly Slack DM and educating them about company policies, Kolide can help you build a culture in which everyone contributes to security, because everyone understands how and why to do it. …
This fall marks the eighth anniversary of the announcement of Apple’s newest major hardware category, the Apple Watch. In that time, it’s become the leading example of a wearable device and though other companies have produced competitors, none have quite managed to match the popularity or cachet of the Apple Watch.
The device has evolved too–perhaps not as dramatically as the iPhone did in its first eight years–changing from a do-everything phone replacement on the wrist to one focused on health and fitness…and then sort of back to its phone replacement roots. It’s gotten a larger screen, more sensors, and different case materials, but you still can’t make your own watchfaces.
What’s on tap for the Apple Watch this fall? What does Apple, if you’ll excuse the expression, have up its sleeve? Unsurprisingly, rumors already abound.…
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Magic Lasso Adblock is a great ad blocker for Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native content blocking extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices. Along with respecting your privacy, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking.
Join the community of over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
Jason bought an M2 MacBook Air, but Dan’s M1 Air is Just Fine. Public Betas are in the air. And Lockdown Mode joins Developer Mode in Apple’s new mode-centric worldview.…
As promised, the M2 MacBook Air went on sale Friday with the first machines shipping to customers next Friday. (I got my hands on one for a little while at WWDC, but haven’t touched one since.)
This product has been repeatedly delayed by supply-chain issues, and so it’s not surprising that many of the people I’ve seen on Twitter are reporting that their MacBook Airs are due to ship in August:
From what I saw during the first minute, only the base-model Air was actually available for July 15 delivery.
Any change beyond the two stock configs bumped it to at least July 20–26, and usually August 2–9.
So don’t beat yourself up for being too slow — you probably weren’t. https://t.co/63RBRNKLOH
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) July 8, 2022
In all likelihood, Apple built a lot of base-model Airs and maybe some of the higher-end configuration, in order to fill its sales channel with M2 Airs next week. But if you want one that’s custom in any way, you’ll need to wait a little bit.
(For the record, I ordered an M2 Air in Midnight, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, for my family. It’s due August 2-9, like almost everyone else’s.)…
Where there’s smoke, there may or may not be fire, especially if you have a Google Nest Protect.…
Our coding experiences, the toys we collect and enjoy, our thoughts on new smartphones with current-gen silicon, how we feel about targeted ads, and how we manage our online privacy settings.…
Another year, another Apple product calendar from Stephen Hackett:
The calendar features my own product photography of Apple products, with each month highlighting some of Apple’s software announcements over the years. Each calendar measures 20 inches by 13 inches (50.8 x 33.02 cm) when it’s hanging on your wall with a simple thumbtack or pin.
I’ve got this year’s calendar and it’s great. The photos are from Stephen’s vast collection of vintage Apple hardware, but they’re whimsical in ways you may not expect. Next year’s calendar features a shot of a Mac Pro wheel hiding in the grass at Apple Park. (True story: Before the WWDC keynote, Stephen was passing around his Mac Pro wheel and explaining that he brought it specifically for a stolen photo shoot on the Apple campus. Scandalous!)
If you like Apple stuff and wall calendars, this Kickstarter is a no-brainer.…
This is a fascinating announcement of a feature of iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura that wasn’t previewed at WWDC:
Apple today detailed two initiatives to help protect users who may be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats, such as those from private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware. Lockdown Mode — the first major capability of its kind, coming this fall with iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura — is an extreme, optional protection for the very small number of users who face grave, targeted threats to their digital security
Are you a candidate to use Lockdown Mode? You probably know it if you are. It’s primarily for a very small group of people who are journalists, dissidents, or people in positions of power who are targeted—usually by state actors. These are “the most sophisticated digital threats,” Apple says, “such as those from NSO Group and other private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware.”
Apple calls the feature “extreme,” and it is. Among its features:
- Messages attachments are limited to images and link previews are blocked
- Features like just-in-time JavaScript compilation are disabled on all sites that you haven’t whitelisted.
- Incoming Apple service requests (like FaceTime) are blocked if you don’t have a previous call history with the person making the request.
…
I come here not to bury the iPhone mini but to praise it. If reports are true, the iPhone 13 mini will be the last of its line, replaced by a larger iPhone 14 Max this fall. And as someone who owns and loves an iPhone 13 mini, this makes me sad.
It seems that not enough people share my love for the iPhone 13 mini for Apple to update it for the iPhone 14 generation. No matter: The iPhone 13 mini is a great device. So great, in fact, that I suspect we haven’t seen the end of its design yet.…
I recently said goodbye to an old friend – a 12-channel analog audio mixer I’ve used to produce podcasts since around 2007. It was always overkill, even when I recorded shows around my kitchen table with three or four guests. This mixer was better suited to making and recording music, but I loved the flexibility it offered. I decided to replace it with something that could both connect directly to a modern computer and give me some podcast-specific features that didn’t require quite as much fiddling and cabling as the mixer did. I chose the Zoom PodTrak P4, a four-port audio interface and recorder that’s marketed specifically to podcasters. I’ve used it for about a month.
Three Roads I plan to do three specific kinds of audio work with the P4. First, I wanted to record a podcast from my home “pod closet” with remote guests, all connected by conferencing software. The second kind of recording I do a lot is for my job as a radio reporter. I call interview subjects via the phone or FaceTime Audio and record their voices for later cutting into reported stories. Lastly, I planned to record podcasts or radio interviews in-person with guests, whether I’m doing it at home or at a conference.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
At various points during the past several years, Apple has been rated the most valuable corporation in the world. And it’s pretty safe to assume that the company didn’t get to that point without being strategic about how it positions its products.
One big part of what’s made Apple so successful is that the company makes sure that it’s got products at every price point. No, it doesn’t compete in the super-budget department when it comes to devices—Apple is happy to leave those low-margin offerings for the likes of Android phones and Dell PCs—but when it does enter a market, it makes sure it always has a solid spread.
Of course, when you’re a company that builds powerful, good-looking devices and values its profit margins, your options are limited somewhat when it comes to making your devices more affordable. Which has led to a key part of Apple’s strategy across all its lineups: in with the old. Apple’s made a science out of retaining older products and selling them at lower prices in order to plug holes in their lineups, and it’s a move that continues to serve the company well.…
This July 4 Jason spends some time away from the grill to discuss charity shops, stroopwafels, and the differences between the U.S. and the UK. Meanwhile, Myke has been inspired to build his own iPad-based status board. Vive la différence, as they say in yet another country.…
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads and now blocks all YouTube ads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and free ad blocker. With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
The app also now blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads; including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by it’s community of users.
So, join over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari – stopping you from being followed by ads around the web. Along with respecting your privacy, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
Jason can see into the future, we ponder how non-nerds will receive some new beta features, and the great mystery of Apple’s M2 Mac roll-out.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
A prototype iOS widgetI’ve spent 17 years with a weather station in my backyard, and parsing that data in interesting ways. Everybody needs a hobby.
At WWDC 2022, Apple announced that it was releasing its follow-on from Dark Sky, which it acquired in 2020: it’s called WeatherKit, and it will be available to apps on Apple’s platforms (via Swift), as well as on the web and other platforms (via a web-based REST API). App developers, who pay $100 a year to Apple for the privilege, will get 500,000 API queries per month as a part of their membership—and the prices go up from there.
Last week I had a moment of realization: I pay for an Apple developer account for various reasons. That means I’ve got access to WeatherKit! And that means that after years of building ways to visualize the current and past weather at my house, I could consider the future. (And yes, I could’ve done this years ago with a different weather API like OpenWeatherMap—which offers a million queries a month for free!—but I didn’t. And I’ve come to respect Dark Sky’s data. The opportunity to use a brand-new Apple service seemed too good to pass up.)…
Look, not everybody pays as close attention to Apple announcements as we here at Six Colors—your preeminent source for Apple news1—do. That’s understandable: most of the things that Apple showed off at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote this month won’t materialize until this fall at the very earliest. And even then, more eyes will be on the actual new phones that the company is releasing.
But you know what’s coming: sooner or later, all those software updates are going to make their way onto the devices of your friends and family and you—yes, you—are going to be the one called upon to explain them.
So, in advance of the inevitable tsunami of calls, emails, texts, and FaceTimes, allow for me to provide you with the following invaluable resource: I’ve combed through Apple’s announcements to discover the features that your less tech savvy friends and relatives are definitely going to be asking you about and how you can explain them to the layperson.
Five features to share
Passkeys: When is a password not a password? When it’s a passkey! Stress that the good news is they’ll never need to come up with another password. The bad news is no, they can’t keep using fluffybunny1974 for every single site.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
When iOS 14 came out, TikTok was filled with videos of extreme iPhone interface customization techniques, courtesy of custom widgets and icon replacement via Shortcuts. Everyone’s aesthetic is different, and you might have considered those customizations silly or gaudy, or even ugly, but the success of those videos sent a powerful signal: people want to customize their devices.
It’s a tale as old as time, dating back to the early days of the Mac. And yet modern Apple has been reluctant to let users customize their devices. Yes, you can set your own Lock Screen and wallpaper, but beyond that, things have been pretty limited.
But the iOS 16 Lock Screen, with its adjustable fonts, color overlays, and custom widgets, suggests that Apple may be entering a new phase. It seems that Apple has taken notice of that positive reaction to iOS 14 and has decided to loosen the reins a little bit. The Lock Screen may be just the start of the changes in the works.…
Me, almost 15 years ago at Macworld:
Apple’s iPhone is a product that’s been years in the making. Apple’s designers have been working on it for years, and the Web has been buzzing about Apple’s entry into the phone market for just as long—or maybe even longer. But now, after six months of intense speculation since its introduction at Macworld Expo, the iPhone has arrived. Although the iPhone is not without a few quirks, it makes good on the hype that surrounded it.
While it’s the 15th anniversary of the iPhone today, I wasn’t one of the reviewers under embargo. We sent out Macworld staffers to wait in lines to buy them—thanks to Brian X. Chen, now of the New York Times, for buying the one I ended up taking with me to review. I wrote my review while on vacation in a canvas-topped tent cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and had to drive down into civilization to file it. What a contrast between such a new, high-tech device and the completely rustic setting.
My then two-year-old son in a Sierra meadow, with cookie. Shot on original iPhone.Anyway, happy 15th to the device that changed everything.…
Our favorite iPhones of yesteryear, how paranoid we are about our online privacy, our sleep tracking habits, and where we go to work outside of our homes.…
Mac hacker extraordinaire Gui Rambo has launched an open-source project, VirtualBuddy, that lets you virtualize macOS on Apple silicon Macs for free:
VirtualBuddy can virtualize macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon, with the goal of offering features that are useful to developers who need to test their apps on multiple versions of macOS, especially betas.
I’ve put this on my to-investigate list. It might be especially useful during beta-testing summers.…
We discuss the “Lightyear” box office and the future of Pixar, finding better ways to binge through smart software, and how streaming franchises are constructed. And then, once again, there’s Sports Corner.…
Jason Snell returns to John Gruber’s The Talk Show to discuss the biggest threads from WWDC 2022 — in particular, Stage Manager and the M2 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook “Pro”. No sports talk (unless you count soccer).…
For the Summer of Fun, Jason and Myke compare their iPhones—one’s Max, one’s Mini, but which one has the most apps and which one has the most photos? Also, Mark Gurman’s got our next 75 episodes plotted out thanks to his detailed dump of future Apple product announcements, Jason is unenthusiastic about the M2 MacBook Pro, and Justin did it.…
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web.
It’s a free and native Safari content blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac that’s been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.
Over 200,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Remove ad trackers, annoyances and background crypto-mining scripts
- Browse common websites 2.0x faster
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by it’s community of users.
With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Download for free today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.…
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances, letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data. Along with blocking all web ads, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to also block video ads.
Download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
In an earth-shattering event, Mail Merge returns to Pages. Oh, and the M2 arrived, too! (This episode also includes the audio of our 50-minute livestream from Wednesday morning about the M2 and MacBook Pro, for those who prefer podcasts to YouTube livestreams.)…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Bjørn Karmann created the typeface Occlusion Grotesque by tracing and carving an initial typeface into a beech tree in Denmark.1 The tree is then left alone for a year, at which point the natural growth processes of the tree cause the trunk to expand, stretching the bark while also attempting to close the wound caused by the letter carvings. Karmann explains:
Returning to the tree reveals an unsupervised transformation that is unique to each letter of the alphabet. The artist now takes on an observant role and meticulously documents the letters with a camera and measurement tools. This is repeated every year with the important detail that the camera settings, lens, distance, and measurements stay consistent at every observation.
The digitalization from the tree to a usable font invites the artist to become the design interpreter. For the most part, the letters can be traced, but occasionally due to unexpected bark behavior, edge cracking, and blurring of boundaries, the artist has to take decisions without diverting from the tree’s intent.
The annual growth of the type is not represented in traditional font weights, but denotes the year of growth being used. What a fascinating and beautiful project.
[Via Paul Lukas and Michael Hochman.…
My pal Glenn Fleishman has a new book out, and it’s all about FaceTime and Messages. You’d think that there would be little information to be gleaned about these stock Apple apps. But you’d be wrong. As Glenn writes on his blog:
I learned so many new tricks and hidden features in writing this book, I can’t even begin to describe them all. (That, I guess, is what a book is for).
- Both FaceTime and Messages support screen sharing, but in different ways with different sets of features. I explain both, and why to choose one over the other.
- iPhones and iPads (on supported models) can simulate direct eye contact in FaceTime—even when you’re not looking at the camera.
- Include friends and colleagues on Android and Windows in your FaceTime calls.
- Point your iPhone at a sign or piece of paper with a phone number and dial that number with a couple of taps (using Live Text on supported models).
- Insert threaded replies in a multi-person chat.
- Watch streaming video or listen to streaming audio with friends over FaceTime with SharePlay.
There’s a lot more to these apps than meets the eye, and Glenn is especially good at digging out all of the details and nuances.…
Our frivolous in-app purchases, how we use tech to stay safe in the age of COVID, our thoughts on RCS messaging, and recognizing the signs of true artificial intelligence.…
What the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro is… depends on your perspective.
If you’re taking the 1000-foot overview of the Mac market, it’s most notable for being the first shipping product to include the M2, Apple’s second-generation home-designed Mac processor. If you consider it out of context, it appears to be a thin, light, powerful laptop for a reasonable (for Apple) base price. And if you glance around at the rest of Apple’s other laptops, it seems like a relic from a bygone era that’s somehow survived into the present.
Every one of those views is absolutely true.
The debut of the M2 The M2 processor is the beginning of the second turn of the wheel for Apple’s Mac processor designs. Like the M1 before it, it’s the base model, undoubtedly to be followed up by the likes of M2 Pro and M2 Max and M2 Ultra and… whatever comes beyond Ultra?
A lot of the differences between the M1 and the M2 are purely generational. The M1 was based on the A14 processor used in the iPhone 12, and the M2 is based on the A15 processor used in the iPhone 13. That means updated generations of CPU and GPU cores, the Secure Enclave, and the Neural Engine.…
Pages’s reimplented Mail Merge feature on macOS.After almost a decade, I guess it’s time to pack in my posters, stickers, and Tim Cook and Craig Federighi phone call scripts for the “Bring Mail Merge back to Pages!” campaign1 and declare victory. Because, yes, Mail Merge has returned to Pages.
Mail Merge in Pages for the first time on iOS.The feature was originally included in Apple’s word processing software, but got the axe in 2013’s version 5.0, when Apple redesigned its iWork suite to give even footing across the iOS, iPadOS, and macOS platforms. In the interim, Mail Merge remained possible only via workarounds like Sal Soghoian’s Pages Data Merge app.
Version 12.1, released today, brings a brand new implementation, however, which lets you populate a template document either from your contacts or a spreadsheet. On the Mac, just create a template with the File > New command or open an existing one, and then choose File > Mail Merge to step through the process. (The feature’s also available for the first time in the iOS and iPadOS versions of Pages, under the three dots menu: tap Mail Merge to start the process.)
This is hugely useful for anybody who not only needs to print and send out large amounts of mail (such as envelopes or even holiday cards), but also anybody creating large numbers of customized documents.…
This week we consider Stage Manager and how it works, as well as how Apple has chosen to communicate its decision-making. Also, Apple makes a surprising deal with Major League Soccer, Myke decides that an iPad Studio and MacBook Studio sound like great new products, and we dare to ask the question: what if they made a laptop entirely out of legacy nodes?…
We all have those tech problems that we kind of give up on. Like an annoying rattle in the car where you can’t track down the source, you just eventually acclimate to it until it feels like that’s just the way it’s always been. (Even then, you’ll find that every once in a while it will just bug you.)
But there’s nothing more satisfying than eventually discovering the cause of one of those issues and vanquishing it for good.
In recent months, I’d run into a weird situation. My M1 MacBook Air could access my iMac just fine via file sharing in the Finder: the iMac showed up in the sidebar, I could copy files back and forth, no problems. However, doing the opposite—accessing the MacBook Air’s files from the iMac—simply didn’t work at all.
It was quite the perplexing conundrum: I checked the file sharing setup in the MacBook Air’s System Preferences and everything looked fine. I attempted the tried-and-true troubleshooting step of turning sharing off and then turning it on again (even tried it with a reboot in between, just to make sure). No dice.
It seemed like the problem was further down, at the networking level. Attempts to use the Finder’s Connect to Server option simply timed out, eventually reporting that the server wasn’t available.…
Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you. It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads, and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2x faster and use less data.
Over 200,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by it’s community of users.
Download for free today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.…
After months–if not years–of fevered theorizing over Apple’s chip roadmap for the Mac, this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, at last, gave us a tantalizing peek at the successor to the blockbuster M1, released a little over a year and a half ago.
Until it gets into the hands of reviewers and users, we don’t have a lot of solid information about the M2’s performance. What we do know is that the processor at the heart of the new MacBook Air and the new (not really) 13-inch MacBook Pro comes in two options: an 8-core CPU/8-core GPU model on the base-level MacBook Air and an 8-core CPU/10-core GPU in every other configuration. We also know that Apple’s added a higher memory capacity, faster memory throughput, and built-in dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware from the M1 Pro and higher.
But, far more excitingly, now that we’ve got a second data point to work with, we can start to extrapolate a little more about the future of the M2 and when we might expect to see it make its way into the rest of the Mac lineup. (Like any professional writer, I can turn two dots into a line. Don’t try this at home, kids.)…
One of the most unexpected announcements at WWDC was probably Apple’s preview of the next generation of CarPlay, which will apparently include deep integration with automotive subsystems that allow Apple to take over some, or all, of a car’s in-car interface.
For a company that famously doesn’t discuss forthcoming products, it was an interesting move. Cars that support this new version of CarPlay won’t be announced until late next year, which means the odds of someone driving a new car with this level of CarPlay integration before sometime in 2024 are pretty low. This is a far-off product demo the likes of which Apple hasn’t made in years.
Of course, the auto industry moves slowly. And this is a product announcement that’s fraught with politics, too, because any car company that prides itself on its own in-car interface design would presumably feel bad if the iPhone simply took that design and threw it away.
And yet… this evolution of CarPlay makes sense. Our phones are personal in ways our cars just can’t be, because we’re always with our phones but not always in our cars. When I see cars with their own built-in maps and navigation, I always roll my eyes because no matter how slick their interfaces and how recent their map updates, I’m pretty confident that the maps app on my phone is slicker and contains better data.…
My thanks to Daylite for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Daylite is an award-winning CRM and productivity app made for Mac-based small businesses. It seamlessly integrates with the iPhone and iPad. It integrates with Apple’s built-in apps, including Apple Mail, so you and your team can capture all your email communication in one place. And you can create opportunities, appointments and tasks in Daylite from right within Apple Mail.
Daylite improves team efficiency and makes collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible, even offline. It’s easy to access information and segment data, manage and share schedules and product status, and more—all within a familiar and intuitive Mac-focused interface.
You and your team can try Daylite free for 30 days.…
Using Stage Manager reveals facts about how sophisticated the underlying windowing system is, and we’re about to enter the M2 era with a laptop that’s exciting exactly nobody.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
If you blinked during the State of the Union, you missed it.I’ve always been fascinated in the quest for the ultimate home-entertainment experience. For every bit that legitimately promises to revolutionize how we watch TV at home, there seems to be a new complication that prevents everything from coming together seamlessly.
I had high hopes that Apple might be the first company to really pull it all together, but its announcement of the 4th generation Apple TV in 2015 kind of botched things. The company been attempting to put things back together since 2015, and every year I’d post a WWDC wish list on my blog with what I’d like to see them do.
But I gave up wishing a while ago. I’ve lost faith that the people managing tvOS think it needs the same kinds of improvements that I do, and it’s just not any fun to create a list of must-have features for a product that seems mostly neglected.
I guess Apple must have felt the same way! Because this year’s WWDC announcements regarding tvOS lack any meaningful changes, and more importantly, communicate nothing about where the platform is going.
What we’re getting There’s no landing page or list that Apple provides about what’s coming in tvOS 16.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
How we work on our Macs, the Cryptopocalypse, our cloud storage regimens, and what is still keeping us from using the iPad as our main devices.…
The 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro is coming soon, with preorders beginning Friday and models shipping June 24. It’s a notable product for a bunch of conflicting reasons. First and foremost, it’s the first Mac ever to ship with the M2 processor, so how it performs will give us our first glimpse into how Apple plans on advancing the Mac processor line-up from generation to generation. It’s also the only Mac laptop shipping without a MagSafe charger and the last to have a Touch Bar.
So while the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro is going to get attention because of the M2, it’s also worth asking the question that was on everyone’s lips last week after it was announced: Why does this computer exist at all?…
With the clash between “Stranger Things” and Star Wars, the summer streaming blockbuster season has begun! And we inaugurate a new segment, Sports Corner, as the path of sports on streaming media sports has begun to change dramatically.…
As a followup to my piece on passkeys, reader Andrew pointed me to a blog post by Terence Eden, which contains a bit of a thought experiment on what happens if you have a catastrophic accident (say, a house fire) and lose access to all your devices:
In order to recover my digital life, I need to be able to log in to things. This means I need to know my usernames (easy) and my passwords (hard). All my passwords are stored in a Password Manager. I can remember the password to that. But logging in to the manager also requires a 2FA code. Which is generated by my phone.
The situation as described is really a worst case scenario in which everything goes wrong, but it does raise questions about Apple’s new passkeys. If you have any device, sync should ensure that they’re all stored there. But what does happen in a terrible case like this where you lose all your devices?
Well, there are recovery methods in place, as you might suspect. Apple talks broadly about them in a support article:
To recover a keychain, a user must authenticate with their iCloud account and password and respond to an SMS sent to their registered phone number.
…
(Image: Shadowfacts)According to Shadowfacts, Clarus the Dogcow has made a return in macOS Ventura.
Congratulations to the world’s #1 Clarus fan, Stephen Hackett.…
Another sports franchise is headed to Apple’s streaming efforts, as the company has announced that it’s signed a 10-year deal with Major League Soccer:
Apple and Major League Soccer (MLS) today announced that the Apple TV app will be the exclusive destination to watch every single live MLS match beginning in 2023. This partnership is a historic first for a major professional sports league, and will allow fans around the world to watch all MLS, Leagues Cup,1 and select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT matches in one place — without any local broadcast blackouts or the need for a traditional pay TV bundle.
From early 2023 through 2032, fans can get every live MLS match by subscribing to a new MLS streaming service, available exclusively through the Apple TV app. In addition to all of the match content, the service will provide fans a new weekly live match whip-around show so they never miss an exciting goal or save, and also game replays, highlights, analysis, and other original programming. This live and on-demand MLS content will provide in-depth, behind-the-scenes views of the players and clubs that fans love. A broad selection of MLS and Leagues Cup matches, including some of the biggest matchups, will also be available at no additional cost to Apple TV+ subscribers, with a limited number of matches available for free.
…
Apple and WhatsApp announced on Tuesday that the popular chat service has been rolled into Apple’s Move to iOS system, which allows Android users to migrate their data to the iPhone. Here’s the announcement from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page(?!):
We’re adding to WhatsApp the ability to securely switch between phones and transfer your chat history, photos, videos, and voice messages between Android and iPhone while maintaining end-to-end encryption. This is a top requested feature. We launched the ability to switch from iPhone—>Android last year, and now adding Android—>iPhone as well.
Here’s how this works: When Move to iOS requests WhatsApp data, it gets an encrypted bundle that Apple can’t read. That bundle is sent to the iPhone via peer-to-peer networking, like everything else in the migration process. When a user taps on the WhatsApp icon on the home screen on the iPhone, the app is downloaded and installed from the App Store. When they log in to WhatsApp (with the same phone number as the old phone), they’ll then be able to unlock and import the transferred bundle of data.
Interestingly, the infrastructure to enable this change is already enabled in both iOS 15.5 (the currently shipping version) and in the current version of the Move to iOS app in the Google Play Store.…
There was a lot going on last week, but I wanted to note this announcement from Apple about July availability for Friday Night Baseball:
“The 2022 season is off to a great start, and we’re proud to bring all baseball fans a new way to watch their favorite teams each week, all without local blackout dates or the need for a cable subscription,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services. “‘Friday Night Baseball’ brings the best of Apple’s signature design and commitment to the highest-quality experience together with the time-honored traditions of MLB, and we’re looking forward to offering fans more great games to watch throughout the summer.”
Apple had previously announced free games through the end of June. This latest announcement extends the window in which anyone can watch Friday Night Baseball, no Apple TV+ subscription required, through the end of July.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire first year of Friday Night Baseball were free, but we’ll have to wait for the next wave of games to find that out.…
For small businesses, it can be difficult to stay on top of clients, leads, and projects that are evolving every day. Here’s how Daylite can help supercharge your team to collaborate better, handle more clients, close more deals, and execute more projects. Designed for Mac, iPhone, and iPad exclusively.
Daylite is more than just a CRM app for small businesses. Its Productivity capability is what sets Daylite apart from other web-based competitors.
Here are a few productivity-boosting power features that thousands of Mac-savvy businesses couldn’t do without:
Daylite Mail Assistant (DMA)
Direct Apple Mail integration allows you to take action from your inbox and be more productive. Instead of drowning in emails all day, you and your team can capture all email communication, clear out your inbox and stay on top of the next steps. Save emails related to clients, appointments, and tasks, so you have a full history of conversations in one place. Plus, you can create tasks in Daylite right from Apple Mail.
Linking
Its linking capability is what makes Daylite shine. You can link emails, notes, tasks, projects, appointments, and other records to existing contacts in Daylite. This enables teams to quickly and clearly view an organization’s structure and access the information they need in a unique way.…
There’s this somewhat odd sentiment among some parts of the Mac community that the best release of the platform’s software ever was Snow Leopard. Yes, that’s right: 2009’s Mac OS X 10.6, a release that was famously marketed as having “zero new features” and focusing on bug fixes and enhancements.
That appraisal is, of course, open for debate, but the idea has persisted enough that some people still regularly call for “Snow Leopard” style releases of Apple’s current operating systems—even though I’m sure there would be a general cry of bloody murder if the company tried to release updates that really didn’t have a single new feature.
Such an update is decidedly not what we got at this past week’s Worldwide Developers Conference: the platform updates that Apple showed off are fairly brimming with new features. But running down the list it also becomes clear that this was a bit of a search-and-destroy exercise for Apple’s engineers, as they crossed off a whole metric ton of requests and “missing” features that have, in some cases, been lingering for years.
Perhaps these updates are more like “filling gaps” releases, but in any case, there’s a lot here that suggests Apple isn’t simply trying to look to what’s next but to fix what’s come before and level the playing field across all its platforms.…
It’s the aftermath of a WWDC like no other, so in this very special episode Myke and Jason kick off the Summer of Fun with an episode recorded live in the California sun. The breeze is blowing, the questions about the M2 processor and Stage Manager are flowing, and we’re trying to get our heads around what last week’s announcements mean for the future of Apple’s platforms.…
Our excitement and trepidation regarding Passkeys, our thoughts on auto-generated Siri App Shortcuts, the most exciting features announced at WWDC, and our inevitable (?) USB-C future.…
The iPad’s journey, the arrival of the M2, and we stopped by Touch Bar’s house on our way to Apple Park.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
It pains me to admit this, but I’ve covered Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference for more than a quarter of a century. I’ve seen it go from a sleepy conference in San Jose to an electrically charged event in San Francisco to a can’t-get-a-ticket event back in San Jose. And, like everyone else, I participated in WWDC remotely for the past two years via session videos posted on Apple’s developer site.
The lesson here is that WWDC is nothing if not changeable. Apple changes with the times, and so does its relationship with outside developers. But having spent a day on the Apple Park campus as a part of the company’s reimagined WWDC this year, I can say this: I don’t think we’re ever returning to the old WWDC, and I think that’s the right decision.…
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native Safari extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
Editable toolbars come to the iPad.Lost in the excitement about Apple finally breaking the iOS multitasking paradigm and introducing overlapping windows and support for external displays with Stage Manager was something that will probably have an even greater impact on users. Apple’s referring to it by the catch-all title of “Desktop-Class Apps”, but it’s a collection of feature updates and app updates in iPadOS 16 that should make using an iPad for productivity, especially with a keyboard and trackpad, a lot better.
Apple seems to have instructed everyone at Apple who’s building system iPad apps to take a hard look at their apps and ask, “Is there something this app can do on the Mac that it should be able to do on the iPad?” The answer isn’t necessarily going to be yes. Still, I suspect that it highlighted many features that only don’t appear on iPad because they were deemed too complicated to be used on the iPhone… and after that decision was made, it was never revisited.
(I’ve run up against this very problem myself, most notably in Numbers, where things would go swimmingly until I reached for a Mac feature and just couldn’t find it on the iPad.…
Last year, Apple started tolling the death knell for passwords with the first round of passkey support on its platforms. At the time, I wrote:
…the writing is on the wall for the good old password, and the first step to its demise is being rolled out in macOS Monterey and iOS 15—though it will probably take at least a couple years before it comes to fruition.
Well, the future is here, somewhat sooner than I thought. With Apple’s forthcoming updates, passkeys are a reality, ready for developers to start offing the password with extreme prejudice. In its WWDC keynote, Apple gave passkeys some time in the spotlight, explaining just how much more secure of an option they are when it comes to authentication. The message is clear: passwords just aren’t sufficient for the connected world we now live in and the sooner they go into the dustbin, the better for everyone.
As usual, Apple’s WWDC sessions spend a little more time detailing how developers can add passkey support to their apps, as well as discussing how to deal with some additional cases that might crop up.
Apple’s newest updates will allow you to login with passcodes, as well as other authentication methods if necessary.…
A surprising part of Apple’s macOS Ventura announcement on Monday was Continuity Camera, which lets Macs use the iPhone camera as a webcam. It’s not surprising in that it’s a feature that’s been used by apps like Camo to take advantage of the fact that most Mac users have a really, really good camera with them at all times. But it’s a tacit admission by Apple that the cameras it puts on Macs just aren’t as good, too. In the end, the pride over the quality of the iPhone camera seems to have overridden the judgments about Mac webcam hardware.
And it’s all for the better. People can complain that this is another example of Sherlocking, in which Apple takes a feature pioneered by outside developers and rolls it into the system. And, yes, it is that. Sherlocking has a couple of interesting aspects that aren’t as widely known, though: First, there’s usually room left behind after a “Sherlocking,” and there are several features in Camo that Apple isn’t bothering to replicate with Continuity Camera. Second, the platform owner has powers far beyond those of third-party app developers—and with Continuity Camera, it shows. There’s no app to launch, nothing to configure, no awkward attempt to mount a phone while not touching the wrong button or the wrong place on the screen.…
The new M2 MacBook Air isn’t going to be on sale until next month, but I was fortunate enough to spend some time with several of them on Monday at Apple Park. Unlike the M1 MacBook Air, which was about providing a comforting shell around the then-new concept of a Mac running an Apple-designed processor, the new Air takes a bold step into modern Mac design without losing what’s great about the MacBook Air.
When I picked one up for the first time, I felt reassured. It was noticeably lighter (a tenth of a pound, or about 50 grams) than the M1 Air I pick up all the time. It’s also quite thin, though instead of the classic wedge design, Apple has kept it a consistent 0.44 inches (1.13cm) thick—thicker than the thin end of the wedge but thinner than the thick edge.
The design is definitely a riff on the 2021 MacBook Pro; the flat, circular feet are taken right from those laptops. (There’s no “MacBook Air” inscription on the bottom, though.) The edges of the laptop are flat, reflecting Apple’s current hardware aesthetic.
When you open it up, you’ll see a bigger trackpad and a full-height function row, again picked up from the MacBook Pro.…
In 2020, Apple acquired the popular hyperlocal weather forecasting app Dark Sky and while some elements of that app have made their way into the company’s own revamped Weather app over the last few years, there remained one last holdout: the Dark Sky API, which, it was announced concurrent with last year’s WWDC, would continue running until the end of 2022.
This year, we’ve met the successor to that technology: WeatherKit.
WeatherKit has a lot of data available to developers.WeatherKit is backed by the new Apple Weather Service, which picks up where Dark Sky left off, offering hyperlocal forecasts that take advantage of machine learning to predict weather and provide a slew of information to apps and services.
This is a big endeavor, but its existence shouldn’t come as a surprise—and not just because of the timeline for sunsetting the Dark Sky API. Apple loves having key technologies under its control and if you’ve scrolled down in the company’s Weather app pre-iOS 16 (or requested weather information via Siri), you’ve surely seen (or heard) that the weather data on Apple’s platform has historically been provided by The Weather Channel.1 It’s not hard to imagine that that reliance on a third party (much less have to display their logo in one of Apple’s prominent apps) for this critical data may have rankled the folks in Cupertino.…
Live from Apple Park, Jason has a first-hand report from the WWDC Keynote. (Myke was nearby, but that’s a whole other story.) Together they discuss groundbreaking iPad news, the new M2 Macbook Air, some familiar iPhone lock screen customization features, and a whole lot more.…
As always, Apple has only a limited amount of time during its WWDC keynote to discuss all the new features that it’s bringing to its software updates. Here are a few of the big announcements that didn’t make their way into the presentation but still got my attention.
Setting up the system If you were doing a little macOS archaeology, you’d probably notice that the System Preferences app has been largely unchanged since the first version of Mac OS X back in 2001.
In macOS Ventura, it’s getting a major redesign, to bring it into parity with the Settings app on iOS and iPadOS. Part of that is a new name—System Settings—but the bigger part is an entirely new user interface that looks like its iOS/iPadOS counterpart: a scrolling sidebar of various sections, such as Wi-Fi or Appearance, which should make it easier to find what you’re looking for—especially if you’re coming from another Apple device.
Time for the Weather In another big step for parity, Apple has brought a few long-running iOS and iPadOS apps to the Mac: Clock and Weather. The former will offer world time functionality, timers, and alarms, including letting you set them via Siri.
The Weather app, which was announced to be coming to iPad at long last as well, brings all the features of that app to the Mac, including maps, animations, and notifications for incoming weather.…
Hello from Apple Park! Dan and I are in our seats (in the shade, fortunately!) for today’s Apple media event. Stay tuned to Six Colors for coverage throughout today and all week.…
Do you want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and free ad blocker. With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso respects your privacy and doesn’t accept payment from advertisers.
The app also now blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads, including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
So, join over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
At long last, the biggest event on the Apple calendar is imminent. (Some people will argue that the biggest event is the fall iPhone event. Those people are wrong!) Apple executives are soon to come on stage—in a live or pre-taped fashion, we don’t know yet—and take the wraps off the latest updates to the company’s major software platforms. Perhaps, if we count ourselves lucky, even some new hardware as well.
As we prepare ourselves for the annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, there’s just enough time left to get some predictions (and, let’s be clear, some wishes) in under the wire.
Of course, forecasting specific features, well, that’s just an invitation to accountability, so instead, I’m going to talk a little more generally. I’ve organized my thoughts for each platform around a theme, so here’s what I’m hoping to see out of each of Apple’s big releases.…
My thanks to the New Mexico Tea Company for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
You might be saying to yourself: Tea? That’s an odd fit for Six Colors. But here’s our secret: Six Colors is almost entirely powered by tea. In fact, Dan and Jason are fueled by tea from New Mexico Tea Company on a regular basis. If you go to the special page for Six Colors readers on their site, you won’t just get 15 percent off your order, you’ll see a bunch of teas recommended by us. Hm. Strangely, they are mostly caffeinated. How unsurprising.
Jason has been ordering tea in bulk from New Mexico Tea Company for years. But they don’t just offer the black tea that runs through his veins; they offer all kinds of teas, from fruity white teas to Pure Chinese and Japanese green tea. Whatever your desire, they’re sure to have something to fulfill it. Their specialty is bulk loose leaf tea from around the world. Some teas they blend ourselves, some they import directly, and some they buy from other importers. It’s easy to order the teas online—including small samplers!—and they ship promptly.
Again, Six Colors readers can get 15 percent off all orders this week… even if you don’t order the caffeine-filled breakfast teas that fuel a lot of posts on this particular website.…
We’re packing our bags for Cupertino. Will the long-foreshadowed stories of the MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and VR headset finally come to fruition? And the advantages of putting on an event on your own campus.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Oh how I love the mad geniuses at The Iconfactory. On Thursday Iconfactory developer extraordinaire Craig Hockenberry announced a new app today, and it’s… unexpected? It’s called WorldWideWeb, and it’s a simple, Bonjour-driven web server. It doesn’t do anything but serve static files, but it does that with nearly zero configuration. It’s clearly scratching an itch for Craig and his colleagues, and I can think of plenty of times I’ve wanted to experiment with a simple web page and some CSS before jumping into a more complex development environment.
But my favorite part of this whole story is… that it also runs on iOS:
Once I had all this running on macOS, I stumbled upon something unexpected. All of the Swift code I had written for macOS worked perfectly on iOS. With multi-tasking and a great text editor, iPadOS was suddenly a viable environment for standalone web development.
The app is free on macOS and iOS.…
In the wake of my article about typing diacritical marks the other week, reader Andrew wrote in with a very niche question:
…lots of typefaces/fonts come with extended character sets and alternative glyphs that – as far as I can see – can’t be accessed via a keyboard combination like the diacritics you mention in the article.
A case in point is a typeface called Cabin I downloaded from Google Fonts. For some reason the designers decided to make the ‘@‘ symbol a white-on-black character, instead of black-on-white. There is an alternative, traditional black-on-white glyph in the extended characters, but I can’t work out how to produce it, let alone set it to be the default.
I can’t say I’ve ever run into this particular problem, but it was an intriguing one, so I did some research and came across a couple articles pointing towards a solution to just this problem: Alternative Stylistic Sets.
Amazingly, this is a macOS feature that I’d never encountered in all my years of using the operating system, but in short it’s a way for typefaces to offer alternate version of some glyphs—for example, Andrew’s @-sign issue.
But how to type those symbols? You can’t simply drag and drop glyphs onto a keyboard layout—cool as that would be—and there’s no Option-key shortcut that lets you pluck them out of thin air.…
Wishing doesn’t make it so.
When Apple makes its announcements at the WWDC keynote on Monday—Dan and I will both be there, in person, to cover it!—it will be revealing stuff that’s been in the works for months. In fact, for the better part of the year.
So I realize that wishing real hard in the direction of Apple Park isn’t going to change a single thing that will be announced Monday. That won’t stop me from hoping that at least some of my dreams might come true, though.
Here’s what I want to see:
iPad Pro momentum. Fans of the iPad Pro (and I am one) have been complaining for years that its software hasn’t been able to take advantage of the power of its hardware. Once again, we’re hoping for a sign from Apple that it knows what the future of the iPad looks like.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported that Apple may unveil a “professional mode” for iPad, which could be a very clever way to add features that iPad power users want without cuttering and confusing the base iPad interface, which is (let’s be honest) what most users prefer.
Now that Apple’s shipping the Studio Display, now would be the perfect time for the addition of support for non-mirrored external display on iPadOS.…
Apple software improvements we want to see at WWDC, the technology-themed art that graces our walls, which browsers we use, and why printers are the worst.…
My wife is a saint. She has to put up with me complaining every time we’re in our car listening to satellite radio and a DJ comes on. “You just don’t want to hear people talking,” she says, and she’s absolutely right. I accept that other people like listening to the prattling DJs, but I hate it and I will keep changing the channel until there’s a song I want to listen to again. I don’t want to hear about who is touring where, or who said something interesting at a show, or even the behind-the-scenes detail about how a song came to be written. Not when I’m just trying to listen to music.
That’s the great thing about streaming music services like Apple Music: whether you’re listening to a curated playlist or even a “radio station,” you can skip songs you don’t like and there’s no intrusion from voices. It’s all about the music.
Or at least, it was. But recently, Apple Music has made some changes, and they’re disastrous. A new tastemaker has apparently rolled into Apple Music HQ and decided that aggressive marketing to paying customers is the solution to a problem that literally nobody had. The result is a degraded Apple Music experience.…
What do “Stranger Things” and “Obi Wan Kenobi” tell us about the present and future of Netflix and Disney+? Also, Netflix’s “The Gray Man,” a revived “Daredevil,” and we answer your letters!…
Everything is just fine here at Apple Park. Yep.As we here at Apple prepare for the first in-person gathering on our campus in the last three years we wanted to share some ground rules we’re putting in place to make sure that all of our attendees have a pleasant, smooth, and above all safe visit to Apple Park for our annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
We are, of course, excited to welcome developers and a small selection of media and VIPs back to Cupertino for this event, but we do ask that that certain boundaries be respected. Once you have been welcomed onto campus, please ensure that you secure your belongings about your person. Keep all arms and legs inside sleeves and trousers at all times. Be sure and check the color of your badge before attempting to access any restricted areas: blue is for VIPs, green is for media, and red is for the Chosen, long shall they be remembered.
As always, we’re looking forward to sharing the latest details on our hardware, software, and services with all of our avid developers, whom we consider a part of the Apple family. Like a distant part that we don’t actually spend much time with, and wouldn’t entirely miss were they to be suddenly gone.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple’s no stranger to killing off old technology. The original iMac famously did away with not only legacy ports but also shuffled the floppy disk right off this mortal coil. Elsewhere, the company has been aggressive about transitioning to solid-state storage and Retina-quality displays, with little to no compunction for the old hardware they replace (and with good reason).
All of this is to say that the company typically doesn’t count nostalgia as an asset. Recently, rumors have pointed to another feature that may find itself on the chopping block: the Lightning connector that debuted on the iPhone 5 in 2012. Speculation would have it replaced by USB-C, which has already replaced the proprietary port on several iPad models, as well as being the de facto connector on modern Macs.
While such a transition would no doubt cause some degree of consternation among many users, I’m all for it. In the words of one of the better Star Wars movies of recent years: let the past die. Kill it if you have to.
With that in mind, here are a few more features that can still be found on today’s Apple products, but whose time in the sun should probably come to an end sooner rather than later.…
It’s time for our seventh annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple’s WWDC keynote! In a surprise development, Jason and Myke are attending in person—but beyond that, they’re totally in the dark. Will it be inside or outside? Will it be live, or recorded? Will there be new hardware announced? It’s time to let our imaginations run wild.…
This week Six Colors is brought to you by the New Mexico Tea Company! Our passion and specialty is bulk loose leaf tea from around the world. Some teas we blend ourselves, some we import directly, and some we buy from other importers. Our goal is to make available a range of tea and tea products to our neighbors throughout the state of New Mexico as well as our neighbors around the world.
We are honored to be sponsoring the Six Colors website this week, and Six Colors readers can get 15 percent off all orders this week. On that page, you’ll see some teas recommended by Dan and Jason, both of whom are New Mexico Tea Company customers! They are big black tea drinkers, but we do have all kinds of teas, from fruity white teas to Pure Chinese and Japanese green tea. So whatever your desire, we are sure to have something to fulfill it!…
Ben Clemens of FanGraphs built a very simple statistical model to see if those detailed Apple TV+ Friday Night Baseball odds, which are generated via machine-learning algorithm by a company named nVenue, are as predictive as they seem.
His results suggest that they aren’t. In fact, they didn’t come close to beating Clemens’ simple model:
…the predictions shown on these broadcasts every Friday would lose money if they gambled against my objectively bad predictions. They’re flawed, perhaps past the point of usability.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing cool in them. In that same Rangers-Astros game, Kole Calhoun stepped to the plate in a 1-1 tie in the top of the fourth. The broadcast displayed an 8% chance that he would hit a home run, more than triple the rate at which the league hits home runs on a per-PA basis. He promptly bopped the first pitch out. Power hitter, homer-prone Cristian Javier on the mound, Minute Maid Park; the odds truly should have been higher, and I think that insights like that are undeniably interesting.
At present, though, these odds are worse than not seeing odds on screen, at least as far as I’m concerned. I wish more people thought about baseball probabilistically, but having clearly inaccurate odds – Marcus Semien isn’t more likely to reach base on 0-2 than he is on 0-0, no matter what the screen says – could result in people trusting odds less, not more.
…
As we compose ourself for WWDC, Dan reports in from an Undisclosed New York Location. Jason finally figures out what he’s learned about the Stream Deck. And, again: HomePod all the things!…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
I’ve been using an Elgato Stream Deck for more than a year now. It’s a USB peripheral that offers a grid of buttons with a display underneath, so each button can be labeled with an icon and/or text that you specify. The goal of the Stream Deck is to make esoteric actions on your computer easier by letting you place them on dedicated keys with custom artwork, so you’ll always know to press the blue button instead of typing Command-Shift-Option-3.
I was initially quite skeptical about the Stream Deck. I’ve got a perfectly nice keyboard, full of keys on which to map commands. Why not just memorize those keyboard shortcuts?
And yet, after using a Stream Deck Mini that I bought at Target on a whim for a few months, I decided to upgrade to the full-sized Stream Deck. It turns out that, yes, the concept of wiring up commands I could never recall from the keyboard shortcuts, of placing front and center all the macros and shortcuts and scripts I spent hours building and then promptly forgot existed, made it all worthwhile. I had gone from a skeptic to a convert, and it only took a few months—and a bunch of lessons learned.…
How we discover new apps, how we force ourselves to take breaks during the workday, our methods for managing our Mac’s menu bar, and the most impressive and useful tech in our kitchens.…
The original HomePod flopped. But Apple wasn’t discouraged. It reconceived the product and released the HomePod mini, a less high-tech-and more affordable-iteration that seems to have been more successful in the market and suggested Apple had larger home ambitions.
Now come rumors that Apple’s planning on building a new HomePod. In fact, there are rumors that as many as three new HomePods could be headed our way. Could it be, in the same year that the iPod finally faded away, that the HomePod will transform itself from a failure into a key Apple product line?
It’s time. Not just for a HomePod comeback, but for HomePod domination. Two HomePods? I want more. I want four. It’s time for Apple to rush back into the smart home game and the HomePod can lead the way.…
The Iconfactory, marking the passing of Corey B. Marion, its co-founder:
Corey was the glue that held all of us here at the factory together. He designed the original factory logo, created dozens of beloved icon sets and somehow managed to help guide the company through thick and thin…. Corey was instrumental in the growth and success of the company from the very start. He loved participating in judging our annual icon design contest, Pixelpalooza, back in the day. His keen eye for design touched nearly all of our products and made them infinitely better including IconBuilder, xScope, Twitterrific and Triode. He even created Linea Sans, a wonderful font based on his own handwriting that users will be able to enjoy for years to come.
Condolences to all of Corey’s family members, colleagues, and friends.…
The much-rumored Apple AR/VR headset appears to be on the horizon, so Myke and Jason break down several reports about its development and debate what approach Apple should take. And as WWDC approaches, there are also rumblings about a new HomePod, Apple Watch design changes, and more Apple displays.…
There I was, trying to type a Croatian phrase into Google Translate when I found myself wondering “Wait, there must be an easier way to enter characters with diacritic marks than by trying to guess the right combination of Option and letter key.”
Friends, there is. File this one under one of those tips that I’d either forgotten or never really realized, in large part because my history steeped in the classic Mac OS meant I always thought of looking these things up via Key Caps.1
A quick search turned up this macOS support article, which points out that—in a move borrowed from iOS—all you have to do is press and hold a key to see every available character associated with that key. More to the point, each character has a number associated with it—hit the corresponding key, and it’ll pop it right in there for you.
Certain letters with diacritics I’ll always have hardcoded in my memory (Option-e plus a letter for accent aigu, for example, or Option-c for ç—thanks years of French homework!) but for characters I more rarely need to type, this definitely speeds up the process.
- Which does still exist as Keyboard Viewer, though you have to jump through the hoops of enabling the Input menu in System Preferences Keyboard or as part of the Accessibility options before you can bring it up). …
The lead-up to Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is always rife with rumor and speculation. But so far this year leaks have been few and far between and most of what has trickled out into the public eye has been on the vague side. Take, for example, Bloomberg’s usually very well-sourced Mark Gurman, who said last week–with nothing more in the way of explanation–that iOS 16 would contain some “fresh Apple apps.”
Let’s assume for a moment that this isn’t merely a resurgence of 1990s slang and that the apps in question aren’t “funky fresh,” but rather that the company is intending to roll out new and/or updated versions of some of its built-in apps on iOS. That certainly sounds promising and, as you might imagine, I have some ideas of exactly what that could (or should) entail.…
We’re barreling toward June 6 like a runaway train, but the rumors are thin. Dan ponders fresh Apple apps. Jason automates his headphones.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
What’s this? Supply-chain analyst extraordinaire Ming-Chi Kuo has suggested that Apple’s investigating E Ink displays for future foldable iPhones. Now, Apple surely investigates lots of things-and most of them never make it across the finish line to become real products.
But as a long-time admirer of E Ink as a technology, I’m excited about the possibility that Apple might use it in future devices. E Ink is a niche technology with some very real limitations, but it’s also got some huge advantages.…
For the second year running, Apple has offered a preview of updated accessibility features coming to its platforms later this year. The announcements come just ahead of Thursday’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which goes by #GAAD online.
The preview is notable for spotlighting features that most people won’t use, but that matter a lot to those with disabilities. It’s also notable because it’s a departure from the company’s typical close-to-the-vest approach to what’s coming on the roadmap.
Here’s a look at what Apple announced, and why it matters:
Door Detection. LIDAR-equipped iPhones and iPads have had a feature called People Detection since iOS 13. Using the Magnifier app and the VoiceOver screen reader, a blind user can learn whether the device camera sees a person, and where that person is in relation to the device. That was handy for social distancing. Door Detection will use the same mechanism to alert you when the device identifies the presence of a door. That’s a more practical use of LIDAR for many blind and low-vision users than even People Detection, both indoors and out. Door Detection can tell you about the door’s attributes, including whether it’s open or closed and if there’s a doorknob.…
Have we all cut the cord? Plus, tech items we can’t justify purchasing, Apple’s new accessibility features, and how we wrangle SIMs and eSIMs when traveling.…
On Monday Rogue Amoeba released SoundSource 5.5, the latest version of its handy Mac sound-routing utility that—let’s be honest—is doing all the heavy lifting for a feature that should probably be a core part of macOS. (Apple doesn’t seem to really care about Mac audio, and that’s good for Rogue Amoeba’s array of products.)
The big feature of SoundSource 5.5 is support for Shortcuts. While Rogue Amoeba’s utility Audio Hijack decided to primarily support automation via JavaScript with some basic Shortcuts hooks, SoundSource is all in on Shortcuts. The app provides 17 different actions, and they affect not just SoundSource’s individual control over apps and audio inputs, but the system’s as well. So with SoundSource, you can now automate many of your Mac’s default audio settings, setting a new default input and output, for example.
As you might expect, I immediately dove into SoundSource’s new automation tools. Most of the time, I listen to music on AirPlay speakers and most system audio goes through my Apple Studio Display’s speakers. But when I’m writing, I often prefer to pop in my headphones and get focused.
That process takes several steps. I have to click on the AirPlay icon in the Music app, so that the audio stops using AirPlay.…
I made a mistake today. I posted today’s episode of Downstream with the feed pointed at the previous episode of Downstream. There are various workflow reasons why this happened, but the bottom line is: I pasted last week’s download URL in and then didn’t change it, resulting in everyone getting the wrong episode. Oops.
So, in the aftermath of fixing that error, I tried to figure out a way to prevent it from ever happening again. I took inspiration from a different system I use to post a different podcast to do it. Both approaches have one utility in common: Keyboard Maestro. (You could easily use another macro utility such as TextExpander if you wanted.)
I use the original macro to post The Incomparable. In that case, I am provided a unique ID string from my host, ART19. ART19 generally prefers to host podcast RSS itself, but I didn’t want to do that, and the ART19 download URL can be derived from the unique ID that displays on the webpage used to post a new episode.
I could type that URL by hand and then paste in the unique ID, but the chances for error in doing that are extremely high.…
After years watching the old Netflix cruise along as the top streamer, things are getting interesting as it shifts gears and engages the realities of today’s streaming scene. We discuss Netflix changes and Julia reviews Disney’s financial results.…
Apple Newsroom:
Using advancements across hardware, software, and machine learning, people who are blind or low vision can use their iPhone and iPad to navigate the last few feet to their destination with Door Detection; users with physical and motor disabilities who may rely on assistive features like Voice Control and Switch Control can fully control Apple Watch from their iPhone with Apple Watch Mirroring; and the Deaf and hard of hearing community can follow Live Captions on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple is also expanding support for its industry-leading screen reader VoiceOver with over 20 new languages and locales. These features will be available later this year with software updates across Apple platforms.
The announcement is in honor of Global Accessibility Day—last year, the company made a similar announcement, previewing forthcoming features like Assistive Touch feature for Apple Watch and Background Sounds for iOS 15.
These new features really open up a lot of possibilities, but the one I’m most excited about is Live Captions. Apple’s had a version of this technology in its Clips app for some years (and clearly makes use of similar functionality with Siri’s language processing and dictation). But on Apple’s platform you previously needed to turn to a third-party app for something like captioning a FaceTime call for deaf or hard of hearing users.…
Is Apple ready to embrace USB-C across its entire product line? Jason loves his Playdate, but is frustrated by Apple Music playing songs he dislikes. And the music may go on, but the iPod won’t be coming along for the ride.…
The larger technology companies get, the more and more commonalities there seem to be between their products. That’s probably not surprising: after all, if only a couple of huge companies are developing smartphone operating systems, chances are they’ll get closer and closer over time as companies borrow from each other, playing leapfrog as they continually innovate.
Like any giant company, Apple’s no stranger to having features similar to those in its products rolled out by competitors. But it’s also hardly one to ignore a good idea, even when it’s created by a rival (for example, the graphical user interface on desktop computers).
This past week, Google held its annual I/O developers conference, at which it showed off a ton of new devices and features for its products. And, as always, there were those who noted that many looked like they’d been pulled directly from Apple products. So, turnabout being fair play, here are a few places where Apple might be able to take a cue from one of its biggest competitors.…
Up until recently, USB-C was more of a fluke in my household—a strange visitor from a possible future, in which we all used small, reversible plugs. Sure, my iMac had a couple of Thunderbolt ports that use the USB-C ports and every once in a while a random cable might have a plug on it, but by and large we remained a good old USB-A household.
Even by late 2020, when I bought a new M1 MacBook Air that had only USB-C ports, the connector was still more of a curiosity than something in daily use. Truth be told, I didn’t plug many things into my laptop, so I wasn’t even really living the Dongletown lifestyle. I did have to buy a USB-C-to-USA-mini cables in order to use my ATR-2100 travel mic while I was on the road, but as the Air arrived during the pandemic, I wasn’t even really traveling.
Slowly but surely, however, USB-C has begun to creep in and take over. When I had some outlets with USB plugs installed in our new kitchen last fall, I made sure to buy ones that had both a USB-C and a USB-A port.1 Lightning cables packaged with new iOS devices now came with USB-C on the other end.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Dan’s back from Seattle, Jason’s back from Phoenix, the music never left, and the iPod touch remains available while supplies last.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Though I greatly enjoyed my vacation last week, it ended with a bit of a mishap. On Sunday morning, the last full day of my travels, I knocked my beloved Series 4 Apple Watch off the nightstand where it had been charging and it tumbled three feet to land—screen down, naturally—on a tile floor.
What at first I thought was merely a chipped edge revealed itself upon closer inspection to also encompass cracks along the edge and across the watch’s face. Alas, my Apple Watch had passed on. It had shuffled off this mortal coil. It was no more. It was…an ex-watch.
So I did what any self-respecting Apple aficionado would do and took advantage of the fact that our flight home had been delayed to order a new Apple Watch for pick up at the nearest Apple Store.
Which is how I found myself sitting outside in the surprisingly pleasant Seattle weather in front of the University Village Apple Store, in possession of a brand new Series 7 Apple Watch.1
But my troubles had only begun. Because despite the fact that I had the previous evening unpaired my old Watch in preparation for migration, when I connected the brand new Apple Watch—after spending a half an hour charging its low battery, connected to my MacBook Air in my backpack—I found that the only backups it offered to restore from were several years old.…
Our computer mousing habits and devices, whether we signed up for the in-person portion of WWDC, our Apple Watch upgrade habits, and the iPods we’ve owned and count among our favorite models.…
A surprisingly lengthy post on the Apple Newsroom which goes on for several paragraphs about the joy of consuming digital music eventually reaches its raison d’être in the final line:
Customers can purchase iPod touch through apple.com, Apple Store locations, and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last.
Yes, that’s right: the iPod touch, the last remaining survivor of that ancient product line (due to turn 21 this October), has reached the end of its life.
It shouldn’t be a real surprise: the iPod touch was last updated almost three years ago, though even then it was to bump the internals, not to make any significant design changes.
As useful as the iPod touch has been to provide an iOS device without the need for an iPhone’s cellular plan, the iPad seems to certainly have supplanted it in that department.
And that’s all she wrote for the venerable iPod, which is survived only by its distant relative, the HomePod mini. Well, at least until Apple decides to resurrect the name for some new product……
This site was making the rounds in my circle of friends for obvious reasons. Created by Alex Barredo, Podcast Details visualizes the consistency (or inconsistency) of a podcast’s run time and release schedule.
I put the Six Colors podcast (just for members) to the test, and here was the result:
We’ve settled in to quite a pattern, but like most of the shows I checked out, it started a lot shakier and then got consistent over time. I think there’s something to this—it’s hard to get in a good rhythm with a regular podcast, but if you can find it, you can keep it going.…
Jason Kottke is taking some time off:
There’s no real roadmap for this, no blueprint for independent creators taking sabbaticals to recharge. The US doesn’t have the social safety net necessary to enable extended breaks from work (or much of anything else, including health care) for people with Weird Internet Careers. I support a lot of individual writers, artists, YouTubers, and bloggers through Substack, Patreon, and other channels, and over the years I’ve seen some of them produce content at a furious pace to keep up their momentum, only to burn out and quit doing the projects that I, and loads of other people, loved. With so many more people pursuing independent work funded directly by readers & viewers these days, this is something all of us, creators and supporters alike, are going to have to think about.
As someone who burned out from his corporate media job, I have tried to be careful with how I work as a “Weird Internet Career” person these past seven-plus years so I don’t do it to myself again. But Kottke is right, there’s really no road map out there for how this works and how people making stuff on the Internet can keep from burning themselves out.…
An unlikely alliance of tech giants beckons us toward our passwordless future, but in the meantime there’s a new version of 1Password. We also discuss Apple Car rumors, hope for the future of AirPods Max, our disassembly of a Magic Keyboard, and more!…
Every so often, I get the smart idea that I should smooth over an everyday problem I have with the power of computers. I know some Python. I work in Nuke, which is a big pile of procedural code blobs that operate on inputs. And I’m capable of using Stack Overflow. I also have plenty of repetitive problems — or more accurately, annoyances — that would be easily fixed with silicon and electricity.
However, other than a handful of little snippety bits and bobs, my life is remarkably manual. Everyone else seems to be living longer, healthier, happier lives with Apple’s Shortcuts — Jason Snell has done some really impressive stuff that goes far beyond mending the ordinary paper-cuts of life. Let me explain my issues (in regards to automation, at least) and perhaps someone out there will have some wild idea for one of them.
I love Nodes Part of a Nuke project. See? Flow charts are powerful. (Courtesy Dan Sturm.)A common smear lobbed by Real Programmers against Shortcuts (and Workflow and Automator before it) is that it’s just a toy to make tools of colorful blocks, rather than the more alpha-masculine energy of monospaced characters with spaces, or tabs, or semicolons.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Myke Hurley joins Jason to talk about why people got so upset about 1Password 8, our password-less future, and our personal logistical concerns about WWDC.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a native Safari extension, it blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Along with respecting your privacy, the app now also includes best-in-class YouTube ad blocking to block all YouTube ads.
Join the community of over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
Last summer 1Password maker AgileBits made the wrong kind of news, when it announced that it was killing its traditional Mac app and replacing it with a new one built with Electron, a development system based on web technologies, on top of a cross-platform code base.
As I wrote back in August:
I think it’s fair to say that most users don’t care about the tools that a developer uses to write the apps we use. But using a system like Electron does have consequences: Electron apps have a reputation for being slow, eating up a lot of system memory, and—perhaps most offensively—failing to behave like proper, “native” apps on whatever platform they operate. Just as there are good and bad Catalyst apps, there are good and bad Electron apps.
It’s been nine months, and 1Password 8 for Mac arrived this week. Since local vaults are no longer supported, it won’t please users who don’t want to use 1Password’s cloud-based password vault system. However, as someone who has been happily subscribed to 1Password and using its cloud vaults with a family plan for a few years now, that wasn’t an issue for me.
The real question is, has AgileBits wrecked its Mac version, or does the new one measure up?…
Last year at WWDC Apple detailed its long-term plans to get rid of passwords. It included a preview of a technology called Passkeys in iCloud Keychain in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey. The idea is that you can log in anywhere by authenticating on your device—you don’t have to set passwords at individual sites, and the authentication is cryptographically protected.
That system uses a method approved by the FIDO alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). On Thursday, it took a step forward as Apple, Google, and Microsoft jointly announced plans to use this capability:
The expanded standards-based capabilities will give websites and apps the ability to offer an end-to-end passwordless option. Users will sign in through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices, such as a simple verification of their fingerprint or face, or a device PIN. This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS.
It will take some time, but it looks like the era of generating unique passwords for every site and using a password manager (or writing them down) may be coming to an end.…
We’re sifting through the fallout of Netflix’s trying times, pondering the future of ads on streaming services and trying to identify which shows benefit from binge-watching—and which don’t.…
The tech we always travel with, things we hope seem slow in 30 years, Twitter’s new Close Friends feature, and devices we own that we secretly wish would die.…
Amazon:
Beginning in late 2022, you’ll no longer be able to send MOBI (.AZW, .MOBI) files to your library using Send to Kindle. This change won’t affect any MOBI files already in your Kindle library. MOBI is an older file format and won’t support the newest Kindle features for documents.
For years, Amazon has used the Mobipocket format (.mobi) rather than the ePub format for Kindle books. Recently it developed its own format, KF8 (and now KFX), and has been using that instead. Everyone else uses ePub. Publishers sell books direct as ePubs, but are forced to include .mobi versions for compatibility reasons.
But this is changing. Amazon announced that later this year, its email and drag-and-drop send tools will accept ePub format files. Amazon will then convert those files to KF8 and deliver them to Kindles, but at least the user won’t have to do the job themselves. Progress.…
You have to admire Apple’s approach to complex technology. The goal, always, is to make it easy, to make it magic, to make it seem effortless. Regular users shouldn’t be burdened by an avalanche of settings and options. Things should just work.
The problem, of course, is that sometimes things don’t just work. “Lean back and enjoy,” Apple tells you. “We got this.” But they don’t have it all the time. And in lots of instances, there isn’t a fix.
The Apple Studio Display, with its perplexing and controversial webcam, dredges up a lot of those feelings of frustration. We can debate the wisdom of putting Center Stage on a display most likely destined for the desks of nerds, but let’s leave that aside. How about the audacity of Apple shipping it without any interface to speak of? And how much better might the camera on the Studio Display have been received if it could be tweaked by its users to produce more pleasing images?…
Tony Fadell, Nest founder and a key to creating the iPod, has a new book out and Fast Company has a very interesting excerpt in which he details what he learned from Steve Jobs about communicating tech products to consumers:
He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—”Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.
Steve was a master of this. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it. And he made it all look so natural, so easy.
There are a lot of things Steve Jobs probably gets a little too much credit for. Being a master communicator is not one of them, but he really was one.…
This week we check in on Studio Display firmware, ponder what form the iPhone 14 might take and whether it’s different enough from the iPhone 13, and break down the results of Apple’s record fiscal quarter—including some trepidation about the future. Also, Myke finally got his Playdate!…
Apple seems, in general, to have weaponized the idea of institutional stubbornness. This is the company that refused to license its operating system to PC makers back in the 1980s and 1990s, insisted on making a smartphone, and launched yet another streaming service. There’s something in the company’s DNA—probably handed down in part from late co-founder Steve Jobs—that promulgates the idea that there are two ways to do things: an Apple way and a wrong way. It’s one of the traits that often makes it most infuriating to its biggest detractors.
But that doesn’t mean that Apple won’t change course when needs suit. Despite its insistence on doing things its own way, the company has over the past several years made more than a few changes that even its closest observers might have judged unlikely at best. There are always reasons behind these decisions, of course, and they’re hardly devoid of self-interest, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t, somewhere deep down, an acknowledgment that maybe, just maybe, the Apple way can evolve.…
Do you want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?
Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.
It’s easy to setup, blocks all YouTube ads and doubles the speed at which Safari loads.
Magic Lasso is an efficient, high performance and free ad blocker. With over 4,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
It blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure web browsing experience.
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso respects your privacy and doesn’t accept payment from advertisers.
The app also now blocks over 10 types of YouTube ads, including all:
- video ads
- pop up banner ads.
- search ads
- plus many more
So, join over 200,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock for free from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.…
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Luca: …and with that, let’s open the call to questions.
Operator: Our first question comes from Jan Key from Key Blur Financial. Go ahead.
Jan: Thanks for taking my question. Tim, you said that you’re facing a lot of headwinds in the next quarter. Can you talk about what impact that might have on gross margin?
Tim: Jan, this is Tim. You know we don’t provide specific guidance for gross margin. But what I can tell you is: yes, we expect to lose exactly 200 basis points in the next quarter, dropping our gross margins to about 33 percent.
Jan: … Uh. What?
Tim: 33 percent. That’s 5 percent less than this quarter. Not great, if you ask me.
Jan: That is very specific.
Tim: You’re welcome.
Jan: And you’re not concerned about that?
Tim: Of course I’m concerned. That’s 5 percent less! That means hundreds of millions of dollars of profit, poof. Real bummer.
Jan: Um, yes. Yes it is? Thanks.
Operator: The next question will come from Frank Lee-Mydear at Bank of Liechtenstein. Go ahead.
Frank: Hi, Tim. Mac sales are doing very well over the last several quarters.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple’s financial results show complications ahead, Jason installed some beta display firmware, and you probably shouldn’t do word games when your brain’s half asleep.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Things are going great. Everything is awesome. Apple posted another record quarter, this time the company’s biggest second fiscal quarter, with $97.3 billion in revenue. Almost every product category showed growth.
And yet, despite all the great numbers, I sense a disturbance in the force. The analysts of Apple’s quarterly conference call to discuss its results felt it, too. Thus far, through unprecedented global instability, Apple has managed to keep on keeping on. But can it continue floating above it all, or is it about to face hard times?…
Every quarter, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri make statements and take questions from financial analysts on a conference call. This is the transcript of the call for April 28, 2022.
Tim Cook’s opening remarks Thank you Tejas. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. Apple is proud to report another record quarter with a March quarter revenue record of $97.3 billion, up 9% from a year ago and better than we anticipated. iPhone, Mac, and Wearables, Home and Accessories had their best-ever March quarter, and services set an all-time record on the strength of subscription growth over the past year.
Before I get into details, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Ukraine. We’re continuing to do everything we can to support our teams in the region, and we are donating to humanitarian efforts on the ground. We’ve also committed to donating products, to support refugees arriving here in the United States.
I also want to speak to the unpredictable nature of the pandemic. We are excited to be welcoming employees back to the offices in the U.S. and Europe. At the same time, we are monitoring COVID related disruptions in China.…
On Thursday, Apple announced its results for the second quarter of its 2022 fiscal year. It was a March quarter record of $97.3 billion in revenue, with all-time quarterly records for iPhone, Mac, and Wearables sales.
We discussed all the results on our YouTube channel:
And here are the charts:
…
One of my very favorite game developers, Zach Gage, is back with a new one. Knotwords, by Gage and Jack Schlesinger, is a crossword-puzzle style game with a twist: instead of filling the puzzle via clues, you have to fill various regions of the board with a limited selection of letters.
It’s a logic puzzle involving getting the right words to fit in all the right places. There’s also a second type of puzzle, Twist, which also limits the number of vowels you can use in each row and column, giving you clues—but also limiting your options. There are new puzzles every day in both normal and Twist formats, as well as monthly puzzlebooks that you can complete.
I’ve been playing Knotwords for more than a week, and it’s fantastic. It’s become a daily habit, and if you like crosswords and Wordle and similar types of puzzles, you’ll love it. Knotwords is free, but the Twist puzzles, access to 30 extra monthly puzzlebook puzzles, statistics, access to archived puzzles, and customization options are all locked behind a single in-app purchase. It’s $4.99 a year or $11.99 to unlock everything forever.
I was able to ask Gage a few questions about what inspired Knotwords and how he approaches building games like this.…
Over the years, all sorts of entities have purchased the television rights to sporting events at prices that don’t make sense, at least if you’re expecting them to turn a profit directly from the sporting events themselves. Fox famously overpaid for NFL rights to establish itself as a network; regional cable networks have overpaid for exclusive local baseball TV rights to keep fans from cutting the cord.
So when Apple signed on with MLB to air Friday Night Baseball, the question should probably not have been, “How does Apple intend to profit enough from selling ads and new subscriptions to make its investment profitable?” It should have been, “What is Apple trying to achieve more broadly by spending money on live sports like baseball?”
There are lots of possibilities. Maybe it’s purely brand recognition for Apple TV+—baseball helps Apple reach a new audience that might never have considered the service before. Maybe it’s about pumping up the value of Apple’s service and bundles for existing subscribers so that they don’t churn. Maybe it’s about building a new sports-focused service as an add-on for TV+. Maybe Tim Cook has Friday nights free and wishes there were better baseball games on TV.…
The video conferencing cameras we use, how we’d change Siri’s voice, whether we’d tackle an iPhone repair, and our plans (or lack thereof) for leaving Twitter.…
It’s been 12 years since the iPad first arrived, amid hype that it was the next iPhone and pessimism that it would never live up to that hype. After some dramatic early years, the iPad has become a comfortable business that’s raking in about $30 billion a year in sales. It’s not the next iPhone, but in terms of Apple’s platforms, it’s roughly the size of the Mac.
What were the pivotal moments in the iPad’s 12-year history? What were the key events that led it from there to here? I’ve forced myself to rank the top moments.…
Apple Newsroom:
The new online store offers more than 200 individual parts and tools, enabling customers who are experienced with the complexities of repairing electronic devices to complete repairs on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups and iPhone SE (3rd generation), such as the display, battery, and camera. Later this year the program will also include manuals, parts, and tools to perform repairs on Mac computers with Apple silicon.
I browsed through the new site1 out of curiosity, and it struck me that while the replacement parts are affordable for most people, the tools are quite expensive. A torque driver, for example, runs between $80-$100, depending on what version you need. There’s also some pretty hefty equipment, like a Heated Display Removal Fixture that’s more than $250, and is clearly aimed at mom-and-pop repair shops.
However, Apple is also offering tool kits that you can rent for seven days, that include all of the tools you need for a specific device, for a very reasonable $49. And I mean everything:
The tool kit comes in cases that, when stacked on top of each other, measure 20 inches wide and 47 inches high. One case weighs 43 pounds and the other weighs 36 pounds (a detailed list of included items is included below).
…
Apple has released both developer and public beta versions of macOS 12.4 that include within them a beta version of the firmware for the Apple Studio Display. This is the first update to the Studio Display firmware since it shipped, and Apple says that it “has refinements to the Studio Display camera tuning, including improved noise reduction, contrast, and framing.”
Since my Studio Display arrived last week and I haven’t yet sent back Apple’s review unit, I’m in the enviable position of having two Studio Displays available for testing. So I updated my display, kept the stock firmware on the review unit, placed them as close as possible to one another to take similar shots, and compared the two.
But first, some observations about the process of updating the Studio Display. After updating to the macOS 12.4 beta and rebooting, the new Studio Display firmware becomes available as an update. Applying this update requires another reboot (and a stealth reboot at the end of that process).
Since the software that runs the display’s webcam is on the display itself, you should see those changes even on Macs not running the latest beta. (This makes sense—Apple would never want a display to suddenly become incompatible with older devices due to a firmware update.)…
Jason added a (working) Studio Display and a Playdate to his house last week, and Myke’s a little upset. Also CNN+ died, Netflix went into crisis, and Apple kept making sports streaming deals. We also discuss the parking situation at Apple Park, accept the passing of the iPhone mini, and envision a new use for the HomePod name.…
Last week’s strange news tidbit: the full-size HomePod, that most recent of Apple’s perhaps misguided product choices, is going at a premium on the resale market after having been discontinued back in spring 2021. It’s odd but not inexplicable. As my colleague Jason Snell pointed out, the HomePod was a case of Apple making trade-offs that ultimately appealed only to a niche audience—but a niche audience that was very excited about it.
The lesson I take away from all this is that though the full-size HomePod was not necessarily a market success, Apple should be willing to take risks on product categories that may not be obvious crowd-pleasers. Macs, iPhones, iPads—all of these are established products these days, ones that the company can count on selling in droves when they release updates every year or two. They’re easy and, if I can be excused for saying so, boring.
But the weird one-off products? The kind that seem destined to be appreciated by the few? Those are the places where you never know when you might find a hit.…
I use Reincubate’s Camo to turn my iPhone into a high-quality webcam for my Mac. Even an older iPhone’s camera is better than any webcam you’ve got, but mounting it can be fussy, and you have to unlock the phone and launch the Camo app every time you use it—which isn’t very convenient when the phone’s display is facing away from you and the whole thing is horizontal.
How to make that process easier? Developer Simon B. Støvring made it a one-click operation:
I will only be using the iPhone 6 Plus as a webcam and I will have it permanently mounted to my monitor, so to make it easier to launch the Camo app on the iPhone after the phone have been locked, I put the iPhone into Single App Mode using Apple Configurator and disabled the passcode on the phone. When in Single App Mode (sometimes also referred to as “kiosk mode”), the iPhone will only be able to launch a single app and the app will automatically be launched when the phone is unlocked.
If you’ve got an unused iPhone sitting around, this seems like a great second life for it.…
Friday afternoon I spent about half an hour showing off the new Panic Playdate on a YouTube Stream.
If you’re interested in the new retro handheld game device, check it out!…
Emergency podcast! Julia and Jason reconvene for a second time in a week to discuss Netflix’s very bad quarterly results (and how the company will change its behavior and strategy as a result) and the rapid but not entirely surprising death of CNN+.…
A baseball digression (including some tech talk), a Mac app that outpaces its cross-platform competition, and the curious case of the HomePod (and why Apple should take more chances).…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Federico Viticci uses Audio Hijack 4 scripting to connect his recording sessions to his time tracking:
That got me thinking: when I start recording a show, I could run a script that fires off a shortcut that contains a Timery action to start time tracking. I don’t want to manually tell Shortcuts which podcast I’m recording, but Audio Hijack can help here as well: the app can pass the name of the session that just started to Shortcuts. If I named my Audio Hijack sessions with the same name I use for each podcast project in Timery, does that mean I could invoke one shortcut that knew exactly what podcast I started recording?
Though scripting Audio Hijack does require some rudimentary JavaScript, its ability to pass data to Shortcuts lowers the bar for ease of use considerably. (I’m a fan of Federico’s approach of passing a JSON dictionary to Shortcuts; it allows a single shortcut to flexibly respond to different kinds of input rather than requiring a whole bunch of different shortcuts to perform slightly different tasks.)…
Listening to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast made me realize: that the original HomePod and the Apple Studio Display have a few things in common. Both products entered a category full of competition—displays and voice-activated speakers. Both were regarded in some quarters as overpriced and over-engineered.
But in some ways, isn’t that just describing the archetypal Apple product? They’re nicer than the competition, but more expensive. They have extra features that most manufacturers wouldn’t bother with—but Apple bothers, because it’s Apple.
Most striking, though, was listening to Marco Arment talk about how he loves his HomePods and how there’s nothing on the market today that’s a match for them in terms of quality and functionality. As someone who just bought a Studio Display, that concept sounds awfully familiar. (Oh yes, and HomePods are now appreciating in value.)
When viewed from the perspective of the overall smart-speaker market, the HomePod seemed like a misstep. But individual users have specific desires and demands. When you try to gauge the market for any particular product, you’re trying to figure out how it fits and if it will sell. These can be entirely different perspectives.
From a market perspective, the HomePod’s price and features made it a poor fit in a limited category, and it appeared from the start that it wouldn’t be a big seller.…
When I first tried Ecamm Network‘s live-streaming app Live, I didn’t like it.1 I liked the idea of it. Software that streams live to YouTube, Twitch, and other services is dominated by open-source projects like OBS and Streamlabs and expensive cross-platform apps like Wirecast. Live is a rarity: it’s a relatively young (introduced in 2017), Mac-only app. There aren’t many of those out there in any category, and this was a category that frustrated me with unreliable, slow cross-platform apps.
Most of my friends who have dived into live streaming gave up and bought Windows PCs, dedicated to running that software. No judgment—I get it. But I really didn’t want to go down that path. I wanted to use my Mac, if at all possible.
Unfortunately, my first attempt at embracing Live didn’t take. In early 2020, I desperately hoped it could replicate my needs for streaming Total Party Kill (and, potentially, Six Colors). Unfortunately, the app wasn’t flexible enough. I wanted control of the layout of the live display. For example, I wanted to place video of two people side by side, with a small picture-in-picture overlay of a screen capture. It just couldn’t be done—Live had a very particular way of approaching a document with a single “source” dominating the screen and additional items being added on top of it.…
Our charging situations, which collaborative workspaces we prefer, how we protect our digital privacy, and what we’re watching on Apple TV+.…
Julia has some advice for David Zaslav as he takes the reins of Warner Bros. Discovery—mostly about the fates of CNN+ and the Harry Potter franchise. Plus, the rise of streaming sports.…
Justin O’Beirne, who keeps a close eye on Apple Maps, has noted that the company has finally expanded its cycling directions in the US:
As of April 15, 2022, Apple has quietly added cycling directions for the parts of the Midwest covered in Expansion #6, including Chicago (pictured below), Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Charleston…
Indeed, O’Beirne notes that this was the second expansion this month; on April 1, the northeast region was also updated with cycling directions.
A quick check shows, yes: my hometown of Boston does finally have cycling directions. As an infrequent cyclist who is constantly trying to to do more biking, this is a welcome addition.
However, the feature is not without its issues. For example, we have a great bike path nearby, and though Maps’s cycling directions do let you prioritize avoiding hills or busy roads, it’d be nice if we could also put a premium on separated cycling routes; there are lots of cases where I will gladly spend the extra five minutes getting to the bike path to enjoy a safer and more leisurely remainder of my trip. (That bike path is also scheduled to be extended later this year, and I’ll be interested to see how long it takes Apple Maps to take that into account.)…
This week we’re imagining the right and wrong improvements for the Apple Watch, speculating about the first wave of M2 Macs, lamenting Apple’s process for replacing a defective product, and buzzing (in a bad way) about CNN+.…
For as long as the Mac has had overlapping windows, it’s come up with ways to manage them. Everything from zoom controls to window shades to turning folders into tabs at the edge of your windows1—seems like the Mac’s tried it all.
But I’m going to take this opportunity to call out a window management feature that’s still chugging away but that I believe is under-appreciated in modern macOS: Spaces.
Spaces has a long history, stretching back to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, released in 2006. But it wasn’t really a new idea in computing: the concept of virtual desktops had existed more or less since the advent of the graphical interface in the 1980s popping up in a variety of other operating systems, though perhaps most prominently in the classic X Window System that ran on top of Unix and other similar OSes.2
Though other features related to Spaces, such as Dashboard and Exposé, have died or “evolved” over the years, Spaces has stuck around, though you could argue that it’s actually become less capable in the interim. For example, the earliest version of Spaces on the Mac let you arrange up to 16 virtual desktops in a grid of columns and rows.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Dan is looking for Focus in all the wrong Spaces. Jason’s Studio Display delivery didn’t go well. That’s baseball!…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Speaking of sports, I recently read Craig Calcaterra’s new book Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game, and I really enjoyed it.
I’m a happy subscriber to Calcaterra’s Cup of Coffee newsletter, which gives me a hit of baseball news and opinion (along with updates about automats and local Ohio politics) every weekday. But Rethinking Fandom is a nice zoom back to the larger issues that affect sports fans today.
In its first half, the book details all the issues with modern sports operations: teams that have no financial motivation to try to win, owners who cry poverty while reaping enormous gains in franchise value and in a stream of income from media rights, cities being hoodwinked into laying out public money under threat of the local sports baron moving to another town, and more. Look no further than this week’s comments by the president of the Cincinnati Reds to encapsulate this issue.
In the book’s second half, Calcaterra tries to come up with a philosophy that can allow fans to remain fans on their own terms rather than throwing it all away in frustration. You might not agree with all his suggestions, but I admit that there are a lot of mitigation strategies in there that might calm down some of the cognitive dissonance.…
The date is set! With the announcement last week that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is kicking off in just a little under two months, the ramp-up to the biggest event of the company’s year has officially begun.
While we don’t yet know how much—if any—hardware will feature at the June to-do, one thing is pretty certain: that Apple will be using the opportunity to roll out the latest changes to its major software platforms, including macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
As ever, expectations are high for Apple to bring all the new features and enhancements, not to mention fixing every single bug or missed opportunity for its software. Will that happen? Of course not. This big endeavor always means picking and choosing your battles, but as long as we’re trying to figure out how Apple might direct its energy, I’m going to use this opportunity to make a few humble suggestions about some features that could use a little love.…
Rob Art Morgan called himself a mad scientist… and what a perfect description. An idiosyncratic writer and enthusiastic technologist who specialized in quantifying Mac speed and determining what was fastest, the man behind the independent site BareFeats has died at 77:
The prolific BareFeats APPLE Computer & Product Reviewer Robert Arthur ‘Rob ART’ Morgan passed away on March 12, 2022, 77 years young, at home in Portland, OR.
For the last three decades, Rob ART has been the Mad Mac Scientist, creator of the BareFeats website, where he combined his love of speed and Apple computers to report “Bare Facts on Mac Speed Feats.”
Robert Arthur Morgan pursued the TRUTH in all things APPLE/MAC with honesty, good manners, and unfailing fairness in his evaluations of products, whether great or small. His way of doing business and writing his BareFeats evaluations provided precious, rare, and valued information for manufacturers, business clients, and faithful readers. He tested Apple Products along with hard drives, graphic cards, and a plethora of accessories to make APPLE Computers run FASTER and meet the designing needs of Apple/MAC users worldwide with greater power, control, and efficiency.
My old boss at Macworld, Rick LePage, turned me on to BareFeats.…
How many people does it take to fill John Moltz’s shoes? Two people. One for each shoe.…
Capturing and editing video on iPhone & iPad, what we think about 8k video, how the Apple Watch’s rumored health features would affect our purchasing decisions, and our thoughts on Apple using Shortcuts as a way to introduce new functionality.…
When I started working for MacUser magazine in 1993, I was assigned to a gray cubicle with an old Mac IIci inside. (The summer intern didn’t get the latest and greatest.) I don’t know how that was nearly 30 years ago, but here we are.
Over the last few years, I’ve spent a little time buying a few old Mac models and getting them up to speed. Within five feet of me as I write this are a working G4 Cube, G4 iMac, Mac Plus, PowerBook 170, and even a Power Computing Mac clone.
As much as using old computers can be a fun nostalgia trip, it also makes me appreciate what we have today all the more. You remember the good times, but forget the bad! As someone who recently had to figure out how to boot a SCSI drive, let me tell you how good we’ve got it.…
Me at Macworld, 10 years ago:
Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the venerable Mac text-editing app BBEdit. I’m sure there are other apps not published by a gigantic company that have managed to last as long, but I’m not sure that any app has changed with the times and remained as relevant as BBEdit. As someone who has written hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of words in Bare Bones Software’s flagship product, let me take this opportunity to praise and reminisce.
I use BBEdit every day. I write most of my stories in BBEdit. Sometimes I write about BBEdit in BBEdit. It’s remarkable that BBEdit has survived 30 years, going from the days when boasting about being “32-bit clean” was a thing, to the days when your app runs natively on Apple silicon.…
Francisco Lindor, no!Apple’s now a sports broadcaster. The premiere of “Friday Night Baseball” on Apple TV+, featuring two live games, has come and gone. Any baseball fan will tell you that it’s a long season, and you can’t tell anything from the final score on opening day. But at the same time, it’s impossible to resist making some first impressions and wondering where things will go from here.
So consider these the first impressions: Apple’s games, produced by MLB Network, were competently done. Even a delay when the lights went off at Nationals Park in Washington was handled competently. Baseball games were played, there were winners, and there were losers, and nobody died. (Francisco Lindor was hit in the face by a pitch, though! He’s okay.) Yes, Apple’s stream crashed once, but let me tell you, I don’t think there’s a single streamer that has not faced some sort of technical failure when it first came time to meet peak demand for a live sports event.
While some sports bloggers think Apple shouldn’t try to stand out from MLB’s other broadcast partners, this tech blogger says the reverse: Apple’s production tended to succeed when it was trying to push the envelope and disappointed when it fell back into established broadcast patterns.…
Baseball season is here and Jason has a detailed critique of Apple’s first Friday Night Baseball broadcasts. But it’s not all home runs and calls to the bullpen, as Myke goes home to Dongletown and we ponder just what might be announced at WWDC 2022.…
Last week Audio Hijack 4 arrived, and was I excited about its automation features. I had several people ask me about a simple automation I created, which generates a single button on a Stream Deck that toggles recording on and off and changes its display based on recording status.
I wish it didn’t, but (at least for now) the only way to control the appearance of a Stream Deck button via automation tool involves Keyboard Maestro. So to make this automation work, I have to create a shortcut, and then run that shortcut from within Keyboard Maestro.
First, the shortcut:
This is pretty straightforward. There’s a single line of JavaScript that determines if my session, “Podcast lossless,” is running:
``` return (app.sessionWithName('Podcast lossless').running)
```
If the result is false, the session is not running. The shortcut turns it on. Otherwise, the session is running, and the shortcut turns it back off. In either case, the shorcut then uses the new “stop and output” feature of Shortcuts to output that same result. This is what Keyboard Maestro will use to do its thing.
Here’s the Keyboard Maestro macro:
The macro is executed by a Keyboard Maestro action on the Stream Deck, on a button with a particular ID—in my case, its R2C3, but it can be just about anything.…
When institutional tech lags home tech, Apple’s baseball efforts get underway, and WWDC 2022 is now officially on the schedule.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Selecting a channel in Audition. It’s ready for EQ and limiting.Among a group of my friends and fellow podcasters, a certain kitchen gadget is known simply as the “cult device.” We enjoy the Instant Pot, but are far too cool to openly admire a mere hunk of metal and circuitry… that was not made by Apple.
In my corner of the tech-creative world, there is another cult device – Elgato’s line of Stream Deck products. Perhaps you’ve heard of them!
You may also have heard that fans of the Stream Deck tend to start small with the six-button Stream Deck Mini, later palming that little fellow off on a new convert, moving up to a model with 15 or 32 buttons. For awhile, there was a brisk trade in these things among my extended circle. I purchased a Mini.
Automate the Radio Stream Deck app with timers and other items mapped.Jason and Dan have written about how they kick off podcast-related tasks with Stream Deck buttons, backed by Shortcuts, AppleScript and/or Keyboard Maestro. When I finally got my first Stream Deck – more on that later – I assumed I would adopt the Six Colors bossmen’s automation tools to make notes while editing my own shows.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
It’s opening day! And Apple has provided more information about its forthcoming baseball broadcasts, which premiere Friday:
Produced by MLB Network’s Emmy Award-winning production team in partnership with Apple, “Friday Night Baseball” will offer a modern and dynamic broadcast experience that appeals to new viewers and veteran fans alike. Each game broadcast will employ state-of-the-art cameras, including high-speed Phantoms, the high-resolution Megalodon, and more throughout the season to present vivid, live-action shots, and offer immersive sound in 5.1 with spatial audio enabled. “Friday Night Baseball” will also incorporate new on-screen graphics that include innovative new probabilities-based forecasts of different situational outcomes, plus highlights and live look-ins from around the league integrated right into the broadcast. Throughout the “Friday Night Baseball” broadcasts, fans can enjoy on-screen callouts about batters’ walk-up songs from Apple Music, test their knowledge of baseball trivia with help from Siri, and more. And, in a first for MLB games, “Friday Night Baseball” will feature rules analysis and interpretation from former MLB umpire Brian Gorman.
Makes sense that Apple is highlighting the high-tech aspects of the production, since it’s destined for streaming only and therefore has more interactive possibilities. (But keep in mind, the broadcast is being produced for Apple by MLB, so in some ways it will be reminiscent of an MLB Network broadcast.)…
Whether we’d put our trust in an Apple Bank, how we feel about editing tweets, our office chair situation, and Plex’s new Universal Watchlist: yea or nay?…
Apple TV+ wins Best Picture, “Our Flag Means Death” is… a hit?, why being the fan of a baseball team is going to bring you pain, “Obi-Wan” takes on “Stranger Things” directly, and Jason subscribed to CNN+… for science!…
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in an online format from June 6 through 10, free for all developers to attend.
However, it’s not entirely online:
In addition to the online conference, Apple will host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6 to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, along with the online community. Space will be limited, and details about how to apply to attend will be provided on the Apple Developer site and app soon.
This makes sense, but it’s also a template for how Apple could manage the future of the conference even once the pandemic has actually subsided. It’s hard to imagine that it would return to what it once was: the online version is much cheaper and almost certainly easier to produce than wrangling thousands of people in a single location. (There’s a strong suggestion that even this in-person event will be outdoors—and hey, there is a big open space right in the middle of that donut.)
Plus, one of the great advantages of an online conference is ease of access and an asynchronous experience, but it does mean that there is something lost in not having people gather in a single place.…
Myke takes possession of his Apple Studio Display, Jason gets excited about the arrival of Audio Hijack 4, and Apple revises its approach to allowing external links in iOS apps.…
Apple’s conflicts with government regulators can often seem like a classic case of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Thanks to its dominance in the tech market, the company has increasingly found itself in the crosshairs of countries from around the world, who are concerned with everything from alternative payments in the App Store to interoperability with other messaging platforms.
The problem is that even when regulators seem to win, the results they end up with are often very different from what they probably intended, even if Apple’s concessions meet the letter of the law. As recently as last week, the Cupertino-based company made changes to the way that it handles some areas where regulators had intervened, but in true corporate fashion, those alterations are minimized to the extent that they will hardly have the impact that regulators would likely have preferred.…
Celebrating all the goodies in Audio Hijack 4, the importance of app automation, the Enterprise report card, regulation threats, and a new home for the Mac Studio.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Ever since earlier this month, when Apple broke the minds—and bank accounts—of its devoted power users by delivering the unexpected announcement of a new and long-awaited Apple consumer display, the internet has been awash in rumors over one particular quirk of the monitor: Why does the Apple Studio Display contain an A13 processor, complete with 64GB of flash storage?
It’s a good question and one that we here at Six Colors couldn’t simply wave off under the guise of “managing the display’s ‘studio-quality’ sound and Center Stage.” That’s just what Apple wants you to think.
So we’ve been tirelessly chasing down leads to uncover what exactly the point is of building an iPhone-level processor that, as recently as two years and a half years ago was the company’s state of the art, into a glorified TV.
Although we have not yet been able to conclusively prove the purpose of this seemingly overpowered piece of hardware, we have narrowed down the field to the most likely rationales behind its inclusion, which we present to you now in order of their relative likelihood, from least to most.
The Studio Display is simply a stretched-out iPhone 11: It’s not the most reasonable answer, naturally.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
An Audio Hijack 4 automation switches blocks on and off and starts a session.Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack 4 is here, and while it’s got a bunch of interesting new features, my favorite is its support for automation via JavaScript and Shortcuts. While not quite everything in Audio Hijack is controllable (yet), most of it is—and it leads to some really interesting possibilities for users.
Audio Hijack can be controlled by scripts saved within the app itself (the app includes several built-in scripts as samples, and more are available on Rogue Amoeba’s website), via scripts saved as .ahcommand text files on your Mac, and via scripts sent directly from Shortcuts. Individual Sessions can run scripts via the new Scripting tab in each session; automations can fire off when a recording, session, or timer stops or starts. One script provided by Rogue Amoeba, Discard Small Files, will delete any recording less than five seconds in length. It’s a perfect match for the Session Stop event.
But Audio Hijack really unfolds when you integrate it with Shortcuts. Right now, the app provides three Shortcuts actions: Run a Script, Run JavaScript, and Run/Stop Session. Run a Script will run a script stored within the Audio Hijack app; Run JavaScript will run a script passed to the app from the shortcut, and Run/Stop Session lets you turn a particular session on or off.…
Apple announced Thursday that it’s launched its Apple Business Essentials program for small businesses in the United States. The company announced the program in November 2021 and has been running it in beta form in the intervening months. The program uses device-management features built into iOS/iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey.
Apple Business Essentials rolls together device management, support, and iCloud storage into a single subscription offering for businesses between 50 and 500 employees in size. (Those are not hard limitations; Apple says it’s seen some even smaller businesses use the service, and the total number of users is not capped at 500.) The program seems to be targeted at business that don’t really have dedicated IT staff, providing simple device management, support, and repair directly.
Apple Newsroom:
Beginning today, businesses have the option to add prioritized support for employee devices with AppleCare+ for Business Essentials. This service includes 24/7 access to phone support, training for both IT administrators and employees, and up to two device repairs per plan — by individual, group, or device — each year. Employees can initiate repairs directly from the Apple Business Essentials app, and an Apple-trained technician can come onsite in as little as four hours to get their iPhone back up and running.
…
Audio Hijack 4 features a new light interface mode and the ability to manually wire connections between blocks.Rogue Amoeba has released Audio Hijack 4, a huge update to its all-purpose Mac audio recording tool. It’s the app’s first major update since Audio Hijack 3, way back in 2015. I’ve been recording all my podcasts with Audio Hijack 4 for months now, and it’s got new features that will please loyal users and dazzle potential new ones.
Audio Hijack’s new Sessions window shows what you’re recording and lets you turn sessions on and off.It all starts with the look of the app, which has been refreshed throughout and now includes a light mode to go with the existing dark mode. The master list of sessions is now a compact list that displays what sorts of things are being recorded (including app icons!), with the ability to run and stop sessions without opening them at all. There’s also a corresponding menu bar item, from which you can start and stop sessions.
An Audio Hijack popover.Each session view has also been given a refreshed look. Each session now keeps track of its own historical recordings and timers via new tabs in the session-specific sidebar.…
On Upgrade this week we were talking about if we’d pay extra for Macs with nice colors, and mentioned the black MacBook, which was more expensive than the white model. Stephen Hackett has a good reminder from Apple history:
For every generation of MacBook that it was a part of, the black notebook cost $1,499. This was $200 more expensive than the mid-tier white notebook. The two machines always shared the same specs when it came to the CPU, RAM and optical drive. However, the black MacBook always came with a larger hard drive for that $200.
I had completely forgotten that there was a (subtle) spec difference between the two colors. Not that it was the real reason behind the price difference.…
Last year, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We worked with Kandji and the hosts of the Mac Admins Podcast, Tom Bridge and Charles Edge, to formulate a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey.
This year, we’re repeating the process. Over the last couple of months, we took the temperature of 71 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than 1000 devices. (If you’re an admin who didn’t take the survey, feel free to fill it out.) They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by Jason Snell and the Six Colors staff.…
There’s a good chance that you’ve already seen that viral video making the rounds over the past week, in which a self-described former Apple employee is blown away by picking up a photo from one iOS device and dropping it on the other. If not, check it out below.
PLEASE tell me I am not the only one who didn’t know about this feature 😅😅😅 pic.twitter.com/iBAYEV3JbG
— michael tobin (@initialfocus) March 29, 2022
Yep, that does indeed work as shown, and it’s a very cool feature.
I’m sure there are some readers of this site who will dismiss this as “obvious”, just as there are others who will have been totally unaware of the possibility.
But here’s what I find fascinating about it: this is actually two different features, introduced years apart in different OS releases, working in delightful harmony.
The first is Universal Clipboard, a feature introduced in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra back in 2016 as part of Continuity, a whole set of enhancements to make it easier to move back and forth between Apple devices. With Universal Clipboard, if you’re logged into multiple Apple devices—iPhones, iPads, Macs—using the same iCloud account, anything you copy to the clipboard on one is immediately and invisibly1 transferred to the clipboard of all your other devices.…
Our thoughts on the EU’s plans for messaging interoperability, how we feel about smart implants and body modifications, when and why we choose websites over apps for certain services, and long overdue feature requests for products we use each day.…
The launch of the Mac Studio was a big moment for Apple. After years of preparation, that launch marked an important milestone in the Mac’s journey. Apple exec John Ternus’s declaration that the M1 chip family is complete marks the end of the first Apple silicon product cycle.
But the wheel keeps turning. The first cycle answered numerous questions we were wondering about less than two years ago–but many more questions remain. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is only the end of the beginning.…
Apple’s first foray into live sports streaming debuts on April 8:
Apple and Major League Baseball today announced the first half of the 2022 “Friday Night Baseball” schedule. These scheduled games are available to anyone with internet access, for free, only on Apple TV+. “Friday Night Baseball” will premiere April 8 with two marquee games.
Key takeaways from this press release:
- Apple says that the games it announced Tuesday, which cover the first half of the season, will be accessible for free. If you have Internet access, you can get them—you won’t need to pay for Apple TV+. (We’ll see if Apple gives the whole season away, or if the second half will be for Apple TV+ subscribers only.)
- As anticipated, Apple will be broadcasting two games with staggered start times, with the second game being a game from a west-coast (or at least western) site. Given the relatively smaller number of western teams (only eight of baseball’s 30 teams are in the Pacific or Mountain time zones), it’s probably safe to guess that a disproportionate number of Friday-night games hosted by western teams will be pulled off local TV and put on Apple TV+. The initial schedule features home games involving the Angels (three times), Dodgers (twice), Diamondbacks (twice), Athletics, Giants, Mariners, and Rockies.
…
It’s episode 400! We evaluate the forward-looking predictions we made back in episode 300, and then draft stories we’ll be talking about over the next hundred episodes! Also, an Apple TV+ movie won Best Picture and we round up an awful lot of Apple rumors.…
Inside of Apple are two wolves…
Okay, I’m only sort of kidding. But it’s true that there’s long been an internal conflict within the company that reaches into its very soul.
On the one side is that intrinsic philosophy, trotted out at many a keynote presentation, about how the company loves to surprise and delight its users. That’s embodied in way that Apple creates solutions to problems that users didn’t even know they had. And when it works, it’s truly incredible: Apple’s best products, like the iPhone and the original Mac, are direct end results of this kind of creativity.
But there’s a dark flip-side to this ideal for which Apple is no less well-known: the “Apple knows best” dogma. It’s often compounded with the company’s fixation on form over function, or with its practice of providing only one way to do something. It’s the side of Apple that seems to think that its products would be perfect, if only it didn’t have to deal with those pesky users all the time.
These two things exist on a continuum and Apple’s behavior over the years has often been pendulum-like, swinging back and forth between the extremes, while never totally abandoning either side.…
My thanks to BZG Apps for sponsoring Six Colors this week. BZG makes Unite 4, which allows you to turn any Website into a Mac app. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and M1 support. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource-hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when using the promo code SixColors at checkout. There’s also a 14 day free trial, and the app is included in Setapp for subscribers.…
Managing Zoom windows, Apple’s cycle of listening to (or ignoring) its customers, and the disadvantages of Apple re-using its technology.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Last year, I revisited one of my favorite iOS games, as Team Alto updated Alto’s Odyssey, bringing it to Apple Arcade with new levels, music, and artwork.
It turns out that Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City was only half of Team Alto’s Apple Arcade project. The new Alto’s Adventure: Spirit of the Mountain returns to the snowy, llama-filled slopes of the original game. People who haven’t ever played Alto’s Adventure will be able to start from the beginning. At the same time, veterans will be able to transfer over their saved progress and immediately begin advancing toward new challenges.
The big difference between the two games is that in Alto’s Adventure, you endlessly glide over snow, rather than sand. Other than that, it’s very similar, with some slight detail changes. (In Adventure, you can capture stray llamas, you run from an elder instead of a lemur, and there aren’t any nasty vine cables that break out from under you.) But they are almost exactly the same in terms of gameplay, as you flip and grind to build up speed and activate the ability to fly via the wingsuit.
Much to my surprise, I discovered that I never quite finished Alto’s Adventure.…
Big tech outages, our data backup strategies, the tech wisdom we’d impart to the masses, and the last time we felt out of our depth.…
Recycling is good. Just ask Apple.
After the company was repeatedly called out by Greenpeace for poor performance on environmental issues, it began a process to detail all the ways it was being green, including that now-familiar slide that appears at the introduction of every Apple product detailing how it’s made from recycled materials, doesn’t contain toxic byproducts, and more. You know the one.
But in recent years Apple has also become an expert at a different kind of recycling. The company has found strategic advantages in designing an increasing amount of its hardware in-house-and then, to make the most of it, it uses that hardware again and again in different products.
The most obvious example, at least this month, is the Apple Studio Display. It has the same Center Stage camera system that is in every current iPad model, the same A13 processor as numerous iPhones and iPads, and even runs a version of iOS behind the scenes. It’s not just the display’s aluminum that’s 100 percent recycled-most of its technology is, too!…
Is Wall Street souring on the streaming wars? Is Netflix coming for your shared passwords? Both issues are way more complicated than they might seem.…
So the Mac Studio has two SSD slots. They’re proprietary and you can’t just swap them in anyway. But why? Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham has an excellent overview:
Deeply sympathetic as I am to the goals of the right-to-repair movement, and deeply frustrated as I am by Apple’s storage prices relative to other high-end SSDs, Miani’s conclusions are based on incorrect assumptions about how modern Mac SSDs work. It’s also likely that these modular SSD slots actually do facilitate easier upgrades and repairs than, say, desoldering NAND chips from a logic board and soldering on higher-capacity NAND chips. There are just caveats you need to be aware of first.
This article explains, in detail, how Apple has chosen to structure its SSDs (the controller is in the M1 system on a chip) and why Apple has chosen to pair chips to individual systems for security reasons.
The fact remains: I suspect that sometime, someday, a trained tech might be able to expand the storage in a Mac Studio. But it’s not as simple as buying two Mac Studios and swapping in a different module.…
Back in late 2000—unfortunately, I don’t have any email archives from this period—we were planning a cover story about Mac customization. Written by Christopher Breen, it recommended utilities like James Thomson’s DragThing and St. Clair Software’s Default Folder. In the era of OS 8, this story also discussed utilities for adding items to the menu bar and changing the appearance of the Mac interface (via Greg Landweber and Arlo Rose’s Kaleidoscope utility).
I’m sure our circulation consultants had told us that how-to covers were big sellers, so we went with “Customize Your Mac” as our cover line. For the art, we hired four models—a rare and fun situation—and did a photoshoot in which one posed with a Mac that had been “customized” visually to get across the idea that you could make your Mac represent your personality. A cowboy was roping an iMac on which we stuck cow spots. A hippie-esque woman in a yoga pose with flowers in her hair sat in front of a psychedelic-patterned iBook. A Neo-like dude in red-tinted wraparound sunglasses held an orange Power Mac G4 Cube. And a woman in a pinstriped suit clutched a pinstriped Wall Street PowerBook.
At some point, one of our production people had revealed that it was relatively easy to print multiple covers of the magazine.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Jason’s got the new Mac Studio and Studio Display and it’s time for his complete review. We also discuss where the M2 chip might appear, and what the Mac will look like in 2023.…
Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:
- A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
- A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
- An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
- A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
- A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
- A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when you use the promo code ‘SixColors’ at checkout.
You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!…
In our YouTube video on Thursday, Dan relayed a question from a listener asking if the Studio Display supported automatic rotation. I grabbed the screen and twisted — and nothing happened. Oh well! Maybe it’s a VESA mount thing.
But, being right-hand dominant, I had chosen to lift with my right hand and rotate with my left—moving the display counterclockwise, placing it on what was the left edge. This morning, after receiving a report from Six Colors member Kyle, I went against every instinct and rotated the display clockwise, placing what was the right edge on my desk.
Yep. Automatic rotation engaged immediately! That is a… very tall display.
And yes, the Studio Display’s built-in webcam also did the right thing and rotated accordingly, though of course it’s now positioned much lower, halfway up the right side of the display.
I’m looking forward to receiving my VESA-mount version of the Studio Display next month and trying this out, though I’m not sure there’s any scenario in which I’d use vertical orientation on a 27-inch display. (I love it for writing on my iPad Pro, but in that orientation a 12.9-inch iPad is 11 inches tall, while the Studio display is 24.5 inches tall.)…
I wasn’t expecting one of the bigger reactions to my Mac Studio review to be my aside about the power strip I’ve been using for more than a decade, but that’s what happened! Here’s what I wrote:
Funny thing about Apple silicon: Apple’s not kidding about power consumption. For 15 years, I’ve used an auto-switching power strip in conjunction with my desktop computers. When the computer turns off, the power strip automatically turns off many other devices—powered speakers, USB hubs, you name it.
The Mac Studio, even with its powerful M1 Max processor, freaked the power strip out. It kept clicking between on and off states because the Mac Studio uses so little power compared to a traditional computer that it dips below the power strip’s threshold. (I just ordered a new power strip with an adjustable threshold.)
The power strip in question was the APC Power-Saving SurgeArrest, which Amazon tells me I bought in April 2008, right after I read about it in a David Pogue New York Times column. APC doesn’t make it anymore, but they do make larger and smaller follow-on versions. Those new power strips have a feature mine did not: a switch to change the auto-switching threshold to a much lower level, “for Chromebooks.”…
When it comes to iPhone upgrades, Apple is incremental. So are iPhone reviews. Those of us who review iPhones are, for understandable reasons, focused on what’s new between this year’s model and the last.
Fortunately, Apple’s release of a new iPhone SE in March 2022 is an opportunity to zoom out and take the long view. Most people don’t buy a new iPhone every year. The primary upgraders to the third-generation iPhone SE will be coming from older models. So here’s an attempt to provide a little more of a big-picture overview for owners of older iPhones who are wondering what’s new in the iPhone SE.
Consider the iPhone mini Before we compare the new iPhone SE to older models, we want to put in a plug for a phone we love, the iPhone mini. (You can buy the 2021 model iPhone 13 mini or the 2020 iPhone 12 mini.) The iPhone minis offer a second ultra-wide camera, two more hours of battery life, support Face ID (rather than Touch ID), have the harder Ceramic Shield glass on their front, are compatible with MagSafe accessories, offer a larger and higher-quality OLED screen… and for all that, they’re smaller and lighter than the iPhone SE.…
Jason’s spent a week with new Apple products. Lots of opinions about what’s wrong and right with the Studio Display. Jason third-thinks his Mac Studio purchase and comes out ahead.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge:
Matter, the new smart home interoperability standard being developed by Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and others, has been delayed. Again. Expected this summer, the launch has been rescheduled for fall of 2022, Michelle Mindala-Freeman of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) which oversees Matter, told The Verge.
CSA claims that the delay is because a lot more platforms than expected are planning on building in Matter support, which certainly makes it sound like a good problem to have, although given that the second part of the explanation is that the software development kit (SDK) needs more time makes me wonder which one of those is truly responsible. That said, they are promising a complete SDK in the second quarter of the year, with a spec to manufacturers by the end of June.
So we’ll need to wait a bit longer for our interoperable smart home tech, which is a bummer on one hand, but on the other, seems totally predictable. These things never launch on time.…
On Thursday Jason and Dan went on YouTube and talked about the new Mac Studio and Studio Display and answered your questions. Here’s the video in case you missed it:
…
Apple’s most popular devices come with their own displays. The iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and iMac can all be used right out of the box. In some ways, it’s the ultimate triumph of the original iMac’s “there’s no step three” ethos.
But some Macs—the Mac mini, the Mac Pro, and the new Mac Studio—don’t play by these rules. They’re old-school computers, and you need to bring a display to the party. If you’re a Mac laptop user, you might want to sit down at a desk sometimes and spread out in front of a larger screen. An external display is just what the doctor ordered!
Apple used to recognize these facts and made Apple-branded displays that were a good fit with their current products, both in terms of style and of onboard technology. But in the mid-2010s, just as Apple was losing its way in terms of Mac product design, it also abdicated its role as the maker of monitors for Mac users.
The idea was that a vibrant market for external displays already existed and that Apple didn’t need to be involved. Other companies would fight over Apple’s customers and compete to make great displays for them.
That didn’t happen.…
The Mac Studio is the first entirely new entry in the Mac product line in a very long time. It’s a kind of Mac—the mid-range-desktop—that used to be common, but vanished shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple. It’s more powerful than an iMac or Mac mini but more affordable than a Mac Pro.
The Mac Studio isn’t for everyone, that’s for sure. Some will find it utterly boring—but others will consider it the fulfillment of a decades-long dream. For the moment, it’s the fastest Mac ever made—and yet if you’re a MacBook Pro user, you might find that your laptop offers equivalent performance.
The beauty of the Mac Studio is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder. I bought one for myself on the day the product was announced, and after a week of using one provided by Apple, I’m sticking with that purchase, but plenty of people will be better served by a different Mac model. In fact, that might be the most beautiful thing about the Mac Studio: It fills a very specific ecological niche to perfection.
Function over form
Back in the olden days, Apple made a load of different desktop Macs in different shapes and at different prices.…
Our experience with game streaming services, our thoughts on Elden Ring, whether we order tech online or choose to pick it up, and the products we purchased from Apple’s March event.…
There comes a time in one’s life when, no matter how long one puts it off, one must buy a new iPad. For me, that day came immediately following last week’s Apple event, at which the company unveiled the fifth-generation iPad Air.
But, before you ask: no, I didn’t buy an iPad Air.
I was tempted, I must admit. Given that the previous generation of iPad Air already had many of the great features of the iPad Pro (as Jason has pointed out), but at a lower price, it seems like an obvious choice.
What ended up tipping me over the edge, however, was the one thing that Apple didn’t change. Like its predecessor, the base $599 model of the new iPad Air comes with just 64GB of storage.
As I was weighing my options, I took a look at my current iPad Pro, the 10.5-inch model from 2017. Despite having a spacious 256GB of storage, I was using only around 60GB. Which, yes, is less than 64, but not enough so that I wouldn’t have to constantly police how much stuff I had on it. (I’d already enabled a bunch of space-saving measures, like letting iPadOS offload apps that I don’t launch regularly.)…
The new iPad Air is coming this week. It’s an enticing mid-range iPad for people who don’t need the extra features of the iPad Pro but want something bigger than the iPad mini and better than the base-model iPad.
What it isn’t is new. The iPad Air offers features that premiered on the previous-model iPad Air (released in October 2020) and the 2021 iPad Pro. So just as the iPad Air remixes features from other iPads, this review is a remix of my previous reviews of those other iPads.
Challenging the iPad Pro I have to admire the fact that Apple makes an iPad Air that undercuts the more expensive iPad Pro in so many ways. As I wrote back in 2020:
Apple is at its best when it’s so confident in its product plans that it repeatedly challenges and one-ups itself… Apple is apparently so confident in the roll that it’s on with the iPad that it’s happy to take the iPad Air, which it previously defined as a more expensive version of the low-end iPad, and transform it into an iPad Pro.
No, the new iPad Air doesn’t offer every single feature of the iPad Pro. There are still some reasons for some users to opt for the more expensive model.
…
On Monday, Apple released macOS 12.3 and iOS/iPadOS 15.4. The two biggest features in these updates are Universal Control and mask support for Face ID. I recommend the excellent MacStories summaries of macOS and iOS.
Universal Control The pointer goes where no mouse has gone before: from a Mac (left) to an iPad.Universal Control lets you control different Apple devices—Macs or iPads—without lifting your hand from your keyboard and pointing device. If you’ve got two Macs, or a Mac and an iPad, or two Macs and an iPad, or a Mac and two iPads—look, you get the idea. Universal Control lets you push the pointer off the edge of your screen… and it magically appears on the other device’s screen.
This isn’t Sidecar, which turns an iPad into an external Mac display. When you move the pointer around on an iPad from your Mac, you’re driving the iPad and iPadOS. That’s why it’s best to think of Universal Control as a keyboard-and-pointing-device sharing system, not a display sharing system.
(And yes, there’s more than just display sharing going on—there’s clipboard sharing and the ability to drag-and-drop across devices and other stuff that’s clearly an expansion of the proximity functionality Apple’s been building since the early days of AirDrop.)…
John Siracusa joins Jason to talk about the Mythical Mid-Range Mac Minitower, the distortion of the iMac over time, the modular possibilities offered by the Apple Studio Display, and other fallout from last week’s Apple announcements.…
Last week’s “Peek Performance” event saw the company launch its latest low-cost iPhone, a revamped iPad Air, an external display and, oh yeah, the first brand new Mac model in years. Those announcements picked off a bunch of the low-hanging fruit and rumored hardware introductions, with about three months to go until the next likely gathering, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
Of course, the company could take a load off and put up its feet until the iPhone launch in September, leaving June for dealing with the many updates to its software platforms, but that doesn’t seem likely. This past week’s announcements may have answered some questions about the future of Apple’s product roadmap, but it definitely raised some new ones as well.…
Apple’s announcement of the Mac Studio on Tuesday may have fulfilled a dream that some Mac users have been clinging to for a couple of decades. Finally, there’s a modular desktop Mac that’s more powerful than the Mac mini without carrying the Mac Pro’s high price tag.
Back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, being a Mac nerd meant using a Power Mac. The arrival of the original iMac in 1998 was greeted with enthusiasm by Mac nerds because it meant that Steve Jobs might be able to restore Apple to greatness after it foundered in the mid-’90s—but none of them would ever stoop to using one themselves.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he presided over a dramatic and necessary simplification of the product line. The desktop Power Mac, a go-to model for power users, vanished in 1998. The choices dwindled to the underpowered iMac (and later, the Mac mini) on one end, and the increasingly expensive Power Mac/Mac Pro tower on the other.
In between, at least for Mac power users, was a desert. And rising out of the desert was a glorious mirage: a mythical mid-range Mac minitower like the Power Macs of old. This legendary creature was known as the xMac.…
Late in 2021, my wife and I moved to a new house, which meant packing up everything in my office of more than a decade and then setting it up all over again in my new (but somewhat smaller) office.
In some ways this was a good opportunity to revisit my setup, try to simplify some aspects of it—perhaps discovering some items I could do without, or maybe enhancing my current setup with new devices to help me do different types of things.
I’ll let you guess which one of those impulses largely won out.
Six months later, there are still some parts of my office that remain in disarray (some pesky piles of old papers that I can never quite seem to get rid of), but my work setup has at least been pretty stable for my most common tasks: writing, recording and editing podcasts, and the occasional bit of video streaming.
With that said, here’s what I’ve got powering my home office these days.
Ergotron Workfit-D: I’ve had this sit-stand desk for almost a decade now: I actually got it free for being a speaker at Macworld Expo. (Yes, that’s how long ago it was.) At the very beginning of the pandemic, I was starting to deal with some potential repetitive stress symptoms from all the time I now spent at my desk, so I bought the associated keyboard tray for my Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and I haven’t looked back!…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient and high performance ad blocker for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It runs as a native Safari content blocking extension, and blocks intrusive ads, pop ups and trackers, including best-in-class YouTube ad blocking.
Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of over 150,000 users. You can download it for free today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store, and Mac App Store.…
Jason bought a lot of stuff this week, some of it more unexpected than others. Dan bought a new iPad—but not the one you’re thinking of. And where does the Mac Studio fit?…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The introduction of the Mac Studio this week got me thinking about how strange the final few years of the Intel-based 27-inch iMac were.
When the 27-inch iMac was refreshed in 2020 we all knew it was the end of the line. Apple silicon iMacs were coming, but just before Apple shut the door on the old iMac, it got a final revision out the door.
Consider the features of that iMac: An optional nano-texture display and a 3.6GHz 10-core Intel Core i9 processor. Macworld’s reviewed iMac configuration cost $4,499—clearly aimed at pro users. Now consider that the original iMac, when it was introduced in 1997, was underpowered and cost $1,299 for the general consumer. The evolution of the iMac took a strange turn. What happened?…
One takeaway from Apple’s Peek Performance event this week: the Mac is increasingly a platform for pros.
After years of pros feeling ignored by the company, that’s a heck of an about-face. But Apple’s delivered a slew of impressively powerful Macs: the iMac Pro, the new Mac Pro, redesigned MacBook Pros, and so on.
But when the dust from this week’s event cleared, I found myself wondering about the space between the low-end consumer offerings and those computers aimed at professionals1—or rather, the lack thereof, especially on the desktop.
If you’re someone looking to pick up an affordable desktop Mac just for some basic tasks—browsing, email, light media creation—you’ve got two pretty solid options: the M1-powered Mac mini, which starts at $699, and the M1-powered iMac starting at $1299 (or, to get one with a comparable GPU as the mini, the $1499 model).
Meanwhile, those looking for more power now have the option of the $1999 or $3999 Mac Studio models, or the $5999 Intel Mac Pro—none of which, of course, include a display. The Mac Studio packs a punch with the M1 Max chip that was, until this week, the most powerful chip ever put in a Mac.…
The iPad Air’s place in Apple tablet lineup, how we avoid succumbing to the news 24/7, our dreams of being radio DJs, and what one thing we’d change about Apple’s new display.…
It’s not every day that Apple announces an entirely new Mac model, as it did Tuesday with the unveiling of the Mac Studio. And everyone knows that Apple’s track record on releasing standalone displays has been sketchy in recent years. But on Tuesday, Apple also did something it has never done before, namely announcing a wide-ranging deal with a major sports league. According to Mike Ozanian of Forbes, the deal is worth $85 million annually over 7 years ($595 million in total) with opt-outs after the first and second years.
For years, there have been rumors that Apple was building out a live-sports infrastructure. Streaming live video is not the same as streaming on-demand video; while prerecorded content can be loaded up in advance on wide-ranging content-delivery networks, live content is coming down in the moment, and must be relayed to everyone watching. And of course, even the most popular on-demand content is viewed asynchronously across hours, or days, or even weeks, while live sports are almost entirely viewed right then, meaning that streamers have to support much higher concurrent viewers.
Major League Baseball was actually a pioneer in this space, building up MLB Advanced Media, which was sold to Disney and is the bedrock of Disney’s streaming strategy (including ESPN).…
Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it?
Here are my quick-hit reactions to Apple’s March 8 event, at which the company updated the iPhone SE and iPad Air, rolled out a brand-new Mac and external display, and made a few other assorted announcements.
The home button’s last hurrah The new iPhone SE continues to be a modern take on the iPhone 8. One of these days, this design will fade into oblivion like the original iPhone SE design (based on the iPhone 5). But Tuesday was not that day.
With an A15 processor inside, I’d imagine this SE will be on sale for a couple of years at the very least. But I’m going to call it now: The next time the iPhone SE gets updated, it will be to a different design, and it will not have a home button. (The home button—and the enormous bezel around the screen that it requires—already feel old.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if the next iPhone SE, in 2024 or 2025, resembles the current iPhone minis. We’ll see. Failing that, at the very least, I’d expect Apple to repurpose the “sleep/wake button as Touch ID sensor” concept from the iPad Air into a future low-cost iPhone.…
It’s not every day that Apple introduces an entirely new Mac line. But on March 8, that’s exactly what happened. Jason, Myke, and special guest Stephen Hackett discuss the new Mac Studio and Studio Display, along with the updated iPad air and iPhone SE.…
As always, the facts come fast and furious at an Apple event, so some details about its latest products fall through the cracks. Others, the company chooses not to dish out, leaving instead for its press releases and product pages.
Here are a few things that you might not have caught in the initial barrage.
Inside baseball Apple’s new venture with Major League Baseball, “Friday Night Baseball” will be available without an Apple TV+ subscription for the time being, but according to the company’s press release, it will eventually require viewers to pony up.
“Friday Night Baseball” will be available on Apple TV+ — and, for a limited time, without the need for a subscription.1
However, Friday Night Baseball won’t be the only baseball content Apple’s providing. There’s also a live show airing every weeknight, “MLB Big Inning”, featuring highlights and glimpses of games. Plus, there’s a 24/7 livestream with replays, classic games, and more, as well as on-demand content.
Can’t stand it Apple’s new Studio Display looks impressive, but depending on how you want to mount it, it could cost a little bit more.
Either the standard tilt stand or a VESA mount option will be included in that base $1599 price, but if you want the fancier height-adjustable stand, it’ll boost the price $400 to $1999.…
Disney inevitably embraces advertising, NBC inevitably takes its ball and goes home, and The Batman inevitably forces a discussion about the future of theatrical releases.…
Want to browse the web quickly, smoothly, and anonymously with no advertising?
Then get the ad blocker made for you – easy to set up, easy to keep up to date, and now with best-in-class YouTube ad blocking.
Magic Lasso Adblock is an efficient, high performance ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply and easily blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances in Safari. Just enable to browse in bliss.
Over 200,000+ users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:
- Browse common websites 2.0x faster
- Improve their privacy and security by removing ad trackers
- Block over 10 types of YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads
- Double battery life during heavy web browsing
- Lower data usage when on the go
And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.
Download for free today via the Magic Lasso website, the App Store and Mac App Store.…
This is it: Apple’s 2022 is kicking off in earnest on Tueaday at the company’s “Peek Performance” event. It’s likely to feature the first of its major product announcements for a year that, based on rumors, is jam-packed with new developments out of Cupertino.
Unlike the immense spectacle that is the company’s June Worldwide Developers Conference—in which the company rolls out its software road map for the year ahead—or the flashy iPhone-centric announcements of the fall, Apple’s spring events tend to be more of a hodgepodge, featuring whatever the company has ready to go. In the past, that’s ranged from iPads to Macs to the occasional iPhone, with plenty of other wildcards thrown in the mix.
As we look ahead to the spring event, let’s run down the most likely culprits that Apple may indeed let us peek at.…
An interesting development in terms of Apple corporate governance, as reported by Levi Sumagaysay of MarketWatch:
Apple investors on Friday voted to support an audit that would examine the impact of the tech giant’s policies and practices on the civil rights of employees, customers and society, as well as an investigation into the company’s use of concealment clauses.
It’s not very often that measures opposed by Apple pass at these meetings, but two of them did. The first will prompt a third-party audit of Apple’s commitment to civil rights, and the second will very specifically probe how the company may have used non-disclosure agreements to induce former employees into silence about working conditions.
Apple, of course, said that the measures were unnecessary because Apple was already doing everything required of it in these areas. It seems like the company may have the opportunity to prove that such statements were correct, and not made in the interest of hiding questionable practices.…
Soccer writer Grant Wahl went to Qatar to report a story in advance of this year’s World Cup soccer tournament. Apparently everyone in Qatar needs to install an app that tracks your location at all times in order to do anything, citing Covid safety:
The way the Qatari government explains it, Ehteraz is a Covid-19 app that’s designed for public health. But as anyone who’s seen the app can tell you, Ehteraz is also a tool that the Qatari state can use to monitor your location at any time. And that’s more than a little scary…
On the morning after my second night in quarantine, someone knocked on my door, gave me a Covid rapid test and told me I’d be free to go in 15 minutes if it came up negative. Which it did. But I still couldn’t enter any public buildings in Qatar until my Ehteraz app was working and I could show a green QR code. (A green QR means you’re negative, a yellow one means you’re in quarantine, a red one means you’re positive and a grey one means you’re a suspected positive.)
All the international tourists who are planning on going to the World Cup at the end of the year should be prepared.…
Event anticipation, chip roll-out theories, and preparing to open our wallets.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My pal Casey Liss, co-host of the Accidental Tech Podcast, has released a new app:
In short, MaskerAid allows you to quickly and easily add emoji to images. Plus, thanks to the magic of machine learning, MaskerAid will automatically place emoji over any faces it detects.
I got to try this app during beta testing and it’s a lot of fun to use. If you want to deface photos with emojis, or cover up faces of people who didn’t consent to have their faces shared on the Internet, it does the trick in nifty fashion.
MaskerAid (get it?) is free on the App Store with just the 🙂 smiley emoji enabled; a $3 in-app purchase unlocks every single emoji, so you can place a Japanese Ogre on the faces of your loved ones instead.…
As a so-called elder millennial, I remember our 19″ Zenith television, with an actual clicker, that sat in the oak armoire in the family room. It would display whatever happened to be broadcast, and that was it. You could buy a TV Guide from the grocery store, and it would have a printed listing of what would be on TV and when, so people would plan to watch a channel at a certain time or set their VCR to record something on tape.
Then we had cable, and eventually a cable channel that just showed a programming guide that slowly scrolled through all the channels. Eventually, we got an interactive programming guide, where you could click to move around in a grid of channels. Finally came the ability to set a DVR recording from the grid.1 The important thing is that we offloaded the burden of managing live TV viewing to computers.
We’ve lost some of that simplicity because of the innovations in on-demand TV. On-demand TV is great, and it lets us live our lives unencumbered by any viewing schedule. However, there are still live events, news, and other situations where I prefer to leave the decision-making up to network programmers while folding laundry.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Using a self-driving taxi service, common myths about livestreaming, our gaming habits, and how we value art created by machines and artificial intelligence.…
It’s official — Apple’s doing a product launch event on Tuesday, March 8. The company sent out invitations bearing the phrase “Peek performance,” a Dad-Joke-level play on words that frustrated humorless editors and sticklers everywhere.
Now begins the reading of the tea leaves1. While I usually try not to give myself a pareidolia headache by staring at Apple artwork and asking “what does it all mean, maaaaan?”, in this case I think it’s worth mulling things over a little bit.
It’s all about that second word—performance. Ever since Apple started including its own chip designs in Macs, Apple has—rightfully—promoted the power and promise of those chips heavily. Since new iPhone-class processors only really appear in the fall, this has to be a reference to Macs running Apple silicon.
What’s the Apple silicon news likely to be? There are a couple of options. First, and less exciting, would be the arrival of M1 Max and M1 Pro chips in new Mac models—perhaps a larger iMac, a new Mac mini, and even an updated 13-inch MacBook Pro. I’m so ready for a new iMac that I want this to be the case.
It’s not really a new story, though.…
Reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been unprecedented, from financial sanctions to seized assets to the de-platforming of Russian state-funded media from social networks. One of the most interesting wrinkles happened Tuesday when Apple said in a statement that it had “paused all product sales in Russia” and removed RT News and Sputnik News from the App Store outside Russia. Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister of Ukraine, credited Tim Cook with the move.
I applaud Apple joining with many governments and companies to sever ties with Russia. But make no mistake: Apple can afford to do so. While the company certainly makes money in Russia, it can afford to walk away… permanently, if it needs to.
Apple can’t do that with China, should that country decide to act in a similar fashion as Russia.…
On Tuesday Apple halted all sales in Russia and removed the RT and Sputnik apps from the App Store. Here’s the Apple statement:
We are deeply concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and stand with all of the people who are suffering as a result of the violence… We have paused all product sales in Russia. Last week, we stopped all exports into our sales channel in the country. Apple Pay and other services have been limited. RT News and Sputnik News are no longer available for download from the App Store outside Russia. And we have disabled both traffic and live incidents in Apple Maps in Ukraine as a safety and precautionary measure for Ukrainian citizens.
According to Politico’s Alex Ward, the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine made this statement: “Apple has stopped selling its equipment in the official online store in Russia, thanks to Tim Cook.”…
Our most speculative draft yet! Jason and Myke refuse to wait for Apple. Instead, they predict what will happen at Apple’s next product launch—whenever it might happen. Will the M2 make its debut? Will there be an iPhone SE, and will it look any different? Are there other Mac and iPad offerings in the works? And most importantly, what fresh colors will be on offer for spring? We do our job—and now it’s time for Apple to do its.…
In June 2020, when Apple unveiled its first Mac built around its own chip, the M1 processor, the company said it was planning for a two-year transition for its entire computer line. Here we are, just months away from the two-year anniversary of that announcement, and we’re poised to find out exactly what’s next in Apple’s processor jump—in more ways than one.
Recent reports suggest that Apple could be planning an event to take place around March 8, which might feature the introduction of one or more new Mac models. So, as we await news of whether such an event will indeed be happening next week, it’s worth it to take a moment and run down the state of this two-year plan and what exactly might be in the offing.…
I use iZotope’s RX audio utilities constantly. They clean up background noise, remove buzzing and humming, and even remove the reverberations from echoey rooms. There was even that one time when someone played three hours of D&D with a sump pump beeping in the background every 30 seconds, and I used iZotope’s tools to isolate that frequency and eliminate the beeping entirely. It’s pretty great stuff.
What’s not so great has been the company’s slowness to embrace Apple silicon. While Rosetta has made the iZotope RX Audio Editor app usable on my M1 MacBook Air, it’s hard to use CPU-intensive audio utilities without feeling frustrated that they’re not living up to their potential because they’re being translated from Intel code.
iZotope finally released its Apple silicon upgrade—it’s RX 9 9.3.0, so if you’re using a previous version of iZotope RX you’ll be forced to buy an upgrade—and yes, of course, everything is faster. A lot faster:
In my brief tests, the native version of the Spectral Denoise tool I use to remove background noises took 60 percent of the time it did in Rosetta mode. The extremely processor-intensive Dialogue Dereverb tool, which uses fancy math to subtract room echo, executed in 75 percent of the time it took in Rosetta.…
Ooooh, Apple, you’ve done it this time. You’ve gone and gotten a European country mad—and not just any European country, but the Netherlands, a country which in the context of an epic fantasy novel would surely be a shadowy realm inhabited by demons who enjoy inflicting eternal torment, feasting upon your soul, biking, and growing tulips, but in this world they’re just into three out of the four.
The point of contention is the insistence by Dutch regulators that Apple must allow dating apps in the country the ability to use alternative payment systems, rather than being forced to use only the App Store. And because the regulators don’t consider Apple’s current “solution”—an onerous process that involves jumping through a bevy of hoops, including submitting a separate binary only for the Netherlands—to be sufficient, the country’s government is now fining Cupertino the baronly sum of €5 million per week, to a maximum of €50 million.
Which in turn has led the European Union’s head of digital policy, Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, to comment, “As we understand it, Apple essentially prefers paying periodic fines, rather than comply with a decision of the Dutch Competition Authority.”
And, simply put, yes. Yes it does.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
No Jason this week, so Dan is joined by special guest John Moltz to discuss smart locks, vintage Macs, and the Apple silicon transition to come.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
I’ve spent a lot of time with different pieces of smart home tech over the last several years, but having finally made the jump from an apartment to a house that I actually own has opened up possibilities that weren’t available to me before.
Thus: a foray into smart locks.
I’ve always been a little bit skittish at the idea of smart locks. The idea of being able to gain access to my home via a security vulnerability or hack seemed like a worrying prospect. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized those fears are largely unfounded. It’s not as if picking a lock or smashing a window is particularly difficult. Nor does it seem likely that your average thief is going to spend time reading up on security exploits for your particular brand of smart lock.1
Moreover, I wasn’t sure about the styling of some of the smart locks on the market, many of which stand out like a sore thumb thanks to complex keypads or glowing lights. Personally, I was interested in something a little more understated.
Which is how I ended up buying a Level Bolt.
The Bolt keeps its battery inside the bolt itself, and it’s easily replaceable.…
Smart locks, streaming tech and accessories, the future of household robots, and whether we’re more productive at day or night.…
ViacomCBS changes its name, Peacock weathers the Super Bowl storm, the Disney brand continues to evolve, the culture of binge-dropping begins to fade away, Netflix is Doing Just Fine, and your letters!…
Oh, tax season. Admittedly, the annual ritual has gotten a lot easier for me since getting a) an accountant and b) getting most forms delivered electronically as PDFs.
But I ended up with a wrinkle this year when I was processing a few of the tax forms provided by my clients. Several of them used a handy service that emails tax forms, which also thoughtfully encrypts and password protects those files. However, when uploading these for my accountant, I find it convenient to strip out the protection, so that I don’t have to provide a bunch of passwords as well.
In the past, I’ve simply used the loophole of opening a PDF in Preview, entering the password, and then using the File > Export as PDF… command or the old trick of printing to a PDF. That generates a version of the file without the password protection.
However, in macOS Monterey I was surprised to discover that these loopholes have been plugged. Exporting as a PDF simply maintained the password protection, and trying to save as as PDF from the Print menu wasn’t even an option: the system now grays it out.
In theory, this is a good security practice to avoid having password protected files easily stripped of those protections.…
Pyto does its thing.Upon arriving at our tropical resort for a week on vacation, my wife and daughter sat out on the deck doing crossword puzzles and I broke out my iPad with Magic Keyboard and tried to solve a puzzle of my own—namely, debugging a Python script. (This is how this family rolls.)
Literally minutes after leaving our house to go to the airport, I got an alert indicating that our home network might be down. Perfect timing, as always. Just before I left I had noticed a notification on my phone that our eero base station had restarted overnight. Given a five-hour flight to Hawaii to stew on that one, and a frantic text message from our housesitter who couldn’t watch anything on our TV, I took a shot in the dark and tried to remotely restart the eero.
The good news is, that totally worked. Within a minute, the network came back and our housesitter was happily binging the HBO Max shows she only gets to see at our house. I checked the weather page on my home server to verify that everything was up and running—and discovered that all of my precious charts and graphs were seriously messed up.…
Jason imagines a future iOS App Store improved by sideloading, Myke gets back into reading digital comics, and both of them have a very strongly worded wish list involving the rumored big new iMac.…
My thanks to Clay for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Being more generous, more responsive, and more conscientious with people can take effort. And yet they’re core to our personal and professional success. That’s why the people behind Clay have created an intuitive and private home for your relationships—built automatically from your email, calendar, LinkedIn, Twitter, and iMessage.
Clay helps you show up informed and at the right time by creating and automatically updating beautiful, contextual cards for each of your contacts. You can use powerful features such as natural-language search, dictation and note taking, reminders, birthday notifications, news articles about people you know, and more to deepen your relationships over time.
Clay was thoughtfully designed specifically for macOS and iOS, using Apple’s latest tech, including a whole lot of SwiftUI. They’ve sweated the small deetails, including animation timings, shadows on cards, and haptic feedback on taps. There are iOS widgets, iMessage and iCloud calendar integrations, plus Spotlight search, Zapier integration, light and dark themes, and no advertising.
If you’re looking for a tool to be more thoughtful with the people in your personal and professional life that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices, give Clay a try for 60 days for free!…
The long, slow transition to electric cars. And is Jason’s iMac shut-down procedure Lawful Good or Neutral Evil?…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The opening act?We’ve been in the Apple silicon era for 15 months now, and I’m tired of waiting.
My last two primary Macs have been 27-inch iMacs. First the original 5K model, then the iMac Pro. As much as I have loved using this iMac Pro for the past four years, I’m over it now. I’m ready to enter the Apple silicon era. And Apple has, thus far, failed to oblige.
Will Apple announce a new, large iMac at an event next month? “Reply hazy, ask again later,” said Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. (Or at least that was my interpretation of his reporting.)
What I’m saying is, if the next new Mac to be announced is a faster Mac mini or an upgraded 13-inch MacBook Pro, I’m going to treat them fairly and evaluate them properly… and the entire time, I am going to be grumbling. Because what I want is a new big iMac.
So to pass the time while I’m waiting, I’m going to do what they taught me to do as a kid and enter the land of the imagination. Here’s what I want to see in a new, big Apple silicon-bearing iMac.
Don’t make it too big.…
Obsolete tech, smartphone camera lenses, Chrome OS on an old Mac or PC, and app tracking privacy on Android.…
Each year when Apple’s WWDC wraps up, I find myself doing what a lot of app developers do: planning my response to the upcoming version of iOS. But my summers aren’t consumed by Xcode or SwiftUI. My annual contribution to the Apple economy is a book called iOS Access for All: Your Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. You think that title’s long? The iOS 15 edition weighs in at 215,000 words, 11 chapters, and four appendices—all written, assembled and sold by me.
Realizing I’d just published the book’s ninth edition got me thinking about how this all happened, and the extent to which I’ve managed to streamline many parts of the publishing process, while hopefully living up to the expectations of a group of readers who don’t get much attention from other iOS books and overviews.
Beginnings Before I focused on iOS or accessibility, I wrote books about the Mac, web development, and wireless networking. I worked with book publishers whose end products were heavy, paper volumes you could find on a bookstore shelf. Even in 2012, when I first had an idea for a book about accessibility on Apple platforms, I knew the publishing model I had worked under for 10 years or so had changed dramatically.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
If we know anything about iOS as a platform, it’s that if you want to run apps on it, you need to download them from the App Store. (If you missed it, it turns out that this decision continues to be controversial!) The iPhone and iPad have never been platforms defined by a combination of Apple-approved apps and third-party apps from random sources.
But what if that’s what iOS was to become? Certainly, as legislators and regulators circle around Apple and its practices, it’s possible that someone will force Apple to allow apps onto the platform without them going through the App Store.
It’s almost unimaginable. And yet… what if that calamity ended up being the best thing for the App Store, and improved it–and the base iOS experience–for most users?…
We all know it needs to happen. So Basic Apple Guy went ahead and redesigned System Preferences on macOS:
Everyone has a thing in their life long overdue for a change. It might be a piece of clothing that you’re convinced still looks good on you or that pickup line that’s more sleaze than smooth. For macOS, it needs to admit that settings… I mean… System Preferences is long (LONG!) overdue for an overhaul. Like insisting, against all evidence, that your favourite pair of jeans still fit, it’s time to face the fact that you’ve outgrown what you’ve got and move on.
This is one of the oldest-feeling corners of macOS. It is long past time for a complete rethink. And I like the look of this proposal.…
Last in, first out? John Gruber, who was the final person to enter the Six Colors Report Card (to be fair, there were four stragglers who popped in at the very last moment), has published his full responses:
For what it’s worth, Snell shared with me that my scores were the 14th most positive among this year’s 53 voters — I’m voter “Fifty-Three” on the “Grading distributions of respondents” graph here. (I shall endeavor to return my ballot sooner next year.)
I appreciate everyone who submits to the survey, but especially appreciate those who take their comments and turn them into posts on their own sites later!…
John Siracusa has Opinions on video streaming apps:
I subscribe to a lot of streaming video services, and that means I use a lot of streaming video apps. Most of them fall short of my expectations. Here, then, is a simple specification for a streaming video app. Follow it, and your app will be well on its way to not sucking.
This spec includes only the basics. It leaves plenty of room for apps to differentiate themselves by surprising and delighting their users with clever features not listed here. But to all the streaming app developers out there, please consider covering these fundamentals before working on your Unique Selling Proposition.
John’s list is really solid. I quibble about a couple of the things he’s looking for, but can’t argue with most of them: there’s nothing more frustrating than an app that gets in your way, especially when you’re trying to do something as simple as watch an episode of TV.
My personal addition to this list is better recognition of when you’ve finished an episode (I’m sorry, I’m not always going to watch all five minutes of credits—you should be able to figure that out).
Apple’s newer video player UI, rolled out in tvOS 15, has become adopted by more and more apps, and it’s really pretty good.…
Finding a common time when a group of people can meet has been a recurring theme of my life for a couple of decades now. Back in the old days, it was often finding common times for project meetings at work. For more than a decade, it has also included scheduling podcast episodes with a disparate group of panelists. And as an independent type person, I often need to schedule Zoom meetings with a random collection of people in different time zones with different schedules.
Looking at Fantastical meeting sign-ups.My calendar app has never really done this job well, so I’ve used a bunch of web-based tools to facilitate this work, most notably Doodle and (more recently) StrawPoll. As of last week, though, my calendar app does do this—because last week Flexibits announced Fantastical 3.6, an update to its subscription-based calendar app that adds a new web-based scheduler.
Fantastical’s scheduler works both ways. If you’re trying to find a common time, you can create an event with multiple possible times, and then generate a link to send to potential participants. They can respond on the web with the times they’re available, and—this is maybe my favorite part—you can see their responses right within Fantastical.…
Jason Snell returns to the show to dissect the Six Colors 2021 Apple Report Card. Also: the care and feeding of mechanical keyboards.…
This week Jason and Myke both revive some classic hardware that hits them right in the feels. Also, there’s a confusing set of Apple event rumors, and Apple tries to address AirTag security concerns.…
People make us laugh, challenge us to improve, support us when things are tough, and celebrate with us once they get better. They’re core to our personal and professional success, but being more generous, more responsive, more conscientious with them? That takes effort.
Before Clay, being thoughtful required relying on your memory as well as a mix of spreadsheets, notecards, address books, and other tools. In addition to being difficult to manage, this approach let important relationships, moments, and context fall through the cracks. That’s why we created Clay—a stunning, intuitive, and private home for your relationships, built automatically from your email, calendar, LinkedIn, Twitter, and iMessage.
Clay helps you show up informed and at the right time by creating and automatically updating beautiful cards for each of your contacts with context such as profile photos, bios, education and work history, location, and social profiles. Use powerful features such as natural-language search, dictation and note taking, reminders, birthday notifications, news articles about people you know, and more to deepen your relationships over time.
We’ve thoughtfully designed Clay specifically for macOS and iOS, using Apple’s latest tech (our iOS app is one of the most advanced SwiftUI apps in production) to ensure the app is attractive, performant, and secure.…
Ah, the humble wireless router: a staple of the internet age, something we’ve all got tucked away in our house somewhere (or worse, out in full view). They’re a pain, a thing that sometimes just needs to be rebooted for no apparent reason, whose errors can be mystifying, and whose troubleshooting and management can make even the most tech-savvy among us grit their teeth in frustration.
It didn’t have to be this way. Once upon a time, Apple was in the business of making wireless routers. The AirPort line debuted in 1999, at the same event where Apple introduced the iBook, the first consumer computer to offer built-in wireless networking. Over the course of nearly more than a decade, Apple made a succession of the devices, until it finally discontinued the line in 2018.
And now, more than ever, it’s starting to feel like that might have been a mistake. Is it too late? Could an AirPort resurgence save us from the pain of dealing with substandard routers? Or are we consigned to a future of annoyance and irritation?…
The Six Colors Report Card for 2021 is in the books, but nerds being nerds, there’s always a clamor for more statistical slicing and dicing of the data.
This year I’m happy to present a few charts from Six Colors member, Duke University professor, and data-visualization expert Kieran Healy that take the initial Report Card scores and slice them in a few interesting ways. (The last one might break your brain. You’ve been warned.)
First up is a chart that drills down into the vote distributions across all the categories, so you can see which categories gathered a variety of votes and which ones were a bit more consistent across all 53 voters.
Next is a chart comparing those distributions to the overall distribution (shown in gray). This one lets you compare how people think Apple is doing on each particular topic with their sense of how Apple is doing overall.
Here’s a plot of all the participants in the survey, ranked from most positive to least positive. I’ve removed the names from this because I didn’t clear such detailed analysis with the panelists in advance, so you’ll never know who our sunniest panelists were (the fifteenth and first to submit), nor the identities of our grouches.…
Taking a stroll through the Apple Newsroom, and how some Apple press releases are like takeout shots in curling.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is the “average” person. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Kolide knows that organizations can dramatically lower the risks they face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.…
Apple just posted a statement about AirTag that addresses a batch of issues:
We’ve become aware that individuals can receive unwanted tracking alerts for benign reasons, such as when borrowing someone’s keys with an AirTag attached, or when traveling in a car with a family member’s AirPods left inside. We also have seen reports of bad actors attempting to misuse AirTag for malicious or criminal purposes.
You should probably just read the statement, but the gist seems to be that Apple:
- Is working with law enforcement to identify people who use AirTags to track people without their permission, and will be making it clearer when you start using an AirTag that it’s a crime to do so.
- Fixing an issue that makes AirPods appear as an “unknown accessory,” presumably startling people unnecessarily.
- Plans an update to allow people to find unwanted nearby AirTags more easily and allow devices to notice and alert about unwanted nearby AirTags more rapidly.
Apple is trying to thread the needle with AirTags, allowing them to be used for good but not for evil. It’s complicated, and Apple knew that going in—but it turns out it still has a lot to learn.…
Writing about podcasting! Is that all that I do?
Well, technically sometimes I also podcast. Which feeds the writing about podcasting. Really, it’s a vicious cycle.
For more than a decade, I’ve been happily using a Blue Yeti for all of my podcasting needs. While it has its detractors, it’s been a good fit for me: a USB mic that sounds good with my voice, and is simple to connect to my Mac. It’s not the most portable mic (for that I have an Audio Technica ATR2100), but as the anchor of my at-home studio, that wasn’t a real concern.
However, I recently ran into a scenario for which the Yeti has not been ideal. To wit, A Complicated Profession, my Star Wars recap podcast over at The Incomparable. For our coverage of The Book of Boba Fett, I’ve been joined not only by my frequent podcasting collaborator Tony Sindelar, but also my wife Kat.
And therein lies the rub. Though I had two USB mics, the Yeti and the ATR, allowing us to both record at the same time, I lacked fine grain control over those mic setups. The biggest impediment was that in order for both of us to hear Tony over Zoom, I had to setup a virtual interface with Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback, but such a setup also made it more difficult for Kat and I to hear each other.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Whether we’re still using the iPad to its fullest potential, how we’re watching the Winter Olympics, AI-generated music and art, and the ways we digitally send cash to friends.…
What are third-party app developers worth to Apple? What is access to Apple’s platform worth to developers? While the past year has brought squabbles and lawsuits and regulations related to dating apps in the Netherlands, the core issue is this: the iPhone and its App Store have generated an enormous amount of money, and as is so often the case, all the involved parties would like more of it.
What’s clear, at least right now, is that Apple has decided to fight any court- or regulator-mandated reduction in the amount of money it takes from the App Store ecosystem. (Apple itself has reduced its cut voluntarily a few times, including for subscriptions that last longer than a year and for developers who make less than a million dollars in revenue.)
What’s also clear is that Apple doesn’t feel that the 30 percent it takes from most App Store transactions is a fee for running the App Store and handling its finances. Instead, Apple feels that it is money owed to Apple for the creation and maintenance of the iPhone as a platform for third-party apps. It’s not just credit-card transactions, bandwidth from servers, and the salaries of the App Store’s approval and editorial teams.…
The future of CNN+ is called into question, the Oscars recognize streaming services of all kinds, and did Peacock finally get the Olympics right?…
Apple Newsroom:
The new capability will empower millions of merchants across the US, from small businesses to large retailers, to use their iPhone to seamlessly and securely accept Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets through a simple tap to their iPhone — no additional hardware or payment terminal needed.
This feature has been much rumored in the last couple weeks, though I’m surprised to see Apple announce it in a press release—maybe this is about getting ahead of the people who dig into software releases to find unannounced features.
What struck me as interesting is that Apple seems to specifically be targeting merchants using third-party apps for this feature:
Tap to Pay on iPhone will be available for payment platforms and app developers to integrate into their iOS apps and offer as a payment option to their business customers. Stripe will be the first payment platform to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to their business customers, including the Shopify Point of Sale app this spring. Additional payment platforms and apps will follow later this year.
This suggests that it’s more about a software framework available to developers than a feature built into the OS—i.e.…
It’s time for our annual dive into the Six Colors Apple Report Card, as Jason and Myke interpret the scores and comments of several dozen Apple-watchers and add their own views on where the company is succeeding—and where it’s not. Also discussed: future M2 Macs and the intricacies of Dutch dating.…
At Kolide, we believe the supposedly Average Person is the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Collectively, we know that organizations can dramatically lower the actual risks they will likely face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Try Kolide Free for 14 Days; no credit card required.
Honest.Security is one part guide and another-part manifesto that defines a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. It’s not just Kolide’s north star but also an aspirational roadmap. It’s our positive contribution to counterbalance the worrying upward trend of human-hostile cyber security, device management, and workplace surveillance philosophies that we’ve seen reach a fever pitch as organizations adapt to the long-term term prospects of remote work.
READ the Honest.Security Guide.…
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.
This is the seventh year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category. I received 53 replies, with the average results as shown below:
Since I used largely the same survey as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion on all but one question compared to previous years. The net changes between 2020 and 2021 surveys is displayed below:
Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and commentary from the panelists.
Mac Grade: A+ (average score: 4.6, median score 5, last year: 4.7)
We live in the era of Apple silicon. Last year’s average score, 4.7, was hard to top—and so a little backsliding due to familiarity might not be too surprising. The average slid by a half a point, but it’s still an A+ grade that’s among the highest we’ve seen in the history of this survey.…
Security has been a significant selling point in Apple’s modern era. The company’s invested a lot in building it into its platforms from the ground up, with innovations like the Secure Enclave, all the way up to user-facing technology like Touch ID, Face ID, and iCloud Keychain.
But in the most recent beta releases of its operating systems—particularly in iOS 15.4—Apple’s rolled out some new improvements that take not only security but also convenience into account. And they demonstrate that, while the company is continuing to take the safety of our devices and information to heart, it also realizes that these are systems that people have to interact with, often many times a day.
Moreover, if you’re peering into the future, you can also see pretty clearly that Apple has further expansions of these technologies in mind, with the aim of continuing to make its products the most secure—and most user-friendly—options on the market.…
A podcast about dating in the Netherlands.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Kolide connects device security and Slack together in a clever way—by sending people important, timely, and relevant recommendations about securing their devices via Slack.
For example, Kolide can instruct developers to set passphrases on unencrypted SSH keys, find plain-text two-factor backup codes and show users how to store them securely, or even encourage employees to uninstall gross browser extensions that sell data to marketers.
It’s a great tool for any company that wants to move beyond the traditional “lockdown model” to one focused on educating and informing employees about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems.
Six Colors readers can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.…
I have to search for a lot of movies to watch on my Apple TV because I have a movie podcast. If a movie is located within a service that I’m already paying for, then I’d like to get that. I don’t want to browse all of the services, and I don’t use websites that claim to have a complete catalog of where movies are available because that’s not always true, and they also can’t take into account movies that I have already paid for in my library.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, but Apple at least seemed interested in solving it when they introduced Universal Search for Apple TV. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem so interested in this problem anymore—and Universal Search has become increasingly useless and frustrating.
Play me a movie, please? Recently, I asked Siri to display “Fight Club,” and was presented with a button to start watching it right away in Prime Video. So easy!
Unfortunately, when it started playing, it was a very compressed, blocky stream, and I could immediately tell something was amiss. I pressed the back button and discovered that what I had clicked on was actually “Popular Movies and TV — Free with ads” within Prime Video.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
How we manage notifications, our thoughts on Crisis Text Line’s data collection, our password management setup, and how we’re feeling about the Wordle acquisition by the New York Times.…
This past weekend I sat around a table with three friends and spent an hour or so cracking jokes, shooting the breeze, and playing a little poker. I’m in the Bay Area, but they were in San Diego, North Carolina, and Canada. Yep-we played VR poker, which (I’ve been informed) means we were actually having a good time in the metaverse.
While Apple’s not rushing to embrace the term, reports indicate that the company has invested a lot of research-and-development money into launching a new product line that intersects with an “area of interest” that Apple CEO Tim Cook has talked about for several years now.
So here I am, fresh from the metaverse-well, playing poker on a Meta Quest 2 headset-to consider the potential arc of Apple’s next big product category. The company has been preparing for this moment for a long time, and this might be the year we finally see Apple’s first VR product. But will it be the next Apple Watch-or the next HomePod?…
Dan and I joined Matthew Cassinelli earlier today to discuss and show off our Podcast Note shortcut and discuss Shortcuts and automation in general. It was a good time, so if you’d like to see this stuff in action, check it out!
…
Speaking of David Letterman, here’s a special episode of The Incomparable from May 2015, when Letterman retired from hosting a late-night talk show. This is not the usual panel discussion. It’s a (dare I say?) more NPR-podcast-like scripted and edited conversation with me and John Gruber, Andy Ihnatko, Tim Goodman, Philip Michaels, and Aaron Barnhart.…
40 years ago, “Late Night With David Letterman” aired its first episode. While unofficial archivist Don Giller has filled his YouTube channel with old clips, as of today there’s an official Letterman YouTube Channel, and it’s launching with a shocking amount of archival video as well as some originals.
Oh, and Letterman’s also on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” tonight. As is only right.…
Apple made a ton of money and released a ton of betas with new features. Face ID works with masks, Universal Control causes the soul of the Mac pointer to leave its body, the iPad relies on legacy nodes, the iPhone may take on Square, Dutch regulators are unsatisfied, and we tried to warn Spotify but it wouldn’t listen.…
Kolide is a SaaS app that sends employees important, timely, and relevant security recommendations concerning their Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, right inside Slack.
At Kolide, we think end-users are the most significant untapped resources for IT admins and are the key to solving the most challenging to fix security issues.
For example, Kolide can:
- Instruct developers to set passphrases on the unencrypted SSH keys littered throughout their devices.
- Find plain-text two-factor backup codes and teach end-users how to store them securely.
- Convince employees to uninstall evil (yet allowed) browser extensions that sell their browser history to marketing companies
These are just several of the dozens of checks Kolide offers out of the box.
Kolide is perfect for organizations that want to move beyond a traditional lock-down model and move to one where employees are educated about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems. We call this approach Honest Security.
Sounds too good to be true? It’s not. You just need to give it a try.
You can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.…
It’s not often that we get to peek behind the aluminum and glass curtain around Apple Park, but besides occasions like the annual Worldwide Developers Conference and the handful of press events, we’re assured that four times a year CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri will sit down to talk about the company’s most recent financial quarter and even field some questions from industry analysts.
And, if we’re lucky, there’s an opportunity to get a few breadcrumbs about what the Apple brass are thinking about. Sometimes, admittedly, it takes a little bit of reading between the lines—these people are extremely disciplined when it comes to secrets. But there are still tidbits to be gleaned from what’s coming down the pike, even if Tim Cook doesn’t want to show you the company’s roadmap.
Hearing Cook talk during last week’s call, I noted a few places where Apple’s chief executive seemed to have a particular interest—and looking at what Apple’s done or reportedly plans to do in those areas, it’s not hard to see why.…
Deep inside the gleaming white innards of Apple Park, protected by multiple factors of authentication and the most sophisticated technological security known to humanity, lies the most coveted of ancient artifacts. More powerful than the Ark of the Covenant, harder to locate than the Holy Grail, guarded more jealously than whatever the hell was on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
It is, yes, the Apple Road Map.
Yes, such an artifact actually exists! Tim Cook is no fool; he does not store Apple’s most vaunted possession merely as some PDF in iCloud, a file that can be copied and disseminated.
No, Tim Cook enshrines the Road Map upon the purest artisanal vellum, responsibly sourced from cows who have grazed only upon the fertile grass of Apple Park’s orchards, scraped clean by Apple interns who are surely regretting voicing any interest in “document security.”
While Cook is the only person with write permissions on the Road Map, a very select few may be permitted to enter the Sanctum Sanctorum buried deep beneath the center of Apple Park and gaze upon it.
And membership in the upper echelons of Apple’s executive team is no automatic guarantee that one will be bestowed read permissions on the holy document.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Kolide focuses on honest, user-focused device management and security, with informed consent, opt-in style enrollment, and commitment to total transparency means.
Kolide even sent me a poem about the company’s mission, which is a first:
We help organizations practice Honest Security
Building software that secures and manages digital assets
While demonstrating empathy, respect, and care for what is most important – people
Empowering them to do the best work of their lives.
Kolide is a VC-backed remote-first startup building device management and security software for fast-growing companies. It’s already got more than 250 customers, and with its novel approach to security and compliance, it may grow quickly. They’re hiring.…
Apple makes money, releases betas, does not reveal roadmap.
Also: We did a live stream about Apple’s financial results and the audio’s tacked on the end of this episode in case you prefer to hear us talking in podcast, and not live stream, form.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
I ran out of ways to summarize Apple’s quarterly results a while ago. When they’re all records, all-time greats, rolling up numbers so big it’s hard for the human brain to quantify them, what can you say? My wife comes home on days Apple releases its quarterly results and asks me, “So, how’s Apple?” And I respond with some variation of, “Apple’s just fine.”
Here’s the news about Apple’s fiscal first quarter of 2022, covering the holiday season of 2021: So many of Apple’s arrows are pointing up that, due to issues with the global supply chain, they’ve run out of arrows.
Apple’s just fine.…
Here’s a complete transcript of Apple’s conference call following its announcement of its record first-quarter 2022 results. You can also watch our recap of Apple’s results.
Tim Cook: Thank you Tejas and good afternoon. Today, we are proud to announce Apple’s biggest quarter ever. Through the busy holiday season, we set an all time revenue record of nearly $124 billion, up 11% from last year, and better than we had expected at the beginning of the quarter. And we are pleased to see that our active install base of devices is now at a new record, with more than 1.8 billion devices. We set all time records for both developed and emerging markets and saw revenue growth across all of our product categories, except for iPad, which we said would be supply constrained. As expected, in the aggregate, we experienced supply constraints that were higher than the September quarter.
Before I discuss our results in greater detail. I want to first acknowledge the toll that COVID continues to have on communities around the world. In many places, case counts are higher and health systems more strained than at any point throughout the pandemic. On behalf of all of us at apple, I want to extend our deep gratitude to the scientists, doctors, nurses, and so many others on the front lines of combating COVID 19.…
Apple’s latest quarterly results are out. And they’re big. It was an all-time revenue record, at $123.9 billion. The company made a record $34.6 billion in profit.
Mac revenue also reached a new all-time high at $10.9 billion, and iPhone revenue also peaked at $71.6 billion. The iPad’s revenue was $7.2 billion, down sequentially and year-over-year, but still among the five best iPad quarters in recent years.
Services kept its upward growth path, setting a new record at $19.5 billion, and Wearables/Home/Accessories likewise set a new record at $14.7 billion.
Helpful charts are appended below. Or check out our video coverage of the results, in which we talk about these very charts, in detail!
…
Apple will announce its FY22 first quarter results later today, followed by its usual conference call webcast at 2 PT, 5 ET. (Update: The results are here.)
This will be the results from Apple’s holiday quarter just gone by, which is usually the company’s largest quarter. Despite expecting some lost sales due to a lack of inventory due to global supply chain issues, Apple suggested it will likely be the company’s single largest quarter ever.
In a break from tradition, Dan and Jason will also be live streaming after the conference call with a tour through the results and what we gleaned from the call. We expect that live stream to begin around 3:30 PT, 6:30 ET.…
When you’re automating something, sometimes you run into a roadblock. On iOS, that roadblock is often impassable, though that happens less often now than back in the day. On macOS, there’s usually a way around if you know the tricks.
Yesterday (and I swear this is not going to turn into yet another post about that podcast note script Dan and I keep bashing around) I decided that there was a feature I could more easily implement in Shortcuts… but that meant that I would need to abandon my original AppleScript script and change how I was kicking off my automations by pressing a button on a Stream Deck.
The current Stream Deck plugin for Shortcuts doesn’t let you pass input on to the Shortcut, which is how I pass text to my note script. So I had to find another way. I ended up using the Run OSA Script Stream Deck plugin to activate my shortcut… via AppleScript.
This is what I mean by getting around roadblocks.
One of the many ways you can activate Shortcuts on the Mac involves using a system app provided by Apple called Shortcuts Events. Shortcuts Events is completely invisible, and always available. It lets you run shortcuts from any AppleScript script, without launching the Shortcuts app.…
How Apple should address AirTag misuse, the techniques we use for cleaning out our inbox, whether Twitter’s “Close Friends” feature interests us, and our applications for a smart foot pedal.…
Rogue Amoeba has announced that my favorite audio utility, Audio Hijack, is getting a huge update:
Perhaps the single most notable change, however, is something making a return from years back: scripting support. In the years since Audio Hijack Pro 2 was replaced by Audio Hijack 3, we’ve never stopped getting requests for some type of scripting to make a return. After much research and experimentation, we’ll soon be providing a from-the-ground-up JavaScript-based scripting system, as well as Shortcuts support.
I’ve been sworn to secrecy on this for a while, but this is the start of something really great for people who use Audio Hijack. JavaScript scripting plus Shortcuts? Can’t wait.…
Netflix’s latest quarterly report makes us wonder: Is it a tech company or an entertainment company? Julia experiences live sports streaming success—and failure. HBO Max takes a victory lap. And why does Showtime still exist? Plus, your letters!…
Most of Apple’s software is proprietary. Some of it, though, is based on open-source projects. WebKit, which powers Safari, is an open-source project. Which means that Apple is not the only source of contributions to the code that powers Apple’s web browser. Indeed, the entire web development community can contribute WebKit code that can be integrated into the core of WebKit. Many (most?) other browser engines are similarly open-sourced.
Which led to the open-source consultancy Igalia creating an experiment called Open Prioritization, which let members of the community to crowdfund features they’d like to see added to prominent browser engines like WebKit, Chrome, and Firefox. (Igalia already did this work for paying clients, by the way—deep-pocketed companies that want a particular feature added to all the browser engines can, and do, pay developers to get it done. What was different here was the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing of the priority list.)
As Eric Meyer explains, implementing the :focus-visible pseudoclass won the vote, the community supplied funds and Igalia matched, the work was done, and Apple’s WebKit team accepted the contribution. It just appeared in Apple’s latest Safari Technology Preview release.
Unfortunately, this led to some people in the web-development community to complain that Apple, the richest company in the world, was relying on crowdfunding in order to implement features in its web browser.…
Myke and Jason discuss the mysteries of Apple’s car project, and express confusion about Apple’s 2022 product release schedule. And at last, France makes a big box-related move.…
Kolide provides teams unprecedented ground truth across their Linux, Mac, and Windows devices. Powered by osquery, our honest approach to obtaining device visibility via informed consent, opt-in style enrollment, and commitment to total transparency means you can meet compliance objectives without eroding resorting to rigid forced management.
Try Kolide Free for 14 Days; no credit card required
Kolide’s Mission (a poem):
We help organizations practice Honest Security
Building software that secures and manages digital assets
While demonstrating empathy, respect, and care for what is most important – people
Empowering them to do the best work of their lives.
Kolide is a VC-backed remote-first startup building device management and security software for fast-growing companies that value Honest Security. With over 250 customers and a novel approach to solving security and compliance concerns, Kolide is poised to grow quickly over the next few years. To prepare, we are looking to responsibly develop our organization to help us meet our lofty goals while increasing our organization’s diverse set of skills and perspectives.
View Open Roles and Apply Today!…
Communication has always driven technology forward. From the telegraph to the telephone to the internet, it’s regularly been one of the killer apps for every technological development of the last century-plus. And Apple’s devices are no exception to that. When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone, he described it as a revolutionary mobile phone, but he also called the device that would go on to dominate Apple’s business was as a “breakthrough Internet-communication device.”
Fifteen years later, we use the iPhone to talk with others in a variety of ways, of which the phone capability may ironically be the least. But while Apple’s spent a lot of time investing in the communications powers of its platforms, it has a tendency to let those technologies languish once it’s rolled them out.
As Apple potentially preps a headset device for an announcement later this year, one of the key areas it’s reportedly looking to concentrate on is also communication. Might this signal a renewed interest in the company’s investment in this category? If so, here are a few ways that Apple could improve its current communications options.…
James Fallows has essentially built an FAQ file about what’s happening between airlines and wireless companies that could have a huge impact on the U.S.:
This post is a basic who-what-why primer on the controversy involving new 5G wireless networks, and airline operations at major U.S. airports. It’s not meant to be conclusive but instead an introduction, with links to more detailed discussions.
In short, new 5G radio bands potentially conflict with critical flight-safety radio bands, and U.S. regulators have done a comparatively bad job of figuring out the rules. It’s more complicated than that, though—read Fallows for lots of great info and links.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is the “average” person. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Kolide knows that organizations can dramatically lower the risks they face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.…
When to repair and when to retire old tech, networking adventures, and green bubbles.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
With the advent of Shortcuts on macOS, automation on the Mac has become more accessible than ever. There is no part of our workflows that we can’t automate and thus there is no part of our workflows that we cannot overautomate.
While developing the Podcast Note shortcut that Jason and I collaborated on, I ran into a dilemma. I had just recently adjusted all my Audio Hijack sessions, where I maintain separate instances for most of my regular shows, to save audio files within corresponding subfolders in my Podcasts folder.1 (The impetus was to get those hefty files off my Desktop, which is now synced via iCloud. No need to have several hundred megabytes uploaded to the cloud only to be removed within the hour.)
But that made my Podcast Note shortcut tricky, because it assumes the files it’s looking for will be in a single folder, not strewn through any of several subfolders.
There were a few different ways this could have been solved—I’m sure I could have adjusted the Podcast Note shortcut to search through all the subfolders and find the most recently modified file, for example, but there’s a risk of error, and it feels like at that point I’ve adjusted it to be too specific to my workflow.…
The decommissioned weather station, with cloudy solar panel, spiderwebbed shield, and mossy anemometer.It’s rare that a piece of technology lasts so long and serves you so well that it’s a big occasion when you finally decommission it. But that’s what happened earlier this month when, in a quiet ceremony, my weather station was retired.
Your correspondent installing the Vantage Pro in August 2004.It certainly had earned its retirement. I installed it and several other weather stations in August of 2004 for a story in Macworld. I liked the Davis Vantage Pro so much that I sent Davis a check and kept it running.
Seventeen years is a long time when it comes to computer-related technology. When I first hooked up the weather station, it communicated wirelessly to a receiver that could be attached to a Mac via a serial cable and a USB-to-serial converter box. A Java app on the Mac logged the data and generated a web page.
As you might expect, things evolved over time. Davis’s Java app was awful and ultimately deprecated, but I replaced it with WeatherCat from Trixology, which I still use today. Davis eventually created an add-on product for the Vantage console that let me drop the USB connection and replace it with an Ethernet-connected logger that uploaded data to both WeatherCat and Davis’s own cloud-based logging service.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
John Paczkowski at Buzzfeed:
Apple has tapped a new head of PR: longtime company spokesperson Kristin Huguet. She’ll replace Stella Low, former communications chief at networking giant Cisco, who joined Apple in May of 2021.
It’s almost as if Apple’s corporate culture is so very particular that hiring a top-level person from outside the company is rarely a good idea.…
Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels thinks Apple should bring back Dashboard:
Apple killed off Dashboard at exactly the wrong time. Just one year after Catalina killed Dashboard, Apple started allowing developers to bring their iOS widgets over to the Mac in macOS Big Sur. Sadly, they all got stuffed into the slide-out Notification Center user interface.
I was not a fan of Dashboard, and I’m glad it (finally) died, but Stephen is exactly right here. Widgets in macOS deserve to not be hidden in Notification Center. In fact, they deserve to be placed on the Desktop, appear from drop-down menus, zoom out from Dock items, and, yes, appear in a floating Dashboard layer. Widget all the things!
P.S. I am not a crackpot.…
9to5Google:
In an email to administrators this morning, Google said it “will now transition all remaining users to an upgraded Google Workspace paid subscription based on your usage.” As such, Workspace’s only free plans are for Nonprofits and Education (Fundamentals).
After getting free Gmail, Drive, Docs, and other apps for the past several years, companies/people will need to start paying for those Google services and the ability to use your own custom domain (instead of just gmail.com).
I’ve been using Google Apps for Domains for 15 years, all for free. I knew the free ride would end eventually, and as of now, it has. But I love using Gmail (and Mimestream) and don’t mind paying $6/user/month for my extremely small user base in order to keep the ball rolling.
Still, it’s a weird feeling to pay Google for a product. Even one I’ve been using for 15 years.…
Ty Burr, former Boston Globe film critic, writing at his Substack about movies that can’t be found online:
The problem, in 9 cases out of 10, is a rights issue. Who owns a movie, particularly one from the post-studio/pre-corporate era of the 1960s through 1990s, can be maddeningly difficult to divine unless you’re a psychic or an entertainment lawyer. Companies dissolve, rights holders die, films and film libraries get bought and bought again and sometimes just disappear into a parallel universe. In many cases, legal contracts detailing a movie’s post-theatrical rights were written in the VHS era or earlier and made no provision for a streaming technology no one back then had the foresight to imagine.
A few years back, I went looking for a legit copy of one of the movies on Ty’s list—Truly Madly Deeply, starring a young Alan Rickman—for my mom1, who loves it but hadn’t been able to find it on DVD. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to locate a copy. (I see on Amazon that Region 2 versions of DVD and Blu-ray are available, but no US version, alas.) More recently, I went in search of 1999’s Tea with Mussolini for my wife which can be had on DVD, but isn’t available for streaming or digital purchase.…
The streaming services we use regularly, creating or augmenting a tech product, the messaging apps we use, and our NFC experiences.…
A bit more than 10 years after its introduction, iMessage is suddenly a part of the conversation again. A dubious report in the Wall Street Journal implied that the secret to the iPhone’s success with young people is all about peer pressure, with Android-using teens being cast out of social circles owing to their status as non-iMessage green bubbles in group chats.
That article was silly for numerous reasons, as John Gruber explored in detail last week. While blue-bubble FOMO is certainly real, suggesting that it’s the reason people want iPhones is A-grade, uncut “people only buy Apple products because they’re status symbols” kind of delusion.
When you look at the messaging landscape today, iMessage isn’t a colossus that dominates the world. In fact, I’d say that iMessage’s first decade is more of a failure than a success in terms of worldwide acceptance, user experience, and innovation.…
If I’ve learned anything about automation, it’s that projects are never really finished. After I wrote about my solution to taking notes during a podcast recording, Dan followed up with his version of the solution, built using Shortcuts.
Shortcuts for the shortcut But it keeps going. Several readers wrote in to point out that Dan’s approach could be simplified. Andrew Kerr suggested a single equation that converts the time into a number where 2:03:31 is represented as 2.0331 and then converted into proper formatting via a regular expression. Antonio Bueno suggested adding the seconds to the beginning of Unix time and then custom formatting the resulting time as HH:MM:SS. Both work. Antonio’s is one step shorter, and it’s the one I’m using in the current version of the Shortcut.
Then there’s the matter of entering in text to describe what’s gone wrong at the particular moment of the podcast being noted. Dan’s Shortcut is set up to ask for text—which frustratingly means you have click the Done button on the dialog box, because Shortcuts on macOS Monterey won’t let you use a keystroke. But it also accepts input, and this is a great workaround—especially if you use a launching app.…
Using a Stream Deck doesn’t just increase your productivity—it also increases your appetite for custom icons to label all those buttons.
Via John Voorhees of MacStories, I found out last week about Christian Lobach’s $4 utility Button Creator, which lets you quickly create drag-and-droppable Stream Deck icons based on Apple’s SFSymbols icons, emojis, or images you drag in.
The app is very simple and I hope Lobach continues to update it. Adding text would be great (Update: A new version with text support is now live on the App Store), since Stream Deck’s text overlay is limited in fonts, sizes, and styling. I’d also like to see Lobach add the ability to drag objects around on the canvas, so I could more precisely position things. (Right now, the images only appear dead center, though you can scale them via a slider.)
This sort of functionality should probably be part of Stream Deck’s own software, but it’s not. And within 10 minutes of downloading Button Creator I had given several different portions of my Stream Deck interface a makeover. Worth the $4 for me, for sure.…
Apple’s rumored VR headset might not ship until 2023, but will it be the best VR headset ever made? And if so, at what cost? Also, Apple seems to have a settled on a strategy for handling demands to open up payment processing and external web links, and we’re frustrated by the decision. Following a silly Wall Street Journal article, Android’s SVP got a little too angry about iMessage. Also, we take an unexpected dive into the Users & Groups preference pane.…
At Kolide, we believe the supposedly Average Person is the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Collectively, we know that organizations can dramatically lower the actual risks they will likely face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Try Kolide Free for 14 Days; no credit card required.
Honest.Security is one part guide and another-part manifesto that defines a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. It’s not just Kolide’s north star but also an aspirational roadmap. It’s our positive contribution to counterbalance the worrying upward trend of human-hostile cyber security, device management, and workplace surveillance philosophies that we’ve seen reach a fever pitch as organizations adapt to the long-term term prospects of remote work.
READ the Honest.Security Guide.…
My thanks to BZG Apps for sponsoring Six Colors this week. BZG makes Unite 4, which allows you to turn any Website into a Mac app. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and M1 support. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource-hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when using the promo code SixColors at checkout. There’s also a 14 day free trial, and the app is included in Setapp for subscribers.…
Some questions are perennials. This week on Upgrade we answered a question from a listener:
Assuming that the display quality of an Apple external display is the same as the upcoming iMac why would Jason pick the iMac over an external display + Mac Mini? It seems like having a more modular set up would be very beneficial in the early days of Apple Silicon #askupgrade
— Kiran Frey (@kamikazekiran) December 31, 2021
With the increasing suspicion that Apple is readying a new, more affordable external display for Mac users comes the revival of a classic conundrum. Which would you rather have—an iMac, or an external display attached to a separate Mac?
I’ve been on both sides of this question. I’ve had an iMac has my primary computer a few times, including for the last seven-plus years. But before that, I spent an awful long time with a MacBook Air as my primary Mac, attaching it to an external display at one or both ends of my commute.
It’s a tricky one. For some people, the answer will be clear. For others, it will be fraught with indecision. One reason some questions are perennials is because there’s no one right answer for everyone.…
I’m kind of a sucker for menu bar apps. I’m not sure why, but there’s tons of software that I would never just leave running in my Dock, but I’m more than happy to reduce to an icon up at the top of my screen.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated a wide variety of these programs, and though in I’ve occasionally tried to cut back and slim down, in the last year or so, I may have gone a bit overboard—even for my 27-inch iMac and its expansive display. I chalk that up to finally becoming a Bartender convert1; it’s made me far less picky about what I’m willing to have in my menu bar, since it doesn’t really clutter up my screen.
So, starting from the rightmost and moving to the left, let’s take a quick survey through these menu bar widgets, some of which may even surprise you,
An analog clock? I can see why that seems like a weird choice, and I’ll admit: the only time I ever interact with this is when I rarely—and usually accidentally—open macOS’s less-than-useful Notification Center. Unfortunately, you can’t totally get rid of the system clock anymore, thanks to it pulling double duty, but I’ve reduced it down to its smallest footprint, for reasons I’ll get into a moment.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
“Shortcuts: Name That Tune” and other puzzles.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Last week, Jason wrote up his new podcast note workflow, using Keyboard Maestro and an AppleScript script. The end goal was to create a text file that contained notes about things to fix while editing, along with timecodes to ease the process of finding them.
It’s a clever idea but I found myself wondering whether or not the same thing could be accomplished in a shortcut.
The answer? Yes! Shortcuts on the Mac is actually a pretty ideal way to handle most of this process, because it’s good at dealing with files. My first crack at a shortcut was just eight steps long—not bad!
That said, there was a bit of a cheat in that initial version that used a few lines of Python, including the very useful strftime function, to handle the heavy lifting of converting a time in seconds to a timecode.
But, as Jason rightly pointed out when I shared the shortcut with him, requiring the Mac in question to have Python installed could be tricky in the future, given that Apple seems to be deprecating its default installation of Python, among other scripting languages. While a third-party app might have been able to handle the conversion just as simply, the goal was to implement it entirely in what any Mac user would have.…
This is the year. All signs point to 2022 as the year that Apple introduces its first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. But what form will that new Mac Pro take?
It sounds simple enough, but in switching to its own processor architecture, Apple is forced to make some very interesting choices about which traditional Mac tower features are going to make it into the new Mac Pro, and which ones will disappear entirely.…
The last tech we bought for our home workplaces, the tyranny of choice with subscription service content, non-smartwatch wearables we’d like, and the state of printers in the year 2022.…
It’s a new year! Disney has moved another Pixar movie out of theaters and onto Disney+. Why “Don’t Look Up” was the perfect movie for Netflix. “Yellowstone” is a legitimate hit and yet nobody is truly happy about it.…
Just as a follow up to my post about digital vaccine cards, I was pleased to hear this week that my home state, Massachusetts, is now following in the footsteps of California and offering digital vaccine records for all residents.
The new My Vax Records service lets any Massachusetts resident enter their name, phone number or email, and birthdate to retrieve their vaccine records online. While the page says it can take up to 24 hours, I received a text immediately, allowing me to not only view my records but download a SMART Health Card that can be added to my iPhone’s Wallet.
While I’d already done that in my previous piece, this has the advantage of also showing my booster shot, which I received at different location from my first two vaccine doses. Also, it doesn’t require me to fill out a form and email it to someone so, you know, that’s also a win. (It also shows me vaccine information besides my COVID-19, so I can tell that I’m up to date on my flu shot, as well as the Typhoid vaccine I got several years back before traveling abroad.)
Kudos to Massachusetts for rolling this out, especially before more cities in the state are starting to require proof of vaccination for indoor locations like restaurants, museums, gyms, and more.…
The Korea Times:
Apple said it plans to provide an alternative payment system at a reduced service charge compared with the current 30 percent charge, as the tech giant turned in its compliance plans to the Korea Communications Commission (KCC).
The company did not provide the exact date of when the policy will take effect or the service fee to be applied but said it plans to discuss with the KCC on further details.
“We look forward to working with the KCC and our developer community on a solution that benefits our Korean users,” Apple said in a statement.
This is, of course, the result of legislation passed in the country last year. Google’s already made a similar move, saying it would cut the commission for those not using its payment system by a modest 4 percent.
The details of such an implementation are going to be interesting. In the U.S., Apple’s victory over Epic seems to not only have solidified the company’s position, but also more or less tacitly acknowledged that even if alternative payments were allowed, Apple would still be within its rights to collect a commission from developers. But that’s according to U.S. law, and the South Korean law has its own restrictions.…
We discuss why it’s useful to take time every once in a while to pull back and look at the big picture instead of getting bogged down in the day-to-day grind. Also, Jason built himself a tool to make his life easier, Apple may be gearing up for its next event, and listeners have lots of questions about Apple displays.…
Once upon a time, you could watch a keynote presentation from any major computer chip company and rest easy in the confidence that the name “Apple” would never pass the lips of any presenter. The message always seemed to be, as per the classic Mad Men meme, “I don’t think of you at all.”
But oh how the tables have turned. With the transition to Apple silicon well underway, and the debut of the high-powered M1 Pro and M1 Max chips last summer, major players in the silicon market are hastening to not only mention Apple, but to prove how much better their latest products are than that computer company that nobody used to care about.
This past week’s Consumer Electronics Show was a news cavalcade for the likes of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, all of whom took their time to reassure the vendors that rely on them that, yes, they could play in the same league as Apple.…
Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:
- A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
- A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
- An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
- A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
- A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
- A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when you use the promo code ‘SixColors’ at checkout.
You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!…
This is a tricky one. On the one hand, the NightWatch Apple Watch stand is ridiculous. It’s an $85 hunk of plastic. No hunk of clear plastic should cost $85.
And yet… I bought one in June after hearing about it on the Connected podcast, and… I kind of love it? You’ll need to make your own decision about whether it’s worth it.
The NightWatch is a clear lucite bubble designed to fit your Apple Watch. You push an Apple Watch charging puck into the back of it, set it on your nightstand, and at night, you drop the Apple Watch in and it charges. But more than that, the curved plastic bubble serves as a magnifier. If you use your Apple Watch in Night Stand mode—and I do, my Apple Watch now serves double duty as my alarm clock—you’ll be able to see the time a little bit larger.
The makers of NightWatch say that it also has some sound channels to amplify the sound of the Apple Watch when it makes an alarm in the morning. I haven’t really noticed much difference, since my Apple Watch is pretty effective at waking me up regardless.
For a couple of years I used elago’s Classic Mac-themed Apple Watch stand, and it was just fine.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Kolide connects device security and Slack together in a clever way—by sending people important, timely, and relevant recommendations about securing their devices via Slack.
For example, Kolide can instruct developers to set passphrases on unencrypted SSH keys, find plain-text two-factor backup codes and show users how to store them securely, or even encourage employees to uninstall gross browser extensions that sell data to marketers.
It’s a great tool for any company that wants to move beyond the traditional “lockdown model” to one focused on educating and informing employees about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems.
Six Colors readers can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.…
Zoom and FaceTime are weird. Apple and the home (again). The G4 iMac turns 20. It floated above your desk like a VESA-mounted iMac.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Speaking of the iMac G4, here’s my look back at that great, weird, beautiful computer from my 2020 tour of the most notable Macs of all time.…
[From 20 years ago:]
As the best-selling Mac of all time, the original iMac set a standard for Apple that’s tough to top. To stand a chance, the design of any follow-up iMac would have to be just as bold, as remarkably different as the original. Apple has succeeded–its new pivoting two-piece flat-panel iMac is a triumph in terms of design, computing power, and value.…
I’ve noticed that folks who write about cord-cutting tend to be maximalists: “How can I get the most of all the things available?” Fair enough. A lot of people like lots of TV.
But I am not them. I am but a humble fan of classic moves with a less-than-12-hours-per-week TV habit. I’m also budget-minded, which some people might call “cheap.” Since we cut the cord a few years ago, I’ve simply done without access to TV, outside of streaming services. But recently, I’ve been on a journey to figure out how I can get the TV morsels I want, at a reasonable cost.
What I care about is the back catalog—classic movies, arthouse fare, restorations, and the odd vintage TV show. And live news. In that last interest, I’m not alone. Live news and sports are big reasons people stick to cable, or add an over-the-top service to their lives. The leading provider of classic movies is Turner Classic Movies (TCM). It’s not simply that TCM plays films from the 30s forward, but that what you find there is often not available on streaming services, or even on physical media. I dig both the volume and the rarity of what TCM does.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Tell me how the panelist caused you extra work.Last year I decided I was spending too much time doing jobs because I could do them, not because they were an essential part of my job. (My friend Myke Hurley would, in the spirit of his podcast Cortex, call this my “Year of Essentials.”)
So I resolved to, among other things, stop editing weekly episodes of The Incomparable. Since 2010, I’ve spent most Saturday mornings editing that podcast. And while I enjoy having complete editorial control and using that regular editing session to try out new techniques, it’s not an essential part of my life and my friend Steven Schapansky can edit it just fine.
But giving up editing meant that I’d need to relay any issues that need to be smoothed out in editing to Steven—and that was a problem. I’d file mental notes about stumbles, interruptions, digressions and the like, and then play them back when I was editing the podcast. When someone swore, I’d switch to the Finder, make a new folder, and give that folder a name like “poop1 23 min”.
This is an untenable situation if I’m going to hand over editing duties, so I needed to resolve to make a change.…
How we turn our digital photographs into physical media, our experiences with external monitors, our thoughts on an audiobook service from Apple, and the AR/VR headset features that would appeal to us.…
We spend our first episode of 2022 discussing what we think Apple will do this year. Is it finally time for an Apple product you put on your face? Jason and Myke also discuss changes they’re planning on making in their working lives for the new year.…
Kolide is a SaaS app that sends employees important, timely, and relevant security recommendations concerning their Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, right inside Slack.
At Kolide, we think end-users are the most significant untapped resources for IT admins and are the key to solving the most challenging to fix security issues.
For example, Kolide can:
- Instruct developers to set passphrases on the unencrypted SSH keys littered throughout their devices.
- Find plain-text two-factor backup codes and teach end-users how to store them securely.
- Convince employees to uninstall evil (yet allowed) browser extensions that sell their browser history to marketing companies
These are just several of the dozens of checks Kolide offers out of the box.
Kolide is perfect for organizations that want to move beyond a traditional lock-down model and move to one where employees are educated about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems. We call this approach Honest Security.
Sounds too good to be true? It’s not. You just need to give it a try.
You can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.…
My friend David Sparks has been leading a double life for a while now. To his law colleagues and friends, he has had a strange side hustle writing and talking about tech. To the rest of us, he’s a Mac expert who still practices law, too.
No more. David has embraced his inner MacSparky and shut down his law practice:
So here goes. No longer do I split my time between two careers. For the first time since 1992, I will have complete control of my schedule. No longer will a client emergency force me to set aside the work that has become my calling. I’m all in, and I have big plans.
I know David agonized over this decision, but as someone who has been talking about career stuff with him for seven or eight years now, it feels like the logical next step. I think he’s going to be a smashing success, and I’m excited that the rest of us will now get David’s full attention.
You can join David’s new membership program, MacSparky Labs, if you want to help support this career transition.…
Microsoft Exchange admins felt a great disturbance in the Force last night as it became 2022:
The “long” type allows for values up to 2,147,483,647. It appears that Microsoft uses the first two numbers of the update version to denote the year of the update. So when the year was 2021, the first two numbers was “21”, and everything was fine. Now that it’s 2022 (GMT), the update version, converted to a “long” would be 2,201,01,001 – which is above the maximum value of the “long” data type. @Microsoft: If you change it to an ‘unsigned long’, then the max value is 4,294,967,295 and we’ll be able to sleep easy until the year 2043!
Dear @msexchangeteam. The FIP-FS “Microsoft” Scan Engine Failed to Load. Can’t Convert “2201010001” to long.
— long wtf = 2201010001; (@miketheitguy) January 1, 2022
Happy New Year, everyone.…
Some predictions are like sweet denim jackets or A-Ha’s “Take On Me”: they never go out of style. As 2021 draws to a close, you’ll see tech pundits from across the Internet carefully calculating their predictions of what exactly is going to happen in the year ahead. Many of these will be right, but they will also be boring.
But where’s the fun in that? I too can tell you Apple’s going to make a 27-inch iMac or an iPhone 14 or that Tim Cook will start an event with “Good mooooorninnnng,” but none of that is any more surprising than telling you that Apple will make a hojillion dollars.
So instead, I welcome you to the first installment of my Perennial Predictions. You know, the ones we make every year which never seem to come true. But even an iPhone screenshot is right twice a day, so when the clock does tick over to 9:41, you’ll look like a genius. So prepare to be amazed, as I tell you what will transpire in [insert year here].
Apple will revive the AirPort. I’ve just about had it with these monkey-fighting routers on this Monday to Friday Internet! Look, my Eero is all fine and dandy, but I long for the days of my wonderful AirPort Extreme, a device that worked so well that I almost never had to configure it (which was good, since even the slightest change meant you had to restart it.)…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
We conclude our 2021 Favorites series with this list of books we loved this year. You might know this about us, but we read a lot. These were the cream of the crop.
Piranesi My favorite book of the year was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It’s not a sequel, not the start of a series. It’s a short, standalone novel about a man called Piranesi who lives in the most unusual of places: a house with an infinite number of rooms, all lined with classical statues. On the lower levels, the sea roars in, sometimes flooding entire sections of the structure. Birds occasionally fly in. Piranesi thought he was the only person in the world, until he met the Other. But there are also the bones of people who have perished in the house, which Piranesi looks after. How did this state of affairs come to be? And who is Piranesi, really? Is this all a metaphor for something, or is it real? All questions are answered, eventually. Sometimes in surprising fashion.—Jason Snell
The Galaxy and the Ground Within The last installment of Becky Chambers’s loosely connected1 Wayfarers series, The Galaxy and the Ground Within was my favorite of the bunch.…
Millennials / Terminal / ls -al / What’s your shell?
It’s the last Six Colors podcast of the year. Let the molting begin!…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Kolide focuses on honest, user-focused device management and security, with informed consent, opt-in style enrollment, and commitment to total transparency means.
Kolide even sent me a poem about the company’s mission, which is a first:
We help organizations practice Honest Security
Building software that secures and manages digital assets
While demonstrating empathy, respect, and care for what is most important – people
Empowering them to do the best work of their lives.
Kolide is a VC-backed remote-first startup building device management and security software for fast-growing companies. It’s already got more than 250 customers, and with its novel approach to security and compliance, it may grow quickly. They’re hiring.…
2020 brought a redesigned iPhone, but in 2021 the iPhone was fairly static while the iPad Pro took a big step forward.
Given Apple’s longer cycles for iPhone redesigns, I don’t expect a revolutionary new iPhone to spur sales ever higher. But Apple will tinker around the edges, while spending time upgrading the iPad and launching new products the likes of which we’ve not seen before& from Apple, anyway.
These are my predictions for 2022 for the iPhone, iPad, and the rest of Apple’s non-Mac product line. I’m doing this with the risk of being dead wrong in public, but I’ve been there before and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.…
It was a weird year for movies. Theaters were closed, open, and sometimes closed again? And not everyone felt comfortable returning to an enclosed space full of other people later in the year. And yet, the move out of theaters also made some films more accessible than they would have been in other years. Most Oscar nominees were available on streaming services before the awards occurred, and one of us (Jason) managed to binge an awful lot of nominees early this year. Some of them made this list! (We’re praising movies we saw in 2021, even if they were made a few years earlier.)
Dune: Part One I read Frank Herbert’s novel in high school and have been amazed how such a deeply weird book has resonated with so many people for so long. This year, I noticed a bit of an echo to that reaction: I am once again surprised that an enormous audience has watched, and loved, Denis Villaneuve’s new adaptation of the novel. Maybe it’s the delight at seeing such an epic film after a long period of pandemic movie delays and cancellations. Maybe it was the fact that people could watch it on HBO Max over and over and over if they wanted to.…
We watch a lot of TV. It’s the platinum era of television—you could watch several hours a day for the entire year and never run out of top-shelf entertainment. But who has the time? So if you’re looking for something to watch, consider these shows, which were our favorites this year.
Ted Lasso (Apple TV+) Look, a million people have told you to watch Ted Lasso, and there’s a reason for that: it’s great. Season 2 may not be exactly what people wanted after the spectacular first season, but it still delivers on everything I love about the show, and takes it up a notch. In particular, the addition of Doctor Sharon Fieldstone as a foil (and ultimately friend) to Ted, the rich development of supporting characters like Sam, and a heel turn that left many viewers reeling. Plus, let’s not forget a fabulous rom-com pastiche, the utter surreality of the Coach Beard-centric episode, and a redeemed Jamie Tartt. If I’m going to be honest—not now, Jan!—I loved it all.—Dan Moren
Hacks (HBO Max) Don’t let this one fly under the radar: “Hacks” was the comedy of the year. Starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder as comedy professionals at the beginning and end of their careers, it’s a study in contrasts.…
What tech had the biggest impact on us in 2021, our predictions for the most surprising tech story of 2022, whether we seek out short-form videos, and our biggest tech irritations of the last year.…
Jason and Julia are off for the holiday, but before they left, they took time to record this special episode featuring answers to listener letters! (Only two-thirds of the letters are from people named David.)…
As the year comes to an end, it’s time for the Eighth Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2021, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.…
This is it: the last installment of Stay Foolish for the year that was 2021. And I think I speak for all of us when I say good riddance, too.
Having already covered the biggest Apple moves of 2021 it’s time now to look forward to the year that awaits us, full of untrammeled possibility and simmering excitement. The last 12 months have been an eventful one for Apple, but we’re already starting to see the shape of the year to come.
With that in mind, here are a few of the biggest things I expect (and hope) to see out of Cupertino in 2022.…
Kolide provides teams unprecedented ground truth across their Linux, Mac, and Windows devices. Powered by osquery, our honest approach to obtaining device visibility via informed consent, opt-in style enrollment, and commitment to total transparency means you can meet compliance objectives without eroding resorting to rigid forced management.
Try Kolide Free for 14 Days; no credit card required
Kolide’s Mission (a poem):
We help organizations practice Honest Security
Building software that secures and manages digital assets
While demonstrating empathy, respect, and care for what is most important – people
Empowering them to do the best work of their lives.
Kolide is a VC-backed remote-first startup building device management and security software for fast-growing companies that value Honest Security. With over 250 customers and a novel approach to solving security and compliance concerns, Kolide is poised to grow quickly over the next few years. To prepare, we are looking to responsibly develop our organization to help us meet our lofty goals while increasing our organization’s diverse set of skills and perspectives.
View Open Roles and Apply Today!…
After such a momentous 2020 for the Mac, it was hard for 2021 to measure up. But with the Apple silicon transition well underway, the question remains: What does the Mac’s 2022 have in store?
Good news, friend. You’re reading a column about where the Mac is going in 2022. Let’s get to predicting the future.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is the “average” person. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Kolide knows that organizations can dramatically lower the risks they face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.…
It’s time for our annual Christmas gift exchange round-robin, and then the boys get down to business with some competitive picks about what will happen in 2022. All that’s followed by a game of 20 Questions, with the questions supplied by Connected listeners! Happy holidays to everyone.…
We played and enjoyed a lot of games this year. Weird, right? It’s as if we needed to escape. Anyway, here are some of our favorites.
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City As I admitted back in July, the endless-sandboarder game Alto’s Odyssey is my favorite iOS game of all time. This year, Team Alto brought an expansion of the game to Apple Arcade, and wouldn’t you know it? Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City is my favorite game of 2021.
If you haven’t played Alto’s Odyssey, you can play the new game from the start and the new levels will just get rolled in. I love the whole game for its beautiful graphics, its soothing soundtrack, and its simple mechanic — you tap to jump, tap and hold to flip, and if you’ve got the Wingsuit extra, use your left hand to fly. The expansion added an additional quest above the main game’s level structure, in which you collect items in order to unlock access to the Lost City, where you’re given a new menu of tasks to perform. The catch is that many of those tasks can only be performed in the Lost City, so you’ll need to keep on boarding to get back to the city and continue the tasks.…
Since 2005, I’ve partaken in a peculiar pastime every January1: the MIT Mystery Hunt. This weekend-long competition sees teams attempt to solve around two hundred puzzles involving everything from obfuscated songs to labyrinthine text adventures. It’s an incredibly fun (and incredibly challenging) event, and one that, in addition to critical and lateral thinking skills, also requires a lot of logistics.
Over the last couple years—especially as both last year’s hunt and this year’s upcoming hunt have been impacted by COVID—I’ve taken on a larger role in helping set up the technology for our Mystery Hunt team of about 25 people.
While I’ve mentioned this obliquely in my previous post on Integromat, I thought it might be interesting to run down the various tools we’re using to automate what’s informally called our “puzzle collateral” system. This largely involves metadata about puzzles that help us track our solving status, as well as the collaborative systems we use in the actual solving. In the past few years, those systems have become inextricably linked, especially as puzzling moves to a remote-only footing. So here’s an overview of what we’re currently using to aid our process.
Our Discord channels, including our national park-themed “conference rooms.”… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The last apps we purchased, how we’d handle third-party payment options on our Apple devices, our experience with Exposure Notifications, and how we track our resolutions, themes, and habits for the new year.…
You thought you were going to get out of the year without a Epidemiology Corner segment? Fat chance.…
WinterFest 2021 is on now. It’s a holiday-themed sale of great independent Mac apps, at discounts of 20 or 25 percent:
The new year brings new plans, fresh projects, and great new ideas. Whether you’re mapping out your next novel, finishing your dissertation, planning a product, or writing memories for your grandkids, these great tools will help. As is our custom in this season, we’re hosting a gathering of software artisans who are working to transform research and writing for a new era. We’ve all finished our latest updates, we’re working together to save you lots of money. Get the tools you need at a terrific price, for a very limited time.
Included in the list are some of my favorites, including Scrivener, BBEdit, and Marked. It’s also got some very interesting apps that I mean to use more in the future—I’m probably going to buy myself a license for Hook Pro, since David Sparks keeps evangelizing it.
Check the whole list out and see if any of them strike your fancy.…
In this Upgrade Holiday Special, Jason and Myke answer the holiday-themed questions of Upgradians everywhere. Smart decorations, holiday wardrobes, the definition of fairy lights, monkey strategies, an eggnog recipe, and Santa’s complex cloud-based organizational system are just some of the topics covered.…
At Kolide, we believe the supposedly Average Person is the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Collectively, we know that organizations can dramatically lower the actual risks they will likely face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Try Kolide Free for 14 Days; no credit card required.
Honest.Security is one part guide and another-part manifesto that defines a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. It’s not just Kolide’s north star but also an aspirational roadmap. It’s our positive contribution to counterbalance the worrying upward trend of human-hostile cyber security, device management, and workplace surveillance philosophies that we’ve seen reach a fever pitch as organizations adapt to the long-term term prospects of remote work.
READ the Honest.Security Guide.…
As we reach the end of the year, it’s time for us to share some of the stuff that we liked this year. Here are our picks for our favorite hardware of the year. Some are obvious… some less so.
24-inch iMac The iMac kept the same design for most of the 2010s. It was a design built for processors and disk drives of a very different era, and with each late-2010s revision, I kept waiting for it to be replaced. But the old design soldiered on.
It took the transition to Apple silicon to finally force Apple’s hand and release the 24-inch iMac, an entirely new computer for the era of SSDs and power-efficient Apple-built processors.
But while the 24-inch iMac more or less performed like the other M1-based Macs that preceded it, those other systems were visually unchanged from their Intel versions. The new iMac is visibly different, offered in six eye-popping colors (plus good ol’ silver) that suggest this iMac is meant to stand out, not blend in. It’s the first iMac with bright colors since the original G3 models.
The tiny details also suggest a new direction for Mac desktop hardware design, from the magnetic power cord to the detached power supply (with optional Ethernet jack) to the color-matched braided accessory cables.…
As 2021 draws to a close, it’s only natural to look back at the year that was and cast our appraising glances over all the things that Apple did during the last 12 months. Despite a global pandemic, the company managed another year of record quarters, released a slew of new products, and fended off some significant challenges.
But when history considers 2021, what will be the stand-out developments, the ones that end up having a long-term effect on Apple and its customers? I’ve picked out what I think are three of the biggest things to happen in Apple-land over the last year. Let’s take a look.…
If you’ve ever struggled to put a screenshot into a photo of Apple hardware to make it fit in an appropriate context, you’ll appreciate this: Apple has just added a Product Bezels section to a redesigned design resources page and added a bunch of new device images.
They’re all available as layered Photoshop files and are free to download, no login required. Apple’s marketing and identity guidelines apply, of course. This could especially be good for anyone making use of Keynote’s new live device display features.…
This week my friend Stephen Hackett posted a video tour of his new home studio and along with it, updated the page detailing all the gear he uses.
Last month, we passed the seventh anniversary of this post about my home office set-up. No, I can’t believe there are posts on Six Colors that are seven years old, but here we are. And when I look at the photo that accompanies that post, I am amazed at how much has changed in the intervening time. Same old floor lamp, same foam nerf-ball brain, same monitor and microphone arms, same chair, same carpet. Everything else has changed. So consider this my end-of-2021 update about what’s in my workspace.
On the desk It’s hard to believe I’ve had my 8-core iMac Pro for four years, but here we are. I suspect 2022 will be the year I replace it, but for that to happen, Apple’s going to need to release a new big iMac or an affordable external display or both.
Since you can remove the stand from the iMac Pro, I’ve got mine attached to a Hover Series 2 monitor arm that came with my original desk, back when I set up this office in late 2013.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Kolide connects device security and Slack together in a clever way—by sending people important, timely, and relevant recommendations about securing their devices via Slack.
For example, Kolide can instruct developers to set passphrases on unencrypted SSH keys, find plain-text two-factor backup codes and show users how to store them securely, or even encourage employees to uninstall gross browser extensions that sell data to marketers.
It’s a great tool for any company that wasn’t to move beyond the traditional “lockdown model” to one focused on educating and informing employees about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems.
Six Colors readers can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.…
So back in October I tweeted about how it was easy to lose the pointer under the notch on the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and that someone should do something about that:
once again I am asking for someone to develop a "utility" that makes the notch glow when the pointer is hidden behind it 😉 https://t.co/vjeaUYYgi3
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) October 27, 2021
The thing is, mad genius Craig Hockenberry of The Iconfactory heard me. And the result, less than two months later, is this:
This holiday season we have a special gift for Mac users everywhere, especially ones with a new MacBook Pro and notch. We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of Notchmeister.
It’s true. Notchmeister will festoon your MacBook Pro’s notch with Christmas light, or a radar scanner, or a Cylon eye. Or it’ll make your Mac pointer throw off sparks or glow when it’s behind the notch. It’s silly, and fun, and reminds me of the old “desktop distraction” Underware for Classic Mac OS.
Notchmeister is free on the App Store and open source. What’s wrong with that?1
- I’d like to know. ↩ …
Shortcuts maven Matthew Cassinelli has a story up at iMore about eight ways for Apple to improve Shortcuts:
Combined with architecture changes, a lack of integration across Apple’s other teams, and the natural growing pains of a brand new paradigm for computing, I’ve noticed a group of issues that Apple could address to pave the way and make Shortcuts an experience everyone can enjoy.
It’s a good list. The big lift for Shortcuts over the next few years is to get much more support for actions in apps—starting with Apple’s. As AppleScript atrophied, the need to support user automation evaporated from the to-do lists of app developers. It will take some serious evangelism from Apple and elsewhere for app developers to make proper Shortcuts support a priority.…
Promised at WWDC, a new version of Swift Playgrounds arrived this week, with its most notable feature addition being support for submitting projects to the App Store. John Voorhees of MacStories provides a good overview:
Starting a coding project from Playgrounds isn’t new either. However, now, you can take that project, submit it to the App Store and sell it once the app clears the App Review process – all from an iPad. That’s a very big deal because it’s the first time an app can be created end-to-end on the same device that runs it. Swift Playgrounds can be used to create apps with iOS and iPadOS 15.2 that run on iPhones, iPads, and M1 Macs, but you cannot create Apple Watch apps or Mac apps that aren’t built with iOS or iPadOS.
Other impressive features in Playgrounds include support for including public swiftpm packages. And according to developer Steve Troughton-Smith, the new version is much more pleasant to use.
Keep in mind, though, that Swift Playgrounds only supports building iOS apps that use Swift and SwiftUI. Xcode on the Mac can do all that, plus building all sorts of other stuff in many other languages. Troughton-Smith also points out that you can’t build apps with in-app purchases using Swift Playgrounds.…
Why we’re not using Obsidian, favorite iOS apps, photos, and thoughts of spring.
[We’ve been told to take next week off. The podcast will be back in two weeks.]…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Smart retouching in action.The Pixelmator team has released Pixelmator Photo 2.0, which brings Pixelmator Photo to the iPhone for the first time.
Pixelmator Photo has been my go-to photo editing app on the iPad since it was first released. It’s a great companion to the Photos app that lets you edit photos from your library and and save them right back into place in your library when you’re done. (The Photos database always retains the original version of photo, so if you don’t like the changes you’ve made, you can always revert.)
Pixelmator Photos has a nice machine-learning-driven feature that analyzes your image and automatically adjusts it; to my eye, it does a better job than the Photos app’s equivalent feature. There are also a huge number of individual adjustments you can make yourself. The new version supports numerous RAW formats including Apple’s ProRAW.
But the real standout feature of Pixelmator Photo remains its smart retouch tool, which lets you quickly fix blemishes on faces, remove people from the background, eliminate dust, and the like. It’s amazingly good. It’s much better than the one in Photos on the Mac, and the iOS version of Photos doesn’t offer any sort of retouching feature at all!…
Here are six iOS apps that stood out for us this year, but weren’t part of the old standbys list. They’re not all new, but they’re ones we used a lot more this year.
Noir I use Dark Mode in iOS all the time, especially on my iPad at night. And there’s not much more frustrating than tapping a hyperlink while reading in dim or no light and having my retinas blasted with a bright white webpage. Sure, conscientious sites (like this one) have updated their designs to support a dark-mode color scheme, but some sites refuse to get with the program!
Thanks to the $3 Noir, one of the new generation of Safari extensions that runs on iOS 15, my retinas are saved from blasting. Noir scans a site’s stylesheet, and if it doesn’t provide a dark mode, it creates one on the fly. You can set, on a per-site basis, whether to enable or disable Noir, and even give it the option of overriding a site’s own dark mode with a Noir version.—Jason Snell
NetNewsWire I rediscovered NetNewsWire because of newsletters. I was getting a lot of newsletters in my email inbox, which is not actually where I wanted to read them.…
This is a nice post from developer Simon B. Støvring about getting data out of 1Password and into iCloud Keychain:
Ensuring all items in 1Password have a valid website address is necessary in order to import the items. iCloud Keychain will skip any items that do not have a valid website address.
After ensuring all items have a valid website address, they can be exported from 1Password by selecting a single vault and navigating to File -> Export -> All items…. After entering the Master Password the dialog below is presented. It’s important to change the file format to “iCloud Keychain (.csv)” before exporting.
The article also includes a link to Ricky Mondello’s shortcut for opening the Passwords interface directly on macOS or iOS.…
We dig into why CNN+ has to exist, even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Also, the strange divisions between what’s on HBO and what’s on HBO Max, we talk a surprising amount about The CW (again), and Netflix has… a blog?…
Will we use SharePlay? What are our feelings about Bluetooth earbuds? How do we protect ourselves when we’re browning online? And what are our picks for favorite TV, movies, and books of the year?…
Apple’s 2021 was one that was… good, but not surprising. After a dramatic 2020 where a global pandemic raged and yet Apple shipped a new iPhone redesign and entirely new processor architecture, 2021 was about settling in. The pandemic undoubtedly delayed some developments from 2021 into 2022, but Apple’s 2021 was always going to be a bit of an anticlimax after the drama of 2020.
The problem with making predictions is that there’s a difficult balance between wishcasting about what you’d like to happen, and approaching things with a steely eye and the discipline to know that just because you really want Apple to make an affordable external display, it’s probably not going to do that on your timeframe.
Last year, while 2020 was wrapping up and I looked forward to 2021, I largely read the room correctly—after a big year, things would settle down a bit in 2021. That was a good call, though it didn’t stop me from missing one of the most pleasant surprises of the year, or for predicting something that was entirely unlikely to happen just because I wanted to see it. Here’s a recap.…
Myke’s back from vacation and he has a lot of follow-up for Jason about last week’s show. We unveil the official Upgrade Draft championship pennant. Then we discuss the increasing reality of Apple’s forthcoming headset and the company’s complex relationship with China.…
Kolide is a SaaS app that sends employees important, timely, and relevant security recommendations concerning their Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, right inside Slack.
At Kolide, we think end-users are the most significant untapped resources for IT admins and are the key to solving the most challenging to fix security issues.
For example, Kolide can:
- Instruct developers to set passphrases on the unencrypted SSH keys littered throughout their devices.
- Find plain-text two-factor backup codes and teach end-users how to store them securely.
- Convince employees to uninstall evil (yet allowed) browser extensions that sell their browser history to marketing companies
These are just several of the dozens of checks Kolide offers out of the box.
Kolide is perfect for organizations that want to move beyond a traditional lock-down model and move to one where employees are educated about security and device management while fixing nuanced problems. We call this approach Honest Security.
Sounds too good to be true? It’s not. You just need to give it a try.
You can try Kolide on an unlimited number of devices with all its features for free and without a credit card for 14 days.…
Apple released iOS 15.2, macOS 12.1, and watchOS 8.3 today, with a bunch of new features including SharePlay for macOS, the new Apple Music Voice plan, App Privacy Report, Legacy Contacts, and a whole lot more.
The company also updated something else—its own website, to quietly announce that one of the major features announced in June and originally due to ship “this fall” has instead slipped to spring of 2022:
As I wrote earlier this month, it’s about to be winter in Cupertino and Apple has yet to even release a version of Universal Control in a developer or public beta, so it was unlikely to meet the deadline. I’m not sure if moving the promised date to spring is an admission that this feature is way off, or just a choice to not once again overpromise and underdeliver.
However, the spring date has made me question my assumption that Universal Control would inevitably appear in the first developer beta releases of iOS 15.3 and macOS 12.2. Maybe even cutting-edge beta users have much longer to wait.…
As was the case with past Apple products that were highly anticipated (such as the iPhone and the Apple Watch), the number of reports and rumors circling an Apple AR/VR headset have intensified, from sources both reputable and otherwise. There have been renders and mockups, specs and chips, and capability theories aplenty. At this point, it would be more surprising if Apple didn’t announce a mixed reality headset next year.
But setting aside all the information garnered from the likes of supply chains and analysts, it’s always worth taking a step back and looking at what Apple is doing right now that might provide clues as to where it’s headed. The company is meticulous about laying groundwork for new products in its existing line-up, and if it’s rolling out something as major as a brand new platform sometime in the next six to nine months, you can bet that today’s Apple devices hold some indications.…
Friday afternoon I tried something new and did a live stream. The subject: a “re-boxing” of my MacBook Pro review unit, which is going back to Apple. (In fact, since the video was completed, a nice FedEx man came and took the box away!)
I’ve got some stuff to work on (I need a more stable and consistent forward-facing camera, for one, and the sound drops out briefly at one point), but I will try to do more of these in the future.…
As we reach the end of the year, it’s time for us to share some of the stuff that we liked this year. We’ll start with a category that is surprisingly robust: Mac apps. Some of these are new, and others are old favorites that got nice updates in recent months.
Mimestream After a decade-plus of using Gmail through the Mac-amplified interface of Mailplane, I had to find a replacement after that app was discontinued. My dissatisfaction with Apple Mail’s slow operation and unreliable search was what drove me to Mailplane to begin with, and I wasn’t willing to go back there. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Neil Jhaveri’s Mimestream is an Apple Mail-style client for Gmail. Its search is proper Gmail search, fast and reliable. And it supports Mac interface conventions. I’ve switched to Mimestream and couldn’t be happier about it. The app is free during the beta period; I have no idea what it’ll cost when it goes final, but whatever it is, it’ll be worth it.—Jason Snell
Bartender 4 I’m not quite sure why I avoided Bartender for so long, but this year the overwhelming number of menu bar icons finally got to me, and I wholeheartedly embraced the $15 menu bar management utility.…
Boop, said the smart appliance to the home automation.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
A couple of things I wanted to do over at The Incomparable’s website involved knowing the status of a shared Google Calendar. For months I tried to build up the courage to figure out how to interact with the Google Calendar API and found I just couldn’t do it.1
So I fell back on my old-school Web ways, and decided to just scrape the HTML of Google’s calendar embed, parse it, and send the prettied-up results to a Slack group of my choice. (It won’t survive Google’s next redesign of its HTML calendar embed, but to be honest, it appears to have not been updated in years.)
Sample output.In any event, if you’re interested in script that will stick the contents of a Google Calendar into a Slack channel, I posted it over at GitHub. No warranty implied.
- A combination of python configuration issues and the requirement to set up a Google API project and validate it via Oauth drove me away, screaming. ↩ …
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge, details an interesting component of the upcoming Matter connectivity standard:
Matter TV, as we’ll call it for wont of an official name, will allow control of a television’s core functions — volume up / down, changing the channel, controlling inputs and outputs, and switching between HDMI ports. “But importantly, you can also do casting,” Chris DeCenzo, Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon Lab126, told The Verge.
Firstly, unifying control of TV functions is a great idea. While HDMI-CEC has been around for several years and gotten increasingly prevalent, it’s yet another standard that has to be supported by TV makers, set-top box makers, game consoles, and so on. Will Matter TV help standardize that further? It’s unclear, but the big name support—Apple, Amazon, Google—behind Matter could certainly help sway things.
But the casting development is an even bigger question. Right now, as DeCenzo points out later in the piece, there are at least five major standards for casting content (of which Apple’s AirPlay and Google’s Chromecast are the biggest). Over the past few years, Apple has opened AirPlay up to more and more partners, making it more and more common on smart TVs and set-top boxes, but there’s still confusion and frustration when one device can’t talk to another.…
Describing an experience with augmented reality, last-minute tech gifts, using tech with holiday decor, and how we prepare for tech support when gathering with family.…
Around my house, 2021 has been a year of durable goods upheaval. The 10-year-old refrigerator gave us a scare, the 14-year-old Prius put us on notice that its battery was soon to need replacing, and the 20-year-old washer/dryer just plain gave out.
So, as supply chain bottlenecks continue to make this a terrible time to be buying a car or major appliance, my spouse and I have been in repair and product research mode for months. The upside is that any replacement machine we buy is bound to bring better technology to our lives.
We’d just like to space it all out a bit, please.
It helps that I’m married to a person capable of hacking or fixing most machines—the fridge and the car are copacetic right now. But the old washer/dryer’s ills proved too much, even for him. Last month, we took delivery of a Wi-Fi-enabled, app-controllable LG WashTower—a washer/dryer unit that fits snugly into a narrow, low space in our utility room, and promises a “smart” laundry experience, from recommending settings based on the kind of clothes you put into it, to sending you a notification when your sheets are done. I’ll confess right now that the two nerds in this house have had a lot of fun doing laundry these past few weeks.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
At Fast Company, Jared Newman writes in praise of the $15 Markdown editor app Typora, which just exited a seven-year(!) beta:
[Typora developer] Abner says he started working on Typora to satisfy his own needs. He wanted a Markdown editor that didn’t display clunky syntax or require a separate preview window, and decided to create his own after failing to find any suitable options. It turns out a lot of other folks were looking for something similar. “The project has gone beyond my expectations,” he wrote via email.
Over the past seven years, Typora has become considerably faster and more stable, and it’s added new features such as diagrams, find-and-replace, word counts for selected text, and a “Focus Mode” that highlights the current paragraph. A recent update also added support for Arm-based Linux devices, so you can run it on cheap Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi micro-computers.
In the article, Jared mentions my preferences for Markdown editors that show the markup, rather than hide it. Typora has an interesting solution to the show-or-hide conundrum: it can optionally display the markup when you’re editing it—for example, if you click on an inline link it expands to reveal the URL—but will style your document without showing markup when you’re not.…
Podcast host, developer, and single-ping aficionado Casey Liss decries the state of high-quality external displays for the Mac:
The above is the entire lineup. That’s it. Four options. Three of which existed 1665 days ago.
In [effectively] 2022, there are four options for retina-quality monitors to attach to your Mac.
If there are others, please let me know, as I’d love to share them. I know that others have existed at some time in the past — like the Dells I featured in the first version of this post — but they’ve been discontinued and/or are not readily available here in the States. [emphasis original]
It remains quite surprising that there isn’t an option for those who can’t afford and don’t need the $6000 reference-monitor quality of the Pro Display XDR to pair with a MacBook or Mac Pro, even two and a half years after Apple released its foray back into the external monitor market. Even the iPad can connect to external displays, though its utility remains a bit limited.
Rumors have continued to appear of a mid-range display, possibly even alongside a refreshed 27-inch iMac next year. Making a version of the iMac displays that stand on their own would be greeted with open arms by many consumers, but as always Apple is surely doing the math on whether it’s a big enough market to justify the product development.…
With Myke on assignment, Dan Moren joins Jason to discuss the features Apple hasn’t yet delivered in 2021 and its product lineup for 2022. Then Jason breaks down the new e-readers you could use to read one of Dan’s novels.…
Apple’s approach to major software updates has changed a bit over the past couple of years. Once upon a time, the company would roll out one big update then do smaller point releases over the next year or two to fix bugs and occasionally add minor features, followed by a long life of security updates. Over the last decade, those major releases have become yearly, but they still tended to deliver most of the promised features in one go.
Nowadays, with several major software platforms to keep up to date, the company has gradually shifted to a strategy of major software releases which include most of the features the company announces at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. But invariably, a handful of those headline features don’t make it into the initial version and instead trickle out in a variety of updates over the subsequent months.
So it’s been with iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey. Several of the most ambitious features have still yet to be released, and with the clock ticking down on 2021, it’s left more than a few users wondering if we’ll even see these features this year.…
Home automation, speakers, Shortcuts, and bagels.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
YouTuber and podcaster Quinn Nelson has a cat problem:
Strange question: is there a way to disable the touch sensitive surface on HomePods? Our cat has learned that if he touches them music plays and my wife woke up to extremely loud Christmas music at 4AM today and I’m pretty sure that’s not the spirit of Christmas.
— Quinn Nelson (@SnazzyQ) December 3, 2021
This is a tricky one, because Apple doesn’t let you entirely disable the touch surface on the HomePod. But there are a few possible workarounds that might prevent Quinn’s fluffy white agent of chaos from waking him and his wife up in the middle of the night.
First, as recommended by several Twitter users, is to use an accessibility feature that adjusts how long you must press the Homepod’s touch-sensitive area before it registers. To do this, open the Home app, long-press or right-click on a HomePod, select Settings, then choose Touch Accommodations from the Accessibility menu. Among the options here is a Hold Duration, which you can set to a ridiculously high number of seconds. (Cats are rarely that patient.)
But a more clever suggestion Quinn received from Zachary Livingood was to use a home automation to set the volume of the HomePod to zero at some point in the late evening.…
We’ve seen stories of people triumphantly locating their lost belongings thanks to AirTags, but, as always, technology is a double-edged sword. It seems that some car thieves in Canada are using Apple’s tracking fobs to locate and steal vehicles:
Since September 2021, officers have investigated five incidents where suspects have placed small tracking devices on high-end vehicles so they can later locate and steal them. Brand name ‘air tags’ are placed in out-of-sight areas of the target vehicles when they are parked in public places like malls or parking lots. Thieves then track the targeted vehicles to the victim’s residence, where they are stolen from the driveway.
In theory, Apple has measures in place to alert people when an AirTag that doesn’t belong to them is found at their location, but even after the company revised how those alerts work it seems that they may not be enough. In June, the company also said that it would build an app for Android phones to detect AirTags and release it “later this year,” but that’s still in the offing.
It’s possible there’s also just not enough awareness of what exactly AirTags are, or what to do if you find one that doesn’t belong to you.…
When I reviewed three recently-released e-readers last month, I received several complaints about this line in the story:
Kobos are much better citizens [than Kindles] when it comes to borrowing e-books from your local public library.
Wait a minute!, said the Kindle folks. My Kindle works great with Overdrive/Libby!
(For those who don’t know, Overdrive is the service used by most public libraries in the U.S. to provide e-books to patrons. Libby is the excellent iOS app that works as a front-end to Overdrive. I can’t recommend them both enough.)
But let me be clear: When I say Kobo e-readers are better at Overdrive than Kindles, I’m not saying Kindles don’t work. I’m saying that it’s not nearly as good as an experience as it is on a Kobo. (This is unsurprising, since the owners of Kobo also owned Overdrive for several years.)
Here’s how you check out a book if you’re a Kindle user. You open Libby, select your book, and tap Read With Kindle (left, above). The Libby app then opens a webview at Amazon.com (center). You select where you want the book sent, tap Get Library Book, and a new page opens telling you that you’ve succeeded (right).…
John Voorhees at MacStories has come up with a clever way to generate a bunch of AppleScript files that just run Shortcuts as a way to open up Shortcuts to apps that support running scripts, but not Shortcuts. Fittingly enough, he uses Shortcuts itself to do the job:
The advantage of using a .scpt file is it can be used by multiple apps. You can drag the file into an ‘Open’ action in the Stream Deck app and run it with the press of a button. Then, you can point Keyboard Maestro at the same file and trigger your shortcut from that app too. It’s a more flexible solution than locking the script in a plug-in.
However, it didn’t take long before building one-off scripts felt like a chore, which is why I created Script Builder. Now, as I go through my library of shortcuts and think about how I can use them on the Mac, I can batch process them into .scpt files.
Should everyone support Shortcuts? Sure. Should Apple make this easier? Probably!
In any event, this is an elegant approach. It occurred to me that a brute-force version of this same approach might also be helpful—basically, a script that could run every few minutes or hours, filling a directory full of AppleScript scripts that simply run whatever shortcuts you’ve got on your Mac, ready to be indexed by LaunchBar and referenced by Keyboard Maestro and Stream Deck and anything else.…
Diving into Netflix’s brand new global and regional top 10 lists, and all the things they tell us about the global streaming giant. Also, ViacomCBS corrects its Star Trek mistake, and why Netflix is bad at movies.…
The older tech that we can’t justify replacing, what we’d change about Twitter in the wake of Jack Dorsey’s exit, the health tech we’d like to see next, and which retro video games we’d remake.…
I was reminded by Simon Støvring, maker of the excellent Mac and iOS utility Data Jar (which is a persistent data store that’s accessible via Shortcuts), that people may not be aware of just how well integrated Shortcuts is into macOS.
For example, if you’re someone who works in the Terminal a lot, you may not realize that you can integrate Shortcuts (including accessing data from apps like Data Jar) directly into your shell scripts and commands via the shortcuts command-line app.
I created a small example shortcut called songtitle that outputs the title of the currently playing song.
Now from Terminal, I can use that output in any way you would normally process data. If I want to open the result in BBEdit, for example, I’d type:
``` shortcuts run songtitle | bbedit
```
If I wanted to output the result to a file, I can use the -o flag to direct the output:
``` shortcuts run songtitle -o ~/songtitle.txt
```
And if I just want to see the output, I can pipe the result to cat:
``` shortcuts run songtitle | cat
```
By the way, shortcuts will also provide command-line access to the names of all your available shortcuts by typing shortcuts list.…
Jason Tate:
A few weeks ago I started working on a new weekend project. I wanted to build a mini-computer that could sit on my desk and display what I was currently listening to. A simple idea. After completing it, I figured I should write up the entire process, because if I don’t blog about it … did it really happen?
Now Playing: the device. This is adorable.…
In about three weeks it’ll be winter in Cupertino, and while the turn of seasons in the Bay Area usually doesn’t amount to much beyond wearing a slightly heavier hoodie, the turning of the seasons also represents an expiration date for one of Apple’s most springtime promises.
Several features of iOS 15 and macOS Monterey announced way back in June didn’t arrive at launch. We got SharePlay in iOS 15.1, iCloud+ features are still in beta, and ID cards have been delayed till 2022. But Apple still claims that Universal Control is shipping “later this fall,” which means we’ve got less than a month before Apple’s promise to ship perhaps the best feature in Monterey, is in arrears.
Sure, three weeks is a long time… until you consider that Apple has yet to even ship a beta version of macOS and iOS that supports this new feature. If the feature isn’t even ready to be previewed by brave souls, how will it be ready for us all by mid-December? It’s tricky.
Nobody likes waiting until Christmas morning to unwrap the presents under the tree, especially the one that’s literally shaped like the outline of a new bike. But we don’t get to choose.…
The holiday season is upon us, and what do you get for the man who has literally everything?1
Tim Cook has got to be a hard man to shop for. From outward appearances, all he seems to do is work and work (out). Truly, he seems to be a man of few luxuries, excusing the occasional hobnobbing with celebrities and expensive home purchase. But with his zip-up sweaters and sensible slacks, his lifestyle doesn’t exactly scream creature comforts.
So, in order to help all those people with Not So Tiny Tim on their holiday list—especially those who are doing a little last-minute shopping2—we’ve compiled this helpful resource of a few things that the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies might be excited to unwrap.
A stay of execution. Court orders aren’t anybody’s best friend, but with the clock still ticking down on Apple dealing with its one loss in the trial versus Epic, Tim (Cook, that is, not the other one) would certainly breathe easier knowing that the App Store wouldn’t undergo any upheavals—no matter how minor they might end up being—during the holiday season.
A steering wheel. By all accounts, Apple’s secretive not-so-secret car project has hit more than a few bumps in the road.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Myke checks in from mid-vacation to discuss his visit with Jason, and shares some observations from his first extended travel in a couple of years. Then Jason takes a deep dive into his adventures Shortcuts on the Mac. And there’s still time to discuss Mac AirPlay quirks and Apple lawsuits!…
How we charge our devices, the travel tech we’re taking with us this year, our thoughts on Apple’s plans for digital IDs, and an examination of Apple’s newly announced Self Repair Program.…
Last week Dan wrote about macOS Monterey’s new Network Quality Tool, which lets you quickly get a sense of your local network speed from the command line.
If you’re a user of ambient Mac menu bar utilities like SwiftBar or xBar, you might be wondering if there’s an easy way to display this information in your menu bar.
I certainly was wondering that, so I’ve written a small SwiftBar plugin (requires python3) to run networkQuality and report the results in the menu bar every 20 minutes. You can download it here if you’re interested.…
An Apple Pencil, a Kobo Libra 2, and some creamed corn.This time of year leads to a few inevitable kinds of stories. Giving thanks, and… deals? Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and Black Friday one of my least favorite “holidays”, and yet they’re placed back to back on the (U.S.) calendar.
I’ve written the occasional tech-I’m-thankful-for column over the years, and even drafted Thanksgiving dinner one year. And while I’ve witnessed many of my friends in the tech press being forced to spend their holiday week digging up Black Friday Deals, I’ve generally been able to stay out of it.
But in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d spread several familiar dishes across the table this week.
Tech-themed giving of thanks On this week’s episode of Upgrade, a listener wrote in to ask about the second-generation Apple Pencil. I have to admit, I haven’t written much about the Apple Pencil since writing a love song to it back in 2018, though I did make a video that showed it off as part of my podcast-editing workflow.
So let me give thanks to one of the most remarkable pieces of technology I’ve ever used. Unlike most appealing tech products, the second-generation Apple Pencil does not offer shiny buttons and blinking lights and the promise of more power.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today filed a lawsuit against NSO Group and its parent company to hold it accountable for the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. The complaint provides new information on how NSO Group infected victims’ devices with its Pegasus spyware. To prevent further abuse and harm to its users, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services, or devices.
The complaint offers new information about a (since-patched) exploit called FORCEDENTRY that was used to install NSO’s Pegasus spyware on Apple devices. NSO, which has been accused of selling its spyware to many foreign governments, is now in a financial crisis after being blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department earlier this month.
Say what you will about Apple’s policies regarding bug bounties and other security issues—the company is capable of spending a nearly infinite amount of money on lawyers who will try to make NSO Group’s existence painful for a very long time.…
Rich Woods reports about Windows on ARM and where it may be headed in the future:
Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, and speaking with people familiar with it, we’ve learned that the deal is set to expire soon.
Other than the fact that Microsoft has publicly said that anyone who wants to can build a Windows on ARM chip, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Qualcomm didn’t just start building PC chips hoping that Microsoft would compile Windows to support it. No, these two companies worked together to make it happen. Because of that, Qualcomm gets to enjoy a bit of exclusivity… This is also presumably why Apple Silicon Macs aren’t officially supported for running Windows 11, so hopefully that will change as well.
When this exclusivity window expires, I would be shocked if there weren’t an official way to run Windows on Macs with Apple silicon soon thereafter.…
This week I’m traveling for Thanksgiving, and I’m using this MacBook Pro review unit before I have to send it back to Apple1.
One of the things I had forgotten in the years where I largely traveled only with an iPad is the frustration of having my home Mac and travel Mac out of sync. These days, it’s less of an issue thanks to syncing services—for instance, all my podcast templates are in Dropbox, and all my BBEdit preferences are in iCloud.
But as I’ve written about here repeatedly, I also rely on a bunch of Automator workflows, saved as Services, to get work done. And those don’t sync, so every time I opened my MacBook Air or this MacBook Pro, I’d find myself running into some Service or other that I didn’t have access to. I could do the work manually, or see if I had archived a copy on a cloud service, or if I was really desperate I could dig into my Time Machine backups on my server at home and see if I could pull the files out.
But on this trip, I realized that there’s another solution. I recently built a bunch of cross-platform shortcuts and a new Shortcuts version of an old AppleScript tool of mine.…
Apple’s car project is back in the news, but is the company’s ambition in this area unrealistic? Also: Qualcomm spoils Apple’s modem move, Apple employees get a new date to return to work, and there’s some good news about the repairability of Apple products.…
Following up from his post from last fall, developer David Smith has taken his Apple Watch on a three-day hiking trip and figuring out some strategies for extending its life:
What gives me some excitement about this experience is that it seems clear that an Apple Watch can already make a solid companion for a long backpacking trip. When I set off I was expecting to have to charge it completely every day, but in reality it is more like every third day. Which gets it under my threshold for consideration for use. Especially since bringing it means that I now have a fully programmable computer on my wrist.
Turns out that putting the watch in Theater mode, thereby deactivating the always-on screen, saves a lot of power. Add in Airplane Mode and he was able to keep the watch running for three days, with fitness tracking still running to log his hikes.
Perhaps most importantly, the Apple Watch was able to display live UK Ordnance Survey maps overlaid with a GPS location. (This is similar to a feature I use here in the U.S. via the iPhone app Maplets, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to offer an Apple Watch equivalent.)…
Apple gets a lot of flak for its “my way or the highway” approach to, well, pretty much everything: App Store terms, product design, colors, and so on. While that’s an approach that definitely has its benefits—you can tell when committees start getting involved in design, and the end result is rarely good—it also lends itself to a degree of obduracy that can be frustrating for any other parties that have to deal with the company.
But that philosophy doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t willing to make changes when it needs to. Innovation is, after all, another one of the company’s hallmarks, and sitting on one’s laurels in the technology market is rarely a path to success. It’s just that sometimes that change doesn’t from people inside the company, but from external forces.
Lately, the company’s made a number of surprising backtracks against previous policies, and while they might not always be done out of the goodness of its heart—as much as a corporation can be said to have one—it does prove that Apple can learn and perhaps improve&even if it sometimes has to be dragged, kicking and screaming.…
This week, thanks to an article by John Voorhees at MacStories about integrating Shortcuts with the Elgato Stream Deck, I discovered an incredibly useful tip about Shortcuts integration on the Mac.
Shortcuts show up in a few places in macOS Monterey: in the menu bar, in the Services menu, and in Finder Quick Actions. Strangely, while on iOS you can save a shortcut as a home-screen icon, there’s no option on the Mac to save a shortcut into the file system… or is there?
As John wrote (and then expanded on in the latest MacStories Weekly), Shortcuts on Mac also lets you add any shortcut to the Dock. It’s a bit hidden—you need to select or open a shortcut and then choose Add to Dock from the File menu. At that point, not only will the shortcut appear in your Dock, but it will also be saved to ~/Applications.
Now, what most Mac users think of as the Applications folder lives at the top level of your Mac’s boot drive. While there’s also an Applications folder inside your user folder—and in the early days of Mac OS X there was a real debate about where best to install software on a Mac—it’s largely unused.…
My thanks to BZG Apps for sponsoring Six Colors this week. BZG makes Unite 4, which allows you to turn any Website into a Mac app. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and M1 support. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource-hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when using the promo code SixColors at checkout. There’s also a 14 day free trial, and the app is included in Setapp for subscribers.…
As someone who’s enthusiastic about mechanical keyboards, I was interested in reviewing a prerelease version of the $110 Nuphy Air75. It’s a 75 percent keyboard (a size that’s right up my alley) with low-profile switches and thin, low-profile PBT keycaps.
The result is a portable Bluetooth/USB-C keyboard that’s thin and light and slips much more easily in a bag (a $19 foldable case/stand similar to the Studio Neat Canopy is an add-on option) than thicker, heaver keyboards. I’ve never tried low-profile Gateron switches before, but they were clicky and responsive in a way that modern Apple keyboards aren’t. (In fact, one of Nuphy’s sample photos indicates that they’re hoping people will place the keyboard atop their MacBook keyboards when in use. Unfortunately, the feet on the Air75 don’t quite fit over the keyboard of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro.)
The keyboard I used came with Mac keycaps preinstalled, including an f-key row that also highlights media controls. (There’s a switch on the back that lets you put the keyboard in Windows or Mac mode, and of course it works with iPad, too—in fact, most of the time I used it with my iPad.)
If I have a complaint about the Air75, it’s that the keycaps aren’t just low profile, they’re very flat.…
Apple Cars without steering wheels and Apple-branded pentalobe screwdrivers. What a world.
(The podcast will be off next week for Thanksgiving. Back in two weeks.)…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
A few months ago I decided to unplug the iPod Hi-Fi I was using as an external speaker for my iMac Pro, and replace it with a stereo pair of $199 Sonos One SL speakers. I’m using my iPad Pro’s internal speakers for podcast editing and other general noises; the Sonos speakers are meant for playing music. I listen to music all day long as I work, and I decided I wanted to get the iPod Hi-Fi off my desktop and get something that sounded a bit better.
The Sonos Ones do sound better than the iPod Hi-Fi, not only fuller but with more stereo separation, considering that they’re on opposite sides of my office from one another. Unfortunately, what I’ve discovered is that using AirPlay from Music on a Mac is not particularly reliable. Music often pauses for a moment. One speaker will start playing and the other will only step in after a moment. And worst of all, sometimes when you pause a song and attempt to start it again later, Music completely loses track of where the audio is playing and refuses to play or plays it out of the wrong speakers.
What I’ve found, in short, is that while AirPlaying music from an iOS device is pretty solid—not perfect, but solid—it’s a lot rougher on macOS.…
Marc Karzen shot the amazing, award-winning bumpers used going into and out of every commercial break on “Late Night with David Letterman,” one of my favorite television shows of all time. Now he’s got a book collecting the photos, with an introduction by Letterman himself, with a website to show it all off.
Every single one of these images immediately shoots me back to the mid-1980s. The photos are evocative, playful, sometimes kitschy and sometimes silly, and always containing the phrase “Late Night with David Letterman.” Letterman video archiver Don Giller compiled a brief video montage to celebrate the release of the book.
…
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple’s focusing on a fully autonomous car for release as early as 2025:
Apple’s ideal car would have no steering wheel and pedals, and its interior would be designed around hands-off driving…. Though the company is pushing to not have a standard steering wheel, Apple has discussed equipping the car with an emergency takeover mode.
The idea of releasing a self-driving car isn’t new, or novel. Companies like Tesla and Waymo have been trying it for a while. But the idea of being so confident in your self-driving technology that you design the interior to not have driving controls at all? That’s beyond the beyond.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m tempted to call it a “moon shot”—a seemingly impossible task that can actually be accomplished with an enormous amount of investment, effort, and intelligence. But I’ll point out that one of the people trying to make a self-driving car is literally building a rocket to take people to the moon, and that effort seems more likely to succeed this decade than building a car that doesn’t have a steering wheel.
You can’t deny Apple’s ambition here. They seem to be of the opinion that if they can’t make a revolutionary car, they shouldn’t bother.…
John takes a foray into smart home automation. Dan wonders about Apple’s rumored headset, and special guest James Thomson takes us to programming school.…
Disney+ came out of the gate strong, but its growth is waning. What does it need to do to reach a broader audience? It’s all about the ‘Hamiltons.’ Also, ViacomCBS pulls the rug out from underneath international Star Trek fans.…
Our computer speaker setups, the latest apps we’ve installed, whether we’re experiencing NFT FOMO, and the smart home gadgets we’d like to get this holiday season.…
A year ago this week the era of Apple silicon truly began, as the first reviews of M1 Macs arrived, followed shortly thereafter by M1 Macs arriving in Apple Stores and in the hands of Mac users everywhere.
We had hope that the future would be brighter with Apple-designed processors, but that optimism was tempered by Apple’s recent Mac missteps. There were also a lot of questions about a processor that had only really seen success in iPhones and iPads. Would there be unexpected pitfalls of abandoning Intel? Could Apple pull off its latest Mac chip transition with the same skill that it showed during the two previous transitions?
Twelve months later, the answers are much clear: We’re in the brightest timeline.…
In a move that I would wager almost nobody saw coming, Apple has announced that it will now allow consumers to buy official parts and tools to repair their own devices:
Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022. Customers join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals.
Essentially, this will give end users the same access that Apple Authorized Service Providers get in terms of instructions, tools, and parts. Initially, this will involve the parts that are most commonly repaired: screens, batteries, and cameras.
In a nice move, Apple says that if you return the part you’re replacing for the company to recycle, you’ll get a credit towards your purchase.
Apple does emphasize that this is really aimed at folks with the technical know-how to replace their own product.
One chief impetus for this is no doubt the growing push for “Right to Repair” legislation across the U.S. (my home state of Massachusetts having been an early adopter of this movement).…
Qualcomm, a company with no real interest in trying to appease Apple, told the world today that Apple will probably be shipping Apple-made cellular chips in devices at scale by 2023:
At an investor conference in New York, Qualcomm executives said they expect to supply only 20% of Apple’s modem chips by the launch of the iPhone in 2023. Qualcomm Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala expects Apple to make up a “low single-digit” percentage of the company’s chip sales by the end of fiscal 2024.
We learned back in 2019 that Apple was buying Intel’s modem business and settling its lawsuits with Qualcomm. Clearly the next step was for Apple’s silicon team to build its own cellular chips—the only question was when.
Sounds like the answer is 2023—or maybe 2022, it’s hard to say. Apple sells older iPhones for a while, so Qualcomm chips will be in Apple products for quite some time to come. Does Qualcomm’s 20% figure (dropping throughout 2024) mean they’ll still own a segment of Apple’s business, or is that just referring to older models? And what exactly does “by the launch of the iPhone in 2023” mean? Fiscal years, extrapolations, it’s all a little murky.…
It’s been five years since Apple announced the TV app—auspiciously on the same day it unveiled the first-generation Touch Bar MacBook Pros. A year earlier, Tim Cook first declared that “the future of TV is apps,” but in short order Apple realized that the future wasn’t hunting for different TV shows and movies across a half-dozen different apps, all with completely different navigation experiences.
So in came the TV app. Apple was so confident about it, the company changed the behavior of its own remote control so that the home-screen button no longer went to a home screen full of apps, and instead just launched the TV app.
Unfortunately, the TV app still hasn’t replaced the home screen—in part because it still doesn’t represent all the content that is available on Apple’s devices. Some wheeling and dealing brought Amazon’s Prime Video app into the fold, but Netflix remains separate—probably forever. (Netflix knows that its subscribers will open up its app to browse and watch something, and sees only disadvantages in mixing its content in with other services and providing Apple with valuable viewing data.)
The TV app experience is also subpar. It’s largely presenting links to other apps, meaning the other apps need to properly handle your login status and play back video.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple’s done releasing products for the year, but that hasn’t stopped the company from revising a child-protection feature, trying to avoid letting developers add links to their apps, launching a new service targeted at small businesses, and welcoming a new Netflix game catalog to the App Store. If you like that sort of thing.…
Developer Dan Petrov has a quick write up of the new command line network quality tool included in macOS Monterey:
It seems that Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring your device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can simply call the executable
networkQuality, which executes the following tests:
- Upload/download capacity (your Tx/Rx bandwidth essentially)
- Upload/download flows, this seems to be the number of test packets used for the responsiveness tests
- Upload/download responsiveness measured in Roundtrips Per Minute (RPM), which according to Apple, is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions
As Petrov points out, this is pretty similar to speed tests available from Fast.com or Speedtest.net, but it is useful to have access to it on the command line—plus there are some advantages to the fact that the Monterey tool by default tests upload and download simultaneously, as well as providing you with a qualitative assessment of your connection. Another handy tool for your kit.…
Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.
Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.
Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:
- A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
- A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
- An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
- A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
- A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
- A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/sixcolors or when you use the promo code ‘SixColors’ at checkout.
You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!…
One of Apple’s best qualities is the time and energy it spends on pushing the envelope of technology. In recent years, it’s debuted impressive camera features, world-class tablets, amazing processors, and much much more.
But one challenge with continually moving the state of the art forward is that sometimes it comes at the expense of making sure the technology that’s already here works as well as it can. After all, if you have to add a dozen new features in a year, that could mean taking away from work enhancing reliability, and squashing bugs in existing features.
We’ve all encountered a slew of problems—some simple (if ridiculous) to fix, others are maddeningly difficult to troubleshoot. As our devices get more and more complex, it’s all too easy for some of those problems to persist for years. And though the best part of the Apple experience has long been “it just works,” the question is…what happens when it doesn’t?…
Being able to control your lights from your devices or enjoy audio in every room are great goals for a smart home, but smart tech isn’t just about the things you can do, but what your smart home can do for you.
That’s one reason I’ve been experimenting with smart home sensors over the last few years. At the moment, my setup is still pretty limited—I haven’t yet delved into water leak sensors or door sensors—but I have invested pretty heavily in temperature sensors, which I’ve deployed in several places in the house. More often than not, this is just for my own edification, but there are also a few instances where there are specific usage cases.
First off, when I installed a new furnace in the house last year, I had an ecobee3 lite smart thermostat put in too. It’s a huge upgrade over my old apartment’s thermostat, which was nothing more than a temperature dial with a few opaque buttons on it and could only be programmed (in a rather complex fashion) from the furnace unit itself.
The ecobee, by comparison, has a great display that lets you see and adjust the temperature, features a powerful app, and plays nicely with HomeKit.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Shortcuts, services, and self-promotion.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Delightful video from the Wall Street Journal‘s Joanna Stern about trying to spend 24 hours in the metaverse.1 My eyes hurt just from watching.
Long story short: the metaverse is a ways from being a place most people are going to spend any time, but it’s quickly heating up as a battleground for tech companies. Expect to see a lot more about it in the next year.
- In a Holiday Inn Express, no less. ↩ …
Left to right: Kobo Libra 2, 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo Sage.I love e-readers, which explains why I write about them a lot. Earlier this year, I abandoned my Kindles and took up with a Kobo Libra H2O, and that’s been a pleasurable experience.
But change is coming to the e-reader world this fall, in the form of three brand-new readers. From upstart challenger Rakuten Kobo come the Kobo Sage and the Kobo Libra 2. And from the big dog, Amazon, comes the 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite.
They’re more different than you might think. I’ve read books on all three over the last few weeks. (So many books!) Here’s my complete review.
Advances in e-reader tech USB-C, ahoy!All of these devices have adopted more advanced technology than previous e-readers. They’ve got the latest E Ink screens, which look great. They’ve got faster processors, which makes a noticeable difference in terms of reducing lag when you turn pages, especially if you need to quickly flip back several pages. (And they’re all waterproof, of course, because you may want to read at the pool or in the bath.)
Though I never, ever use them, Amazon added audiobook support for Kindles a while back.…
Global supply chain issues strike again! The first units of Panic’s Playdate handheld gaming device were scheduled to ship before the end of the year, but they’ve now been delayed to early 2022, due to hardware issues:
As our first 5,000 finished Playdate units arrived at our warehouse in California for 2021, we began to test a few of them. We quickly became concerned that some of them weren’t giving us the battery life we expected. Playdate’s battery is designed to last a very long time, and always be ready for you, even if not used for a while. But that was not the case: in fact, we found a number of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn’t power on at all — and couldn’t be charged. That’s a battery worst-case scenario.
This quickly turned into a months-long, all-hands-on-deck research stress-ball, and we halted production at the factory.
Moreover, it turns out that the processors the device uses were backed ordered for two years, so Panic decided to make a change for later units that would allow them to use a similar chip that’s more easily available.
At least there is some good news: the public beta of the Playdate’s web-based game development tool will arrive in January 2022, with the full SDK available in February.…
I’ve written a couple of times about Template Gun, a hot-dog cannon of an AppleScript that I use to automatically expand zip archives of Logic Pro templates to use in editing projects. The script began as a simple tool to choose a template and put an unzipped copy on my Desktop, but then added the ability to use the Internet to automatically rename the folder and project to the right episode number.
But of course, we now live in the era of Shortcuts on the Mac, and prompted by my Upgrade podcast co-host Myke Hurley, I considered whether I could rebuild the Template Gun in Shortcuts on the Mac. The answer is yes—I constructed a new version of Template Gun that never once resorts to AppleScript to do its job.
Here’s a guided tour through all 54 actions that make up the shortcut, which you can get for yourself here.
What made Template Gun a tool that was just for me was that it was hard-coded to specific podcast templates of mine. If I started a new podcast, I’d need to update the AppleScript script to add support for the new podcast. With Shortcuts, I decided to make it a bit friendler by allowing configuration via a Dictionary:
Essentially, each podcast template gets an entry containing its name; inside each entry are two keys—slug and format—that determine how the shortcut acts on the template.…
Our thoughts on Twitter’s new subscription service, the keyboards we’re using, how we feel about smart locks, and some thoughts on Apple’s new Communication Safety features for Messages.…
With the removal of the Touch Bar from top-of-the-line MacBook Pro models-and make no mistake, the grim reaper is coming for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, too-Apple’s era of experimentation with the keyboard is over. Out with 2015’s “butterfly” keyboard, out with 2016’s Touch Bar, in with the Magic Keyboard and a row of full-height function keys.
For some reason, in the middle of the 2010s, Apple decided it was ready to reinvent how keyboards on laptops work. It was a bad decision that the company has spent years trying to fix. Of all the innovations from that period, the only one that remains intact is the Touch ID sensor on the power button. The rest of the changes are just a bad memory. So now what?…
The Verge’s Adi Robertson:
Epic v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers says Apple must comply with an order to let developers add links and buttons to external payment options, denying the company’s motion for a stay. “Apple’s motion is based on a selective reading of this Court’s findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction,” her new order reads.
Despite winning nine out of ten counts in the Apple v. Epic, Cupertino decided it was going to push for a perfect score by appealing the one place it lost (specifically, the judge’s decision that Apple can’t stop developers from linking out of their apps for alternative forms of payment). That change is scheduled to go into effect next month; Apple’s request for a stay was an attempt to delay that change, by claiming that it needed more time to figure out how implementation would work and that appeals were still pending, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has denied that request.
So what happens next? Apple hasn’t exhausted its options: the company plans to appeal to the Ninth Circuit to grant the stay (and in theory, it could take it to the Supreme Court), but there are no guarantees.…
Apple extended its service offerings to businesses on Wednesday by announcing Apple Business Essentials, which rolls together device management, support, and iCloud storage into a single subscription offering for businesses between 50 and 500 employees in size.
The subscription plan uses device-management features Apple introduced in iOS/iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey, and is in a free beta test beginning Wednesday and lasting through next spring. Per-user pricing will start at $2.99 per month and increase based on the number of devices and amount of iCloud storage allotted to individual users.
Company IT managers can administer users on an Apple-hosted web interface, and then instruct their users to log in with a company-assigned Apple ID. Managers can enforce certain security policies and distribute apps (via the new Apple Business Essentials app). On personal devices, corporate-based data and personal data are kept cryptographically separate.
A lot of companies are focused on Apple device management and broader business device management. What may make Apple’s offering different is the (optional) addition of a new tier of AppleCare+ designed just for Business Essentials subscribers. Apple says the new AppleCare+ tier, available next spring, will provide 24/7 phone support for both IT administrators and users—meaning small businesses can direct their employees to Apple for tech questions that might otherwise be fielded by a help desk—as well as rapid onsite repair, where an Apple representative will come to a business (or a home, if the employee is working remotely) within a few hours.…
Take Control Books recently released version 2.2 of my book about Apple’s Photos app. It covers changes in macOS Monterey and iOS/iPadOS 15, including the revamped Memories feature, new sharing and search options, better search intelligence, and importing of Photos libraries into other Photos libraries on Mac.
The book overs all the features of Photos in depth, and you’ll probably discover some things that you never knew Photos could do. Every summer I spend time with the beta versions of Photos and I always find some surprising things that Apple hasn’t really publicized. This year was no different.
If you bought the second edition of the book, the update is free. For everyone else, it’s $14.99 and comes in Kindle, ePub, and PDF versions.…
Twitter announced its premium Twitter Blue subscription service back in June, but it has just launched in the United States:
We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In these regions, Twitter Blue is available for in-app purchase on Twitter for iOS and Android, or on twitter.com through our payment partner Stripe.
While Twitter Blue offers a selection of features on the web and in Twitter’s apps, the feature I’m most excited about is one that’s similar to Nuzzel, a social link aggregator that Twitter bought and shut down earlier this year.
The top of the Top Articles view on Twitter’s website.The new Top Articles view shows the links that have been the most shared in your network over the last 24 hours. Nuzzel offered many more options that I’d like to see Twitter add, including the ability to compile links from Lists and adjust the time window. But this is a pretty good start.…
Michael Flarup just launched a Kickstarter for a book all about the art of iOS app icons:
The iOS App Icon Book features hundreds of works of art from individuals and teams around the world. It serves as an inspiration and as a historical collection covering more than a decade of design on the iOS platform. The icons in this book have been carefully curated to showcase conceptual and executional excellence in icon design and covers a broad range of applications, topics, and styles.
He’s been working on this a long time.
It’s already funded, of course, but you can back it for €60 ($70). It looks to be a gorgeous art book/coffee table book that preserves the history of iOS app icon art, while also delving into the process of designing some notable app-icon favorites. The sample pages look amazing.…
Much as I love some good smart home lighting, there’s nothing worse than running into a problem that is singularly dumb. Recently, I detailed the smart home lighting setup in my new house, and noted that in addition to installing Lutron Caseta switches, I had also repurposed my older Hue bulbs as overhead lights in my office.
Just one problem: that meant that I could no longer use the wall switch to turn the overhead lights on and off, and instead had to use Siri, pull out my phone, or stumble inside in the dark to find the Hue dimmer switch that I magneted to my filing cabinet.
I’d resigned myself to sticking the dimmer switch to the wall next to the existing switch1 when I stumbled across a clever product that seemed like the perfect antidote to my problems: the Lutron Aurora.
The switch (left) clicks into a bracket (right) that sits on the wall switch and is tightened in place with a screw.The Lutron Aurora is a smart switch designed specifically to work with Hue bulbs (though it can work other Zigbee bulbs as well) and looks like a traditional round dimmer control. It comes in two parts: there’s bracket that you put on a single-pole (or toggle) light switch and then tighten with a screw to keep in place and the dial itself snaps onto that.…
Now that the M1 Pro and M1 Max have arrived, we turn our attention to the future of Apple silicon in 2022 and beyond. Will there be new chips every year, or is that too rapid a pace? Also, we’ve spent another week with the new MacBook Pro, Google makes a daring legal move in Korea, and we take the long view on Apple’s record fiscal year.…
As the waning days of 2021 are upon us, it’s time once again to look ahead to the future, to the horizon. Despite a global pandemic and supply chain woes aplenty, Apple has had a blockbuster year, with successful launches of new iPhones and iPads, and a continued transition on the Mac that is redefining the product line for the next generation.
But in the tech business, you’re only as good as your next move. No company can afford to rest on its laurels, and even Apple, with all of its success, is not an exception. So as we start thinking about closing the books on 2021, it’s worth looking ahead to that puck that Apple’s skating towards. And while we may have good reason to anticipate some of its upcoming products, there are always places where Apple could have something surprising up its sleeve.…
Better late than never, the big three: Charts, canyons, and clever automations.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
I’m intrigued by the new Focus modes in macOS Monterey and iOS 15, but frustrated by the fact that there’s no easy way for an automation tool to detect the current Focus status.
Except! There is. If you know where to look. After lamenting this situation in the Automators Forum, Drew Kerr swept in with a solution—namely a JavaScript for Mac Automation script that parses the contents of the Do Not Disturb database in ~/Library/DoNotDisturb and returns the name of the current Focus mode, or “No focus” if there’s no current focus.
You can save this as a script in Script Editor, or as a .jxa text file that you can run from the command line:
``` osascript -l JavaScript ./whichfocus.jxa
```
Or you can do what I did, and pour it into Shortcuts’ Run JavaScript for Automation action. There are many options.
I love this. Thanks to Drew for figuring it out… and say, Apple, don’t you think “get current Focus mode” should just be an action in a future version of Shortcuts?…
Amongst the additions in macOS Monterey are a couple new screensavers—I know, try and contain your excitement. One is the retro “Hello” module inspired by Steve Jobs’s introduction of the original Macintosh.
The other is the eponymous “Monterey” module, which appears to be a pretty minimalist series of shifting color images, along the same pink-purple palette that Apple’s used in many of its dynamic desktop wallpapers in Big Sur.
But reader Josef uncovered something interesting about the Monterey screen saver, and it turns out that it’s more complicated than you might think.
While poking around in the file for the Monterey screensaver (which you can find at /System/Library/Screen Savers/Monterey.saver), Josef found a file called canyon.abc inside the package. That’s an Alembic 3D file that appears to contain a mapping of (as the name suggests) a canyon. If you open the file in Preview, you’ll find that you can actually zoom in and out and pan around the image.
Combined with a second file in the Monterey screen saver, camera paths.abc, it seems pretty clear that what might look like simply an abstract series of colors is actually an animated trip through this 3D model of a landscape—not dissimilar in some ways to the Aerial screensaver on the Apple TV.…
Some of us are going to virtual reality. The rest of us are stuck in this stupid reality.…
Microsoft and Facebook’s new metaverse moves, Netflix’s entry into the games market, Zoom’s consideration of an ad-supported model, and how we deal with needing to use Windows on our Apple silicon Macs.…
What happens when a TV network has a potential big hit, but doesn’t have a streaming strategy to find an audience? Are sports leagues finally going to risk their fat cable contracts in order to build a local streaming service? And what’s up in Australia?…
Apple’s added a few features over the last couple years that help us cope with our current world situation, whether it be unlocking our iPhones with our Apple Watches or improvements to FaceTime. In iOS 15.1 last month, it rolled out the ability to store a digital version of your vaccine record in the Wallet app.
With more and more places requiring proof of vaccination, it seems like digital vaccine records would be the way to go—way better than trying to cram that huge card into your wallet. So I decided to give it a whirl.
But if there’s been any constant in my interactions with health and technology (especially over the last year and a half), it’s that things are always more complex than it seems like they should be—especially here in the U.S., where healthcare is a fractured mess of public and private concerns.1
I managed to get my vaccine record into my Wallet, eventually.Such it was with vaccine cards. Apple’s system uses the SMART Health Cards specification that’s supported by a wide variety of governments, pharmacies, and healthcare providers; its goal is to create digital health records that can be easily verified.
The good news was that the healthcare network I use is a SMART Card Issuer, meaning that I ought to be able to go to my online patient portal and download the information I needed to import my vaccine records.…
At Macworld New York in 1999, Apple filled out its “Grid of Four” with a consumer notebook called the iBook.
I’ve written about the iBook at length elsewhere, but the gist of the machine was pretty straightforward — Apple viewed it as an iMac to go.
Looking at the iBook, it’s not hard to see the family resemblance to the colorful, curvy iMac G3:
With the iBook, Apple was able to bring the fun and whimsy of the iMac to a portable computer that was unlike anything else on the market at the time. Its bright colors just screamed iMac!
During the introduction of the iBook, Steve Jobs said that taking the iMac spirit and putting it into a portable was about more than just the design; it was about making the best consumer notebook possible. That meant building the notebook around a 12-inch 800 x 600 display and powering the machine with a 300 MHz G3 processor coupled with the fastest possible graphics. In short, the iBook was faster than Windows notebooks, and second only to Apple’s own PowerBook in terms of power.
But the colorful iBook didn’t last. In 2001 Apple released a new iBook with a much more tame design, and Apple’s notebooks have been conservatively designed ever since.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Last week Apple announced the results for its fiscal fourth quarter, which was the latest in a series of records set by the company. As always, I generated a bunch of colorful charts based on the numbers.1
With the closing of the fourth quarter comes the closing of a fiscal year. And while none of us gathered around a HomePod and shouted “Happy New Year!” on midnight of Sept. 262 (the first day of the new fiscal year), as far as Apple is concerned it’s now fiscally 2022.
That means it’s time for the final totals, and an entirely new set of charts based entirely on Apple’s annual performance. This provides a fun opportunity to revisit some charts from about two years ago and look back at where the company has been, while considering where it might go next.
Let’s start with the big one. Here’s the overall Apple revenue for the last 23 years:
Apple has been on a rocket-ship ride since the debut of the iPhone. But Fiscal 2021 was like no other. Revenue was up 33% from 2020.3 After three years where revenue held steady, it’s a huge jump, the biggest in total dollars ever.…
Netflix will begin to roll out games to its subscribers worldwide starting tomorrow:
🎮📱 Let the Games Begin📱🎮
Tomorrow, Netflix Games will start rolling out on the Netflix mobile app. First on Android, with iOS on the way.
It’s early days, but we’re excited to start bringing you exclusive games, with no ads, no additional fees and no in-app purchases. pic.twitter.com/ofNGF4b8At
— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) November 2, 2021
Ash Parrish at The Verge has more detail:
Users will be able to choose from one of five games: Stranger Things: 1984, Stranger Things 3: The Game_, Shooting Hoops, Card Blast, and Teeter Up. Starting today, users can download Netflix games from the Google Play store, requiring a Netflix subscription to play. Then on November 3rd, Netflix will begin rolling out games to the app itself. When on a mobile device, Netflix Games will come packaged in its own dedicated row and have a dedicated tab.
You may be asking yourself, “How does Netflix think this will be ‘on the way’ on iOS given Apple’s app store policies that even Microsoft couldn’t get around?”
I think Steve Troughton-Smith’s tweet has this right:
It sounds like these will be individual games on the App Store, but accessed through your Netflix subscription.
…
We’re joined by Apple VPs Tom Boger and Tim Millet to discuss Apple’s chip-design philosophy and how it factored into the company’s first high-end Mac chips, the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Also, Jason and Myke discuss Apple’s latest record quarterly results and Myke takes delivery of his new MacBook Pro.…
One of the most interesting wrinkles about Apple’s new MacBook Pros is that the company offers them with two different chips. At first glance, you might assume that the more expensive M1 Max chip is simply a bigger, faster, more powerful chip than the less expensive M1 Pro—but looks can be deceiving. The two new chips are closely related, and depending on the kind of work you do with your MacBook Pro, the extra power of the M1 Max might not be worth the extra price.…
Reviews are in and the new MacBook Pros are a hit! Customers love the power, the battery life, the not totally garbage webcam, and the function keys that are actual keys. It’s hands down the best pro laptop Apple has made in years, and nobody could be disappointed by a single aspect of it.
Well. Except…the notch.
What used to be just a campfire tale warning children about the danger of those newfangled iPhones has now come for all of our Macs. Devouring our menu bars with no remorse. Consuming cursors with a vengeance. Concealing valuable, much-needed screen real estate.
Surely Apple, in its infinite loop wisdom, could have found a way to design around the notch. A company that can fit thousands of songs in your pocket? One that can pack so much power into smartphones that they can outperform expensive computers? That continues to make money with the efficiency of a machine designed only to make money? No, the idea simply beggars belief, which means there’s only one reasonable conclusion that any right-minded person can reach.
Conspiracy.
What is Apple hiding behind the notch? What truth lurks, obscured only by that seemingly innocent black, half rounded-corner rectangle?…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Analysts, supply chains, legacy nodes, MacBook Pros, Monterey, Shortcuts. Your basic Friday.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
It’s Record Quarter Season again. On Thursday, Apple announced another record for its fiscal fourth quarter, ending its fiscal year with a three-month period in which the company generated $83.4 billion in revenue, up 29 percent from the same quarter a year ago. (In fact, Apple’s shown very little fiscal fourth-quarter growth lately, making this quarter that much more impressive.)
Still, does a dark cloud hang over Apple? If you’re a financial analyst, maybe. And that’s the most interesting detail that came out of this week’s look into Apple’s finances.…
Here’s our complete transcript of Apple’s conference call with financial analysts on October 28, 2021, featuring CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri making statements and then answering a few questions from the analysts.
Tim Cook’s opening remarks Thanks, Tejas, and good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining the call today. A year ago, I spoke to you about the atmosphere of uncertainty in which we were living and the way it had come to define our daily experience, both as people and as a company. Today much has changed, profoundly so. And while we are still living through unprecedented times, we are encouraged by progress around the world. I’m grateful to our teams, who have stayed resolutely focused on our customers and the pursuit of innovation on their behalf. We’ve aimed to help our customers navigate the world as it is, while empowering them to create the world as it can be. Whether it’s public health workers managing vaccination campaigns on iPhone, or students returning to classrooms full of iPads, or families staying connected over FaceTime, it is an honor to know that what we make matters and to see that reflected in the world and in our performance.…
On Thursday, Apple announced results for its fourth financial quarter of 2021, covering July through September. The company generated $83.4 billion in revenue. (The previous two fiscal fourth quarters showed very low growth over the previous year, so this year’s 29% increase in revenue year-over-year is especially impressive.)
iPhone sales were $38.9 billion, up 47% versus the year-ago quarter. It was a very good year for the iPhone business. Services were $18.3 billion, continuing their relentless growth pace at 26% above the year-ago quarter.
Wearables sales were $8.8 billion, up 12% versus the year-ago quarter. That’s a good number out of context, but actually the slowest year-over-year growth rate for the category in almost five years. It’s a very seasonal business, though, so to truly judge the state of Apple’s wearables business, we should wait until the holiday quarter.
iPad sales were $8.3 billion, up 21% versus the year-ago quarter. The iPad business has averaged almost $8B in sales per quarter over the last year. We’ve seen six straight quarters of year-over-year growth for the iPad, 10 of 12, and 14 of 18.
Mac sales were $9.2 billion, up 2% versus the year-ago quarter. Despite the Mac’s smaller year-over-year growth number, it’s important to keep in mind that last year’s fourth quarter was the best Mac quarter ever at the time, and at $9.2B this is a new all-time record quarter in terms of Mac revenue.…
As seen on my Mac: Two cross-platform shortcuts.Shortcuts has arrived on the Mac with macOS Monterey, and while the new Shortcuts app is pretty weird, it works—and it brings most of the functionality from Shortcuts on iOS along with it.
As I’ve written about before, building Shortcuts is frequently much easier than building similar workflows on macOS using AppleScript and Automator. Now that Shortcuts is on the Mac, there’s no need to replicate shortcuts from iOS using those technologies! Instead, the same shortcut can run on both platforms. Problem solved.
Err… well… okay. Maybe not solved. While you might have rightfully assumed that not everything that works in Shortcuts on the Mac will work in Shortcuts on iOS—AppleScripts, shell scripts, and the like simply don’t exist on that platform—it might surprise you to learn that the reverse is also true. The Mac’s version of the Share menu is not nearly as sophisticated as the one on iOS, and the Share menu is a major launching point for iOS shortcuts. Safari’s automation interface is, similarly, not nearly as friendly on the Mac as on iOS.
But will that stop us? No! This week I’ve converted several of my shortcuts to “universal” versions that run on both macOS and iOS.…
Whether we could see ourselves making use of a “Metaverse,” our supply chain woes, the best features of macOS Monterey, and how we review devices as tech journalists.…
One of the most interesting wrinkles about Apple’s new MacBook Pros is that the company offers them with two different chips. At first glance, you might assume that the more expensive M1 Max chip is simply a bigger, faster, more powerful chip than the less expensive M1 Pro—but looks can be deceiving. The two new chips are closely related, and depending on the kind of work you do with your MacBook Pro, the extra power of the M1 Max might not be worth the extra price.…
If there’s a theme of Apple’s operating-system releases in 2021, it’s platform unification. This development is most significant for macOS, which tended to lag behind iOS in the 2010s, missing out on some or all of the year’s exciting innovations.
Apple has spent the last few years getting the base technology of iOS and macOS back in sync, removing 32-bit software, adding Mac Catalyst and support for iOS apps on Apple silicon, and introducing new cross-platform development technology via Swift UI. And with macOS Monterey, you can see the fruits of all that labor: The big new features of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are also the big new features of macOS Monterey.
Unfortunately, some of the biggest features are still missing. The most important new feature in Photos is missing from the Mac, though Apple says it will arrive soon. And one of the biggest features being imported to the Mac from iOS, Shortcuts, is in a half-finished state.
But here’s the good news: Despite all the worry among Mac users the past few years that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac.…
If there’s two things that we here at Six Colors love, it’s putting data in our Macs’ menu bars and the weather—also, of course, combining those two things.
Following Jason’s previous excursions into adding weather info to his menu bar, I decided to embark upon a similar task with my recently acquired Netatmo weather station and our perennial favorite menu bar utility, SwiftBar.
Netatmo provides an API to let you retrieve data from its weather stations, and its documentation page even allows you to test it out with your own device (you’ll need to log in to your Netatmo account first).
The standard Netatmo system is composed of two modules: one that sits inside your house and one that goes outside. I was more interested in the outside temperature, though I may adapt it in the future to provide information from both. However, the outside module collects relatively little information: just temperature and humidity.1 (The inside module, by comparison, also measures noise and CO2 levels.)
Writing the script itself proved to be fairly straightforward; it was largely built on a similar script that I’d made to display the current UV level. Like many APIs, Netatmo’s can be accessed using a variety of programming or scripting languages.…
Jason’s spent the last week with the new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor, and we’ve got his in-depth review. And at last, Jason and Myke both review the new Apple Watch Series 7.…
The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models usher in a new era in Apple laptops. These are the first high-end Macs to be powered by Apple-designed processors, and that’s a big deal—but they also reject the minimalist design mid-2010s Apple, which achieved design simplicity by forcing complexity and frustration on users.
These new MacBook Pros are a success story not just because of Apple’s custom-built processors, but because Apple has admitted (in deeds, if not words) that the previous generation of laptops were a misstep. When you’re designing a tool for professionals to use—and make no mistake, these MacBook Pros are serious tools for serious jobs and priced accordingly—function should always win out over form. There’s a different sort of elegance to be found in versatility.
I’ve spent the last week with a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max processor with 32 GPU cores and 64 GB of RAM. And I’m happy to report, it’s true—all of it. Apple has undone its mistakes of the past few years and created a laptop that’s essentially a Mac Pro you can slide into a backpack.
A flatter look They’re separated by 20 years, but the MacBook Pro’s similarity to the Titanium PowerBook G4 is remarkable.…
Panic’s Cabel Sasser shares a look at a prototype for the original iPod:
To celebrate, I want to show you something you’ve never seen before.
Now, there are a lot of mysteries in the Panic Archives (it’s a closet) but by far one of the most mysterious is what you’re seeing for the first time today: an original early iPod prototype.
We don’t know much about where it came from. But we’ve been waiting 20 years to share it with you.
It’s both surprisingly huge and surprisingly yellow.…
Fifteen years ago, I wrote this:
Since its first release five years ago on October 23, 2001, the iPod has become one of the most recognizable products in the world. It has transformed Apple’s business and its public image, and is probably responsible for a “halo effect” that has improved the Mac’s image and fortunes as well. Whether you’re a rabid iPod lover or someone who just doesn’t see why the iPod’s such a big deal, it’s hard to dispute the gigantic impact the iPod has had on our technological world.
The iPod burned bright and then faded away. In the end, it is probably better seen as a precursor to the iPhone. It changed Apple’s fortunes forever.…
The beginning of Apple’s turnaround has been pegged to a lot of dates: when Steve Jobs returned to the company as part of its acquisition of NeXT in 1997, the debut of the original iMac in 1998, even the release of Mac OS X in 2001. But if you’re looking for the date that Apple truly charted its course for the market-dominating position it finds itself in today, you’ll have to go to October 23, 2001, on the calendar—or exactly 20 years ago.
That was the day that Apple took the wraps off a most unexpected product, but one that would go on to change everything for the company: the original iPod.…
My thanks to Daylite, the award-winning CRM and productivity app made for Mac-based small businesses, for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Daylite is ready for macOS Monterey! It seamlessly integrates with Apple devices—not just the Mac, but the iPhone and iPad. It also integrates with Apple’s built-in apps, including Apple Mail, so you and your team can capture all your email communication in one place. And you can create opportunities, appointments and tasks in Daylite from right within Apple Mail.
Daylite improves team efficiency and makes collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible, even offline. It’s easy to access information and segment data, manage and share schedules and product status, and more—all within a familiar and intuitive Mac-focused interface.
You and your team can try Daylite free for 30 days.…
Monterey, MacBook Pros, and M1 Pro/Max. Also: AirPods and iPods.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
macOS Monterey arrives on Oct. 25, and among many changes and additions, it alters a concept that’s been a part of the Mac since the very beginning.
When you copy a file in macOS Monterey’s Finder, you will see a floating copy window, of course:
There’s just one thing about that window that’s unusual. The red circle used to close windows, inactive in previous versions of macOS, is now active. And what happens if you click it?
The window closes… and the copy continues.
Once you close the window, it won’t reappear for subsequent operations until you choose Show Progress Window from the Window menu. But Finder is still providing you with some feedback that a copy operation is happening. In List views, a circle to the right of the filename slowly fills in clockwise until the copy is done. In Icon views, a progress bar fills from left to right across the bottom of the icon. (These animations aren’t new, but they’re more important now!) An “X” hovers over the top-left corner of the icon, from which you can cancel the file copy.
When I started using the Mac, Finder copies used to be an opportunity to stretch your legs—not only were they slow, but the copy window was modal, blocking out any other use of Finder while the disks grinded away.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The other shoe has finally dropped.
Eleven months after the release of the first M1 Macs ushered in the Apple silicon era for the Mac, Apple has addressed how it plans to serve the needs of users for whom iPad-level performance, impressive though it might be, just isn’t enough.
With the announcement of the M1 Pro and M1 Max, Apple has connected the dots and revealed two new chips that propel the MacBook Pro to new heights. Two connected dots make a straight line–and that line points to the future of the Mac. Here’s a look at what might be coming next.…
There’s a lot going on right now at Netflix, which is trying to manage growth, changing how it reports viewership, and facing internal criticism for some of its programming.…
Apple’s got new MacBook Pros and we’ve got opinions. Even though none of us are buying one. What, is it your first time here?…
What Apple’s new MacBook Pros are lacking, much consternation over “the notch,” how often we use noise-canceling headphones, and the excitement of pivot tables!…
By all accounts, Apple’s MacBook Pro announcements this week have been a home run: the return of a veritable smorgasbord of ports, fantastic new displays, and more power than you can shake a log at.
But even though what Apple did announce seemed to strike a chord with its audience, the event left a few head-scratching questions about what Apple chose not to do. It seemed like there were a few opportunities that the company decided not to move on—but, as always, there’s probably a rationale at work, even if it’s not immediately obvious.
Exit, Center Stage While the addition of a 1080p webcam on the MacBook Pro is a welcome improvement from the piddling 720p version in previous models, it’s still a far cry from the 12 megapixel front-facing camera that Apple’s been adding to its latest iPhones and iPads—heck, even the $329 iPad has that ultra wide lens with Apple’s innovative Center Stage1 feature. So why not the fancy new Apple silicon-powered MacBook Pro?
Even the new iPad mini has Center Stage, but no Mac has gotten the feature yet.Round up the usual suspects: space, logistics, and money. While the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are undeniably thicker, at .61″ and .66″, than the svelte .25″ of the latest iPad Pros and iPad mini (and even the .25″ thickness of the ninth-generation iPad), we don’t yet know exactly how thick the lids of the new MacBooks are, nor what else Apple had to cram in there to accommodate the new mini-LED display.…
It was around 2016 on the edge of the desert when the Touch Bar began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I’ll need several adapters for that…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge butterflies, all clicking and sticking around the laptop, which was going about 2.8 gigahertz with the top down to Dongletown.
If Mac laptops come in eras, one just ended.
It started in 2016 with the release of MacBook Pro models featuring butterfly keyboards, the Touch Bar, and a minimal selection of USB-C ports. It ended on Monday with the announcement of new MacBook Pro models that roll back most of the major changes introduced in 2016, putting the MacBook Pro in a new state of grace that recalls the middle of the last decade.
If you can, cast your mind back to the 2015 MacBook Pro. It had all of these features, due to be deprecated in 2016:
- MagSafe charging port
- HDMI port
- SD card slot
- 2 Thunderbolt and 2 USB-A ports
- Physical function keys
Now consider the 2021 MacBook Pros, which have:
- MagSafe charging port
- HDMI port
- SD card slot
- Three Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports
- Physical function keys
Although Apple removed the dreadful “butterfly” keyboard in 2019-2020, the rest of the issues with this era of MacBook Pro remained.…
The new MacBook Pros are here! Jason and Myke break down what’s new with Apple’s pro laptops, welcome the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, and even devote a little time to new AirPods and colorful HomePods. Also, Myke’s wallet is a little bit lighter.…
It’s official: As of the latest macOS Monterey beta—version 12.0.1, which makes me wonder if they’ve locked version 12.0 on the new MacBook Pro models and everyone else will jump straight to 12.0.1—Safari tabs have been reverted to their original “tab” appearance, instead of being a bunch of floating lozenges.
I feel bad for everyone at Apple who worked hard on building a new Safari design only to see it entirely reverted just before shipping. That said, it was the right decision, and I’m glad it never made it into the final version.
(And it’s not completely gone: If you opt for the Compact tab layout in Safari’s Preferences, you’ll get the original narrow lozenge-style tab design.)
Also gone, apparently: That colored toolbar that shifts based on the design of the currently active tab. If you scroll down when you’re at the top of a page, you’ll get a glimpse of that color, but it appears to have vanished from the chrome at the top of the window.
All these changes seem to have also been made to the release candidate of iPadOS 15.1, too. Hooray.…
Apple’s Unleashed event wrapped up in under an hour on Monday, and it wasn’t short on news: new MacBook Pros, brand new Apple silicon processors, new colors of HomePods, and, uh, some music announcements.
But for all of that news, there were still a few things here and there that the company didn’t talk about in its 50-minute spiel, which some perusing of the Apple website—and some eagle-eyed readers—picked out. Let’s run through a few.
Core strategy With the M1 processor, Apple provided a single choice across all the various models: there were versions with 7 cores of GPU, and versions with 8. Every single model had the same 8 cores of CPU.
With the M1 Pro and M1 Max, those options have changed a bit. Every model of the new MacBook Pro has the option to customize your choice of processors, which seem to be available in five configurations.
| Processor | CPU cores | GPU cores | | --- | --- | --- | | Pro | 8 | 14 | | Pro | 10 | 14 | | Pro | 10 | 16 | | Max | 10 | 24 | | Max | 10 | 32 |
*Available on the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro only.
It seems likely that both the 8-core CPU option and the 14-core GPU options are binned1 versions of the “standard” M1 Pro configuration: 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores.…
Apple fans, excited for macOS Monterey? So are we! Daylite is an award-winning CRM and productivity app made exclusively for your Mac, and it’s now Monterey ready!
Daylite goes beyond the essential CRM experience or project management tool for small businesses. Daylite is the only Mac-focused CRM and productivity app that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices and most of the built-in Apple apps and features, like direct Apple Mail integration, so you and your team can capture all email communication in one place. That means you can create opportunities, appointments and tasks in Daylite right from your Apple Mail.
Daylite empowers small businesses by improving team efficiency and making collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible (even offline). You and your team can easily access information and use smart lists to segment data tailored to your specific client story. You can manage and share everyone’s schedules, project status, and next steps, all done in Daylite.
If you live by the Mac, you’ll love Daylite. Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!…
One of the most interesting aspects of moving from an apartment you rent to a house you own is the freedom it gives you in terms of what smart home tech you can adopt. There are some things that just don’t fly in many rental units, like devices that require hardwiring, or anything that requires you to make lots of holes in walls.
And so you make do with alternatives, imperfect as they sometimes are. Take lighting, for example. Smart bulbs and smart outlets go a long way, but they also come with their share of frustrations—cue the numerous stories about people who’ve had to put tape or sticky notes on wall switches so that they don’t get turned off, thus rendering a smart bulb useless.
In my apartment, I had an assortment of Philips Hue bulbs around the place, letting me remotely control lights in my living room, kitchen, bedroom, and office. But in making the jump to a house that I own, I got the chance to revisit and, yes, upgrade my smart lighting setup.
I opted for Caseta Lutron dimmer switches to control the recessed lighting in my kitchen and living room (which are basically one large space), as well as a pair of pendant lights over our kitchen peninsula.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Tamara Shopsin’s novel Laserwriter II (MCD) will be published on October 19. It’s a funny and quirky book about ’90s-era Apple products and the people who fix them at New York City’s premier Mac repair shop, Tekserve. Tekserve was a real place! I never went there, but it was a fixture in Mac magazines and at Macworld Expo on the east coast.
The main character in Laserwriter II is a young woman who is taught the secrets of printer repair by the sages of Tekserve and works with a cast of characters—some pleasant, some unpleasant. It’s an enjoyable trip back in time with several laugh-out-loud passages. My only real criticism is that it’s too short, and left me wanting more.
Here’s a brief interview with the author:
Jason Snell: What prompted you to revisit the ’90s?
Tamara Shopsin: It was born of a desire to document the shuttered Macintosh repair shop: Tekserve. A place that happened to have had its heyday in the ’90s. I think anyone who went to Tekserve will understand the impulse of wanting to bottle it. It was a weird magical place whose advice could be trusted more than Yoda. If a person lived in NYC in the ’90s and used a Mac computer in any way they ended up at Tekserve.…
Almost every year since 2007, I’ve gotten a new iPhone.1 Some years promise big improvements over the past—others are more incremental. But 14 years into the iPhone’s life, those big updates are decidedly fewer and farther between.
Such it is with the iPhone 13 Pro. This is the third “Pro”-branded iPhone in Apple’s history, and with every iteration, it’s increasingly clear that the moniker is more marketing than anything of substance.
What makes a Pro phone? These days it’s more camera lenses, different materials, and one or two additional features. Not a better processor, increased storage, or even more RAM, the traditional hallmarks of “pro” in the Mac lineup. This isn’t a phone for pros—what would a “professional” smartphone user even look like? Are the rest of us rank amateurs by comparison?
Ultimately, the Pro phone is simply the more expensive phone—but Apple couldn’t exactly call it the “iPhone Pricier.”2 But I digress.
Jason has already taken a close look at the 13 and 13 mini in his review; the iPhone 13 Pro (and, by extension, the Pro Max, which feature-wise is exactly the same this year, with the exception of being larger in every way: chassis, screen, and battery life) mainly differs from its standard 13 counterpart in three ways.…
Surprise! Jason and Myke predict what will happen at next week’s Apple media event. What ports will be on the much-rumored MacBook Pro? Will it appear in familiar colors, or will Apple branch out and offer something new? Will we see updates to the Mac mini, new AirPods, or—dare we dream—an affordable external display? It’s all to play for.…
MacBook Pros; Shortcuts and other betas.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
How we share passwords, a subscription service we wish we could give up, our external storage setup, and the tech we once wrongly dismissed.…
I know a lot of people who have been monitoring the progress of macOS Monterey and hoping that there might be more changes in store to the Safari interface before the final version ships, possibly as soon as later this month. I’ve been pretty dubious — it’s awfully late in the process for changes, after all.
And then macOS Monterey beta 10 dropped this week, and would you look at this:
Yep, that’s the Safari Favorites Bar, now located above the tabs.
If you don’t use the Favorites Bar, maybe you won’t care. I use the Favorites Bar a lot, and I hated Apple’s decision to move it beneath the tabs. And now… it’s not?
So I’ve got to hand it to all of those people who wanted to believe that the design of Safari 15 on the Mac might still be in flux. I think they may be right, after all!…
There’s an Apple event next week! So naturally we spend time talking about writing apps instead.…
David Smith is a prolific app developer, and has created several popular apps focused on the Apple Watch. And yet when it came time for him to take an extended backpacking adventure outdoors, he chose a different watch:
For short day trips, the Apple Watch is great. It has done an admirable job tracking various hiking outings for me, and I love being able to see exactly where I went on those adventures.
But its battery life has never allowed for this to be practical for multi-day trips. It needs to be charged after around 7 hours of tracked hiking. Fine for a day trip, but when I head out to environments like this there aren’t an abundance of outlets to be found.
When I read Apple Watch reviews that wish it had longer battery life, I think about how there are key milestones for some features. If an Apple Watch can’t get through a day, it’s too short. But after it can get through a day (and it’s fair to point out that for people who use workout tracking a lot and have the smaller Apple Watch model, it may not be there yet), does it need to get through a day plus a few hours?…
Over the last several decades, Apple’s success has stemmed from one overriding philosophy: making technology personal. From the computer that sat on your desk, to the notebook you popped open on your lap, to the iPhone that you carry in your pocket and the Apple Watch you wear on your wrist, the company has increasingly fostered that personal connection between us and our devices.
But more recently, that personal connection has also carried with it a degree of insularity, of wrapping ourselves up in technology. In a recent interview with Bustle, Apple CEO Tim Cook commented on the interplay between technology and mental health:
… it’s how we look at the world. We want people to do things with their devices, like the photography exhibit that we both enjoyed, or connecting with family and friends with FaceTime. Not endless, mindless scrolling.
That prioritization does sometimes seem at odds with the very nature of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, these windows into a world that is at time disconnected from our own, even as it connects us with other people. But perhaps it hints that the next evolutionary step for Apple is to find a way to integrate our technology into the world around us.…
It’s official: there will be another Apple media event this fall, and it’s Monday, Oct. 18 at 10 Pacific.
New MacBook Pro models are likely to be the star of the show. We’ll have full coverage on Six Colors, as always. Myke Hurley and I will offer post-event coverage after it’s all said and done, live on Relay FM.…
Left to right: Kobo Libra H2O, Kindle Oasis, iPad mini, Boox Nova Air.Many years ago, the Internet handed around an old Radio Shack newspaper ad and pointed out that the smartphone could now replace nearly every product in the ad. So many gadgets dedicated to individual tasks that have now been rolled up into a device that’s the ultimate multitasker.
For decades we’ve been warned by Alton Brown that unitaskers are evil, and while that’s a good general rule when it comes to kitchen gadgets, every rule comes with its exceptions.
My favorite tech unitasker has long been the e-reader. With their black-and-white E Ink screen, long battery life, and laser-focused software, Kindles and Kobos have been my choice even though I have a perfectly good iPhone and iPad on which I can also read books.
While I read novels on a Kobo, I still do a lot of reading—newsletters, RSS, newspapers, links from Twitter, you name it—on my iPad. That stuff’s just not available, or readily available, on devices with E Ink screens.
But what if it was? What if someone built a tablet that could run a wider selection of apps but still had the crisp, clear look of an E Ink screen?…
Apple Watch Series 7 pre-orders lead to more Apple color confusion, Apple’s App Store rules may need to skate to a puck that’s headed for a courtroom, and Myke takes his iPad mini on a train.…
Me, back in 2015:
Google to iOS users: thanks for using our apps, please enjoy Android UI conventions
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) October 8, 2015
Jeff Verkoeyen, staff engineering lead for Google Design on Apple platforms, on Twitter now:
This year my team shifted the open source Material components libraries for iOS into maintenance mode…
The time we’re saving not building custom code is now invested in the long tail of UX details that really make products feel great on Apple platforms. To paraphrase Lucas Pope, we’re “swimming in a sea of minor things”, and I couldn’t be more excited about this new direction.
One year at the XOXO conference I was buttonholed (in the nicest way) by someone who worked on iOS apps at Google, who wanted to understand why I was so hostile about Google’s apps not respecting iOS conventions and instead forcing Android conventions on iOS users.
I felt that Google arrogantly believed that people were first and foremost users of Google’s platforms, and benefited from consistency across those platforms, when the truth was that people who use iPads and iPhones expect apps to behave like every other app on the platform.1
Over the years Google has unified its design language and moved its work forward in a lot of ways that are admirable.…
Who watches the Apple Watcher? Deep thoughts for a Friday.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Back in August, we passed the 10th anniversary of Tim Cook being named CEO of Apple, and of course, this week marks ten years since the passing of Steve Jobs.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge in the decade since, and in my mind, there are three major inflection points when it comes to Apple under Tim Cook.
Apple Watch Announced in the fall of 2014, many say the Apple Watch is the first new product to materialize under Tim Cook. While the exact timeline isn’t known, I think it’s clear that the Apple Watch is a very Tim Cook product with its focus on health and fitness.
The Apple Watch has come a long way in the years since its introduction, but looking back at the original announcement and the first set of models, it is surprising how muddied things were. Apple didn’t quite seem to know what the Apple Watch was for yet, so it threw a lot of stuff at the wall. Kevin Lynch demoed about a ton of apps that never really materialized, and the emphasis on personal communication was way off the mark.
However, as the hardware and software have matured, so has the idea of the Apple Watch: it’s a wearable for people who want to track their fitness and get notifications wherever they go.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Many years ago, when I first started writing about Apple on the MacUser blog, one of my first recurring features was a series I called “Under the Gavel”, in which I rounded up legal challenges to Apple.
Those challenges haven’t abated over the last several years—if anything, they’ve intensified. In fact, just in the last day or two, there have been several new places where Apple has found itself on the receiving ends of government investigations or legal actions. So, if you’ll allow me to indulge in a bit of a trip down nostalgia lane, I’m briefly dusting off the old gavel to break down these latest developments.
Can’t tap, won’t tap Reuters reports that the European Union is preparing to bring antitrust charges against Apple over the locking down of the Near-Field Communications (NFC) chip in the iPhone. That’s the wireless radio that powers things like Apple Pay—which is precisely what’s dragged the company into the EU’s crosshairs.
At issue is the fact that while Apple uses the iPhone and Apple Watch’s NFC chips for Apple Pay, it doesn’t allow third-party developers to take advantage of the hardware for the same purpose. Therefore, companies like Square or Venmo can’t leverage the technology for tap-to-pay features in their own apps without using Apple Pay—of which Apple, of course, gets a cut.…
Facebook went down, so we spend our time talking about Steve Jobs and the Apple of yesteryear.…
“Squid Game” and Netflix’s international strategy, the difference between a hit and a franchise, “Law & Order” and TV network brand extensions, successes and failures at the box office, and the best streaming services for scary movies.…
Our paper document approach, our thoughts on Facebook and whether we think it will change its ways, the single-purpose robot we’d have in our homes, and the rate at which we replace and/or upgrade our smart watches and smart phones.…
The iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini aren’t for everybody. Apple’s higher-end iPhone Pro line offers a high-refresh-rate display and a telephoto camera and a few other features that make those phones the ne plus ultra of smartphones, and if you really want the best the smartphone world has to offer at any price, they’re a great choice.
But the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini are for everybody else.
They’re cheaper. They have most of the same advantages as the higher-end iPhones do. They’re a huge improvement over most upgraders’ current phones. The iPhone 13 mini is the rare modern iPhone to come in a manageable size. And at least to my eyes, the iPhone 13 design just looks better than the iPhone 13 Pro.
Don’t want to spent $1000 on a new iPhone? Don’t sweat it. Apple’s lower-priced iPhones are anything but second rate.
Best deal, best look What I find remarkable about the iPhone 13 (and the iPhone 12) is that they appeal to me more aesthetically than the iPhone 13 Pro (and iPhone 12 Pro) models. The shiny glass back, especially when dressed in a bright color, is bold and interesting where the iPhone 13 Pro back is frosted and muted.…
Time rolls forward, the past recedes, and it all starts to fade, doesn’t it? Ten years ago, Steve Jobs died, and at the time I pondered how he’d be remembered. In the intervening years, his most notable product–Apple itself–has risen to unimaginable levels of power and influence.
The fact that so much of Apple’s growth has happened since Jobs’s departure hasn’t reduced him at all. It would be relatively easy to argue that the success of Tim Cook’s Apple suggests that, despite everyone’s concern in the late days of 2011, the company actually could go on without Jobs at the helm. But that’s not what anyone thinks. Instead, Jobs is credited for putting Apple on the path that led to it becoming what it is today.…
Andrei Frumusanu of Anandtech takes a deep dive into Apple’s new A15 processor:
Apple’s initial vague presentation of the new A15 improvements could either have resulted in disappointment, or simply a more hidden shift towards power efficiency rather than pure performance. In our extensive testing, we’re elated to see that it was actually mostly an efficiency focus this year, with the new performance cores showcasing adequate performance improvements, while at the same time reducing power consumption, as well as significantly improving energy efficiency.
The efficiency cores of the A15 have also seen massive gains, this time around with Apple mostly investing them back into performance, with the new cores showcasing +23-28% absolute performance improvements, something that isn’t easily identified by popular benchmarking. This large performance increase further helps the SoC improve energy efficiency, and our initial battery life figures of the new 13 series showcase that the chip has a very large part into the vastly longer longevity of the new devices.
In the GPU side, Apple’s peak performance improvements are off the charts, with a combination of a new larger GPU, new architecture, and the larger system cache that helps both performance as well as efficiency.
There’s an enormous amount of detail in this article, so if you’re interested in the specifics of what Apple has done in this year’s chip architecture, dig in.…
The iPhone 13 and iPad mini are out and MacBook Pros may be on the way shortly, so it’s time for us to answer your questions! It’s an extended #askupgrade covering new hardware, how to use the iPad mini, and the value of ProMotion.…
A couple weeks back, while I was in the throes of working on my iOS 15 review, I noticed a weird bug: my phone was no longer responding to “Hey Siri” requests. If I held the home button down, Siri seemed to work just fine, but if my phone was, say, sitting on a table, it would remain blithely unaware, no matter how much I pled, yelled, or swore.
I’ve come to rely on Siri, which is now the only voice assistant in our home, and as our new house is larger than our old one-bedroom apartment, I’m not always within hailing distance of a HomePod.1 I’d fallen back to using my Apple Watch, but more than anything, the issue simply amped up my frustration.
After doing some research, I tried all the Apple-recommended fixes, and more than a few other suggestions of questionable usefulness that I found around the web. I turned Hey Siri off and on about a half dozen times. I deleted my Siri History. I disabled Dictation. I restarted, I reset, I experimented with every permutation of Siri permissions and switch positions possible. Nothing seemed to work.
I turned to Twitter a couple of times, hoping I might reach somebody on the Siri team at Apple, but mostly receiving advice that retreaded the ground I’d already covered.…
If you’re looking to order an Apple Watch Series 7 after last month’s announcement, mark your calendars: Apple announced on Monday that preorders for its latest smartwatch open this Friday, October 8, at 5am Pacific/8am Eastern. It’ll be available in more than 50 countries.
Apple usually doesn’t announce products until its ready to ship them, which made last month’s unveiling—without even a firm ship date beyond “this fall”—somewhat puzzling. But reports had suggested that there had been supply chain challenges interfering with the production of the Apple Watch—and subsequent reports saying that those obstacles had been overcome.1
There’s still no Buy link available on Apple’s website as of this writing, meaning that you can’t configure the Series 7 in advance. Apple’s press release says only that Series 7 starts at $399.
- Depending on when Apple’s first event was actually recorded, this makes a certain amount of sense. They could afford to be vague with the hopes that they could ship them faster than people expected. ↩ …
With the update of the iPad mini last month, Apple’s tablet lineup now has a series of strong offerings across the board, from the base model ninth-generation iPad all the way up to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. At first glance, it seems like there’s something for everyone—but look closer, and the cracks start to show.
The high-end and low-end of the lineup have been pretty clearly staked out: Nobody who’s in the market for a $329 iPad is seriously looking at the top of the line iPad Pro, or vice versa. In the middle, though, things get squishier, especially when it comes to the iPad Air. In part, this is because the tablet lineup is out of joint, as Apple’s update schedule for the different models has varied widely over the last year or two.
Will 2022 bring an opportunity for Apple to gets its tablet ducks in a row? Maybe, but if so, it’s got some decisions to make first.…
Jason Snell returns to the show to talk about the new iPhones 13, new iPad Mini, Safari 15’s craptacular new tab UI, and the insightful questions posed to Kevin Durant on the Brooklyn Nets’ media day from Basketball Digest’s best NBA reporter.…
Justin Hamilton:
Today, I released a new app called Affirmations. It’s a self-care tool I made that delivers compliments and positive reminders to you. I specifically designed the foundation of the app in a way that I can add or remove affirmations as I please, arrange them into groups that the user can enable or disable, and make them time sensitive (i.e. for holidays). Kinda like CARROT, but not homicidal.
What a great idea for an app. My friend Greg Knauss wrote an app, long ago, that suggested you send text messages to people you love. It became the butt of jokes, but I think there’s something very kind about the idea of harnessing the impossible power of our pocket computing devices to remind us about who we are and what we care about.…
Via Merlin Mann and Gabe Weatherhead, I discovered this presentation by Florian Haas about the right and wrong ways to run a distributed workforce:
- Distributed teams are better than localized teams — not because they’re distributed, but because they’re asynchronous.
- Avoid anything that makes a distributed team run synchronously.
- Use less chat.
- Have fewer meetings.
- Write. Things. Down.
Asynchrony is the secret sauce of distributed workgroups. It’s not that synchrony can’t be valuable, but its value is overstated—and the tyranny of the synchronous should not be imported into distributed workgroups.
Haas makes some excellent points about trying to adjust workgroup culture to store important information in retrievable places—a wiki or a Google Doc, rather than a thread somewhere months ago in Slack that nobody can find. More excellent advice.…
Sometimes Apple takes itself too seriously. Calling an iPhone “Pro” and carting out Hollywood directors and cinematographers to advertise iPhone features… it’s a bit much.
Yes, the iPhone 13 is a serious slab of technology, with iPhone 13 Pro models priced at $1,000 and higher. iPhone models support ProRes video capture, ProRAW still images, and uses advanced sensor-shift image stabilization to keep images crisp. Pro models are wrapped in surgical-grade stainless steel. If you had to operate on someone, you’d operate on them with an iPhone 13 Pro.
But most people who buy the iPhone 13 Pro aren’t buying it because they’re professional… anything. They’re buying it because it’s the Best iPhone, because it’s got three cameras and shiny edges, and because they want a fancy new phone. And deep down, Apple knows this. Because it uses all of its high-tech knowledge, all of its prowess and combining software and hardware, to make “pro” features that aren’t really designed for pros—they’re designed to make the rest of us have fun.…
Mimestream is a Mac app reminiscent of Apple Mail, but it uses the Gmail API.I’ve been using Mailplane as my email client for something like a decade. Unfortunately, back in June the makers of Mailplane announced that they were letting the app die due to Google banning embedded browsers from Gmail.
I mourned, of course. My frustrations with Apple Mail had driven me to Gmail, and Mailplane was the perfect way to use Gmail on a Mac—in a separate app, with Mac keyboard shortcuts and drag-and-drop support and everything else, while still keeping the speed and efficience of the Gmail web interface.
I went through the stages, as you do. I tried to run Gmail in a single-site browser. It didn’t really take. I opened Apple Mail and… nope. It doesn’t work the way I want my email to work, and it’s inconsistent and slow in just too many ways. I’m not going back to that relationship.
Instead, I found Mimestream, by former Apple Mail engineer Neil Jhaveri. It’s a dedicated Gmail client app for the Mac that’s more app-like than Mailplane, while keeping the consistency and speed that Gmail offers over Apple Mail. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and I full intent to pay for it when it emerges from beta testing.…
This week Six Colors is sponsored by Boom 3D, immersive audio for everything you listen to on your Mac (or PC).
Boom 3D offers an enhanced audio experience with all kinds of media like movies, music, games, and more. A zero-distortion volume boost, and instant enhancement of ordinary stereo to 3D Surround Sound are just two of the features of Boom 3D that can transform the audio experience on your computer.
Tune your sound with a 31-channel equalizer or choose from an extensive assortment of presets. Increase audio levels past device defaults. Adjust the volume of individual apps. And a whole lot more, all from within Boom 3D.
Get Boom 3D for 70% off for a limited time on Global Delight’s store.…
Apple has released a quick update for iOS 15:
iOS 15.0.1 includes bug fixes for your iPhone including an issue where some users could not unlock iPhone 13 models with Apple Watch.
In addition, it fixes these bugs:
- Settings app may incorrectly display an alert that storage is full
- Audio meditations could unexpectedly start a workout on Apple Watch for some Fitness+ subscribers
Apple also links to a security page, but at the moment it doesn’t list any security aspects to this update. If you have been frustrated that iOS 15 broke Apple Watch unlock of iPhones while wearing a face mask, grab this update.…
iWork updates and new iPhones.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Brandon Katz of The Observer has a good overview of Apple TV’s current subscriber base, how Apple’s strategy of focusing on building a high-quality catalog of originals is going, and why its metrics for success might not match those of its competitors:
Estimates from industry analyst Entertainment Strategy Guy suggest Apple TV+ has accrued just 8.1 million paying customers in the U.S. (which is certainly less than 20 million). Regardless of which datapoint you choose, the immediate reaction is the same: Apple TV+ is severely lacking after nearly two years.
Yet different streaming services have different ambitions and raw subscriber counts are not the only metric of success and failure in the streaming wars. So before we go slapping labels on Apple TV+ all willy nilly (people still say that, right?), let’s first explore Apple’s greater goals, strategies and future outlook.
If it sometimes seems like Apple is playing a different game than its competitors, that’s because it is.…
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Team,
At Apple, our values are strong. We care about the environment, we look out for workers across our supply chain, and we pride ourselves on creating a welcoming, inclusive space for everybody.
But above all, we keep our mouths shut.
It’s come to my attention in recent days that this core value of secrecy has not been taken seriously by some amongst us. Not only have we seen leaked product information, but internal communications have found their way into the press—even our internal communications about not leaking our internal communications. Honestly, it’s made me reconsider our commitment to basic reading comprehension.
That’s why I’m pleased to report that we’ll be quintupling down on secrecy at Apple. That commitment will start at the very top: I know in the past, I’ve been viewed as a bit of a chatterbox CEO, always sharing the details of my personal life in the press, but that stops now. No longer will I grant splashy interviews, or talk about my commitment to augmented reality. I will become a man of mystery, unknown to any and all. The next time we meet, we may not even recognize each other. Perhaps I will even dye my hair and grow a beard—who can say?…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Downstream is about the future of streaming media. Tech and entertainment companies are vying to see who will become the media giants of the 21st century. Julia and Jason tell you a little about their background and what they’ll be covering.…
I’m happy to announce Downstream, a new fortnightly podcast I’m co-hosting with Julia Alexander about the future of streaming media. Tech and entertainment companies are vying for our attention and money—all to see who will become the media giants of the 21st century.
In our introductory episode, we talk a little bit about our background, and there’s also a sample episode recorded last month to give you an idea of the flavor of the podcast. I’ve enjoyed talking about the future of streaming media with Myke Hurley on Upgrade and with Tim Goodman on TV Talk Machine, and I’m looking forward to digging in deep on the subject with Julia, who is paid to think about this subject every day!
You can subscribe at the usual places, like Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts and Overcast and Castro and Spotify.…
Is Amazon’s new Astro robot cute or menacing? What are our biggest family tech support challenges? How do we revisit our photos? And what do we use for video chatting?…
Keynote will let you place live camera (left) and device screen capture (right, Mac only) on slides as standard objects. You’ll need to bring your own device frames, though.On Tuesday Apple released version 11.2 of its iWork app suite, featuring new versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.
Your mileage may vary, but my favorite updates are in Keynote, which has added support for live video on slides—from cameras or (on the Mac) from device screen captures. Video objects can be added to individual slides as regular objects, which means they can appear and disappear across slides and be a part of transitions between slides. They’re croppable and can be layered above or below other objects on a slide.
This means you can present via a Keynote deck and include yourself in the presentation when necessary, and leave yourself out the rest of the time, letting you be the director of your own presentation if you’re screen-sharing with others. Combine this with Keynote’s ability to record a presentation, and you can craft a dynamic presentation that integrates your image when it makes sense. (In a weird quirk, M1 Macs won’t be able to use the video-feed feature until they update to macOS Monterey, which is not yet available in a final version.)…
Myke and Jason review the iPhone 13 and iPad mini, settle on their preferred iPhones, and wonder if Apple should appoint a Color Czar.…
Boom 3D for macOS and Windows offers an enhanced audio experience with all kinds of media—movies, music, games, and more. A zero-distortion volume boost, and instant enhancement of ordinary stereo to 3D Surround Sound, are just two of the many features of Boom 3D that can transform the audio experience on your computer.
Some of the features of Boom 3D:
- The 31-Band Equalizer offers an extensive assortment of equalizer presets along with controls that allow the most serious audiophiles to curate audio with utmost precision.
- The Volume Booster feature lets users increase audio levels past the device defaults.
- The 3D Surround Sound feature obtained from Global Delight’s patented sound staging tech converts any ordinary stereo audio into 3D surround audio. And it works with absolutely any kind of headphones.
- The app also offers personalized volume controls for individual apps allowing the users the freedom to adjust volume levels of different apps in one place.
- Some incredibly powerful audio effects that make your music, gaming, or cinematic experience unique and more intense are available on Boom 3D.
- The intensity slider is another feature that provides a precision control over the bass and the treble.
- Boom 3D comes with a highly advanced audio player that supports even lossless audio formats.
…
It was 20 years ago that I reviewed Mac OS X 10.1 for Macworld. I remember writing this article under the redwood tree in my backyard—the same place I wrote my iPad mini review earlier this week.
Mac OS X 10.0 was interesting, but so slow as to be essentially unusable. During that era, I had my Mac set to dual boot, so I could return to OS 9 to get work done. But OS X 10.1, while not exactly speedy, was usable enough to get by:
The Mac community has been buzzing about Mac OS X for years. But even Apple admits that OS X’s previous incarnations—from last year’s beta to this spring’s first “final” release—were only for people who wanted to experiment with and explore the operating system’s new features. For these early adopters, OS X was a glimpse into the future—the rest of us just sat back and waited for the future to arrive.
Apple’s new version of the OS, Mac OS X 10.1, is what we’ve been waiting for. With improved reliability, dramatic speed boosts, many interface improvements, and a clutch of native software, this release is the first version of OS X that’s truly ready for general use.
…
Dan’s waiting for a new iPhone. Jason’s got four, and an iPad mini. We wrote a lot of words this week, so many words that we no longer understand words.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The cameras, they get better every year.When it comes to iPhone upgrades, Apple is incremental. So are iPhone reviews. Those of us who review iPhones are, for understandable reasons, focused on what’s new between this year’s model and the last.
The problem is that most people don’t buy a new iPhone every year. The primary upgraders to the iPhone 13 will be coming from the iPhone 7, or 8, or X, or XS, or XR. For them, several years of Apple innovations will be rolled into a single purchase. But reviews of the new iPhones will not address what happened in 2018, or 2019, or 2020.
Here’s an attempt to provide a little more of a big-picture overview for owners of older iPhones who are wondering what’s new in the iPhone 13. I’ve simplified matter a little—if you own a “plus” or “max” model of iPhone, obviously your phone will be a little larger, and you may want to consider the direct upgrade to the iPhone 13 Pro Max to continue with your large phone. The iPhone 13 mini is also a great option for those who prefer a smaller phone with all the same power as the larger iPhone 13.…
For power users and people who like to tweak their devices, the arrival of Safari Extensions in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 is a huge step forward.
Dan has already written about Safari Keyword Search, which lets you quickly access different search engines from within Safari’s Smart Bar. (On my Mac, I use LaunchBar to do this sort of thing—but of course, there’s no LaunchBar for iOS. Safari Keyword Search hits the spot.)
So now I’m here to tell you about another Safari Extension released alongside iOS 15 that has dramatically improved my life: Noir, a $3 app that forces websites that don’t offer up a Dark Mode version into Dark Mode anyway. You can set Noir to match your current system mode (i.e., only darken pages when in Dark Mode), or force every page into Dark Mode all the time.
I read on my iPad a lot, sometimes late at night, and it kills me when everything else on my iPad is in dark mode but some websites just can’t get with the program. With Noir enabled, almost very site I visit is delightfully dark. (By default, Noir doesn’t override a site if it has its own Dark Mode style, though you can choose to override that if it isn’t dark enough for your tastes.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
What size iPad we prefer, our assessment of Apple Arcade two years in, the new iOS 15/iPadOS 15 features we love, and our most recent Apple purchases.…
In 2020, Apple sold an iPhone Leather Wallet that attached via MagSafe and held three credit cards. I bought one and have used it for a year, and I like it! But this year, Apple has revised the wallet to add a new feature: Find My support.
Here’s how Apple describes the feature:
The new wallet features a secure NFC chip which enables support for Find My. It can hold up to three cards, and it’s shielded to keep them safe. To use an NFC-enabled card, such as a hotel key, you need to remove the card from the wallet.
This new wallet works with all iPhones with MagSafe, not just new models. I attached it to my iPhone 12 mini and it walked through the setup procedure. You can choose to have your iPhone notify you if the wallet has detached, and also optionally to have your wallet disclose your phone number if it’s found and attached to a different iPhone.
Best as I can guess, this is what’s happening: the NFC chip in the new wallets has a unique ID number. When you pair it with your iPhone, that ID number is associated with your iCloud account. If you choose to allow someone who finds your wallet to view your phone number, Apple’s essentially allowing their phones to look up the number associated with your iCloud account.…
Last week, Apple announced the new A15 processor in a peculiar way: by comparing its new chip to the Android competition, rather than the A14 that powered last year’s generation of iPhones. We were all left to try to infer the speed of the A15 based on Apple’s claims, and wondering if the company was obscuring the performance improvements in the A15 because they weren’t particularly impressive.
In the past week, things have gotten a lot clearer. Tuesday brought the first reviews of the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro and on Wednesday I got a look at what the iPad mini has to offer. Now we’ve got the cold, hard facts about the A15—and it’s more complicated and interesting than I guessed last week. The net result? Apple is making one chip but using it in three different ways, and while some aspects of the A15 upgrade aren’t particularly exciting, others are quite impressive. Systems-on-chips made at a scale of five nanometers are complicated. Who knew?…
Why does the iPad mini exist? Let me count the ways. It’s for kids, people with small hands and good eyesight, people who want a pocketable(-ish) iOS device that doesn’t compromise on features, claustrophobic spaces, readers… in fact, I probably can’t count as high as there are uses for the iPad mini. Like its edge-case cousin, the Mac mini, it serves a multitude of purposes because it just fits them better—figuratively or literally.
Also like the Mac mini, the iPad mini tends to go a few years between revisions, so it’s vital that Apple not skimp on features when it’s time for an upgrade. I’m happy to report that the 2021 iPad mini is thoroughly a modern iPad, more advanced than the 2020 iPad Air, which itself is basically a smaller iPad Pro. The iPad mini is not for everyone, but for everyone who loves it, this new model is pretty much everything they’d ever want it to be.
State of the (mid-range) art The iPad mini (far right) joins the iPad Pro and iPad Air in assuming a flat-sided look.As is traditional for Apple these days, innovations generally start on the high end and slowly make their way down the product line.…
You can’t judge a book by its cover, but Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite line is a little more appealing on the outside. The ebook giant has released two new model of its most popular e-reader, bringing new features some of which have trickled down from the company’s high-end Oasis model.
To start with the Kindle Paperwhite now has a 6.8-inch display—nearly an inch larger than the previous generation—with smaller bezels, and, for the first time, a backlight that can change color temperature, to provide a warmer light for bedtime reading.
Amazon’s also amped up the Paperwhite’s battery life, which can reputedly go for up to 10 weeks without a charge. It can also charge faster, as it bids adieu to the micro-USB port in favor of a USB-C port: just two and a half hours to fully charge, as long as you’re using at least a 9W power adapter.
However, Amazon has clearly realized there’s more opportunity here and has added a second Paperwhite model, the Signature Edition. In addition to the features in the base model Paperwhite, the Signature Edition1 also includes wireless Qi charging, sensors that automatically adjust the backlight color temperature (on the base Paperwhite it has to be done manually), and 32GB of storage (compared to the base Paperwhite’s 8GB).…
Earlier this year, I lauded the return of one of my favorite Safari extensions, Arne Martin Aurlien’s Safari Keyword Search. Now that extension has been updated to version 2.0 and is embarking on a whole new territory: iOS.
Safari Keyword Search is a little tool that allows you to define shortcuts for searching specific sites. For example, you could type “imdb George Clooney” to be taken directly to the IMDb search results for George Clooney, or “w iPhone 13” to go straight to the Wikipedia page for the iPhone 13. You can also define your own shortcuts, so, for example, I’ve defined “sc” as a Google search limited to sixcolors.com, which helps me quickly turn up articles here—in fact, I used it to find that piece I just linked to above. (Yes, Apple does offer a Quick Website Search feature that’s similar, but I have generally preferred Keyword Search’s way of doing things.)
The latest version brings the extension to iOS for the first time, thanks to iOS 15’s new web extensions support, and it works just as well as it does on the Mac. Having suffered for years without the option to use this on my iPhone and iPad, I’m delighted to finally have it.…
iOS 15 is here and Myke and Jason share their opinions about new features! Also we’ve got a lot of Apple Event follow-up, and now that Ted Lasso has won eight Emmy Awards, it’s time to back the truck full of money up to Jason Sudeikis’s house.…
[This story contains material from the forthcoming update to my book “Take Control of Photos, Second Edition.” If you’d like a deep dive into every feature in the Photos app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, consider buying a copy. The iOS 15/macOS Monterey update will be available soon as a free update.]
Apple’s 2021 updates to the Photos app, both in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, are fairly substantial. The Memories feature has been completely reworked into a dynamic multimedia slideshow—though it won’t arrive on macOS until later on in the cycle. New sharing features make it easy to pluck images out of Messages and pop them into your library—and in the case of some images, they’ll show up in there even when you don’t ask them to.
Every year, Apple seems to apply more machine-learning algorithms to scan your photo library, and this year is no exception. The system now identifies all sorts of objects, scans all the text found in images, and exports a lot more of that data into Spotlight search.
And while the changes in the macOS Photos app are more subtle than on iOS, there’s one big addition that should please people who use multiple library files.…
Widgets can be placed anywhere, not just in the left column. And I’ve reduced my home screen to a single page thanks to the addition of App Library.I’ve spent the last three months using pre-release versions of iPadOS 15 on an M1 iPad Pro. In addition to all the features of iOS 15 that Dan has detailed in his full iOS review, there are some iPad-specific aspects worth discussing separately.
Overall, this is a solid update. Never once did I regret updating my iPad Pro, which I use for many hours each day for both business and personal tasks, to a beta release. Still, some features are more notable than others.
Blast from the past: Widgets and App Library iOS 14 introduced widgets that can live on the iPhone and iPad home screen. The problem was that while widgets could live anywhere on the iPhone, they were limited to a single column at the left side of the first page of the iPad’s home screen. Expanding that functionality seemed inevitable, and with iPadOS 15 iPad users can now place widgets pretty much anywhere, on any page of the home screen.
That’s great, but I wanted more after waiting a year.…
What is there to say about an operating system fifteen years after release? Fifteen years after the classic Mac OS was released, it was just two years away from its successor, Mac OS X, coming on the scene (a replacement effort that had already seen several aborted attempts). Fifteen years after Mac OS X was released, it was already on its third name iteration, having evolved to OS X, and then back to macOS. The point is: these are mature operating systems, not upstarts still trying to find their way.
The same is true of Apple’s mobile OS. It might seem like it’s the new kid on the block, but the truth is that iOS has reached the point where any limitations are predominantly choices that Apple has made. And splashy new features are often forays into unexplored territory rather than making up ground.
So it is with iOS 15, a release that appears with at least one of its most touted features, SharePlay, delayed until later this year, and another impressive piece of functionality—Universal Control—demoed but never even present in the betas. What’s left is a hodgepodge of interesting ideas and occasionally misguided attempts to prescribe how people should use their mobile devices.…
This past week saw a slew of fancy new devices from Apple: iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. But as significant as the latest models in the company’s lineup are, you may have also raised an eyebrow to see a few devices that not only aren’t brand new but are, in fact, a few years old.
Apple has developed a strategy over the last few years of keeping its older products around, for a variety of reasons. It’s a bit puzzling at times, as those products often end up looking like eyesores when put up against the company’s current lineup, and yet they stick around—sometimes for years. (Remember the MacBook Pro that had an optical drive? Or the 21-inch non-Retina iMac?)
It’s hard to argue with results. Apple’s sales performance has been staggering in the last decade, and while we don’t know how these older devices impact the bottom line, they remain an important part of the company’s sales strategy nonetheless.…
My thanks to Daylite, the award-winning CRM and productivity app made for Mac-based small businesses, for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Daylite seamlessly integrates with Apple devices—not just the Mac, but the iPhone and iPad. It also integrates with Apple’s built-in apps, including Apple Mail, so you and your team can capture all your email communication in one place. And you can create opportunities, appointments and tasks in Daylite from right within Apple Mail.
Daylite improves team efficiency and makes collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible, even offline. It’s easy to access information and segment data, manage and share schedules and product status, and more—all within a familiar and intuitive Mac-focused interface.
You and your team can try Daylite free for 30 days.…
A new home is a blank slate: an opportunity to start over, to hopefully do things better this time—and probably, ultimately, to end up with the same mess as always. But in this era of smart home tech, it also means a chance to expand and, of course, to upgrade.
As I tinker with the tech setup in my new house, I’ll probably be writing a few pieces about how it’s evolving: not just as I adapt my existing devices to this new space, but hopefully as I get a chance to try out some of the newer technologies that are coming down the road—can’t wait for Matter.
This month, let’s talk a little bit about my home theater setup.
Carefully cropped to avoid the pile of empty boxes.Back in June, Jason was considering how to achieve his single remote lifestyle in the wake of Apple’s new Siri Remote. That was an area of some interest for me as well, and now that I’ve moved… by George, I think I’ve cracked it!
My goal was the same as Jason’s: to whittle down to a single remote control. The main obstacle in my path was my aging Onkyo TX-8211, the same stereo receiver that I’ve been using since high school.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Dan bought a new iPhone. Jason wants to buy a new Apple Watch. An iPad pricing conundrum. And to those who dream of a unified Apple color system, keep watching the starlight.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
AppleInsider reports that Geekbench users are uploading scores for the iPhone 13 that show a 10 percent increase over the iPhone 12 in single-core performance, and a 21 percent increase in multi-core tests.
If accurate, this would place the A14 to A15 performance boost in line with recent updates. What makes this a question at all is that Apple hasn’t directly compared the two chips, instead opting to compare the iPhone to “the competition.”
The only Apple-to-Apple comparison the company has made is in comparing the iPad mini to the previous-generation mini, making it theoretically possible to derive the speed of the A15 by comparing it to the speed of the older A12-based iPad mini. And those numbers didn’t look impressive—in fact, they looked slower than the A14.
It’s hard to reconcile those two facts, unless the A15 chip in the iPad mini is somehow slower than the A15 chip in the iPhone. And according to Joe Rossignol of MacRumors, that’s exactly what’s happening:
Both the iPhone 13 and the new iPad mini are equipped with Apple’s latest A15 Bionic chip, but benchmark results reveal that the chip is downclocked to 2.9GHz in the iPad mini, compared to 3.2GHz in all iPhone 13 models.
…
Dylan Patel, in a post with a laughably doom-and-gloom headline that nevertheless makes some interesting points about Apple’s chipmaking division and the A15 processor:
It appears Apple has not changed the CPU much this generation. SemiAnalysis believes that the next generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems… Instead of a new CPU core, they are using a modified version of last year’s core. One of these modifications is related to the CPU core’s MMU. This work was being done for the upcoming colloquially named “M1X” generation of Mac chips. Part of the reason for this change is related to larger memory sizes and virtualization features/support.
Apple has, according to multiple sources, had a bit of a brain drain from its chipmaking division recently—Patel says Apple’s chief CPU architect and 100 other engineers left in 2019 to create a startup that was bought by Qualcomm, and more recently a new startup was founded with more senior Apple engineers.
Is that the reason for the A15 not being potentially as huge a performance leap as recent generations? Maybe. What about COVID? Seems possible. And, as Patel points out, Apple’s chip architects have also had to do extra work to create chips that fulfill the needs of the Mac, and that’s not nothing.…
The last time we used the full capabilities of the iPhone’s video camera, the Apple products we still want to see this year, whether we’re tempted by the Apple Watch Series 7, and all the things we track with Apple’s Find My network.…
The iPhone makes up the bulk of Apple’s annual product revenue, so it’s fair to say that Tuesday’s announcement of the four new iPhone models is the most important Apple announcement of the year. But the importance goes beyond the iPhone itself because Tuesday was also the day that Apple announced the A15 Bionic, its next-generation processor.
These days, pretty much everything Apple builds—from Macs to iPads to iPhones—is powered by Apple-designed processors. The arrival of the A15 is the beginning of a new foundation for devices Apple will be releasing into 2023. Just as last year’s A14 processor was the basis for the M1—and possibly a souped-up M1X version in forthcoming MacBook Pros—the core design of the A15 will probably end up being used for future Macs and iPad Pro models.…
Good morning! (Photo: Apple)Dan’s got the quick reactions to Tuesday’s Apple event covered, but I had a few notes left on the cutting-room floor that I wanted to get out before shifting out of event mode. It’s weird to cover these events remotely, rather than driving to Cupertino and back. I don’t miss spending all that time on Interstate 280, but it did give me time to think. Today I did most of my thinking in my garage, instead.
Center Stage is everywhere I’m a big fan of Center Stage, which debuted in the M1 iPad Pro. Using an ultrawide camera and some machine-learning-driven software to auto-pan and zoom your image for conference calls? It’s the best. The M1 iPad Pro has become my go-to device for family Zoom calls for just this reason.
So… you get a Center Stage, and you get a Center Stage! The new iPad Mini and even the new low-end iPad get the same 12-megapixel ultrawide camera, with a 122-degree field of view, as the iPad Pro, and the same hardware to drive it.
The question is, when is this feature coming to the Mac? (And can it come to the iPhone too, or does that make less sense?)…
As a subscriber to the iPhone Upgrade Program for lo these many years, I’ve been glad to see that Apple has streamlined the process year after year. What once required you to go into a store and hand over your existing phone can now be handled via the mail.
And this year, Apple has continued to improve the process: when you go through the process of setting up your upgrade order in the Apple Store app—at least with my carrier, AT&T and, according to others I’ve spoken to, T-Mobile—you’ll be notified that your replacement phone will ship with an eSIM instead of a physical SIM. That, I believe, is a first.
Two years ago, when I first wanted to transfer my AT&T physical SIM to an eSIM, it was a ridiculous multi-day process that involved me visiting no fewer than three brick and mortar AT&T stores before I found one with access to the special barcode that would let me switch.
Last year, “thanks” to the pandemic, that process was simplified to talking to an agent online.
This year, I won’t have to do a thing, exactly as it should be.
Combined with the fact that the new iPhone 13 features Dual eSIM support, it sure seems as though the physical SIM card’s days may be numbered.…
Apple announced new iPhones, Apple Watches and iPads on Tuesday, and this is our quick reaction to the news. What color is the saddest rainbow? Why was Joz locked out of Apple Park one night? Why is Myke disappointed about the Apple Watch design but excited about iPhone photography? Together, we’ll make sense of Apple’s tour of California.…
Sure seems like Apple’s got the whole “slickly produced video” thing down to a science, doesn’t it?
As expected, today’s event saw the wraps taken off the new iPhone 13 series, as well as the Apple Watch Series 7, a revamped iPad mini, and the ninth-generation iPad. With the presentation firmly in the rearview, it’s worth taking a quick look at what Apple showed off.
Lucky 13 Meet the new iPhone…similar to, but basically better than, the old iPhone. Every year, Apple improves the cameras and the processors in the iPhone, and this year’s no exception. But I did find it interesting that Apple chose to remark upon two less sexy features: improved battery life and better durability (or so Apple says). Both of those have real, tangible benefits to users, even if they’re not top-line marquee features. It’s always interesting to see Apple focus on things that make people’s iPhones last longer; it’s one place that seems be at odds with its business, since a functioning iPhone doesn’t necessarily need to be replaced as quickly.1
Knives all around.Of course, the main attraction are the new cameras. They’re certainly the most visible bump2 from year to year, and the larger sensors and trickle down of the sensor shift optical image stabilization is sure to provide a lot of benefit for low-light photography.…
Apple released a bunch of software updates Monday to counteract dangerous security vulnerabilities in its operating systems. Ivan Krstic, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture wrote:
After identifying the vulnerability used by this exploit for iMessage, Apple rapidly developed and
deployed a fix in iOS 14.8 to protect our users. We’d like to commend Citizen Lab for successfully
completing the very difficult work of obtaining a sample of this exploit so we could develop this fix
quickly. Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop,
often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not
a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our
customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.
The smart advice: update immediately.…
This week, Six Colors is being sponsored by Daylite, the award-winning CRM and productivity app made for Mac-based small businesses.
Daylite is the only CRM and productivity app that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices—it supports not just Mac, but iPhone and iPad—as well as Apple’s built-in apps. Daylite offers direct Apple Mail integration, so you and your team can capture all your email communication in one place. And you can create opportunities, appointments and tasks in Daylite from right within Apple Mail.
Daylite empowers small businesses by improving team efficiency and making collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible (even offline). You can easily access information and segment data tailored to your specific client story. You can manage and share everyone’s schedules, project status, and next steps.
And just as important, of course, is Daylite’s familiar and intuitive Mac-focused interface.
Give it a try! You and your team can try Daylite free for 30 days.…
The bigger Apple has gotten, the easier it seems to have become to anticipate the company’s plans. Turning a battleship isn’t easy or subtle—it’s going to make waves.
That’s true in both general terms—expect a new iPhone every fall—as well as, thanks to a leaky supply chain, the specifics. None of which means that the Cupertino-based company can’t keep some surprises up its sleeves, but despite Tim Cook’s repeated insistence that Apple is doubling down on its security and secrecy, information still seems to make its way out.
So, as we look forward to Tuesday’s event, teased with the tagline “California Streaming”, here’s what you might expect to see when Apple executives take the stage.…
If you can read only one legal analysis about the ruling in the Epic-Apple lawsuit, let it be John Voorhees’s at MacStories:
While the decision is undeniably a win for Apple in many respects, it’s also a decidedly mixed bag. I’ve taken the time to read Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ 185-page decision and having written an in-depth look at the issues going into the trial, I thought I’d follow up with what the Court’s ruling is likely to mean for Epic and Apple as well as all developers and consumers.
John knows the law and has followed the case closely. There are a lot of interesting details that we will undoubtedly be hearing more about as the case is appealed—by both parties.…
It’s another emergency draft! In this bonus episode, Jason and Myke predict what will happen at Tuesday’s Apple media event. What form will the new iPhones take? Will a new Apple Watch make an appearance? And what special bits of stagecraft might propel one of us to a decisive draft victory?…
On Friday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued her judgment and counter-judgment on Epic Games’s lawsuit against Apple.
The result largely favors Apple, to the extent that Apple released a statement declaring victory:
Today the Court has affirmed what we’ve known all along: the App Store is not in violation of antitrust law. Apple faces rigorous competition in every segment in which we do business, and we believe customers and developers choose us because our products and services are the best in the world. We remain committed to ensuring the App Store is a safe and trusted marketplace.
Perhaps most notably, Epic has to pay Apple its cut of transactions that bypassed Apple’s in-app purchase system and is still banned from the App Store, and the judge has defined the market in question in the lawsuit as “digital mobile gaming transactions”—rather than what Epic preferred the market definition to be, something more along the lines of “iPhone transactions.” Apple monopolizes iPhone transactions, but the judge decided that the iPhone is not a market unto itself.
But while Apple can claim victory, there’s also the matter of a permanent injunction the judge placed on Apple, effective in 90 days:
Apple Inc. and its officers, agents, servants, employees, and any person in active concert or participation with them (“Apple”), are hereby permanently restrained and enjoined from prohibiting developers from (i) including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to In-App Purchasing and (ii) communicating with customers through points of contact obtained voluntarily from customers through account registration within the app.
…
Breaking Apple legal news, and what we’re excited about for next week’s Apple event.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Marvel has revamped its Unlimited app, and The Verge’s Chaim Gartenberg has the details. One big part of the push are “Infinity Comics”, which are designed vertically, to be scrolled on an iPhone:
Marvel is investing big on Infinity Comics, too. It’ll launch with 27 comics available today, with plans for over 100 by the end of the year. Infinity Comics will be exclusive to Marvel Unlimited subscribers, but they’ll be fully in-universe (meaning that anyone who wants to keep up on the full adventures of Marvel’s superheroes will want to make sure to check them out).
But better than all of that, in my opinion, are improvements to following comics and creators. One of my biggest frustrations when I first used Marvel Unlimited was that there was simply no way to say: follow this series and let me know when a new issue out, a feature that seemed like table stakes. The update adds that, and more: you can also follow both creators (in case, for example, you want to know when Saladin Ahmed releases a new book) and even characters, so you can keep track of them across all titles.
Plus, the app now lets you download an unlimited number of comics for offline reading, instead of the piddling 12 you could previously, and you can save an entire series or run at once, instead of individually.…
What will Apple announce next week? I guess we’ll find out next week, because we don’t know.…
Daniel A. Gross, writing for The New Yorker:
The high prices of e-book rights could become untenable for libraries in the long run, according to several librarians and advocates I spoke to—libraries, venders, and publishers will probably need to negotiate a new way forward. “It’s not a good system,” Inouye said. “There needs to be some kind of change in the law, to reinstate public rights that we have for analog materials.” Maria Bustillos, a founding editor of the publishing coöperative Brick House, argued recently in The Nation that libraries should pay just once for each copy of an e-book. “The point of a library is to preserve, and in order to preserve, a library must own,” Bustillos wrote. When I asked Potash about libraries and their growing digital budgets, he argued that “digital will always be better value,” but he acknowledged that, if current trends continue, “Yes, there is a challenge.”
The experience of checking out ebooks from the library has definitely gotten better, but so much of it remains a frustration, because of the attempts to apply the same models that worked with physical books to ebooks. It’s certainly not an easy needle to thread, but digital books are only going to be more in demand going forward, and I don’t think we’ve reached the final form yet.…
How we’d upgrade our tech setups if we had the space, the tech parts of our emergency preparedness plans, our thoughts on cashierless “just walk out” stores, and whether we would add digital IDs to our Apple Wallets.…
Tim Cook reportedly wants to usher in one more new product category before retiring. Here, he can be seen practicing hailing a driverless cab. (Or just greeting a keynote audience. Your call.)For years, it has been rumored that Apple has been working on a car or car-related project. Dubbed Project Titan, this project seems to have seen all sorts of stops and starts1 over the years if reports are to be believed. Way back in 2014, the project was supposedly approved by Tim Cook, with Apple veteran Steve Zadesky at the steering things.2 Zadesky left the company in 2016, but in those two short years, it seems that the project really gained traction.3 Employees were poached from several car companies, including Tesla and Mercedes-Benz.
As the team grew, news broke that Steve Jobs had been interested in looking at a car project way back in 2008, the year after the initial iPhone launched. This was confirmed by Mickey Drexler, who was an Apple board member from 1999 to 2015. Not one to miss out on the limelight, Tony Fadell also confirmed the claim to Bloomberg. Here’s Adam Satariano, writing in the fall of 2015:
Jobs and Fadell, who had collaborated on the iPod and iPhone, swapped ideas about car designs on multiple occasions.
… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
It’s official: Apple’s next product-launch event will come on Tuesday, September 14 at 10 a.m. Pacific. Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak announced it on Twitter and the emailed invitations followed.
As always, Six Colors will bring you coverage of the event and its aftermath. So begins the busy season of Apple product announcement news!…
In the last week, Apple has announced that it’s making a few changes to its App Store rules. These have run the gamut in importance, with some potentially having substantial ramifications to the status quo, while others seem to do little more than pay lip service to the displeasure of developers. But they have one thing in common: they’re the result of outside forces targeting Apple’s marketplace.
But even as these risks have been dealt with, more threats are massing on the horizon. The App Store remains the company’s most significant vulnerability, the one that has put them in the crosshairs of competitors, regulators, and legislators alike. The real issue Apple needs to consider is not whether the App Store will evolve, but how.…
As Jason and Myke wait for the announcement of an iPhone launch event, they discuss Apple’s curious set of incremental changes to App Store policies, what those changes mean, and how they inform Apple’s possible future strategies.…
As relayed by TechCrunch and many other outlets, Apple has announced it’s delaying the release of its CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Media) scanning features. Here’s the statement Apple PR furnished to media outlets:
Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.
The roll-out of these features was utterly botched, from conflating features that should’ve been kept separate to the rolling thunder of damage control as the company carted out technical white papers and FAQ stories and executive interviews to try to explain what they really, actually meant by it. And there appear to be some serious, technical criticisms of the methods Apple is using to detect CSAM media.
It’s all for the best that Apple has decided to delay. Perhaps the company will re-think some aspects of its approach. It’s unlikely that this functionality will simply disappear forever, but after a few months in the penalty box maybe it can emerge alongside a clearer, stronger message.…
Apple’s negotiation strategy, and anticipating a September hardware event.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
This week’s episode of Upgrade was a “call-in show,” in which we answered audio questions sent in by listeners. I’ve heard from a few people who wondered how we put the show together, so I thought I’d provide some of the details. (I use this same set-up for The Incomparable’s annual best-of-the-year clip shows and for various Game Show podcasts that require exciting sound effects.)
A Dropbox file requestIt starts with a Dropbox file request. I rely on this feature of Dropbox for most of my podcasts these days! When you create a File Request within Dropbox, a folder in your Dropbox account is tied to a web page accepting file uploads. The files uploaded to the webpage appear in your Dropbox. That’s it. You take the URL for the webpage, hand it out to anyone who needs to send you files, and you’re on your way.
(I’ve taken this even further by setting up a push notification when a file is uploaded to my File Requests. To do this, I’m forwarding the notification email Dropbox sends when a file is uploaded to Pushover, which does the notification on my iPhone and Apple Watch.)
Once we got the files, Myke Hurley cut them down to size using Rogue Amoeba’s Fission (for easy edits) and Apple’s Logic Pro (for tough ones), and I processed some of them with iZotope RX to remove background noise and, in a couple of cases, echo.…
Late Wednesday, Apple said that, prompted by an investigation from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), developers of “reader” apps—a category that Apple has previously defined as programs that primarily let users consume previously purchased content or subscriptions—will be able to include a link to their website in the app. Despite the agreement being made in Japan, the change will apply to the App Store worldwide.
While the exact implementation details have not yet been disclosed, Apple says that the link will be for users to “set up or manage an account.” And yes, the singular is accurate here: it’s one link. The change goes into effect early next year, and Apple will update its guidelines before that point.
As always, the devil is in those details. The company has never shied away from spelling out exactly when, where, and how developers can present certain information inside their apps. It’s not at all out of the question that Apple would say, for example, that such a link could only appear on, say, a first-launch splash screen or buried deep in a settings screen.
But, even if the company does make those restrictions very specific, this is still a crack in Apple’s App Store veneer, and something developers have been clamoring for almost since the beginning.…
China’s new limit on video games for those under 18, the software features that are gone but not forgotten, Apple Watch exercise accuracy, and our writing on paper vs. typing preferences.…
It’s been a rough few weeks for AgileBits, the company that makes password-manager 1Password. It announced that the new version of its Mac app would be built on a new, powerful and consistent code base, ensuring a consistency of product and a faster upgrade pace. Sounds good, right? It certainly did to AgileBits, which clearly saw its decisions as a win.
Of course, many Mac users reacted quite differently. What AgileBits actually did was throw its native Mac app in the garbage and replace it with an app built with the web-development system Electron, one that would be identical to the versions of 1Password on Linux and Windows. Good news, Mac users! We’re replacing your Mac app with a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator version! Please clap.…
On iOS, translate an Apple News URL into a real one via Shortcut.A Six Colors subscriber writes:
If you have an Apple News link, is there a way to get the internet source link from it?
Apple News has this annoying habit of refusing to generate proper links for sharing. Instead, every link points to apple.news, which redirects Apple users to the News app and everyone else to a preview page. If you like those links opening directly in News, that’s fine—but if you share a link with someone else, you’re also advertising your use of Apple News and not supplying the real web source address of the story. These links can be especially annoying in some contexts because they obscure the source site and other details (like the keywords in the headline) that people might use to decide if the link is worth a click.
If you’re using Apple News on the Mac, you can find the source by choosing Open in Safari from the File menu, or choosing Safari from the Share menu, then copying the link from Safari. On iOS, you can use this shortcut from the share sheet—in Apple News or by tapping on holding on a link almost anywhere!—to…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
It’s the first-ever Upgrade Call-In Show! This week, Myke and Jason answer listener questions about Apple, themselves… and popular dance steps. Go ahead caller—we’re listening.…
I picked up the Sonos Roam on a whim.
As we’ve gotten prepped to move to our new house, I’ve decided to switch up my TV audio setup from my old stereo receiver and bookshelf speakers to a soundbar, the Sonos Arc.1 When I made the purchase (on Massachusetts’s tax free weekend, and with a nice coupon), the discounted rate on the Roam made it a no-brainer to throw in. I figured it would make a solid “around the house” speaker that we could take outdoors, to a room with no other speakers, or even on a trip.
Conveniently enough, the Roam appeared just a couple days before my wife and I ventured off on vacation to a Wi-Fi-free undisclosed location, so I charged up the newly acquired Roam and threw it in my backpack.
This proved to be a solid decision.
When in Roam… The Roam’s controls live on one of the end caps.The Roam is pretty compact: at 6.61″ by 2.44″ by 2.36″, its rounded triangular body is about the size of a short, skinny water bottle. But that small chassis is packed with tech, attested to by its surprisingly heavy weight of .95 lbs.
Both end caps are rubberized, and one features playback controls: a play/pause button that also lets you skip tracks and go back with double and triple clicks, volume up/down, and a microphone mute.…
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today announced it has acquired Primephonic, the renowned classical music streaming service that offers an outstanding listening experience with search and browse functionality optimized for classical, premium-quality audio, handpicked expert recommendations, and extensive contextual details on repertoire and recordings.
With the addition of Primephonic, Apple Music subscribers will get a significantly improved classical music experience beginning with Primephonic playlists and exclusive audio content. In the coming months, Apple Music Classical fans will get a dedicated experience with the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits.
I know a lot of classical music aficionados who have been frustrated by the way Apple Music handles the genre (even calling it a “genre” is a bit reductive, I know), so this strikes me as good news for Apple Music subscribers.1
- Next do film scores! ↩ …
Great resource from Jim Salter at Ars Technica that runs through the basics of three useful command-line programs: grep, sed, and awk:
Trying to read the man pages for the utilities most frequently seen in these extended command chains didn’t make them seem more approachable, either. For example, the sed man page weighs in at around 1,800 words alone without ever really explaining how regular expressions work or the most common uses of sed itself.
If you find yourself in the same boat, grab a beverage and buckle in. Instead of giving you encyclopedic listings of every possible argument and use case for each of these ubiquitous commands, we’re going to teach you how to think about them—and how to easily, productively incorporate them in your own daily command-line use.
I really appreciated this piece: though I’ve been a long-time user of grep and I’ve seen sed and awk I’ve never really grokked1 how best to use them. Salter’s overview is very simple and runs through the most basic uses which means that I may actually end up using and understanding them instead of just pasting in code I got from somewhere else.
- No manual entry for
grok. …
The design of Safari 15 on the iPhone has gone to a better place, but Stephen Hackett reminds us that trouble on the Mac and iPad remain:
The ordering of the UI elements at the top of the screen… divorces the tab — which includes the name of the current webpage — from the webpage itself. Maybe everyone at Apple prefers their bookmarks in the Sidebar instead, but for those of us who are used to the more traditional location, having the Favorites Bar split the tab and its content makes skimming what tabs are where more work than it should be.
To make matters worse, it’s hard to tell at a glance which tab is active and which is inactive. Previous versions of Safari didn’t struggle with this, but Apple has seem to fit to bring the age-old “which iPad app has focus” problem to the browser. Using the Monterey beta, I almost always end up trying to tab to or away from the wrong tab because I can’t quickly register which one is active when looking at the tab bar.
I think Apple has improved the legibility of the selected tab a bit in recent betas, enough that it’s usable, but it’s not as good as it could be.…
Here at Apple, we know how important browsing the web is to our customers. It’s how many of us pay our bills, manage our health care, and attempt to figure out exactly what an ‘updog’ is.
So when it came time to redesign the interface to our industry-leading web browser Safari, it was an endeavor we undertook with the utmost seriousness that befits the critical nature of the app’s place on our platforms. This couldn’t be something that was just slapped together or changed for the sake of change: altering something as fundamental as the conceits of a web browser is an action that must be thought through carefully, with every facet justified and considered. At Apple, we pride ourselves on saying a thousand no’s for every yes, as anybody who’s ever dealt with our PR department can attest.
But after days of painstaking work developing this brand new interface, we’re pleased to finally share with you… the new Safari.
It starts off with the all-new address bar. At Apple, we like to say we’re at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, and I’ll tell you where that intersection isn’t: floating over the content that you want to see and interact with.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Whether we see ourselves one day carrying foldable phones, our thoughts on drone and robot delivery, changing the rules of copyright, and designing our own computers. Jason sits in for Dan this week!
Go to the podcast page.
Apple, in its iOS 15 beta 7 release notes:
iCloud Private Relay will be released as a public beta to gather additional feedback and improve website compatibility. (82150385)
Essentially, Apple has decided to launch iCloud Private Relay as a beta when iOS 15 ships in the fall, and the feature will be turned off (for now) by default. Paying iCloud users will be able to turn it on and try it out. iCloud Private Relay helps obscure web-browsing behavior by passing website requests through two proxy servers.
It seems like Apple’s slowing this roll-out down, at least in part, because there are lingering compatibility issues with some websites—most notably sites that are displaying the wrong region-specific content, or getting confused when signing in. There are some fairly easy remedies web developers can do to make these issues go away, but getting the web to adjust to any new feature takes time, and Apple appears to have erred on the side of caution.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Apple has put TestFlight for Mac into public beta testing. After years on iOS, in June Apple announced that its tool for beta-testing apps would come to the Mac this year. It’s been missing in action during early macOS betas, but as of Wednesday, it has arrived. For developers who want to use it, and fellow developers who want to sign up for betas on their Macs running macOS Monterey Beta 5.
This isn’t just for Mac apps, either. According to John Voorhees at MacStories, iOS apps that run on M1 Macs also appear in TestFlight on the Mac.
TestFlight for Mac is downloadable via Apple’s developer site.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
A couple of decades ago, most people probably didn’t imagine there would be a day when they would carry around an incredibly powerful piece of technology that would be utterly integral to their daily lives. Back then, cellphones had only recently become affordable (it hasn’t even been 20 years since I got my first one); the concept of fitting the internet into your pocket was still a few years away.
But the smartphone revolution came, saw, and conquered. Nowadays it’s far easier to imagine getting by without a car or a computer than without a smartphone. But technology has a way of never standing still and, moreover, technological evolution seems to progress at an accelerating rate. The amount of time it took us to go from mainframes to desktops was a lot longer than to go from desktops to laptops, or laptops to smartphones.
Which raises the question: what happens after the smartphone? Every big tech company in the world—well, the smart ones at least—has got to be looking down the road to figure out where our digital future is headed, and Apple’s no exception. The clever folks in Cupertino have clearly already been thinking about this, and you might be surprised to realize that a few of the contenders are already here—even if they’re not about to supplant your iPhone in the near future.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Notes in macOS Monterey includes a lightweight tagging feature.What do you think of when you think of the apps Apple includes with macOS and iOS? Are they too simple, too complex, or just right? Do you use them or ignore them in favor of more sophisticated apps from third-party developers? Is the fact that they’re included with every device a bonus or a mark against them?
In truth, the path Apple takes with its included apps is a precarious one. Included apps are a part of the overall value of the operating system, and by extension, Apple’s hardware. And most users will never, ever download a third-party app to replace the ones included on the device. (Apple’s role as a dominant player in the podcast market owes an awful lot to the fact that in recent years every iPhone has shipped with an app called Podcasts.)
A built-in app has to be easy enough for everyone to use without much trouble. It’s got to be a crowd-pleaser. But at the same time, it needs to move with the times or risk being left behind. Yet when one of Apple’s apps moves ahead, it invariably does so by adding features that were previously available in third-party apps. And at that point, Apple will be accused of “sherlocking”1 those features and threatening the future of those apps.
Given that the word sherlocking is nearly 20 years old (and the concept behind it is even older), this is not a new issue. It’s easy to tell stories about big, bad Apple coming in and destroying the markets for third-party apps by building their best features into the free core of the operating system—because it’s true. But it misses the point.
Apple can’t afford to keep its built-in apps simple and stupid. It does have to try to surf the zeitgeist, but delicately, providing the masses with crowd-pleasing features reminiscent of those found in other apps. App developers that build alternatives to Apple’s products by filling in obvious omissions apps are playing with fire—because Apple will eventually fill those obvious holes.
Canny app developers know that when Apple adds features to its built-in apps, it’ll do it by creating something that’s been sanded down silky smooth and varnished to a shiny finish. It’ll be the sort of feature that appeals to those masses but lacks all the details, the fiddly extras, the edge-case features—and that’s the place where a third-party app can continue to add value and keep its business going strong despite Apple’s arrival.
To use an example from iOS 15, Notes and Reminders have added support for tagging individual items. Sounds pretty fancy, but if you look closely, you’ll find that it’s simple. Anything you type as a hashtag is recognized and added to an index of tags. You can click on tags in the sidebar to search for them. You can build smart lists based on them. But that’s it. No notetaking or to-do app should be quaking in their boots.
Inspired by, not sherlocking, PKM apps Still, it makes me wonder about the future of the Notes app. The hottest thing in personal productivity are Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools such as Obsidian and Craft. These are apps or web services (or both!) that let you collect information in various documents and letting you link them all together, creating a Wiki-like experience for your notes—including features like a graph view of all connections and a list of all documents that link into a given document.
Obsidian will let you interlink documents (left) and display incoming links in a panel (right).So if you work in the Notes team at Apple, what do you think when considering all the PKM hype? Do you consider it too hot to handle, something that’s way too far out-of-bounds for a simple app like Notes? Or do you consider it an important future direction for Notes to keep it relevant?
My guess is—surprise, surprise—somewhere in between. I suspect that the Notes team would try to understand what user needs PKM tools are fulfilling—and whether the broad middle of Apple’s user base has similar needs. If so, what could Apple do to fulfill those needs in a way similar to what the PKM tools provide, but with much greater simplicity. The result is probably an update to Notes for iOS 16 or 17 that offers features that seem vaguely PKM-like, but probably in a way that hard-core users of Obsidian will turn their noses up at. Users of Roam Research will say Apple’s new features are “for babies.” A blogger will accuse Apple of trying to “sherlock” Craft.
It’s all very predictable. And the result will be: Notes will get better, the other apps will keep on serving an audience that needs a lot more out of their apps than Notes can ever provide, the blog post will get attention for a couple of days, there will be a minor spurt of Twitter outrage, and life will go on.
(For the record, I’d predict that Notes will pick up the ability to cross-link to other notes, and you’ll be able to view backlinks from a particular note. I’d also expect Apple to expand its support for tagging, including using hashtags to jump around to related Notes.)
Sherlocking 1Password? Too late. The macOS Monterey password manager is good enough for most—but not all—individuals.At the risk of stoking more outrage, let me bring up another recent example of the tension between Apple’s built-in features and those found in third-party apps. Recently AgileBits announced 1Password changes that angered a lot of people. I pointed out that Apple’s new password-management features in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey are impressive enough that many 1Password users might not need to use the app anymore. I suspect that AgileBits’s drive toward supporting teams and larger businesses over the past few years has been driven by a realization that basic password management is rapidly becoming table stakes for device operating systems.
And in fact, I have heard from many upset 1Password users who say they can’t really abandon the product because they have come to rely on shared vaults with family members and collaborators. This was all according to plan. AgileBits is moving that product into areas that aren’t as easily replicated by Apple or Google or Microsoft.
That said, I would imagine that most individual users can get by with Apple’s features just fine. Between the new password manager, which supports time-based authentication codes, and the longstanding ability to password-protect and encrypt notes in Notes, a lot of 1Password’s core functionality is going to be built into every Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
This is how this works. The vast majority of users will now get access to a password manager that’s good enough for their needs. People who have never really used a password manager or never used time-based authentication codes will now be more likely to do so because it’s all built-in with an improved interface. But there will remain a large market for people and organizations that need more than Apple can deliver.
And Apple will continue to walk that line, trying to keep its apps relevant but with mass appeal.
- Two decades ago an app called Watson wrapped web search into an app interface. A software update to Apple’s Sherlock search utility (long since replaced by Spotlight) introduced similar functionality and displaced a large part of Watson’s potential user base. ↩
This week we kick off our annual fundraising for St. Jude, ask listeners to call in with their questions, and discuss how Apple approaches putting features in—and taking them out—of its public betas.
Go to the podcast page.
My thanks to Tempo for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Tempo is an email client with a calming interface, with unique features designed to remove email anxiety and put you in control.
Tempo delivers new emails in batches around a customizable schedule, giving you control of when you get notified to sort through everything that’s new. You can sort your inbox, mark everything that needs your attention as a To-Do item, set Reminders for later, and archive the rest. There’s also a special tab to keep newsletters neatly separated from the rest of your inbox so that you can read them in peace.
Tempo also believes in privacy, not selling data and actively removing tracking pixels. It’s a company and a tool that believes our most important work happens outside of your email client.
Dan’s got an Existence Reveal, Apple shows some restraint regarding OS features, and built-in iOS apps get smarter.
[We’re taking next week off. The Six Colors Podcast will return Sept. 3.]…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Apple has spent a long time moving its operating systems and the apps that run on them closer together. Take a look at Apple-built apps like Music, Photos, Notes, and Reminders and you’ll see years of effort to bring those apps together both in terms of looks and functionality.
And yet some differences have persisted, ones that have always implied more of a philosophical divide than a technical one. Some of the most advanced features on macOS didn’t migrate to the iPhone and iPad, no matter how useful they might be.
But things are changing. The iPad and Mac, especially, are coming together. Apple has spent years suggesting that the iPad is becoming a peer of the Mac. It’s tough to square that argument with the decisions that keep advanced features on the Mac and off of iOS.
I don’t want to get too excited, but this fall with the release of iOS 15, Apple is breaking through a barrier that has previously starved its iOS apps. We’ve entered the era of smart features on iOS, at last.
Reminders in iOS 15 offers user-created Smart Lists.Not so smart, Apple Today, my iPhone and iPad use iCloud to seamlessly sync my music and photos libraries, as encapsulated in the Music and Photos apps.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
As someone who wasn’t that familiar with the wildly popular software platform Roblox, this video by People Make Games was incredibly enlightening. It’s a remarkable piece of journalism that explains how Roblox sells itself as a business opportunity for a whole new generation of developers, while making it almost impossible for games to break out without advertising with Roblox, and paying out in a Roblox-controlled currency with a terrible exchange rate—all while it has become valued at $41 billion.
I highly recommend the video, and the People Make Games Patreon.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
A few months ago, I volunteered to be interviewed by Italian student Federico Monaco for his thesis project about Web accessibility for the color-blind. (I am red-green color-blind.) The results of his work are now on display as the Colorblind Accessibility Manifesto, which points out that designers must consider that using only color to impart information in user interfaces can be inaccessible to some people.
As a part of his project, Monaco is seeking developers to help create a browser extension to aid in improving web usability for the colorblind.
I was just reminded of the importance of color accessibility earlier today, when I encountered a color-coded interface that didn’t present any alternative method of differentiating itself, such as offering different shaped interface elements—despite the fact that my iPad has the “Differentiate Without Color” setting turned on. (Apple offers a Color Filter feature that makes it easier for me to differentiate between colors—but it also makes all the colors on the device look horrendously unnatural.)
If you’re a web or app developer and you haven’t considered color when you’re considering accessibility, give Monaco’s website a look.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Can anonymity online be a good thing? The first smart home device someone should buy. Our technology collection habits. The “technology anachronisms” in our lives.
Go to the podcast page.
Ashley Carman at The Verge details a lot of complaints about Apple Podcasts Subscriptions:
But in the months since Apple Podcasts’ announcement, podcasters say the platform has failed them in various ways. For a company that prides itself on functionality, design, and ease of use, the new backend’s bungled launch is a mess. Podcasters say Apple Podcasts Connect, which they’re required to use in order to take advantage of subscriptions, has a confusing interface that often leads to user error scenarios that have them pinging Apple at all hours of the day in a panic — one podcaster’s entire show was seemingly archived until Apple stepped in to help and explain what happened.
I talked to Apple reps about this back in June, and basically made all the points raised in the article. The weaknesses of Apple’s initial subscription offering, most particularly the burdens placed on podcasters to use Apple’s limited back-end tools, were apparent the moment the feature was announced.
The real question is, who at Apple decided this product was good enough to be released? Especially given the related changes made to the Podcast app that managed to break podcast updates in a serious and lasting way.
This is turning into one of those cases where Apple’s relative inattention to podcasting from 2005 through 2020 is seeming more and more like a golden age.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
You’d think that when Apple executives stand on a stage (or on some sort of set in a pre-produced video) and boldly announce all the new features coming to its operating systems in the fall, they’d be highly confident in the features they were rolling out. (They sure seem confident, don’t they?)
But the truth is that Apple’s operating-system announcements aren’t set in stone. There might have been a time when that was true, but these days the company is keenly aware of the power of bad buzz—and it adjusts its direction accordingly.
Whether it’s bad buzz surrounding a feature that isn’t as well thought out as Apple thought, or bad buzz about a feature that’s just too buggy to be worth trying, today’s Apple spends its summer and fall course correcting. And that’s why some of this past June’s WWDC announcements will never come to pass, and others will be missing in action in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey 12.0, only to arrive later in the fall, winter, or even spring.
Continue reading on Macworld.
This week Jason and Myke ponder what it means to be a native Mac app in the era of SwiftUI, Catalyst, and Electron. They also consider the fallout and further disclosures from Apple’s child-protection announcements, celebrate Ted Lasso Christmas, and talk about how they’re traveling with iPads and Macs today.
Go to the podcast page.
This week Six Colors is being brought to you by Tempo. Tempo is an email client with a calming interface, with unique features that will help remove email anxiety and put you in control.
Tempo delivers new emails in batches around a customizable schedule, giving you control of when you get notified to sort through everything that’s new. You can effortlessly sort your inbox, marking everything that needs your attention as a To-Do item, setting Reminders for later, and archiving the rest. There’s also a special tab to keep newsletters neatly separated from the rest of your inbox so that you can read them in peace.
Tempo allows you to connect up to five Gmail accounts seamlessly. Toggle accounts in any combination that best suits you. Don’t want to see work emails during the weekend? Toggle off your work account on Friday and switch it back on Monday.
Privacy is important to us at Tempo. We will never sell your data and only track what is necessary, which we do anonymously. We also actively remove tracking pixels from messages before they’re delivered and rendered for you to view.
We believe your most important work happens outside of the email client. We aim to reduce the time you spend on email to focus on the work that matters. Check out Tempo today.
When you’re a company as big as Apple, the idea of threats starts to evolve. By contrast, when you’re a brand-new startup or a small indie business, or even an established and somewhat successful company, you probably face threats from other companies, from your products just not being successful, or even from mistakes you’ve made.
But at the size Apple has reached, none of these are really existential threats. Competitors exist, certainly, but oftentimes they’re more like peers—you’re as unlikely to take them out as they are to take you out. Unsuccessful products might ding you a bit, but they’re hardly going to sink you. And even big mistakes can’t really do substantial damage when your revenue is in the tens of billions and your cash reserves are measured in twelve digits.
So when Apple has reached a point—where, by some accounts, it is worth more than about 96 percent of the world—are those existential threats, if there are any, coming from? As it turns out, when you’ve reached the size of a country, those threats—perhaps unsurprisingly—often come from countries themselves. And those happen to be several of the biggest threats that Apple is facing at this very moment.
Continue reading on Macworld.
If you can’t move the preferences window because it’s fake, you might be running an Electron app like 1Password 8.I’ve used AgileBits’s 1Password for more than a decade. I’ve recommended it to friends and family alike. Over time, password management has become more common, and this fall’s operating-system updates will improve Apple’s built-in password management so much that it’s all most people will ever need.
That said, 1Password offers many features Apple doesn’t, and the company has become increasingly active in competing in the enterprise space, with an influx of investment to help it grow rapidly.
Which brings us to this week, when AgileBits announced the beta version of 1Password 8 for the Mac—and walked into a storm of criticism from Mac users. You see, AgileBits chose to build the new version of its Mac app using Electron, a system based on web technologies that’s used by numerous cross-platform apps, including Slack, Skype, and Discord.
I think it’s fair to say that most users don’t care about the tools that a developer uses to write the apps we use. But using a system like Electron does have consequences: Electron apps have a reputation for being slow, eating up a lot of system memory, and—perhaps most offensively—failing to behave like proper, “native” apps on whatever platform they operate.
Just as there are good and bad Catalyst apps, there are good and bad Electron apps. I’m sure that the very best Electron app isn’t as good a Mac app as one written using Apple’s AppKit frameworks—but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be good. And AgileBits has pointed out that it’s using Rust, a robust programming language, to power everything except the user interface, so performance should be more than you’d expect from “just a web app.”
I’m going to withhold judgment of 1Password 8’s interface, mostly because it’s still in beta and I’m sure AgileBits is going to get plenty of feedback about all the ways it fails to measure up to the standards of Mac users. I hope they’re listening and will adjust accordingly.
What’s really causing all this consternation, I think, isn’t 1Password moving to Electron. Electron is a bit of a bogeyman. The root problem is this: 1Password, originally a Mac-forward software developer, has simply decided that the Mac isn’t important enough.
I know that those are harsh words, and that the people at AgileBits would argue with them. But in a blog post by Michael Fey, AgileBits’s VP of Engineering for Client Apps, the company laid out its entire development strategy. It’s a post meant to explain what the company is up to and tamp down a lot of angry hot takes (and probably should’ve been posted the moment it announced the Mac beta).
Fey’s post clearly spells out AgileBits’s priorities. Android and iOS apps are built with native platform frameworks in order to create the best app experience possible on mobile. For iOS, AgileBits decided to use Apple’s new SwiftUI framework rather than the venerable UIKit, in order to skate “to where the puck was going.” Their plan was to use SwiftUI on the Mac, too. In doing so, AgileBits was buying into the vision Apple has for SwiftUI as a tool to build interfaces across all of Apple’s platforms. Unfortunately, it seems that SwiftUI didn’t measure up on the Mac:
Despite the fact that SwiftUI allowed us to share more code than ever between iOS and macOS, we still found ourselves building separate implementations of certain components and sometimes whole features to have them feel at home on their target OS.
I have to read this as a (gently stated) indictment of the current state of SwiftUI. AgileBits was willing to put in the extra work for iOS, because it’s an important platform and SwiftUI is clearly the future there. But implementing it on the Mac required a lot of duplicate work—and what’s worse, SwiftUI apps aren’t compatible with older versions of macOS. AgileBits was planning on covering the older versions with an Electron version, but once it decided the SwiftUI implementation for the Mac was too much work, it pulled the plug—and now plans to ship an Electron version to all Mac users.
I appreciate that AgileBits was originally planning two separate Mac implementations. That’s a sign that the company cared enough to expend extra resources to have a good experience on the Mac, rather than doing what it did to Windows users in deciding Electron was good enough.
And yet as a longtime Mac user, I find AgileBits’s decision-making process incredibly sad. Because as Fey’s post makes clear, at no point did the company consider keeping the Mac-only version of 1Password alive. AgileBits, once a major Mac developer, decided (for legitimate business reasons, of course) that the Mac’s not a platform that deserves its own bespoke app. Or as Fey put it:
We could support as many versions of macOS as we wanted using Apple’s AppKit framework, but that meant adding another frontend toolkit to the mix.
Translation: The Mac’s important, but not important enough to build a version of the app that only works there.
I get it. 1Password has to cover Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. The Mac is a small platform compared to Windows, and “desktop” is a small platform compared to “mobile.” If I were an engineering manager asking for resources for a bespoke Mac app, I would have a hard time justifying it, too.
And yet, here we are. A banner Mac app and app developer has abandoned a platform-native app for the same web-app wrapper it’s using on Windows. Even if it’s the best Electron app you’ve ever seen, it won’t be the same—and more than that, it says something painful about the future of Mac software.
Apple shares the blame, though. If today’s SwiftUI was truly the One True Tool to unify Apple’s platforms that it’s meant to be in the future, the Mac version of 1Password would be presented in SwiftUI. And perhaps in a year or two, that will happen—after all, the SwiftUI version of 1Password is right over there on iOS, ready to make the move when it’s feasible.
Just because these are decisions made with the cold, hard reality of business priorities and budgets and the current state of developer tools doesn’t make me any less sad, though. A long-running and beloved Mac app is getting thrown in the trash and replaced with a web app. It’s not the first—and unfortunately, it won’t be the last.
My thanks to TextSniper for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
TextSniper is a bit like the Live Text feature that will be rolling out with macOS Monterey, but with fewer limitations—and you can use it on any Mac running macOS Catalina or Big Sur, today. TextSniper can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it anywhere you need it. TextSniper can even read the text to you.
TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The OCR is done on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. If you’re tired of re-typing text from images, can’t wait for Live Text, or aren’t planning on updating to Monterey, TextSniper will help speed up your workflow right now. Use the promo code SixColors to get 20% off this week.
How Apple’s technical ambition and corporate focus on privacy turned into a PR disaster.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Joanna Stern sat down with Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi in a video interview to talk about the child safety features Apple recently released.
Stern does a great job of breaking down the technology as they discuss it, and while Federighi lays out Apple’s case pretty well, it certainly won’t allay all the fears that have arisen as the result of this announcement.
More notable to me is the escalation in the response from Apple. We’ve gone from nameless press statements to interviews with Apple’s privacy chief to pulling out the big guns. Federighi is probably the second most recognizable Apple executive; we’ll see if this continues ramping up to the point that Tim Cook has to give an interview. I wouldn’t bet against it.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
If you’re thinking of cutting the cord—or if you’re on one over-the-top TV service and considering alternatives—I highly recommend Suppose, which will let you list all the channels that matter to you, and will then present the over-the-top services that match your priorities.
I was able to boil down the many choices to just a handful by entering in my local channels, regional sports network, and a couple of specific sports cable channels. That’s how I got to Fubo TV with YouTube TV as a close runner-up.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We answer some member questions before delving into an actual serious issue.
Go to the podcast page.
Fubo’s Quad Box interface is great for sports.Though I’ve just cut the cord and dumped traditional cable TV, the truth is, I’m cheating. I’ve subscribed to what’s called an “over the top” TV service, which provides a bundle of live TV channels—essentially, it’s a cable TV plan that’s done entirely via streaming. This has required me to replace my venerable TiVo with an app that runs on my Apple TV.
The service is Fubo TV, for which I’m paying $60 a month. I can’t give up live TV, mostly because of sports, so it’s fitting that I ended up with Fubo TV—it originated as a sports streaming service, though it now also carries local channels and cable entertainment channels.
I chose Fubo TV because of its channel lineup, which included all the sports channels I required. (YouTube TV came close, and I intend to test-drive YouTube TV in the future and write about it here when I do.) But channels are only part of the equation when it comes to TV service: There’s the TV interface itself. How can an app measure up to an old-fashioned TiVo box attached to a cable plan?
The short answer is, it’s a step back in terms of functionality, with a lot of room for improvement. It’s usable, but can be frustrating. Let’s get into it.
Great for watching, weird for navigating The grid guide works okay, but you can’t simplify things by hiding channels you never want to see.If I had to sum up the live-TV viewing experience of Fubo TV, both on the Apple TV app and on its companion iPad and iPhone apps, is that it’s a pleasure to watch but frustrating to navigate. The live TV streams are of good quality—everything on Fubo TV seems to be 720p except for a few special 4K sports streams—and I couldn’t tell the difference in quality from what I’d get from my cable company. (My cable company was presumably compressing and downsampling my video, too. Sneaky monkeys.)
The channel-choosing interface could use some work. There’s a program grid guide, which works well enough, but I wish I could customize it a bit more. You can mark channels as Favorites, but that’s all—on my TiVo, I could also hide channels that I was never going to watch, and Fubo TV won’t let me do that, so there are junk channels littered throughout my live TV interface.
There seem to be two different live TV states in the Apple TV app, one in which you swipe from side to side to change channels, but another in which you end up swiping up and down to see channels. It’s confusing, and magnified by the fact that the app doesn’t seem to have been updated to support the functions of the 2021 Apple TV remote control.
However, once you get the hang of it, Fubo TV’s Multiview feature—which lets you put two, three, or four different live channels on the screen at once—is simply amazing. This is a feature designed for sports viewing, and I was impressed at how viewable the picture quality was in all of the little subdivided boxes on my screen. (Technically a 4K TV can be subdivided into the equivalent of four HD pictures, and it seems like Fubo TV is doing just that.) During the Olympics, I popped in four of NBC’s channels and switched around—you can swipe around to choose which picture’s audio plays, and click to temporarily bring one of the channels up to full-screen. I’ll be using this feature all the time on busy sports weekends, I think.
The one drawback of Fubo TV’s approach is that it doesn’t support tvOS’s picture-in-picture feature, which would allow me to watch one stream from Fubo TV alongside video from a different app. In theory, I could use this with the MLB app or the ESPN+ to mix and match across apps. I hope Fubo TV figures out a way to add this feature, but not at the expense of Multiview.
This baseball game, prominently marked LIVE in a red banner, isn’t live. You have to look for the white NEW banner instead. It’s really confusing.Fubo TV also fails to properly highlight sporting events that are currently happening versus ones recorded earlier. Replays of baseball games from the day before were highlighted with a red sticker indicating that they were LIVE, when they were nothing of the sort. (Turns out there’s a second sticker, NEW, that appears if it’s… live? Very confusing. And pointless, if you’re looking at what’s currently on—every single item is marked as LIVE.)
I was also taken aback by Fubo TV’s live interface not jibing with shows it was recording via its cloud DVR feature. Here’s an example: I dropped in live on a baseball game I had set to record. I couldn’t back up to earlier in the game without going to the Recordings section of the app and playing the game from there! This is basic stuff TiVo had working in the very first days, but Fubo TV just hasn’t connected the dots yet.
A serviceable cloud DVR, but only that Following a team takes one click.Coming from two decades(!) with TiVo, not having the ability to record shows and play them back later would’ve been a dealbreaker. Fortunately, most over-the-top services now offer a cloud-based DVR that lets you set recordings and play them back later. My Fubo TV plan came with 1000 hours of virtual capacity because I opted for quarterly billing.
And owing to Fubo TV’s history covering sports, this DVR has some nifty features. When you enter the recording interface for a specific sporting event, it will let you record the event or offer to record all the games by either of the participants. Setting up a wish list for my favorite teams on TiVo was a pain; on Fubo TV, it took one click. Fubo TV is also smart enough to know that sporting events can run long, so it automatically pads recording time without even asking. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you pad the starting time, which can be necessary for channels that are inconsistent with start times.)
Unfortunately, everything else about the Fubo TV DVR interface is rudimentary at best. To delete a show when you’re done watching it, or to delete an auto-recording subscription, takes way too many clicks. I should be able to delete with a click or two when I reach the end of an episode, but no luck.
Fubo TV’s playback controls only skip 10 seconds at a time, don’t support the Apple TV remote jog wheel, and won’t take Siri commands.But the absolute worst feature of Fubo TV’s app is its playback interface. Pressing left or right to skip works in 10 second increments, and it’s not adjustable. TiVo’s skip was 30 seconds in duration, perfect for commercials but also pretty good for skipping between plays in an NFL game or between pitches in a baseball game. Worse, there’s no Fast Forward or Reverse option at all—if you want to scan ahead or behind in the material, you need to pause the program and then carefully swipe on the Apple TV remote. (Fubo TV doesn’t support the jog wheel gesture on the new Apple TV remote, either.) And there’s also no support for using Siri to jump forward or back an arbitrary duration. The whole player interface needs an overhaul, stat.
Portable TV Fubo TV is also a service that spans platforms, and that’s huge. I have access to my DVR recordings on my iPad and my iPhone, whether I’m at home or traveling. It’s also quite nice to be able to watch San Francisco Giants games on my iPad via Fubo TV, rather than having to use NBC Sports’ lousy app for in-market viewing.
I was also previously paying a separate charge to attach TiVo Mini boxes to one other TV set in my house, and other sets just didn’t have access to live TV. No more! Now all the TVs in my house have a box connected to them—Apple TV, Roku, or Amazon Fire, we’ve got all three—and those boxes have a Fubo TV app on them. So live TV and DVR recordings are available everywhere.
I’ve obviously got a lot of criticisms of the Fubo TV app, but I don’t feel any regret about cutting the cord. Truth be told, we weren’t using the TiVo much—and I’ve been using live TV a lot more now that it’s another app on my Apple TV, especially since I can open up Multiview.
The tech we can’t seem to let go of, what annoyances we’d fix with $50, our feelings on smart TVs, and how automated photo-surfacing apps work (or don’t) for us.
Go to the podcast page.
There are plenty of whiz-bang features in Apple’s upcoming OS updates, but to my mind, Live Text is the one poised to fundamentally change our interactions with technology. Once upon a time pictures were pictures and text was text, but now that boundary has been blown away; it’s time to rethink a lot of our assumptions.
Jason’s already documented how “useful” Live Text can be when interpreting handwritten recipes, but just in the handful of weeks that I’ve been using beta software on my iPhone, iPad, and M1 MacBook Air, I’ve already found a few unexpected applications of the technology (and at least one missed opportunity).
Low-tech definition Reading ebooks has spoiled me. No, not because of the ability to cram a 1000-page epic tome onto a device the size of a pamphlet. Not even because of the ability to download books onto without leaving the comfort of my couch.
It’s the definitions. It may surprise, shock, and otherwise stagger you that I’m a bit of a language nerd, but there’s no better feature for me than being able to tap and hold on an unfamiliar word and have a definition presented.1
Recently, however, I requested a book from the library that was only available in hard copy.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Apple’s out-of-the-blue announcement last week that it was adding a bunch of features to iOS involving child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) generated an entirely predictable reaction. Or, more accurately, reactions. Those on the law-enforcement side of the spectrum praised Apple for its work, and those on the civil-liberties side accused Apple of turning iPhones into surveillance devices.
It’s not surprising at all that Apple’s announcement would be met with scrutiny. If anything is surprising about this whole story, it’s that Apple doesn’t seem to have anticipated all the pushback its announcement received. The company had to post a Frequently-Asked Questions file in response. If Q’s are being FA’d in the wake of your announcement, you probably botched your announcement.
Such an announcement deserves scrutiny. The problem for those seeking to drop their hot takes about this issue is that it’s extremely complicated and there are no easy answers. That doesn’t mean that Apple’s approach is fundamentally right or wrong, but it does mean that Apple has made some choices that are worth exploring and debating.
Continue reading on Macworld.
This is a good interview between Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch and Erik Neuenschwander, head of Privacy at Apple, about Apple’s announced child-abuse-related features. A highlight:
We have two co-equal goals here. One is to improve child safety on the platform and the second is to preserve user privacy. And what we’ve been able to do across all three of the features is bring together technologies that let us deliver on both of those goals.
You can see this in how the features were designed—Apple is trying to balance these two goals. (How well it did remains the subject of discussion.) Not all of Neuenschwander’s answers are entirely satisfying, but they’re still informative about how Apple is approaching this issue.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Funny and incisive piece from Amanda Mull at The Atlantic about the bad design of the CDC’s vaccine cards:
But let’s hold our focus on the most important point of inquiry: What’s the deal with the cards? When Bogost looked into them in May, a historian at the CDC guessed that their design was likely inherited, but no one seemed to know from what. “Like so much of our vaccine rollout, I’m guessing someone had to produce this in, like, eight hours,” Buttenheim said. “There was not time to workshop it and focus-group it and pressure-test it and rapid-cycle prototype it.”
Mull also points to issues trying to make the existing vaccine cards work with electronic systems:
New York City’s smartphone verification app—not to be confused with New York State’s Excelsior Pass, or its new Excelsior Plus Pass—appears to accept photos of restaurant menus as proof of vaccination. A spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that’s because the city’s app doesn’t verify anything; it simply gives users a place to store a photo of their vaccine card.
Par for the course.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We discuss Apple’s multiple announcements related to child safety, including what prompted Apple’s actions, the different ways any technological tool can be used, where Apple has chosen to intervene, and the dangers of sliding down a slippery slope. In lighter news, we also talk about Apple’s rediscovery of its online store and various attempts for streaming services to build new franchises. Also, alert Broadway and the West End: we may have invented a new segment.
Go to the podcast page.
TextSniper is a lightning-fast OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it into a live document or anywhere you need it.
TextSniper is a bit like Live Text, but with fewer limitations. You can run it on any Mac starting from macOS Catalina today. It is application and file format agnostic; whatever you see on your screen in no time can be turned into editable text.
TextSniper can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in snipping tool on Mac, just way more powerful.
TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The OCR is done on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. With TextSniper, you can:
- Quickly get an editable text from images, PDFs, Zoom calls, presentations, and videos.
- Copy text from anywhere, even applications and websites that don’t let you select text.
- Quickly grab data like email addresses, phone numbers, links, etc.
- Read QR codes and barcodes.
- Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.
Tired of re-typing text from images? Get TextSniper now and speed up your workflow! Use the promo code SixColors to get 20% off this week.
Ars Technica’s Jim Salter on a novel eavesdropping method devised by security researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev:
The Cyber@BGU team—consisting of Ben Nassi, Yaron Pirutin, Tomer Gator, Boris Zadov, and Professor Yuval Elovici—analyzed a broad array of widely used consumer devices including smart speakers, simple PC speakers, and USB hubs. The team found that the devices’ power indicator LEDs were generally influenced perceptibly by audio signals fed through the attached speakers.
Although the fluctuations in LED signal strength generally aren’t perceptible to the naked eye, they’re strong enough to be read with a photodiode coupled to a simple optical telescope. The slight flickering of power LED output due to changes in voltage as the speakers consume electrical current are converted into an electrical signal by the photodiode; the electrical signal can then be run through a simple Analog/Digital Converter (ADC) and played back directly.
Wild.
This isn’t something that most people need to worry about, thanks to several reasons outlined in the piece (the need for line of sight, the inability to capture any local audio, and so on), but it’s still kind of amazing to think about.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Last week, Google took the wraps off its upcoming Pixel 6 line of smartphones—though, in very Google fashion, it didn’t spill all the details about the devices, just dropped enough to tease consumers, with a promise that more would be shared this fall.
But even that brief look clues us in a little bit about the state of smartphones in 2021. Google may not, thus far, be a maker of top-tier flagship smartphones (a market it’s largely ceded to device makers like Samsung), but as the steward of the Android platform, it obviously has a vested interest in its success, so it’s no surprise that Google’s playbook is taking notes from Apple—though it’s certainly not a one-way street.
Google is probably hoping to steal some thunder from Apple with its Pixel announcement, given that the annual announcement of the latest iPhone is likely due next month. While that strategy may or may not pay off, it does mean that we can probably start to pinpoint where these two major players have decided to put their energy and resources, which in turn gives us a peek at where the future of the smartphone market is headed.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Rich Mogull and Glenn Fleishman have a detailed look at Apple’s announcement of multiple software changes involving photos and illegal material:
Apple’s announcement headlined these changes as “Expanded Protections for Children.” That may be true, but it could easily be argued that Apple’s move jeopardizes its overall privacy position, despite the company’s past efforts to build in safeguards, provide age-appropriate insight for parents about younger children, and rebuffed governments that have wanted Apple to break its end-to-end encryption and make iCloud less private to track down criminals (see “FBI Cracks Pensacola Shooter’s iPhone, Still Mad at Apple,” 19 May 2020).
You may have a lot of questions. We know we did. Based on our experience and the information Apple has made public, here are answers to some of what we think will be the most common ones.
Very much worth a read. This is a complicated and troubling topic.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
A special Thursday edition. Mac Pro, Google’s new chip and phone, and two writers talk about programming.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The return of our pandemic tech setups, our thoughts on Citizen’s premium Protect offering, whether we’ve replaced complicated tech with something less complicated, and how we do — or don’t — stream audio throughout our homes.
Go to the podcast page.
And I thought they looked good on the outside!Earlier this week, Apple announced a range of new GPU options for the Mac Pro, adding support for AMD’s RDNA2 architecture via its own MPX module format. All three of the new options are overkill for my uses, so I’ll be sticking with my Radeon Pro W5700X, which was the first additional GPU offered by Apple beyond the options that originally shipped with the machine.
Since the Mac Pro’s late 2019 launch, Apple has also added options for 8 TB of storage, not to mention the parts that let a user switch from feet to wheels and back again.
All in all, there are almost two dozen components on Apple’s online store that can be installed inside the Mac Pro, including GPUs, SSD modules, cables, drive enclosures, and RAM kits.
The ability to upgrade a machine over time is exactly why some users are drawn to the Mac Pro—and one reason the 2013 model was such a dud. No, the Mac Pro isn’t as open as the old-school Power G3 and G4 towers, but even this level of upgradability isn’t present anywhere else on the Mac.
This hardware is not cheap—not even close—but the flexibility is there if you’re willing to pay for it.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
The iPad Pro has frequently been an incubator for technology that Apple ultimately plans on rolling out to the rest of its product line. Last year, the iPad Pro got a LiDAR scanner months before it appeared in the iPhone 12. This year’s 12.9-inch model introduced the mini-LED screen technology that will probably be showing up very soon in a new line of MacBook Pro laptops. And this fall’s iPhone Pro models are rumored to come with high- refresh-rate displays, pioneered years ago on the iPad as ProMotion.
But there’s another core Apple technology of the future that’s currently available only on the 2021 iPad Pro. And I’m confident that, in the next couple of years, you’ll see it spread across most (but not all) of Apple’s products: Center Stage.
Center Stage uses machine-learning technology to pan and zoom in a camera’s field of view to get the perfect shot during a FaceTime call or other videoconference. It will zoom in on a single subject, or zoom out to find every person in the frame. If you haven’t tried Center Stage, you’ll need to trust me: It’s great. And having experienced it for months on my iPad Pro, I now want it everywhere. It’s too good a feature not to be, and as soon as possible.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Another week, another special guest. James Thomson has a shocking confession that will leave you reeling.
Go to the podcast page.
It’s not dead yet! On Tuesday, Apple rolled out three new graphics card modules for the Intel-based Mac Pro, all based on AMD’s Radeon Pro W6000 series GPU. (Apple posted a Mac Pro performance white paper to celebrate.) The new modules (in Apple’s MPX format) come in three variants, with a Radeon Pro W6800X, two W6800X GPUs, and the W6900X. Each module also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI 2 port to the Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro supports two MPX modules, so you could pop in two of the dual-GPU modules to max out performance. They can connect using AMD’s Infinity Fabric Link, which can connect up to four GPUs to communicate with one another via a super-fast connection with much more bandwidth than is available via the PCIe bus.
The new modules are replacing previous modules featuring AMD Vega II GPUs, and will be offered as configure-to-order options for new Mac Pros and as standalone kits. Get ready now: it’s $2800 for the Radeon Pro W6800X, $5000 for the W6800X duo, and $6000 for the W6900X. Each module also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI 2 port to the Mac Pro. Apple’s also removing the Radeon Pro Vega II and Pro Vega II Duo MPX modules as configurable options with new systems, but will still sell them as standalone kits for $2200 and $4400, respectively.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
For those who want the benefits of biometric authentication for their existing Mac, good news: the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, recently introduced alongside the M1 iMac, is now available for individual purchase. The standard model will run $149; the version with a numeric keypad (and, more importantly, an inverted-T arrow key configuration), $179. Both include a Lightning-to-USB-C cable for pairing, charging, and wired usage.
One reminder: These keyboards are only compatible with Macs powered by Apple silicon running macOS 11.4 or later. (It’s possible that the keyboard functionality will still work with older Macs, but the Touch ID features will certainly not.)
Unfortunately, though the keyboards are available color-matched when sold with iMacs, the individual versions are in the classic silver/white scheme only. So if you want to go the two-tone route, you’ll need to find an iMac owner willing to part with theirs after the fact.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Everdeen Mason of the New York Times, with an abrupt announcement:
Starting Aug. 10, we will no longer support crossword play on Across Lite. This means we won’t provide downloadable .puz files for use on that platform. You can play the NYT crossword on our Crossword App and on desktop and mobile web.
This decision will limit crossword players to the Times’s own app and website. Previously, you could play it in various third-party apps, including Red Sweater’s Black Ink on Mac and iOS. This decision reduces the choices of paying subscribers and has some accessibility implications, too.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Google SVP Rick Osterloh unveils the new Tensor System-on-a-Chip designed by Google to power the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro phones:
Tensor was built for how people use their phones today and how people will use them in the future. As more and more features are powered by AI and ML it’s not simply about adding more computing resources, it’s about using that ML to unlock specific experiences for our Pixel users.
The team that designed our silicon wanted to make Pixel even more capable. For example, with Tensor we thought about every piece of the chip and customized it to run Google’s computational photography models. For users, this means entirely new features, plus improvements to existing ones.
Tensor enables us to make the Google phones we’ve always envisioned — phones that keep getting better, while tapping the most powerful parts of Google, all in a highly personalized experience. And with Tensor’s new security core and Titan M2, Pixel 6 will have the most layers of hardware security in any phone.
This actually works as a concise summary of Apple’s chip design strategy for the last decade.
Whether Google will actually succeed at making a phone that sells well remains to be seen, but even if the latest Pixels don’t become runaway hits, I suspect the Tensor chip design will not be going away.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Myke’s headed off on vacation, but before he goes, he’s made time to discuss last week’s Apple financial results. Then Jason welcomes special guest Julia Alexander for a mega-Upstream about ScarJo v. Disney, the future of the movies, and the current state of affairs for streaming services.
Go to the podcast page.
You put something in the trash in macOS, you empty the trash, it’s gone. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Sometimes, though, you run into an odd hiccup. Upon my recent updates to macOS Big Sur 11.5 and 11.5.1, I ended up with a folder called “Previously Relocated Items” on my Desktop. In it was another folder…inside that, another folder…and so on until it ended in what appeared to be an alias pointing towards a system folder elsewhere1. Fine, no problem. I tossed it in the trash and hit empty.
And that’s where I hit a snag.
The Finder graciously informed me that I could not empty the trash because the operation was not permitted. I tried restarting: no dice. Venturing into Terminal to delete the folder with the trusty rm -rf command fared no better. I tried the unlink option, which removes symbolic links (or symlinks, the command-line version of aliases), but that was similarly disallowed. Even superuser privileges conferred by sudo made no difference.
So, what’s a user to do? I didn’t want to be stuck with that item in my Trash bin for the rest of my days (or until a subsequent update came along to iron things out), so I poked about a bit until I found some other folks who’d encountered the same issue, and located a solution.
That answer ended up being restarting my Mac in Recovery mode—by holding down command-R at boot—and launching the Terminal utility there to remove the offending file, which works because in Recovery the Terminal session is logged in as root.
A few caveats before you attempt this yourself: First, some suggested solutions said that in order to do this, you need to disable Apple’s System Integrity Protection (SIP), a security feature that prevents you from making certain low-level changes that could damage the operating system. This is not required, and I wouldn’t recommend turning off SIP—those protections are there for a reason.
Second, whenever you’re interacting with your machine as root, be extra careful. That’s a lot of power to wield, and a simple typo can really mess your day up. Be sure you’re deleting only the files you mean to delete, and be as specific as possible. (For example, I first used unlink to remove the problematic symlink, then removed folders one at a time, starting with the deepest and moving up.)
Finally, one issue I encountered was that—thanks to the recent changes of Apple’s file system—the new APFS protocol separates the system and your data into separate volumes. Before you can access your files via the Terminal in Recovery, you’ll need to first launch Disk Utility and mount the Data volume of your drive, which will in turn require you authenticate with your user password. Then you can use Terminal to navigate to the correct volume and remove the files.
Hopefully this helps folks who find themselves besieged by these undeleteable files. Maybe in a future update, Apple will work this issue out for itself.
- The X11 subsystem, if you’re curious. ↩
During Apple’s recent Q3 financial results call last week, one analyst posed an interesting question to Tim Cook: how does Apple decide which technologies it wants to build itself, as opposed to simply buying off the shelf?
Apple’s fixation on control is legendary. From the earliest days, the company prided itself on building the whole widget, hardware, and software, in an age where those two were becoming increasingly decoupled. Even today, it remains arguably the defining characteristic of the company. Just compare it to its main rivals in the smartphone or PC market.
As Apple has become larger and more successful, that focus on control over the whole widget has gotten even broader. The company’s been building its own processors for mobile devices for more than a decade, and those advancements have finally jumped to the Mac. On the other end, Apple has introduced more and more services that help provide the glue between those traditional hardware and software components. This trend isn’t about to stop any time soon; there are plenty of places where the company has decided to move its core technologies in-house.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Once every three months, I have the self-inflicted privilege of producing a complete text transcript of Apple’s post-results conference call with a gaggle of financial analysts. I used to type it all out by hand, but these days I use an automated transcription service and just edit that so that it makes sense.
But this week, something strange happened. A whole portion of the call, which I never heard with my own ears, somehow ended up in the transcript. Did it happen after the rest of the world dropped off the line? Was a microphone left on? Did the automated transcription pick up words that were inaudible to human ears? I don’t know how it happened, but the results are downright unbelievable:
Operator: All righty, here’s Carol Manalist from Research Group.
Carol Manalist: Tim, Luca, congratulations on the big quarter. I was wondering, could you give any more detail on which iPhone models are the most popular? How are the more expensive Pro phones selling compared to the regular iPhone 12 models? And does it vary across region?
Tim: Carol, this is Tim. We’re really bullish on the iPhone. The iPhone 12 is selling really well. In the U.S.,…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Stephen Hackett’s Mac hardware calendar, old hardware, the Mac’s golden era (it’s now!), and picking at the thread of the tapestry that is Safari 15.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Fubo TV on an iPad.I cut the cord this week.
After several years of very slowly inching my way toward the precipice, it all happened in a hurry this summer: A discovery that I preferred to watch shows via Apple TV apps, even if they were also available on my TiVo. The realization that other than “Jeopardy!” and live sports, everything I watched was streaming. Wanting to simplify my TV (and remote control) setup when a TiVo was stuck in the middle of it all.
Finally, I broke down and did the math: I could replace my Xfinity cable TV and internet with AT&T gigabit fiber internet and an over-the-top TV service. And, after swapping a few streaming service freebies (Comcast gave me Peacock, AT&T gives me HBO Max), I’d get faster internet and everything running on the Apple TV—for $65 less every month.
For TV—because, yes, I’m not giving up live sports—I went with Fubo TV. I’ve already got a long, long, long list of ways the Fubo TV app could be improved—and I am going to test drive YouTube TV, which lacks a single channel that would’ve made it my choice over Fubo—but it will serve my baseball and football and “Jeopardy!” needs just fine.
In truth, even after consulting the excellent site Suppose, which lets you compare over-the-top TV services, I was disappointed to find that essentially no service offered all the channels I wanted.1 However, Fubo offered everything but TBS, which broadcasts baseball playoff games in October. So for one month, I’ll also subscribe to Sling Blue, just to get TBS, and then I’ll turn it off when the playoffs are over. Annoying, but also sort of freeing.
After years of dreaming about fiber being available in my neighborhood, the installation itself was easy. The hard part was adapting my home network to the new fiber gateway. While AT&T’s included Arris router is nifty—the optical terminal is built in, so it’s a single box—it is like every other cable box in wanting to provide firewall, routing, and wi-fi. There was no way the AT&T router’s wi-fi was going to cover my whole house the way that my two Eero boxes do, so I didn’t need its wi-fi. But I was willing to give it a try as my router.
So I switched my Eero into bridge mode, and used the AT&T box’s web interface to set up port forwarding to my server. It all worked pretty well, with one fatal exception: lack of support for an esoteric feature called “hairpin NAT.” I run a server at my house, and want it to be accessible both inside and outside my network. Hairpin NAT is a feature that realizes when you are trying to connect to an internet server (let’s call it snell.zone) that’s inside your network, and routes your outbound request back to the right place. With it, my scripts and widgets that reference snell.zone work everywhere. Without it, they only work outside my home network.
So I decided to go back to the network setup I was using with Comcast’s router—no wi-fi, no routing, just a dumb pass-through to the Eero, which would do all the routing. I set it up using the AT&T router’s clever Passthrough mode, and… everything failed. Couldn’t load a single thing inside the house.
After an hour of pulling my hair out and trying any number of different network configurations, I finally realized what the problem was: While my Eero router was running my entire network and piping it through the AT&T router, it was relying on the AT&T router for a bunch of its network information, including DNS server addresses. While Comcast’s router was happy to tell Eero the addresses of Comcast’s servers, AT&T’s router prefers to list itself as the DNS server of record. The result: all the devices on my network tried to connect to a server that they couldn’t actually see, because the Eero stood in the way. Once I realized this, I entered AT&T’s actual DNS server addresses in Eero’s settings and rebooted, and everything fell into place.
What I’m saying is, networking is dumb.
In any event, now everything is working, our entertainment flows only out of apps on our Apple TV, and things are good. While I’m going to keep my eye on the over-the-top competition, Fubo TV gets the job done—at least well enough to make me confident in calling Comcast today and canceling my account. It’s the end—I’ll miss you most of all, TiVo!—but the moment has been prepared for. I’m ready for the future.
- Locals, NBC Sports Bay Area, NFL Red Zone, and Pac-12 Networks were the big ones. ↩
Welcome to Billionaires in Space, the show where we talk about billionaires…in space.
Go to the podcast page.
What services we’ve added (or subtracted) during the pandemic, our Twitter bits that deserve to be shows, what companies we would de-IPO, and the travel tech we find indispensable.
Go to the podcast page.
Among the things Wall Street likes are growth—always growth—and certainty. This past year has provided a lot of uncertainty, both in life and in business. And while Apple has done well over the last year—its latest financial results included $81 billion in revenue, the best third quarter in the company’s history—it’s also been uncertain about its future.
Once again, Apple’s executives have declined to forecast the company’s results for the next quarter. However, they were willing to predict that it would see “very strong double-digit year-over-year revenue growth” that will be lower than this quarter’s year-over-year growth rate of 36 percent. (That’s actually some guidance, albeit of the broad variety; it means next quarter’s revenue will be between $71B and $88B.) But overall uncertainty remains, about the progression of the COVID pandemic, about foreign exchange headwinds, about increased shipping costs, and most notably about whether Apple will be able to get enough component parts to make iPhones as iPhone season approaches.
Here are some of the more interesting things that I noted in Tuesday’s results and the post-results conference call that Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri hold with a bunch of Wall Street analyst types.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Here’s a complete transcript of Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri’s call with financial analysts following Apple’s record third-quarter results.
Tim Cook’s opening statement Good afternoon, everyone. Today, Apple is reporting a very strong quarter, with double digit revenue growth across our product and services categories and in every geographic segment. We set a new June quarter revenue record of $81.4 billion, up 36% from last year, and the vast majority of markets we track grew double digits with especially strong growth in emerging markets, including India, Latin America, and Vietnam. Total retail sales also set a June Quarter record and almost all of our retail stores have now opened their doors.
This quarter saw a growing sense of optimism from consumers in the United States and around the world, driving renewed hope for a better future and for all that innovation can make possible. But as the last 18 months have demonstrated many times before, progress made is not progress guaranteed. An uneven recovery to the pandemic and a Delta variant surging in many countries around the world have shown us once again that the road to recovery will be a winding one. In the midst of that enduring adversity, we are especially humbled that our technology has continued to play a key role in keeping our customers connected. Just last month, it was great to be back with our teams and customers for the opening of our newest retail store in Los Angeles, Apple Tower Theater. It was a hopeful reminder of the energy and sense of community shared spaces bring, and how appreciative we all are now of the simple privilege of talking to one another face to face. As we look forward to more in-person interactions in the future, we’re doubling down on innovation and doing all we can to help chart a course to a healthier and more equitable world.
I’ll have more to say about our work in those areas a bit later on, but first let’s turn to our product and services categories. For iPhone, this quarter saw very strong, double digit growth in each geographic segment, and we continue to be heartened by our customers’ response to the iPhone 12 lineup. We’re only in the early innings of 5G, but already its incredible performance and speed have made a significant impact on how people can get the most out of our technology. Customers love iPhone 12 for its super fast 5G speeds, A14 bionic chip, and a Dolby Vision camera never seen before in a phone.
Users continue to rely on iPad and Mac to work, learn, create, and connect. iPad had its highest June quarter in nearly a decade. While Macs set an all-time June Quarter record. We’ve seen a great response to the new iMac and iPad Pro both powered by the M1 chip’s exceptional speed and power efficient performance. The iMac’s remarkable thin design and vibrant colors have made it a favorite for users everywhere. And the iPad continues to be an incredibly versatile tool in our users’ toolbox, inspiring creativity and connection, and keeping us entertained and productive in equal measure. It was another very strong quarter for Wearables, Home, and Accessories, which set a new June quarter record while helping people find more ways to stay entertained, healthy, and connected at home and on the go. Apple Watch remains a go-to choice for users to stay on top of their health and reach their fitness goals. And our newest accessory AirTag began shifting to an enthusiastic response from customers, making the Find My network more useful than ever while protecting user privacy.
Turning to services, which set a new all-time revenue record. As we continue to roll out innovative new features and programming. We’re proud to be the recipients of 35 Emmy nominations this year, which speaks to the quality of our programming and an enthusiastic reception from customers and critics alike. Apple TV+ users are loving series like Mythic Quest and anticipating groundbreaking films like Coda, which premieres next month. And of course, Ted Lasso kicked off season two just last week and continues to win over viewers with its heartwarming message about the power of community, compassion, and hope. We also introduced Apple Podcast Subscriptions, a global marketplace for users to discover exclusive content and support their favorite creators. And we launched spatial audio for Apple Music, a cinematic listening experience that promises to change how music fans listen and musicians create even more immersive, layered, and beautiful songs.
Last month, we shared many exciting new features at WWDC, but more powerful than any of them was the incredible showing of developers from all walks of life and around the world. The new tools we announced will help developers harness cutting edge technologies like augmented reality, reach new users and customize their experience on the App Store, or learn to update or invent an app with Swift, Apple’s powerful and intuitive programming language. Today’s investments in education and coding translate to tomorrow’s small businesses and groundbreaking new apps. The act of an app economy already creating jobs and opportunity around the world. In June, a new study by the Analysis Group found that it was another record year for App Store developers, whose combined billings and sales increased by 24% to $643 billion in 2020. The app economy continues to be an incredible engine of prosperity and opportunity fueled by the ceaseless striving of developers to make apps that enrich people’s lives. Much like the developer community, we are diehard optimists about technology’s potential to help people live happier, healthier, and more fulfilled lives, goals that shine through with powerful new updates coming to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS this fall. That begins with innovative new features that help users stay connected with one another, like SharePlay and spacial audio for FaceTime, or disconnect when they need a break like Focus, which limits distracting notifications when you’re winding down for bed or concentrating at work. And new productivity features make iPad an even more useful tool for multitasking, helping users navigate across apps, split their screen, or use Quick Note to capture a thought, the moment inspiration strikes.
In the health space, our new health sharing feature will make it easier than ever to securely share your health data with loved ones. That includes new capabilities like walking steadiness, which uses sensors to assess a user’s stability doing everyday task and recommends exercises to improve stability and avoid a fall. In the belief that privacy is a fundamental human right, we shared new features in iOS 15 that continue to drive our progress forward, from mail privacy protection, which stops invisible pixels in an email from tracking your mail activity, to App Privacy Report, which helps users check on the apps they’ve granted permission to use their personal data. We also introduced some incredible next-generation technologies coming to the accessibility space. From Assistive Touch, which helps people with limb differences navigate Apple Watch, to new voiceover capabilities to help blind and low vision users, accessibility remains a bedrock principle for us in the simple belief that the best technology for the would should be the best technology for everyone.
But the responsibility to be a force for good in the lives of others extends beyond the technology we make so that teachers and students shaping our future. This quarter, as part of our racial equity and justice initiative, we awarded innovation grants to engineering schools at four historically black colleges and universities to expand their coursework, scholarships and internship opportunities in hardware engineering and silicon chip design. We see education as a great equalizing force and we’re more dedicated than ever to supporting the educators, advocates and students lighting the path and leading the way. That includes the 350 Swift Student Challenge Winners we recognized if this year’s WWDC. If you ever need a dose of hope or inspiration, I can’t say enough about our student scholarship winners, whose apps bring so much good into the world, from teaching other young people to code, to helping volunteers deliver groceries to people at high risk of COVID-19. Young people’s innovations remind us that our collective future is bound up in the next generation’s passion for solving global challenges and of the responsibility. We have to join them in building a better world.
Turning to our own backyard, we’re continuing to press forward in our efforts to help bring more affordable housing to the Bay Area and across California. This month, we shared that we’ve contributed more than $1 billion to help first time homeowners and construct thousands of new affordable housing units across the state. And we’re continuing to say focused on supporting the global response to the pandemic and delivering the best product and services for people.
Our greatest source of inspiration isn’t technology itself, but how people use it in their own lives in ways great and small. To write a novel or to read one. To care for an ailing patient, or see a doctor virtually. To track their heart rate on a jog, or to train for the Olympics. Every day, I’m grateful for the dedication of our teams to the simple mission of creating technology that improves people’s lives. And I want to thank everyone at Apple for the purpose and passion they bring to that mission.
With that, I’ll hand it over to Luca for a deeper dive on our performance this quarter.
Luca Maestri’s opening statement Thank you, Tim. Good afternoon, everyone. We’re very pleased to report record June quarter financial results, which reflect the importance of our products and services in our customers’ lives and our strong, underlying operating performance. Our revenue reached a June quarter record of $81.4 billion, an increase of nearly $22 billion or 36% from a year ago. We grew double digits in each of our product categories, with an all-time record for services and June Quarter records for iPhone, Mac, and Wearables Home and Accessories. We also set new June Quarter records in every geographic segment, with very strong double-digit growth in each one of them. Products revenue was a June quarter record of $63.9 billion, up 37% over a year ago. This level of sales performance combined with the unmatched loyalty of our customers drove our installed base of active devices to a new all-time record. Our services set an all-time revenue record of $17.5, billion up 33% over a year ago, with June quarter records in each geographic segment. Company gross margin was 43.3%, up 80 basis points from last quarter, driven by cost savings and a higher mix of services partially offset by seasonal loss of leverage. Products gross margin was 36%, down 10 basis points sequentially. A seasonal loss of leverage was almost entirely offset by cost savings. Services gross margin was 69.8%, down 30 basis points sequentially, mainly due to a different mix. Net income of 21.7 billion, diluted earnings per share of $1.30, and operating cash flow of $21.1 billion were all June quarter records by a wide margin.
Let me get into more detail for each of our revenue categories. iPhone revenues set a June quarter record of $39.6 billion, growing 50% year-over-year and exceeding our own expectations, as the iPhone 12 family continued to be in very high demand. Performance was consistently strong across the world, and we grew very strong double digits in each geographic segment, setting June quarter records in most markets we track. Our active installed base of iPhones reached a new all-time high thanks to the exceptional loyalty of our customer base and the strength of our ecosystem. In the U.S., the latest survey of consumers from 451 Research indicates iPhone customer satisfaction of 97% for the iPhone 12 family.
Turning to services, as I mentioned, we reached an all-time revenue record of $17.5 billion, with all-time records for cloud services, music, video, advertising, and payment services, and June quarter records for the App Store and AppleCare. Our newest service offerings, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, Apple Card, Apple Fitness+, as well as the Apple One bundle continue to scale across users, content, and features, and are contributing to overall services growth. The key drivers for our services business all continue to move in the right direction. First, our installed base of devices reached an all-time high across each geographic segment. Second, the number of both transacting and paid accounts on our digital content stores reached a new all-time high during the June quarter in each geographic segment and paid accounts increased double digits. Third, paid subscriptions continue to show strong growth. We now have more than 700 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 150 million from last year and nearly four times the number of paid subscriptions we had only four years ago. And finally, we’re adding new services that we think our customers will love while also continuing to improve the breadth and quality of our current services offerings. For example, during WWDC in June, we previewed our new iCloud Plus and Apple Wallet features, which we believe will create a more secure and differentiated customer experience.
Wearables, Home and Accessories grew 36% year-over-year to $8.8 billion, setting new June quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. We continue to improve and expand our product offerings in this category. This quarter, we began shipping our new Apple TV 4K with a redesigned Siri remote and our brand new AirTags, and the customer response to both products has been very strong. In addition to its outstanding sales performance globally, Apple Watch continues to extend its reach, with nearly 75% of the customers purchasing Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. For Mac, despite supply constraints, we set a June quarter record of 8.2 billion, up 16% over last year, with June quarter revenue records in most markets we track around the world. It is remarkable that the last four quarters for Mac have been its best four quarters ever. This exceptional level of sales success has been driven by the very enthusiastic customer response to our new Macs powered by the M1 chip, which we most recently brought to our newly redesigned iMac.
iPad performance was also strong with revenue of $7.4 billion, up 12% in spite of significant supply constraints. During the quarter, we also started shipping our new iPad Pro powered by the M1 chip and customer response has been outstanding. Both iPad and Mac have taken computing to the next level, and when you combine their performance over the last 12 months, they’re now the size of a fortune 50 business. Thanks to the best product lineups we’ve ever had. Very high levels of customer satisfaction and a loyal growing installed base. In fact, around half of the customers purchasing Mac and iPad during the quarter were new to that product. And in most recent surveys of U.S. consumers from 451 Research, customer satisfaction was 92% for Mac and 95% for iPad. In Enterprise, our customers are excited about the superior performance, battery life and security that the new M1 Macs bring. Mass Mutual for example, is offering M1 MacBook Pro to all of its employees and equipping all conference rooms with M1 Mac minis in preparation for return to work. And with its incredible performance and affordable entry price, the MacBook Air with M1 is gaining rapid adoption among many leading enterprise organizations. Italgas, Italy’s largest natural gas company, which will soon be using its extensive network to distribute renewable gases, is replacing every employee’s windows laptop with the new MacBook Air powered by Apple’s M1 chip to bring the latest technology to its workforce. And Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading SuperApp, that provides transportation, food delivery and digital payments services, is adding M1 MacBook Air to its company-wide M1 Mac deployment.
Let me now turn to our cash position. We ended the quarter with $194 billion in cash plus marketable securities. We retired $3 billion of term debt and increase commercial paper by $3 billion, leaving us with total debt of $122 billion. As a result, net cash was $72 billion at the end of the quarter. As our business continued to perform at a very high level, we’re also able to return $29 billion to shareholders during the June quarter. This included $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents and $17.5 billion through open market repurchases of 136 million Apple shares. We also began a $5 billion accelerated share repurchase program in May, resulting in the initial delivery and retirement of 32 million shares.
As we move ahead into the September quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information referred to at the beginning of the call. Given the continued uncertainty around the world in the near term, we’re not providing revenue guidance, but we are sharing some directional insights assuming that the COVID related impacts to our business do not worsen from what we are projecting today for the current quarter. We expect very strong double digit year-over-year revenue growth during the September quarter. We expect revenue growth to be lower than our June quarter year-over-year growth of 36% for three reasons. First, we expect the foreign exchange impact on our year-over-year growth rate to be three points less favorable than it was during the June quarter. Second, we expect our services growth rate to return to a more typical level. The growth rate during the June quarter benefited from a favorable compare, as certain services were significantly impacted by the COVID lockdowns a year ago. And third, we expect supply constraints during the September quarter to be greater than what we experienced during the June quarter. The constraints will primarily impact iPhone and iPad. We expect gross margin to be between 41.5 and 42.5%. We expect OPEX to be between 11.3 and $11.5 billion. We expect OI&E to be around zero, excluding any potential impact from the mark to market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16%.
Finally, today, our board of directors has declared a cash dividend of 22 cents per share of common stock payable on August 12th, 2021 to shareholders of record as of August 9th, 2021. With that, let’s open the call to questions.
Q&A Chris Kasmin, Raymond James: Just to dig into the commentary on guidance a little bit, starting with the fact that last year, obviously there was a later launch of iPhone than what we’ve typically seen in another years. Could you talk us through that and perhaps some of the other products, what may be different as compared to last year?
Maestri: First of all, we are expecting to grow very strong double digits, that’s the starting point here, we expect this very strong level of growth that we’ve experienced during the course of the year to continue into the September quarter. We said that the growth rate is going to be below 36% and I’ve listed three factors. The first factor is that the dollar continues to be favorable on a year-over-year basis in the sense that it’s weakened against most currencies on a year-over-year basis. But that benefit is going to be about three points less in the September quarter than what we’ve experienced during the June quarter, because the dollar strengthened against most currencies in recent weeks. Second, I mentioned that the services growth rate that we’ve experienced in the June quarter, 33%, that’s significantly higher than what we’ve had in recent history, and that was due to the fact that there were a couple of services categories, namely our advertising business and AppleCare that were significantly impacted a year ago because of the COVID lockdowns. And therefore they had a relatively easy compare in the June quarter. And so we don’t expect that to continue into the September quarter. And so we expect significant growth in services, but not to the level that we’ve seen in June. And then I mentioned that the supply constraints that we’ve seen in the June quarter will be higher during the September quarter. Back when we talked here three months ago, we said that we were expecting supply constraints for the June quarter, between $3 and $4 billion to affect primarily iPad and Mac. We were able to mitigate some of those constraints during the June quarter. And so we came in at a number that was slightly below the low end of that range that we had quoted at the beginning of the quarter, but we expect that number to be higher for the September quarter. And so when you put all that together, again, very strong double digit growth for September with this caveats that I just mentioned.
Chris Kasmin, Raymond James: With regard to the supply constraints, do you expect those supply constraints to persist through the December quarter as well? What effect will that have on the holiday selling season? And then in conjunction with that what additional costs are you absorbing because of these supply constraints? Is that having an effect on gross margins or just product cost in general, as you perhaps pay a little more to get more supply?
Cook: Chris, it’s Tim. In terms of the cost, we’re paying more for freight than I would like to pay. But component costs continue in the aggregate to decline. In terms of supply constraints and how long they will last, I don’t want to predict that today. We’re gonna take it sort of one quarter at a time. And as you would guess, we’ll do everything we can to mitigate whatever set of circumstances we’re dealt.
Maestri: And Chris, on the cost side, as I mentioned during my comments, our results for gross margins for the June quarter, 43.3%, we really saw some really nice cost savings during the quarter. And I think you’ve seen that we provided a guidance for 41.5 To 42.5 for September, which is obviously a level that we are very pleased with.
Jim Suva, CitiGroup: Tim and Luca, I just have one question and either of you, or both of you could figure out who’s best to answer it, but… We look at a world of pretty unprecedented, whether it be COVID, the Delta variant, China floods, supply chain components, just wondering for your like R&D and Innovation, is it being materially impacted by that such where a normal cadence is unfair or is it kind of happening during a slow time of year where you’re able to empower people to work remotely and still have the typical innovations and product launches that you’ve had historically in the past?
Cook: Jim, the company has been incredibly resilient. The employees are really doing double duty and I could not be more pleased with the cadence that we’re coming out with new things. As you can see from the software announcements that we made at WWDC and the corresponding launches of the software that we plan on in the fall, and then all of the products that we’ve been able to bring out over the last 12 to 18 months, it’s amazing. And so I’m very pleased with it.
Shannon Cross, Cross Research: Tim, I’m curious, what have you learned from this iPhone cycle regarding customer preferences and pricing and maybe subscriptions and that. And if there’s a difference, if you could talk about it, on a geographic basis.
Cook: You know, if you look at our results in Q3, Shannon, we had strong double digit growth for switchers and for upgraders. And in fact it was our largest upgrade quarter for a Q3 ever. And so we feel really great about both categories. And as Luca kind of said during the opening comments, our results are really strong for iPhone around the world. And so it’s been a very, very strong cycle, and yet the penetration on 5G is obviously still very, very low. And so we feel really good about the future of the iPhone.
Shannon Cross, Cross Research: Okay. And maybe if you can talk a bit about China—up 58%— where are you seeing the growth? What are you hearing from customers? Obviously 58% is not sustainable, but how sustainable is the strength?
Cook: It was an incredibly strong quarter. It set a June quarter revenue record for greater China for us. And so we’re very proud of that. And doing the best job we can to serve customers there. We had a particularly strong response to the 12 Pro and the 12 Pro Max. Those results were particularly strong, but if you look at the balance of our products, we also set June quarter records for wearables, home and accessories, for Mac, and for services. So it was sort of an across the board strength. And we’re seeing plenty of new customers come to the market. For example, Mac and iPad, about two thirds of the customers who bought in the last quarter were new to that product. For the Apple Watch that number was 85%. And so, yeah, we could not be happier with the results.
Shannon Cross, Cross Research: Was the 85% China or overall?
Cook: 85% was China. The numbers I reference were specifically for China
Maestri: And Shannon, for the world the watch is 75%.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Luca, I was hoping you could maybe talk a little bit more about the gross margins and maybe the expectations you laid out for September. I think sequentially, it implies it’s down a a hundred basis points or so, so what are the puts and takes, that would be helpful because I think historically September tends to be a flattish, maybe even up a little bit gross margin number for you folks.
Maestri: Yeah, I think it’s important to go back to the Q3 results, right? It’s 43.3%. And one of the things that I mentioned is that in addition to getting really good cost savings on a sequential basis, we also had a very high mix of services as part of the total. And particularly with advertising doing really, really well because of the rebound that we saw from from the COVID lockdowns a year ago. And so as we move forward sequentially, we do expect a different mix. And so that drives the guidance that we provided, which again, as you know, it’s significantly higher than just a year ago, for example. A year ago we were at 38.2%, so almost 400 basis points of expansion on a year-over-year basis, right? And so I think it’s important to take that into account. Just a different mix.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: I don’t think anyone expected gross margins to be north of 40 this quickly for you folks. So that is impressive. If I have a followup on services and I know you’ve called out the 33% growth this quarter as a bit of an aberration, the compares were easier. But if you look at your services growth rate over the last four quarters, let’s just say, what do you think is enabling this growth? Is it you are able to have a higher ARPU, more monetization of your installed base, or your installed base growing, I’m curious which one’s bigger. And then over time, how do you think those two components stack up for you?
Maestri: It’s a combination of multiple factors, right? Obviously, the fact that our installed base continues to grow and it sets new all-time highs all the time, obviously it gives us a larger opportunity all the time. And second, we add more and more people that are engaged in our ecosystem, both transacting for free, which is a very large number and people that are willing to pay for some of the services and that percentage of people that are paying for our services continues to grow nicely. I mentioned it grew double digits again this quarter, so that obviously helps on the revenue side. And of course we continue to increase both the quality and the quantity of the services. As you know, during the last few years, we’ve launched a lot of new services from Apple TV+, to Fitness+, Apple Arcade, News+. And of course the Apple Card. And so these are businesses that we are scaling right now, and so all that additional revenue helps. And I think it flows through our growth rates, as you said, during the last four quarters we are well into the mid twenties, right? So it’s obviously very nice for us to see.
Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley: There’s a debate in the market around how much Apple benefited from the pandemic given increased spend in areas like Mac and App Store. But of course, you’ve mentioned over the past several quarters that there are other areas that were limited by the pandemic and store closures and less foot traffic. When you net out all the puts and takes, was your business helped or was it hindered by the pandemic?
Maestri Well of course, we don’t have the crystal ball that tells us exactly what these different variables, how they impacted our business. We do know that on the positive side of the ledger, obviously, especially during the periods of extreme lockdowns, digital services did very well because entertainment options were limited. And so obviously our digital services did really, really well. Obviously with more people working from home, more people studying from home, we know that iPad and Mac demand was very, very strong. On the other side, we had certain services like advertising, because of the reduced economic activity, AppleCare, because our stores were closed, they were affected negatively. And certain products like the iPhone or the Watch that are maybe more complex types of sales because of the complexity of the transaction. They were also affected because so many points of sale were closed all around the world, not only our stores, but also our partner stores, right? So we had that dynamic throughout COVID. And now some of these businesses are rebounding. I mentioned advertising and AppleCare. IPad and Mac, it’s difficult for us to gauge because we’ve been constrained for quite a long period of time, and the reality is that maybe the new normal after we exit COVID may be different from the past. For example, maybe there’s going to be hybrid models around work, for example. And so it’s difficult to tell you on a net basis what that is. And this is very fluid, because it tends to change over time. I can certainly tell you that we’re all looking forward to a COVID-free world. I think that that would be very good for us and for our customers as well.
Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley: And just to follow up on iPhone specifically, if you look historically after a really strong product cycle, which you’ve experienced this year with iPhone 12, iPhone revenues come under pressure, because the upgrade rate slows, the mix often shifts to the lower end of the portfolio. Is it fair to assume a similar trend will play out over the next year? Or if not, what do you think is different this time.
Cook: Katy, it’s Tim. We’re not predicting the next cycle, but I would point out a few things. One is we have a very large and growing installed base. As you know, the iPhones passed a billion active devices earlier this year. Two, we have a loyal and satisfied customers. The customer sat that we’re seeing on the new iPhones is just amazing. It’s jaw dropping. And the geographic response is pervasive across the world. In the U.S., we have the top three selling models. In the UK we have four out of the top five. In Australia we have the top two, in Japan we have the top three, in urban China we have the top two. And so the, the response from customers all around has been great. Obviously the product itself is amazing. The 12 lineup was a huge leap that introduced 5G and had A14 Bionic and a number of other fantastic features that customers love. The next thing I think to consider is that we’re in the very early innings of 5G. If you look at 5G penetration around the world, there’s only a couple of countries that are in the double digits yet. And so that’s an amazing thing nine months or so into this. And the last thing is, we’re going to continue to deliver great products. We’re going to continue to do what we do best, integrate hardware, software, and services together into an amazing experience. And so those are the things that I would consider if I were coming up with a forecast.
Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley: That’s great color. Thank you.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Tim, this is actually perfect timing for this question. You talked about your installed base of a billion odd units. I was curious if you could help us understand how old that installed base is. And the reason that I’m asking this question is we’re clearly seeing people upgrade to 5G phones, and if that’s the case, and that continues, that could be a larger force than most other forces for your revenues to continue to grow as people migrate to the 5G family of phone. And so I was curious if you can shed light on how the upgrades are happening and then also how old that base is.
Cook: First of all, it’s difficult to answer your question precisely. But what I would tell you is on both switchers and upgraders, we did extremely well in Q3, both were up strong double digits and the geographic representation of iPhone year-over-year comps looks extremely well. And so we’re really pleased with it. I would remind you that the billion number that I quoted also was iPhone, where we quoted a number earlier in the year, in the January call I believe, of 1.65 billion devices is the total active devices, just for clarification. And so the net is, very strong switchers, very strong upgraders, best upgrade quarter for the June quarter that we’ve seen. And we feel really great about the momentum, but at the same time, we recognize that the 5G penetration is quite low around the world. Very, very low. We’re at the front end of this.
Harsh Kumar, Piper Sandler: Fair enough. Apple’s probably one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. How does Apple determine what’s strategic and something that Apple wants to make itself versus non-strategic? And also, I was curious, it’s public news now that ARM is getting acquired by Nvidia, and I’m just curious how Apple views that, is that something that’s beneficial to Apple or not meaningful or negative?
Cook: Well, I think that that acquisition has lots of questions that people are asking and I’ll sort of leave that up to everyone else. In terms of us and how we decide to make Silicon, we ask ourselves if we can do something better. If we can deliver a better product. If we can buy something in the market and it’s great, and it’s as good as what we could do, we’re going to buy it. We’ll only enter where we believe we have an ability to do something better and therefore make a better product for the user. And so the M1 is a great example of that. We have the ability within our Silicon team to deliver product that we feel is appreciably better than we could buy. And so we’ve taken our great hardware and software expertise and combined those and have brought the M1 out and the response to the M1 has been unbelievable. It’s powering Mac sales that are constrained. It’s powering, now, iPad, which also has constraints on it. And so that’s how we look at whether we should enter a market or not.
Krish Sankar, Cowen: Luca, uh, you mentioned, services growth should normalize in the September quarter. And I understand the last few quarters’ services business was strong, driven by work from home, etc. So what is a normalized growth rate for the services business as folks return back to the office in this post COVID world?
Maestri: Well, I think you can go back seven quarters and try to do a bit of an average, and that’s what we were talking about. Of course there’s always a bit of variability around results, right. But certainly we haven’t done 33% in years. And so that was a bit of an anomaly. And again, I explained it’s around a couple of the businesses that had a relatively easy compare during the June quarter. But our services growth as been for many, many quarters strong double digits and we feel confident around that level.
Krish Sankar, Cowen: I think, Tim, you mentioned in your prepared comments that in September quarter, there’s going to be greater impact on supply constraints on the iPhone and iPad. So I’m kind of curious—this is the first time I heard you talk about component shortages impacting the iPhone. Can you be more specific, is it display drivers or what exactly is the choke point on the supply?
Cook: The majority of constraints we’re seeing are of the variety that I think others are seeing that I would classify as industry shortage. We do have some shortages in addition to that, that are where the demand has been so great and so beyond our own expectation, that it’s difficult to get the entire set of parts within the lead times that we try to get those. And so it’s a little bit of that as well. As I said before, I think probably maybe where the basis of your question, sort of the latest nodes, which we use in several of our products, have not been as much of an issue. The legacy nodes are where the supply constraints have been on Silicon.
David Voight, UBS: Maybe just a point of clarification. So based on the data and the comments about upgraders and switchers being strong, as well as emerging markets were relatively strong in the quarter, what does that specific set of data points strength mean for the iPhone portfolio? And I guess my question around that is, when you think about switchers and price points, I think last year you launched the SE 2 to really address some of the lower price point markets like the emerging markets. So does that mean thinking about the portfolio going forward, there’s less of a need for a lower price product going forward and that the current portfolio and the new cycle going forward would be more high-end in nature as we currently have today.
Cook: Yeah, David we had an incredible quarter for the emerging markets in Q3. We set June quarter records in Mexico and Brazil and Chile and Turkey and UAE and Poland and Czech Republic. India. Obviously in China, as I talked about before. Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, I could go on to name a few more, it’s a very long list. Those results are for the entire line of products that we have. And keep in mind, we still do have SE in the line. We launched it a year ago, but it’s still in the line today. And, is sort of our entry price point. And so I I’m pleased with how all of them are doing and I think we need sort of that range of price points to accommodate the types of people that we want to accommodate. And so we’ve got something for the entry buyer who really wants to get into an iPhone and then something for the pro buyer who wants the very best iPhone that they can buy. And I think that’s true in the emerging markets as good as it’s true in the United States or other developed markets.
David Voight, UBS: So does that mean sort of the emerging market buyer that wants to get into the iPhone, is looking for a device that has 5G capability as well? Obviously we’re early innings in a lot of markets. Or how do we think about that intermediate to longer term in terms of consumer preference for 5G in those markets, if available from an infrastructure perspective?
Cook: In most of the markets I read, it is really, really, really early on 5g.Really early. But I think the top end buyer is buying for the future as well, because they may hold their phone for two years or longer in some cases. And so 5G becomes an important part of their buying decision.
Ben Bolin, Cleveland Research Company: Could you walk us through a little bit about how you think Apple One bundles are influencing the trajectory of services and the economics? And then a second part on services, I’m curious how you think IDFA is developing and influencing the trajectory of the advertising business within services.
Cook: In terms of Apple One, as you know we’re offering Apple One because it makes enjoying our subscription services easier than ever before, including Apple Music and Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade and iCloud and more. And so we really put the customer at the center of that and have recently begun to remind people about Apple One in a way that we probably waited a few months before doing that. And so I’m very pleased with what we’re seeing on Apple One right now and think it’s a great ramp for the future of services. And more importantly, it’s a great customer benefit because many of our customers like to try out more than one of these services, and it allows them to do that with one easy bundle and subscription service. In terms of IDFA or advertising in general. I take it your question is about ATT [App Tracking Transparency]. With ATT we’ve been getting quite a bit of customer reaction, positive reaction to being able to make the decision on a transparent basis about whether to be tracked or not. And, it seems to be going very well from a user point of view.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Luca, you noted significant product revenue de-leverage, but yet your product gross margins were roughly flat, you noted cost savings. Can you maybe talk about whether these are tactical in nature or more structural, like vertical integration, that’ll continue to drive benefits to product gross margins? And on services side, you noted several times about the strength in ad growth, which is obviously very high margin contributor, but the sequential trajectory on services margins was flat, so what were some of the offsets there?
Maestri: On the product side I talked about cost savings. Tim mentioned that maybe on the freight side, we’re seeing some level of cost pressure that is a bit out of the norm at this point in the cycle. For everything else, for all the major commodities and components, we continue to see a very typical cycle where we are getting good cost savings on a sequential basis. And so far it’s been very good, as you can tell from the absolute level of gross margins, because on the product side we’re up more than 600 basis points on a year-over-year basis. So it feels something that we’ve been able to accomplish and we were able to maintain at least in the near term, nothing that was abnormal during the quarter or a one-off in nature. It was pretty structural. On the services side. Again, up a lot on a year-over-year basis. So the baseline has gone up a lot. The sequential decline, as you said, it was very, very small. And as I mentioned several times in the past, we have a very large services portfolio with very different margin profiles in our services. And so even a slight change in mix can drive some sequential differences. And this was the case this quarter, just a different mix. I mentioned, for example, that AppleCare has rebounded. And so the relative success of our services in the marketplace can drive some slight changes in gross margins. Again, step back for a second, 69.8% gross margin, we’re very, very happy we’re where we are with the services margin trajectory.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: And Tim, there is increasing regulatory focus in China, in particular, on some of the Chinese companies. It’s not a direct impact to Apple, but how should investors handicap the indirect impact, given some of these companies are pretty large contributors to Apple’s app store revenues. And also, are you seeing any impact at all from these, and is the limiting of the usage of some of these apps influencing how people are either interacting with your devices or is there any other ancillary impact that you’re seeing?
Cook: Well, for the quarter, as you can see, we, we grew 58%. So it was a strong quarter and embedded in that was a quarterly record for services, which includes the App Store. And so, we’re seeing strength in China. The economy has really bounced back there fairly quickly from COVID. In terms of the regulatory focus, what we’re focusing on from our angle is to serve users there and try to make sure that they’re very satisfied with the products and the services that we’re showing. And we work with a lot of different companies to ensure that. And so that’s our focus.
Apple posted record third-quarter results on Tuesday, featuring $81 billion in revenue. Here are the charts….
Selecting and dragging some live text from an image on macOS Monterey.In a surprise twist, a macOS Monterey feature previously advertised as being available only on M1 Macs will now be available on Intel Macs as well.
The feature, Live Text, uses the Neural Engine on Apple-designed processors to convert text in images into text you can select and copy. But in the just-released fourth beta of macOS Monterey, Live Text has also been enabled on Intel Macs.
My understanding is that on Intel Macs, Apple is using GPU-based processing power to do the analysis of the images. Unlike iPhones and iPads, which are commonly used to take pictures which might immediately need to be analyzed for Live Text, on the Mac there’s a little more leeway for slightly less-than-instantaneous processing of text.
That said, my understanding is that Live Text—on M1 or Intel—is never intended to present any sign that you need to wait while text is being processed. The feature should be identical on both architectures.
It seems likely that this feature was original targeted for both architectures, and then disabled on Intel Macs in early betas because it just wasn’t good enough to release. Its appearance in this beta is perhaps a positive sign that Apple isn’t rushing Intel Macs into obsolescense.
(Live Text also gets my vote for this OS update cycle’s best stealth feature. It doesn’t seem like much when it’s described, but when you use a device with Live Text enabled, it changes how you see and interact with images. It’s instantly useful in numerous contexts.)
This week Myke and Jason join Netflix in pretending to be gamers while cable TV channels pretend to be streaming services. We also ponder a smarter Apple display, and Apple has designs on fancy Hollywood real estate. And Myke goes to the Streaming Services as we discuss “Loki” and the first episode of “Ted Lasso.”
Go to the podcast page.
Messages is likely the most used app on Apple’s platforms—especially iOS—and with our inability over the past year and a half to meet up with people in person, it’s probably become more popular.
iMessage, the Apple-created system that powers the modern day Messages app, is coming up on its tenth birthday this fall and it’s had quite the decade. In 2016, Apple said users sent roughly 200,000 iMessages per second; it’s not hard to imagine that, five years later, in a world more technologically connected than ever, that number has grown immensely.
But for all of the popularity of iMessage, and the company’s repeated addition of new features and capabilities, there are some places where Apple’s messaging system remains somewhat frustrating or even lackluster. For obvious reasons, Apple has a lot of vested interest in keeping the program stable and simple, and it can’t implement every possible feature, but a few pop out as things that can be improved, or even just more useful.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Listening to users, rejecting innocent apps, and self-inflicted Safari wounds.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Chaoji Li, developer of iDOS reports that the app has fallen afoul of Apple’s prohibition on executed code, and will probably be removed from the App Store (though it’s still available as of this writing):
The bottom line is that I can not bring myself to cut the critical functionalities of iDOS2 in order to be compliant with Apple’s policy. That would be a betrayal to all the users that have purchased this app specifically for those features. Existing users should still be able to download this app in your purchased history, however, if someday you can’t and the appstore [sic] says “removed by developer”, it’s definitely not my doing.
This is a damn shame and points, once again, to the flaws in Apple’s one-size-fits-all rulemaking. As the developer points out, iDOS runs code inside an emulation environment within the app sandbox, meaning that it’s not really a security risk. While you might be able to argue that it provides the opportunity to load objectionable content outside of the purview of the App Store…we’re talking DOS here, people. I don’t expect you’re going to find a lot of kids trawling the Internet to find an old version of Leisure Suit Larry to install. After they learn how to use DOS.1
Apple also points out that this could allow for the loading of unlicensed material that circumvents App Review, which, fair, I suppose, but again, we’re talking software that is decades old, most of which is probably classified as abandonware.
iDOS is an impressive app: heck, you can use it to install Windows 3.1 on an iPad. Wild! Apple should be in the position of celebrating the resourcefulness of its developers, not punishing them for pushing the limits of the platform.
Over the last few years, Apple has been advancing the narrative that the iPad is just as good as a traditional computer2, but if Apple is going to continue to dictate the boundaries of its capabilities by arbitrarily deciding what software can and can’t do on the platform, the truth is simple: this platform, good as it is, will never be as good as a computer. And Apple will have no one to blame but itself.
- DOS is by far the more objectionable content, amirite? ↩
- What’s a computer? ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
How we manage email spam, the tools we use that have changed how we complete tasks, tech decluttering, and how we fix privacy problems like Pegasus.
Go to the podcast page.
Last year, I wrote about how I built a bunch of scripts to notify me about my local air quality. Well, it’s summer again, and wildfires are back—and with wildfires comes polluting wildfire smoke.
It can be really useful to get a quick read on the outdoor air quality, especially if you’re considering whether it’s safe to go for a run or even open a window. Fortunately, in the intervening year a few apps have arrived on the scene to make it easier to do just that.
Clockwise from upper left: Breathable (medium), Breathable (small), Paku (Weather style), Paku (colorful), my own Scriptable widget, AirLookout (PurpleAir), AirLookout (AirNow).Breathable is an iOS app that creates a widget you can place on your iPhone or iPad. The widget is customizable via the app, including an option to display an emoji instead of an AQI number. That’s actually smart—it’s so easy to focus on the number, but it’s the gross quality level that’s important, not the specific number. (Unfortunately, Breathable doesn’t seem to be using the AQI adjustment calculation put out by the EPA to describe smoke from fires, so its numbers don’t quite match some other tools.)
Setting up Breathable isn’t simple, because it relies on two separate air-quality sources—and you as the user need to sign up for at least one of them.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
When Apple rolled out previews of the next versions of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS back in June, the most controversial aspect was the dramatic redesign the company gave to the Safari web browser. The new design sidelined much of the app’s user interface, choosing instead to prioritize web pages. And criticism has been fierce.
The good news is, based on the most recent preview releases of macOS, Apple is treating that Safari design more like a first draft than a final edition. Apple may not be going back to the drawing board with Safari 15, but it seems to be committed to listening to the criticism and making changes before the new design arrives on everyone’s devices this fall.
Safari isn’t just another app. I would argue that the web browser is the single most important app on just about any device, and on Apple’s devices, Safari reigns supreme. Sure, you can run other web browsers, but Apple would very much prefer all its users stick to Safari and would view any abandonment as a major embarrassment. The stakes are high.
With the latest beta releases, Safari on macOS has been left in a state that clearly can’t be the finished product—it’s a sign that Apple wants to show progress while still needing time to undo or tweak what it has done. On iPadOS, changes are in the works, but not visible yet. And on iOS, the new design feels a bit more entrenched but also still clearly in flux.
Continue reading on Macworld.
A few big stories in the news over the weekend disclosed the existence of a piece of spyware called Pegasus, developed by NSO Group, which has hacked a number of phones—including iPhones—belonging to journalists, politicians, activists, and so on. It’s frightening stuff, but should you be concerned?
The short answer: probably not? Tech Crunch’s Zack Whittaker linked to a tool that can help you check if your phone was compromised.
I downloaded and tried out the Mobile Verification Toolkit so you don’t have to and, well, it’s definitely not user friendly. I had to install some command line updates via Homebrew, which took a little bit of trial and error after the instructions proved to not be exactly correct for my system, then had to make a decrypted copy of my iPhone backup, plus had to make sure I’d downloaded the correct definitions file to compare it to.
In the end, it popped up warnings about a couple dozen cases where my web browsing in Safari had been redirected, all of which appeared to be innocuous (things like being redirected from strw.rs to starwars.com), and one warning of a “known malicious file” that appeared to be a Crash Reporter preference file.1
The Mobile Verification Tool for iOS.That’s not surprising to me, given that even with the widespread nature of this spyware, since, again, it seems to generally be of concern to those who are high-profile opponents of hostile regimes or companies. The average user is probably not going to be the target of very expensive and resource-intensive attacks like these.
However, it should still be of some concern that spyware now exists which can use previously unknown exploits to compromise a device without requiring users to take any action. That’s a new level of capability that, for obvious reasons, makes it difficult to take steps to protect yourself: you can’t even avoid opening suspicious links, for example.
The exploit was confirmed to work on iOS 14.6; as of this writing, Apple has not yet posted the details of the security updates in iOS 14.7, released yesterday, so it’s unclear whether or not this exploit still works. (One would hope that the timing of stories about it were concurrent with the vulnerability being patched, but it entirely depends on when Apple learned of it.)
Phones remain attractive targets, given the amount of personal data we keep on them, so there’s going to be more and more money and resources poured into finding ways to compromise them. Here’s hoping the companies that make them can keep up.
- From what I can tell, Pegasus can try to disable Apple’s Crash Reporter, which involves writing said file, but given that I didn’t see any other flags, I think this is a case where that file was probably created for separate, legitimate reasons. ↩
I updated my perennial “The right Mac laptop to buy for a student” story today, two years to the day since I last updated it.
It’s funny how that story has evolved since I first posted it. In 2017 the answer was “Wow, it’s complicated, no choice is really great.” In 2019 it was “Now that it’s Retina, the MacBook Air is probably the choice despite the keyboard.”
In 2021 the answer is easy. It’s the M1 MacBook Air. That’s it, that’s the answer. Clear as a bell.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Sliding down a string of lanterns in the Lost City.On July 16 Team Alto1 released Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City on Apple Arcade. It’s a sequel of sorts to Alto’s Odyssey, released three years ago on the App Store.
In both games, you’re a sandsurfer endlessly sliding down mountainsides, doing backflips and grinding on cables and ruins for points while collecting coins and other items hidden along your path. Yes, it’s an “endless runner” of a sort—but what makes it special is its relatively simple mechanic and its gorgeous graphics and music, which end up making the game much more peaceful and calming than you’d expect.
And let me put my cards on the table: Alto’s Odyssey is my favorite iOS game ever.
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City is the original brought to a new audience via Apple Arcade—but with a new biome, featuring new graphics, music, and challenges. If you’re a newbie to Alto’s Odyssey, you can play the entire game from the beginning and get the whole experience. If you’re a veteran like me, there’s a button you can tap in the app’s settings to import all of your information from Alto’s Odyssey, letting you concentrate on the added content and challenges of the new game.
It’s still great. As a fan of the PlayStation game Journey (available on iOS, by the way), I’m amused by just how many homages to that game are contained within Alto’s Odyssey. The music and graphics in the original game were immaculate, but The Lost City just adds more.
Yes, the Lost City is beautiful at night, too.When you arrive at the Lost City biome—which requires you to find ten map fragments scattered across the sands—you’ll see new background images, be able to interact with a few new object types, and of course the music will shift, too. Rather than add on to the old game’s existing level system, Team Alto has also introduced a new set of challenges, which you pick up as you explore. In a new mechanic, you can only “arm” a single challenge at any time, so there’s a single task you are trying to accomplish as you slide, flip, and grind.
And of course, there’s still Zen Mode, which lets you enjoy the sound and sights of this beautiful game without having to worry about scores or the game ending when you crash. I find it therapeutic. I wish more games would embrace the “you can’t lose, we’re just here to have a good time” ethos in more places.
When I completed my final tasks on Alto’s Odyssey, it was a bittersweet ending: I had conquered the game, but it also felt like a goodbye to something I loved. I’ve revisited the game a few times over the last couple of years, usually in Zen mode. Discovering The Lost City has given me a reason to revisit an old favorite, and I’m so glad I did.
And I’m also glad that Apple and Team Alto found a way to bring this game—plus a little bit extra—to a new audience. If you’ve got Apple Arcade, drop everything and get to the sandy slopes of Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City.
- Team Alto is a collaboration between development studios Snowman and Land & Sea. ↩
Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 14.0, a new version with a whole bunch of new features. (Even the oldest software dogs are fully capable of learning new tricks.)
BBEdit notes are persistent, auto-saved text files.The biggest new feature in BBEdit is Notes, a persistent collection of casual documents. Yes, there are other places you can leave yourself notes—but those places aren’t BBEdit. As a BBEdit user, I frequently find myself with a very large number of untitled documents full of stuff. Notes are the solution, since they’re automatically saved and viewable in a new Notes browser. Just as I was writing this story, I ended up on a phone call and needed to take some notes. Rather than naming and saving the file somewhere or switching to a different app, I just opened a note in BBEdit (where I was already writing) and took notes there.
For programmers, the biggest BBEdit 14 addition is support for the Language Server Protocol, a standard originally developed by Microsoft for Visual Studio Code and now available for pretty much any developer tool out there. Different editors can access a local language server to provide consistent autocompletion, definitions, and documentation. It’s still a bit early days for LSPs, both within BBEdit and without. I used the Python language server Jedi and sometimes it worked flawlessly, but other times it was a bit buggy. My understanding is that many of these language servers are still built with some very specific development tools in mind and that there may be bugs when trying to use them with a tool they didn’t even know about, like BBEdit. But I would be shocked if this wasn’t all working a lot better a few months down the road, now that BBEdit 14 is out in the world.
As someone who has been experimenting with writing code in Python, JavaScript, and PHP, I am intrigued by the LSP features but also am not the best person to judge how well they’re implemented. But I love the idea that BBEdit is trying to play ball with tools that are popularly used in other development tools—and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to use the feature more in the future.
In the meantime, most of what I edit in BBEdit is in Markdown. Maybe someone will decide it’s time to make a linter/syntax checker for Markdown, designed for BBEdit’s new features.
But there are some new Markdown features, regardless! Dragging an HTML file or an image into BBEdit will now generate appropriately formatted Markdown. Markdown footnotes are now properly syntax colored, for those monsters who put footnotes in their Markdown.1
Also, a new feature that I inspired makes its debut: BBEdit now lets you attach a script in order to provide control over the text generated when you drop an image file into a BBEdit editing view. In short, I have modified the AppleScript script that I use to upload images to Six Colors so that if I drag an image into my story in BBEdit, the image is automatically resized, uploaded, and the proper HTML is inserted at that point in the document. (It’s magical.)
Resizing and uploading an image is now a drag-and-drop process for me.A BBEdit 14 license is free for users who bought BBEdit this year, $30 for those who bought it last year, $40 for users of older versions, and $50 for brand-new purchasers. And of course, a large swath of BBEdit’s features are available for free without a license.
- I resemble that remark. ↩
Jason’s back, and Myke has a lot of questions about his vacation. They also discuss a load of Apple TV+ news, new Safari betas, the MagSafe battery pack, and a bunch of Apple hardware rumors.
Go to the podcast page.
Amongst Apple’s latest spate of updates today is HomePod 14.7, which brings as its biggest feature the ability to view and control timers set on the HomePod from the Home app. Which all HomePod owners can probably agree merits a big “finally“.
Now, when you tap and hold on your HomePod to bring up the media controls, and then scroll up, past all the alarms you’ve ever set, you can find a list of your current timers—including their names, if they have one—as well as current time remaining, plus the ability to pause, resume, or cancel. You can also create new timers via the Home app.
Why aren’t currently running timers in all this empty space?This is all, frankly, great. It’s been one of my most wished-for features.
Unfortunately, it’s both too late and much too little.
For one thing, why are the timers forced to be buried all the way below the alarms? I use timers way more than I use alarms; I should at least be able to rearrange them to put alarms closer to the top.
And for that matter, why are the timers not surfaced anywhere else in the UI? I have a HomePod in my kitchen, but if I go to the Kitchen room in the Home app when my timer is running, why does seeing the current time remaining require tapping and holding on the HomePod, and then scrolling down? Apple’s done better about picking out relevant details, like information from sensors, and presenting them at the top of the interface. Timers should be there too.
While we’re on the subject, how come my different HomePods still aren’t aware of timers set on other HomePods? If I ask my office HomePod about a timer I set in the kitchen, it sure would be handy for it to tell me that I’ve got two minutes left for my tea to steep, instead of the very unhelpful “there are no timers set.” I’d like to see any current running timers on my iPhone lock screen and my Apple Watch too, to be honest. It’s a far cry from a unified home system.
Perhaps most annoyingly, when a timer is going off it no longer appears in the Home app interface, meaning that to stop a timer, you still have to shout at Siri, even if you’re halfway across the house. This is just a bizarre choice.
In short, months after Apple discontinued the HomePod and focused its sights on the HomePod mini, the company still doesn’t seem to have a clear vision for how exactly consumers use smart home tech. It continues to view the HomePods primarily as places where people play music, as evidenced by opening the HomePod in the Home app: 97 percent of the interface is music, with “Alarms” juuuust peeking out at the bottom so you know that there’s other stuff you can do.
Rumors of a homeOS appearing at WWDC were dashed, but here’s hoping that amongst Apple’s fall announcements is a revitalized and, well, better home system. Glad as I am that HomePod 14.7 improves timers, it just puts in stark relief how frustrating Apple’s home strategy—or, more accurately, lack thereof—is.
To paraphrase the immortal words of Smash Mouth, the tech starts coming and it don’t stop coming. Every year seems to bring a new set of Apple devices, replete with a host of features, some of which seemed practically impossible previously. But such is the way of progress! It marches ever forward.
The difficulty, as always, is in figuring out exactly which technological advances will find their way into future products. More often than not, these novel approaches are expensive or impractical, especially if you’re shoving them into something as small as a smartphone or a watch.
But sometimes you can trace the trajectory of these developments to see just how they might end up in an Apple device—and perhaps even get an idea of when.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Those apps? They’re a widget! 🤯Siri gets a lot of flack from Apple device users—and it’s often well deserved. The voice assistant’s performance is generally spotty, sometimes downright recalcitrant, and—in my house anyway—tends to evoke frustrated yelling.
But Apple has long been using Siri as the catchall for its various artificial intelligence and machine learning ventures, and much as it may surprise you to hear me say it: some of them are actually pretty great.
For the last year, I’ve been relying on one specific use of these machine learning technologies: the Siri Suggestions widget on iOS and iPadOS.
Widgets were, of course, a big hit when iOS 14 was released last year, allowing users to customize their home screens with not just app icons but data pulled from their favorite apps.
But the Siri Suggestions widget has proved to be a valuable, if overlooked, addition as well.
Many people have probably used Siri Suggestions without even realizing it: if you’ve noticed the apps and actions that appear when you swipe down to bring up Spotlight on your iPhone or iPad, that’s Siri Suggestions.
Essentially, Siri Suggestions learns from your behavior and tries to predict various apps and tasks that you do at specific times, locations, and so on.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Podcasting has been an important part of my life for more than a decade now; these days, I make roughly half my income from the various shows that I host and produce. That’s why it’s so frustrating when Apple, the de facto leader in podcast discovery, seems to have screwed up what was once its biggest asset in favor of trying to capitalize on a new feature.
Back in April of this year, Apple announced plans to roll out Podcast Subscriptions, which would allow creators to monetize their podcasts with subscriptions that can be purchased directly in the Apple Podcasts app. The company’s Podcasts app is one of the biggest podcast clients in the industry, thanks to Apple’s longstanding position as the most prominent directory of shows and the fact that the app is preinstalled on every iOS device.
Unfortunately, when Apple started rolling out the podcast subscription feature, it came with a (presumably unintended) side effect: new podcast episodes sometimes don’t show up. Back in May, Jason speculated about some of the possible causes, the most likely culprit being Apple changing how it handles podcasts behind the scenes.
But more than two months later, this problem persists. Just this week, I’ve received multiple emails, direct messages, and Twitter replies mentioning that the latest episodes of several of my shows simply aren’t showing up in the Apple Podcasts app. Sometimes it seems to vary by platform or region. Other shows that I’ve put out in the same time period show up as normal. It’s maddeningly inconsistent. And I’m certainly not alone in this, either; when I asked in a Slack community of podcasters if there was anything to do about this other than throw up my hands in frustration, several other hosts could offer nothing but sympathies.
But all of this points to a very serious root issue: a loss of reliability.
My Star Wars podcast, A Complicated Profession, shown in Apple Podcasts (left) and on The Incomparable website (right). The July 12 episode finally appeared on July 16.The previous incarnation of Apple’s podcasting management tools wasn’t particularly amazing, and at times the system worked in ways that felt capricious and arbitrary.1 But those frustrations have largely hit creators, while the service has generally remained reliable for end users. And given that it’s always been a free service, most creators shrugged and took a “you get what you pay for” mentality.
But the problems with reliability cropped up right around the time that Apple also decided that there was money to be made on podcasts. And much as this might benefit creators, Apple also gets to take its usual 30 percent cut. Awkward.
Apple Podcasts (left) and the Relay FM website (right). The July 14 episode has not yet appeared in the former.The bottom line is that it’s a shame that Apple’s addition of a monetization feature has ended up damaging its reputation amongst podcast creators. Consumers, at least, can turn to a different podcast app like Overcast, Castro, or Pocket Casts, all of which seem to have no problem displaying the latest episodes of shows. But some won’t even know that’s an option and, as a result, shows may lose out on listeners and, in some cases, revenue.
As I said above, I do make money from podcasting—just not via Apple’s subscriptions. And it’s started to feel uncomfortably like Apple doesn’t care about podcast creators livelihoods’ unless it’s also getting a cut.
Unfortunately, the options for creators are limited since pulling up stakes on Apple Podcasts—still the place most people find podcasts—is a non-starter. But with competitors like Spotify and Amazon pushing into the market, this doesn’t help Apple’s reputation any. It’s probably not the tipping point that will drive people to abandon Apple’s podcast platform, but it’s another drop in the bucket.
Perhaps, looking back over nearly two decades of Apple stewardship in podcasting, I was naive in thinking that the company’s aims in supporting the free distribution of podcasts were at all altruistic. Maybe they started that way, but at some point, Apple decided it could make podcasting another revenue generator to add into its growing Services portfolio.
I’d like to be proved wrong about this, but I haven’t seen any direct acknowledgment from Apple about this issue over the last two months, much less any indication of what went wrong and how it plans to fix it. And even if Apple does deal with these particular examples2, it doesn’t give me confidence that I won’t run into the problem in the future with these or other shows—or that other creators wouldn’t encounter it as well. That lack of reliability is hardly a recipe for success or trust.
- I once couldn’t get a show’s artwork changed for months on end because of a minor formatting/hosting problem. ↩
- The latest episode of A Complicated Profession finally appeared between the writing of this post and its publication. ↩
We’re back from vacation and in need of network administration.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
The input devices we use, how much of our work happens in the cloud, form vs. function in our tech purchases, and the details that Apple sweats (and the ones it doesn’t).
Go to the podcast page.
Apple’s continuing to build out its MagSafe accessory market by releasing a $99 battery pack that uses the company’s magnetic charging feature. Just slap it on the back of your iPhone 12/12 mini/12 Pro/12 Pro Max and it’ll automatically charge it to the tune of 5W (basically the equivalent of the standard iPhone USB-A charger). The battery pack’s power level is shown in the iOS battery widget.
How do you charge the Battery Pack? Unsurprisingly, it’s got a Lightning port on it, so you just charge it a Lightning-to-USB cable connected to a USB adapter to charge at 15W, or up to 20W with a USB-C adapter. And, very handy, you can charge both devices by attaching the Lightning cable to either the phone or the battery pack. That way, you can still connect your phone to another device like a Mac or a CarPlay unit and charge the battery pack.
The battery pack is compatible with cases that support MagSafe, like Apple’s own, but the company says that if you use a wallet case, remove your credit cards before attaching the battery pack.
The good news is that, theoretically, any future iPhone that supports MagSafe will work with the battery pack, which is a leg up on battery cases, which you generally have to change whenever the form factor of the phone changes. The downside is, if you’re looking to pick one up, you’d better like white—it’s the only color it’s available in.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I’ve been watching and enjoying Loki, but one of the most fun parts of the show is the design and aesthetic of the Time Variance Authority offices. It’s just dripping with a ’60s feel, with retro technology that feels like it is (appropriately) from an entirely separate timeline.
The Verge has an interview with production designer Kasra Farahani, in which they delve into this specific aspect, and it’s definitely worth a read.
According to the series’ style guide, the all-powerful TVA has been able to pick and choose different technologies from different timelines as they please. “The conceit behind the technology at the TVA as we imagined it was that… digital technology never existed, and that analog technology just continued to get more and more sophisticated,” he says.
It’s relatively light on spoilers, but if you’d rather wait until the end of the show to read, well, good news: the series wraps up tomorrow.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Like many of you, I generally feel that I pay a lot for internet access and it’s not as good as I’d like. But it’s tricky sometimes to draw data from that feeling. Which is why Consumer Reports and The Verge have teamed up to collect actual numbers about internet prices and performance—and they’d like your help.
Head over to the Consumer Reports site; they’ll run a quick speed test to see what your performance is actually like, and then ask for a copy of your internet bill. (Which, of course, they will handle carefully and delete after pulling the relevant information.)
Many geographic regions have monopolies or little competition when it comes to internet access, and over the last year of working/living/school from home, it’s become increasingly apparent that broadband infrastructure is not only lagging behind, but is also unevenly distributed. If you’ve ever felt burned by the limited internet options available to you, then this might be one way to help at least provide hard data supporting that.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
After a few tips from Harry McCracken on Twitter, retro tech genius Benj Edwards has created detailed instructions on how to run Windows 3.1 on the iPad:
Thanks to a MS-DOS emulator called iDOS 2 on the App Store, you can install Microsoft Windows 3.1 on your iPad—then play classic Windows games or simply shock your friends. Here’s how to set it up.
This is sick and wrong and also brilliant. (And if you’re missing the TRS-80, well, Harry figured that one out too.)
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
For the first time Jason is (mostly) off this week! After discussing who’s winning the streaming wars, Myke challenges John Siracusa to describe his ideal Mac, asks Merlin Mann to share what he’s excited about, and answers a #myketalk from Jay Miller. But don’t worry, lasers return later on.
Go to the podcast page.
Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo has more details on the fake phones the FBI seeded amongst criminals:
Two different interfaces would launch depending on what PIN you typed in on the lock screen. PIN one would show a bunch of popular but non-functional apps, like Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Candy Crush. Presumably, this was meant to fool any third parties checking out your phone.
A second PIN would enter what was supposed to be the secure section of the phone, showing three apps: a clock, calculator, and the settings. From here, the “calculator” app actually opened a login screen to Anom, which targets were told was a secure, encrypted way to chat. This was basically the smartphone equivalent of a fake book triggering a bookshelf to slide over, revealing a secret passage. It’s so secret, it has to be secure!
I love this story so much. It kind of reminds me of the “secret” games and programs you could install on your graphing calculators back in the day.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
FB9299101
Recent Similar Reports: None
Resolution: Open
Please provide a descriptive title for your feedback: Mail toolbar should provide single-tap icon for clipboard paste.
Please describe the issue and what steps we can take to reproduce it:
Mail offers buttons to add photos, take a photo, adjust fonts, scan a document, insert a file, or use Markup — but if you want to paste text from the clipboard you have to find it under a submenu that’s shared with undo/redo.
This makes no sense. If there’s room for esoteric items like “use the camera to scan documents,” why is there no room for pasting text? It’s a task that should not require two taps.
Related: Hiding paste and cut under an undo/redo submenu makes no sense. They are not related at all. I’d recommend hiding as little as possible under submenus, but if you must, please group like items together.
(Note: You may argue that this is easily solved by invoking the three-figure gesture to paste text. If unknowable gestures are good interface design, I recommend removing all icons and toolbars from iOS and replacing them with an entirely gestural interface. [I do not actually recommend this.] But if you think toolbars are a good idea, because it’s nice to have functions available with a single tap, why hide pasting text in a junk drawer designed for undo and redo?)
Longtime MacUser and Macworld contributor Chris Breen works at Apple these days, and so he can’t write about tech anymore. Mostly. But for years, first at Macworld and now on his own blog, he has been detailing the horror of trying to get fast Internet in the remote Bay Area location where he lives.
Things are getting worse, not better:
AT&T wants out of the DSL business. So. Badly. DSL is slow (though AT&T could make it faster), it’s outdated, and it’s creaky and requires routine servicing. You can see why the company wants to move its customers to fiber. That desire, however, doesn’t extend to actually providing fiber to the rural hayseeds.
And they’re doing it by revoking third-party access to their DSL circuits, forcing those customers into the AT&T family because they rarely have any other option, and then charging outrageous prices for lousy speeds.
A whole lot of people in the U.S. are not able to get good Internet connections. They remain invisible to most, because those of us who write about this stuff are rarely the ones affected. I always appreciate hearing from Chris, and while I hope he gets fast Internet someday, his posts are a good reminder that not everyone has gigabit fiber at the ready.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We’re both sitting on a beach drinking a cold beverage this week. (But not the same beach.)…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Pokémon Go, our biggest tech gear ROI, the tech we take on vacation, and whether we’d rather have a time machine or a transporter.
Go to the podcast page.
I recently had to go back to my Series 5 Apple Watch after my Series 6 met an untimely end when I slid down a waterfall at a state park on family vacation. I was fine, but my watch’s glass face met an underwater rock, and uhhh… it did not survive.
When I got home, I grabbed my Series 5 off the shelf, knowing I didn’t have time to deal with having my Series 6 repaired and didn’t want to be without an Apple Watch, as I’ve recently begun using the watch in a major way after we spent some time apart.
Getting my old Series 5 back up and running was a real journey.
First, I had to unpair the shattered Series 6 from my iPhone. While its display was a loss, my watch was still functional enough for this process to take place. Unpairing is an important step when changing Apple Watches, as that is when a backup is made of the device.
Setting up an Apple Watch from scratch is a lot faster than most other Apple devices, but I was hoping to avoid that hassle. Here’s how Apple explains it:
When you unpair your Apple Watch from your iPhone, the watch is backed up completely to your iPhone to make sure that the latest data is saved.
… This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
David Sparks finds a glimmer of hope for the future of Apple Mail in Apple’s new MailKit plug-in interface for the Mac:
There is already a rich ecosystem of Apple Mail plugins, but I’ve become increasingly leery about using and recommending them during recent years. My concern was that Apple could, at any point, pull the plug on Apple Mail plugins.
A few years ago, I talked to an Apple engineer at WWDC who explained that mail plugins, historically at least, represented a security vulnerability, and Apple is very much interested in removing any security holes. The good news is that the announcement of MailKit means Apple is not pulling the plug on plugins but instead found a safe way for them to continue while keeping the platform secure.
Sometimes it’s the little things. I desperately want Apple to do more with Mail, but adding a modern plug-in interface (that, dare I say it, might one day even show up on iOS?) gives me some hope that if Apple isn’t interested in extending Mail, maybe plug-in developers can do the job in a way that’s secure, stable, and built for the future.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I know you’ve heard it a million times before, so many times that you skim past it when you read it. And you’ll probably do it again this time, but I’ve got to try. I’m looking out for your best interests here.
However much you’re backing up your Mac, you’re probably not backing it up enough.
Last week my friend Antony lost nearly a week of productivity to a dead drive in his iMac. Fortunately, he was able to recover every one of his files thanks to various backup strategies.
Similar to my Drobo crash of early 2020, Antony’s use of Time Machine and Backblaze allowed him to get up and running with a minimum of pain. It’s an important point that doesn’t get enough attention: you aren’t backing up enough.
Time Machine comes on every Mac, and all it needs is a big disk to back up to. (It says automatic backups are off because I’m using TimeMachineEditor to schedule them.)Start with Time Machine. Apple builds it into every Mac, and thanks to the arrival of APFS and changes in macOS Big Sur, it’s a lot less painful to use than it used to be. Buy a drive that’s bigger than your Mac’s hard drive and attach it to your Mac regularly. If you use a desktop, you can get a big SSD and tape it to the back of your display, where you’ll never have to look at it. If you use a laptop, either you’ll need to get into the habit of plugging a backup drive in, attach the backup drive to another Mac on your network, or tape the backup drive to the back of your laptop. Hopefully not the last one. Since my Mac mini server is on my network at all times, my iMac and my wife’s MacBook Air both back up over the network to the Mac mini server via Time Machine.
Time Machine backups are great for retrieving a file you didn’t mean to delete or reverting an unfortunate app update you immediately regretted approving. They’re great for wiping a computer and starting fresh or for restoring a dead computer. The problem is that Time Machine backups are located in your house, which means that if something bad happens to not just your Mac but your whole house, you’re out of luck. Also, depending on how big your backup drive is, your ability to retrieve older files may fade away quickly as Time Machine frees up space for new backups.
Backblaze is backing up my entire server (8TB!) to the cloud.The solution to all this is to pay for an online backup service. After years of using CrashPlan, I switched to Backblaze a couple of years ago, and it’s gone well. For the most part, Backblaze backs up my data silently, and I never notice it. But when my drive died last year, I was able to download individual files from the backup immediately and have them ship me a USB hard drive of my enormous data set so that I could restore it. If my local backup wasn’t available—for example, in the case of a natural disaster—all my data would still have been safe in Backblaze.
Consider, too, that you might have a bunch of cloud storage space that you’re not using. I store almost all of my current working files in Dropbox, where they’re backed up and versioned. This means that if I save a file and then my computer explodes a minute later, it’s all safe in the cloud. Cloud storage is a nice refuge.
ARQ Backup uses extra cloud space and also manages periodic local backups of all my server files.But if you’re like me, you may also have an enormous amount of cloud storage space that you’re not using. I had a bunch of Dropbox space and even more OneDrive space because I pay for Office 365. So I bought a copy of ARQ Backup and used it to back up my most important files to my cloud storage space that I’m already paying for and not using. I’m also using ARQ to back up my RAID to two large hard drives when I connect them to the server, which I do every week or two.
Carbon Copy Cloner backs up regularly to an external drive on the back of my iMac.Finally, I keep a drive plugged into my iMac and my Mac mini server that makes a daily duplicate of the entire drive. Because you can never have enough backups—especially ones you can boot from on a different Mac in a pinch. For this task, you can take your pick of two wonderful apps: Shirt Pocket Software’s SuperDuper and Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner. My server backs up its small internal SSD to a small SSD connected via USB every day using SuperDuper. My iMac backs up to a larger SSD tucked into its VESA mount every day using Carbon Copy Cloner.
Extreme? Yes. But even when I was backing up using Time Machine and Backblaze alone, I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t be sure that all my files would be available in case of an emergency. You probably don’t need to use all of these techniques—but however many methods you’re using today, I urge you to consider layering in an additional one! You might never need it—but it only takes one bad day to wipe out years of work.
As much fun as it is to see Apple roll out updates to its major platforms every summer, it’s always a slightly bittersweet experience. Even though there are new features and shiny things galore to pore over, there seems to be some software that is left shivering in the cold rain, their faces plastered against the window while newer features are showered with love and adulation.
Of course, Apple’s platforms are so expansive these days that the company can’t possibly update each and every app on a yearly basis. But even so, there are a few that seem to perpetually languish, year over year, to the point that one wonders if Apple forgot about them, while others get updates of dubious necessity. More frustratingly, some of those very apps are ones that users rely on day in and day out. Apps that may not be exciting, but are definitely necessary.
As we continue to comb through the fallout from this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, it’s worth taking a look at some of the apps that Apple didn’t make substantial changes to and which could maybe use a little bit of care and attention of their own.
Continue reading on Macworld.
Presenting Upgrade 360, a new program designed to improve your podcast listening experience by letting you choose the level of podcast quality you wish to receive. Perhaps you want to hear us talk about the podcast bubble without any audio artifacts! Maybe you’d like our discussion of the macOS Public Beta to be delivered at a shockingly low bit rate! It’s the same old Upgrade, but delivered in a few new ways—plus the usual way, we should be clear it’s also just being delivered the usual way.
Go to the podcast page.
In the second edition of Mark German’s excellent Bloomberg newsletter, he details that Apple is actively exploring new ways of work that don’t circle around Cupertino:
Just a few years after completing the multibillion-dollar Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California, Apple Inc. is ramping up efforts to decentralize out of Silicon Valley. I’m told that executives at the highest levels of the company recognize that hiring and retaining talent will be one of the biggest challenges to its future success, and reducing its reliance on the Valley is a key step in mitigating that issue.
Apple has traditionally operated on the principle that ambitious technologists yearn for a place in Silicon Valley where they can put their mark on the next iProduct. The company’s top brass for years fought against decentralization. But that thinking has changed for several reasons based on what I’ve heard from Apple employees.
Spreading outside of Silicon Valley is smart. The question is, will the company embrace remote work and geographically dispersed workgroups as some of its competitors have, or will it just set up groups for in-person work in different cities?
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
One of the features I’m most excited about in Apple’s latest platform updates is the ability to save two-factor authentication codes into my iCloud Keychain. That means (hopefully) no more having to jump to a separate app—or even a separate device!—just to get one of those good old six-digit codes.
To date, I’ve relied upon Authy, an excellent app that not only makes it easy to store all those disparate account credentials, but also syncs them between devices as well as letting you back them up and easily restore them when you move to a new device. In fact, Authy made it so easy that whenever I could enable 2FA, I did. As a result, I have more than 30 accounts with two-factor codes.
So what I was not looking forward to was migrating all those codes from Authy to Apple’s new password system, a process that promised to be mind-numbing in the extreme, since I figured I would have to essentially log into each account, disable two-factor authentication, and then re-enable it. To boot, since Apple’s new platforms are in beta, it seemed like I should probably make sure Authy continues to work, just in case something goes wrong, which means doing the setup process twice.
Nice as it would be if Apple’s new system could simply import all your codes from Authy—or other apps like Google Authenticator—it doesn’t seem as though that’s an option for that at present, which isn’t entirely surprising given the security issues involved. (There is an import password option for Apple’s new system, but it’s mainly aimed at other browsers or password managers.)
The new password manager in the Safari Technology PreviewHowever, I found a couple of things that helped me speed up the process, shifting it from mind-numbing to purely tedious. First, Apple’s recently released Safari Technology Preview for Big Sur includes the new password manager, so you don’t have to upgrade to the macOS Monterey beta to get it. (Or deal with the iOS/iPadOS versions, which are a little more cumbersome.)
Second, I found a tip that lets you easily display all of your time-based one-time password (TOTP) setup keys from Authy using the Authy Desktop app for Mac and Google Chrome.
The end result was that I spent about an hour laboriously copying each setup code into the appropriate password entry in the Safari Technology Preview’s Password section and—just to be on the safe side—logging in to each website to make sure it worked. The biggest challenge was often figuring out which code went with which sites, since I often relied on Authy’s helpful icons rather than labelling them clearly.
But now I’ve got pretty much all of my accounts set up in Apple’s new system. Some websites are better than others about letting you autofill the verification codes, but most are pretty seamless already. (If the site worked with codes that were texted to you via SMS, then it ought to work with TOTP codes pretty seamlessly as well.)
The only downside is that it doesn’t work in the standard version of Safari on Big Sur, but in that case I’m no worse off than I was before: I can still refer to either Authy or Apple’s beta software to retrieve a code.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for again sponsoring Six Colors, this time for Loopback. Loopback has become an essential tool in my Mac audio toolbox. Loopback passes audio between Mac apps, so if you need to play a recording into Zoom or include music in a streamed event, you can do it with just a few clicks.
Loopback creates virtual audio devices, which you can set to originate from different apps and input devices. They appear on your Mac just like a real, physical device, and can be selected as an input for any audio app on your Mac.
If you move audio around on your Mac—whether you’re podcasting, streaming, or even just enlivening a Zoom call—Loopback will solve your problems. You can try it for free, and through July 15 Six Colors readers can save 21% on purchase by using the code RAINBOW21.
A week of public betas: Safari, Shortcuts, Focus, and more.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
Stephen Hackett, Six Colors contributor and collector of vintage Apple Hardware, has launched a Kickstarter for a 2022 wall calendar featuring his original photography of items from his large collection. The days of the year are marked with key dates from Apple history.
Hackett = Quality. I bought one immediately, and I suspect many Six Colors readers will be in the market for one too.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
More than ever, the Mac is Apple’s power tool. Today’s Macs running Apple silicon can use the complete library of macOS apps, and apps from iOS via Catalyst or unmodified directly from the App Store. And then there’s everything that’s under the hood, from app scripting to Unix-based tools of all sorts.
But with the move to Apple silicon and Apple’s announcement in June that Shortcuts is coming to the Mac as a part of a multi-year automation transition, things are changing. While the Mac isn’t going to stop being a power tool, the next few years will change its nature in some fundamental ways.
Continue reading on Macworld.
If there’s a theme of Apple’s operating-system releases in 2021, it’s platform unification. This development is most significant for macOS, which tended to lag behind iOS in the 2010s, missing out on some or all of the year’s exciting innovations.
Apple has spent the last few years getting the base technology of iOS and macOS back in sync, removing 32-bit software, adding Mac Catalyst and support for iOS apps on Apple silicon, and introducing new cross-platform development technology via SwiftUI. And with macOS Monterey, you can see the fruits of all that labor: The big new features of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are also the big new features of macOS Monterey.
The Mac is also getting a boost with older iOS features finally being brought to the other side, most notably Shortcuts, the iOS automation tool that is the first sign of a renaissance of user automation on macOS.
The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac. Apple wants its platforms to share features, but it also recognizes that each serves a different (albeit overlapping) audience.
With the release of the first public beta versions of macOS Monterey (as well as iOS and iPadOS 15), everyone now has the opportunity to give these new operating systems a try. As always, be warned that they’re not ready for release for a reason, and you should never install beta operating systems on devices that you depend on to do your job day-to-day. For those with patience, consider this a preview of what your Mac might look like this fall. For those without patience, well, let’s take a look at Apple’s work in progress that will be taking shape this summer.
The trouble with Safari 15 The thing about platform unification is, if Apple makes a dramatic move to change its software, it now does so across all of its platforms. And this year, Apple has chosen to make dramatic interface changes to Safari across not just macOS but iOS and iPadOS as well. I think the changes work fairly well on the iPad, but they’re kind of a mess on the iPhone and, unfortunately, the Mac.
The new version of Safari collapses the traditional two-row interface at the top of the browser into a single row. I guess we should’ve seen this coming: Apple’s been collapsing window chrome and toolbars for a few years now on the Mac. And I get the impulse: While I mostly use macOS on a 27-inch iMac display, most Mac users are on small laptop displays, and on small widescreen displays, every vertical pixel saved is crucial. (I spent years using an 11-inch MacBook Air as my primary Mac, so I do understand the desire to save space.)
But this design change is a bridge too far. By cramming the bulk of its browser interface into a single row, it’s had to make too many sacrifices—and they don’t outweigh the benefits gained by saving space.
Moving tabs into the same space as all the other interface elements forces them all to get smaller. Once you’ve got more than two or three tabs open, the tab’s title gets so truncated that it’s almost impossible to tell at a glance which tab is which. If you’ve got multiple tabs from the same website—so there’s not even a favicon to differentiate them—you might as well give up.
To make matters even worse, the background color of the entire top of the Safari window is now matched to the color of the website you’re viewing. It’s a cute trick, but while I understand the desire to make Safari feel more like it’s a part of the content it’s displaying, it’s a readability disaster. Contrast with the text on tabs is frequently poor, and since the color shifts depending on which tab is active, it feels like my brain is constantly recalibrating how to read that particular text contrast. On top of that, there’s also the cognitive dissonance of seeing tabs for sites with a strong color identity displayed in a different color because they’re not the currently active tab. And you can’t see the title of the page you’re currently viewing, because the URL displays instead unless you hover the pointer over it.
Because the address bar is embedded in individual tabs now, it also means that when I type Command-L or Command-T, I have to hunt down the place where that URL is being entered—the URL box jumps around based on the location of the particular tab I’m currently using.
A lot of user interface elements have also been hidden away to provide more space for tabs. Tasks that were once a click away sometimes need to be searched for in a sub-menu.
Tab Groups is a feature with potential.One of the other major new features of Safari 15 is a reaction to how many people use many, many browser tabs. It’s Tab Groups, which lets you have multiple sets of open tabs that you can toggle between, meaning you don’t need to have dozens of tabs open in a single window or scattered across multiple windows. Instead, you can keep tab sets for various tasks in their own groups and toggle between them.
Even better: Tab Groups sync via iCloud, so any of your Apple devices running iOS 15, iPadOS 15, or macOS Monterey will show the very same pages in the same groups. And these aren’t bookmarks: If you’re in a Tab Group and open a new tab, it goes in that group and syncs to all other devices. If you navigate to a different page, the group gets updated. Apple is trying to improve browsing by allowing you to get your tabs in order and have them available wherever you happen to be. It’s not a feature for everyone, but it’s smart, works pretty well, and will be a boon for many users.
But I have to ask: How can the same company that developed Tab Groups create an interface design that makes tabs unreadable? With one hand, Apple seems to understand that tabs are important and could use a 21st century upgrade; with the other hand, it cuts off all but the first few words of the tab title and obscures the text behind an ever-changing background color.
There’s one more new feature in Safari: iCloud Private Relay. It’s a feature that’s designed to make it much harder for anyone on the Internet to determine your identity and track you by obscuring your device’s internet address; traffic from Safari is sent through an Apple server and then an independent company’s server. Your Internet address should still reflect your general region for broad geolocation purposes, but it can’t be used to personally identify you.
As someone who has advocated for Apple to go all the way and offer a VPN service, I’ve got to applaud iCloud Private Relay. It doesn’t encrypt all traffic on your Mac, but captures all your Safari traffic and anonymizes that. That seems to be a pretty good combination of giving users privacy without overwhelming Apple’s servers with a staggering amount of traffic to relay.
That all said, I have to mention that iCloud Private Relay is only available to people who pay for iCloud. If you’re paying for even a tiny amount of expanded iCloud storage space (including if you’re in an Apple One bundle), you get iCloud Private Relay. If you’re not paying, you don’t get it. This makes perfect sense because routing that much network traffic on an ongoing basis can’t be cheap.
And yet… this feature also gives me pause. While I admit that it’s logical to charge for network-based features like this, I can’t help but be a little bothered by the fact that there’s a major new privacy feature in macOS (and iOS, and iPadOS), but it’s not available unless you enroll in a recurring payment to Apple. I don’t think we’re standing on the edge of some sort of slippery slope that will lead to Apple splitting its platforms so that there are some new features for everyone and some only for those who are willing to pay… but given Apple’s recent focus on enhancing services revenue, I wonder sometimes how that business decision might distort the choices it makes in developing the software that runs its products.
Shortcuts Shortcuts on the Mac can execute all sorts of scripts that aren’t available on iOS.As someone who uses automation on my devices to make my life easier, I am pleased to report that macOS Monterey brings Shortcuts from iOS to the Mac. And this is no halfway approach: Shortcuts is the centerpiece of where Apple is going with automation across its platforms, and this is a bold first step.
Shortcuts offers a redesigned interface that’s consistent across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Like Automator, Shortcuts is a tool that aims to make automation easier for non-programmers by building automations out of individual blocks of functionality which can be supplied by the operating system or by individual apps. On iOS, Shortcuts far surpassed what Automator was capable of doing, thanks to its sophistication and the support of many third-party iOS apps, which lent their capabilities to the palette of options within Shortcuts.
Given Shortcuts’s history as an iOS app, it wouldn’t be surprising if Apple had chosen to take baby steps in macOS Monterey. Perhaps it would limit Shortcuts to apps that originated on iOS, either via Mac Catalyst or running directly on Apple silicon?
That didn’t happen. The creators of “classic” Mac apps can add support for Shortcuts directly into their apps, and Apple has built bridges to connect all of the different automation utilities currently present on macOS. Shortcuts can run AppleScript scripts and shell scripts, command-line tools can run Shortcuts or AppleScript scripts, and AppleScript scripts can execute shell scripts or run Shortcuts.
Where did this dialog box escape from?Though Shortcuts has already surpassed Automator in terms of ease of use as well as functionality, it’s still a very young app—there’s plenty of room to grow over the next few years. Only with this version can you hide steps of a shortcut to make the rest of the file easier to read, for example. Shortcuts also shows its new arrival on the Mac by generating dialog boxes and alerts that look nothing like standard Mac interface elements. In the end, either Shortcuts needs to feel like the rest of macOS or the rest of macOS needs to come to Shortcuts—but right now, it’s neither fish nor fowl.
I also hope that the arrival of Shortcuts provides an impetus to push macOS’s automation integration forward. In addition to offering a menu-bar item from which you can run shortcuts, Shortcuts for Mac mostly follows the paths that were previously available to Automator actions: A presence in the Services menu, items that can appear under the Quick Actions submenu in Finder, on the Touch Bar, and in Finder’s Preview pane. I should be able to place an individual shortcut, or a Shortcuts icon, right on the toolbar in Finder.
Though we’re early in the beta process, I’m already impressed with the compatibility of Shortcuts on the Mac. I was able to check a couple of boxes (to enable Mac support) and get complex shortcuts that I built for iOS to run on the Mac perfectly, no additional changes required. And Shortcuts includes a command that lets you determine which device is running, so a shortcut can run one way on the Mac and a different way on the iPhone or iPad. That’s a lot easier than keeping two different shortcuts in sync.
I appreciate Apple characterizing the arrival of Shortcuts on the Mac as the beginning of a years-long process. Not only does that imply a level of commitment to user automation on the Mac that I’ve wanted to hear for years, but it acknowledges that there’s more work to do. If Shortcuts is the future of automation on the Mac, what’s the future of scripting? Is AppleScript, which dates back to the 1990s, going to be retired? And if so, what will replace it? There should be room for a scripting language that can be more agile and powerful than the building-block approach of Shortcuts. Similarly, what will happen to the Apple Events framework that allows apps to be controlled remotely? Will it be replaced, and if so, how?
This is where iOS is also lacking. Apps on iOS can rarely (if ever) be controlled to the same level of detail as they can be on the Mac. If Apple can determine what the future of scripting and app control will be on the Mac, perhaps that will be a unified approach that will also work on its other platforms. I hope so—but in the meantime, Shortcuts for Mac is a great first step that moves the platform forward without closing any doors just yet.
Platforms together, architectures apart Just as Apple is bringing its platforms closer together, the Mac is in the midst of an architecture transition. In come Apple-designed processors (currently just the M1, although more are surely on the way), and out go Intel processors.
Obviously, there will come a day when macOS is no longer available for Macs on Intel processors. (Relax—I imagine it will be a few years, yet.) But macOS Monterey begins the transition by offering a few features that don’t work on Intel Macs.
Portrait Mode is available only on Macs running Apple silicon.In many cases, it’s the bringing of the many platforms together that is the reason for the separation of features across chip architectures. Many of the new features in macOS Monterey are taking advantage of specific features of the Apple chip architecture. So FaceTime on Intel Macs won’t offer to fuzz out your display in “portrait mode,” nor will it scan your photos and convert them to copyable text, nor will it support on-device and unlimited-duration dictation. For those features, you’ll need a Mac with an Apple-designed processor.
This is just the beginning. It’s the way of things, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. Intel Macs are the past. Apple will maintain compatibility for a few years yet, but if a feature can be improved by implementing it in a way that only works on Apple’s processors, that’s how that feature will be implemented. In the autumn of 2023 you’ll probably be able to install macOS 14 Sequoia on that 2018 Intel MacBook Pro, but the snazziest new features won’t be there.
FaceTime and SharePlay: Pandemic lessons learned? FaceTime has a new Grid View but it’s still not quite what I expect from a videoconferencing app.I don’t use FaceTime very often from the Mac, but I do use Zoom a lot—and Apple has added a bunch of new features to FaceTime that aim to close the gap with other, more popular apps for videoconferencing. FaceTime missed its moment during the heights of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, but Apple seems to have learned its lesson and is trying to catch up.
FaceTime now supports a new “grid view” that’s more like a Zoom conference call rather than the floating-bubble interface of old. It’s still a little weird and inefficient, but it’s less distracting. There’s support for inviting someone to a FaceTime call via URL, which is long overdue. M1 Macs can add a blurred-out Portrait Mode effect to make their backgrounds blurry.
Per-app video and audio controls in Control Center seems a little weird.I find it a little odd that Apple has placed the interface that lets you toggle Portrait Mode on and off in Control Center, of all places. The idea is that microphone and webcam modes are intended to be global settings available to all apps, not just FaceTime. (The settings are even adjustable on a per-app basis.) I don’t think it makes sense for this setting to be in Control Center at all—what are app preferences for, anyway? And why is Apple so afraid to add features to the FaceTime app on the Mac?
I don’t have much to report on group FaceTime based on early betas of macOS Monterey and iOS 15 other than to say that I found them pretty buggy, with video and audio cutting out and individual participants sometimes appearing more than once. It’s early days—but Apple will need to make all of this rock solid if it ever hopes for FaceTime to become an option when all of us already have Zoom, for better or for worse.
It’s also easy to see the new SharePlay feature as a reaction to all those browser extensions that became popular in the early days of the pandemic, the ones that allowed people to watch the same streaming videos simultaneously. SharePlay works with FaceTime to do that for videos, music, and more. There’s built-in screen sharing, too.
It’s a good idea, and if it works, it could be cool—especially since a system-level technology is likely going to be able to execute on this idea far better than a hack made at the browser level. But at the moment, it’s all a bit of a buggy mess. Apple has the summer to make it all come together, and I hope it does.
A new focus on Focus You can set what people you want to be allowed to bother you in a particular mode.A few years ago, Apple embarked on a quest to help us manage all the distractions that our devices can cause. (Which is awfully nice of Apple, since its devices were the ones the caused the problem in the first place!) In 2021, it has brought several disparate features together in something called Focus, which attempts to let you control—across all your devices, including the Mac—what people and apps can bug you, and when.
This is an extension of the simpler concept of Do Not Disturb, which is useful when you’re sleeping or driving or trying to focus. But you can set multiple Focus modes and define them in different ways—and again, they sync across your devices, so entering a “don’t bother me, I’m writing my novel” mode on your Mac is not going to just move all your pesky notifications to your iPhone or Apple Watch.
You can define different modes for different situations—imagine a mode where only co-workers can contact you, and a different mode where nobody from work can contact you. You can keep those modes on until you turn them off, or limit them by time or until your current calendar appointment is done.
While I’m still trying to figure out how I’ll use Focus mode in practice, my early experiments are encouraging. When I start writing, I can shut out the world for a set amount of time, with exceptions for close family. I appreciate Apple expending the effort to nudge users to take control of their notifications and consider the appropriate contexts for certain kinds of messages.
Shared With You (for certain apps) Safari’s Shared With You view is possibly the most useful.This year, Apple is building a system that allows information that’s been shared via Messages to be surfaced in other contexts. It’s a really smart idea—that the information people send to us is often better served by being presented to us based on what it is, not its presence in a text-message chain.
The result is Shared With You, a section that’s being added to numerous Apple-built apps, including Safari, News, TV, and Podcasts. If someone sends you a picture in Messages, Photos knows about it and can offer to add it to your library. Links your friends send to you can show up in a Shared With You area in the Safari start page. And so on.
Not every suggestion is going to be a hit, and I definitely ran into some irrelevant stuff when using Shared With You. But there were also great successes. After all, sometimes you know that someone sent you a link to a story on the web you want to check out, but you can’t remember who or when. A trip to Messages might find it, but Shared With You in Safari compiling all the links you’ve been sent? That’s far more likely to be a hit.
There’s a lot that could be done with this technology, and this is an interesting first step. But what it really needs is support for third-party apps on both ends of the equation. Other messaging apps, for example, should be able to contribute content to the Shared With You pile. they can also offer shared content in the right context.
A large collection of other features It’s funny. For a release that at first blush seems to be a less dramatic update—and macOS Monterey really is!—it’s still got a load of changes, far more than I can get to in detail in this first glance. Fortunately, we have all summer to unearth more hidden gems, but here’s a first cut at other additions that are notable:
Universal control. This is actually a banner feature, the ability to control up to three Macs or iPads from a single keyboard and mouse. I’d like to tell you all about it. But the fact is, Universal Control isn’t ready yet. So it will have to wait until later betas.
AirPlay on Mac. Yes, Macs can be AirPlay targets now! You can stream video to Macs via AirPlay! This is probably not going to solve the issue of using your old iMac as an external display (too much latency and compression), but it’s still a cool idea. This one’s not really all there in the beta, unfortunately—in my tests all the video was at the wrong aspect ratio! It’s a beta. I’ll keep an eye on it.
Live Text. Available on M1 Macs only, this feature basically uses an OCR engine to make text inside images accessible. It works remarkably well. I will admit, I used this feature inappropriately to try to read some old handwritten text, and it didn’t fare so well. But it was all in fun. In general, Live Text is pretty cool—and has some amazing accessibility implications, since people like to post images with text inside them, and now macOS can read that text.
Finder niceties. I love a good Finder update. In macOS Monterey, you can resume file copies that have timed out for whatever reason, rather than having to start over at the beginning. That’s so great for large media files. Also, there’s a more accurate pie-slice progress bar on every file as it’s being copied. And this may only be of interest to me, but the Go To Folder command in Finder looks better and works faster. It’s as fast as autocompleting paths in the Terminal, and that’s a good thing.
Memoji in login window. If you hate Apple’s Memoji, I have bad news. (If you like them, it’s good news!) You can now set your Memoji to be your user icon and appear—with animations!—in the login window. It’s cute, sort of.
Passwords in Systems Preferences. Apple has majorly upgraded its cloud-backed password database. It’s all a bit hidden away in the System Preferences app, but it’s a full-featured password manager that will auto-fill to most apps. If you’re just using Apple devices, it may be the only password manager you ever need.
Photos updates. There’s much more here, and I’ll get to it in detail later this summer, but the Photos apps on iPad, iPhone, and Mac continue to converge. On the Mac side, you can now import photos from a different Photos library. Interactive memory movies, a la iOS, are coming to the Mac too—but won’t be there in the initial release of Monterey.
The Quick and the Notes. On iPad, Quick Notes are a really cool idea. On the Mac… ehhh. It’s a global keyboard shortcut to bring up a new note. Floating windows tied to a global keyboard shortcut are a lot less exciting on the Mac, where that sort of thing has been around for decades, than they are on the iPad. Still, Notes has picked up some more interesting features, including support for tags (so you can quickly find any note containing a tag) and at-mentions of users in shared notes.
Apple Maps. The new Apple Maps design, where available, is amazing. It looks like something out of a video game, with randomly placed trees and shockingly accurate streets, right down to the crosswalks and stop signs. Fortunately for me, the Bay Area is already covered. Sorry, Rest of World! It’ll be great whenever you get it.
Low Power Mode. Inspired by the iPhone, the Mac now has a Low Power Mode—and it’s available on both Intel and M1 Macs. Low Power Mode forcibly dims your display and underclocks your processor, all in the hopes of reducing battery drain.
Missed opportunities Though Apple has been known to surprise us with mid-cycle feature additions, for the most part the company picks an annual set of operating-system priorities and sticks to them. While summer is a time to reflect on what’s new and exciting on Apple’s platforms, it’s also a time to notice what didn’t make the cut—and won’t likely be addressed for at least a year.
Most notably, macOS Monterey does nothing to address the failure of notifications, Notification Center, and widgets from macOS Big Sur. Floating notifications seem to be untouched, so they’re just as obscure and hard to click on as they were in Big Sur. (System alerts are still centered with weird margins, harming legibility for no clear benefit. You’d think there would’ve been a fairly straightforward fix there, but Monterey fails to apply it.)
Even more frustratingly, Apple has left notifications and widgets to live out of sight on the right side of the screen. It would be logical for Apple to allow widgets to live on the Mac’s desktop—the equivalent of the home screen on iOS—but instead, they’re hidden away. I never use widgets on macOS for this reason, despite using them all the time on iOS. Even allowing widgets to pop down from a menu bar icon would be better, since the Mac menu bar is a more appropriate home for glanceable information.
And as for the pile of notifications stacked up in the top half of Notification Center on the Mac: I find them utterly useless. I never look at them, and when I do find the need to see a notification I missed, I can never find it amid the detritus. I don’t know the right solution to a proper Mac version of Notification Center, but this isn’t it.
I’m enthusiastic about the fact that the Mail app is getting a new plug-in format because it suggests that perhaps Apple has a strategy for improving Mail, and this is the first sign of life we’ve had in a while. But it’s a meager thing. We’re all pretty much stuck with email, and many companies have tried to find more intelligent ways to process, filter, and triage email. And yet it feels like Mail is more or less the same app it was when it came on the scene two decades ago.
I can’t believe that Apple thinks Mail was perfected in 2001. I can’t believe that the same company that has applied machine-learning algorithms to identify what breed of cat or dog is in a photo or whether the cadence of your steps indicates that you’re a risk of falling has never considered that perhaps applying some intelligence to our disastrous inboxes wouldn’t have some value. In this very release, Apple is mining text messages for their value and spreading that to other apps—but email just sits there like a lump.
Email apps need to be rethought and reimagined. And while this is most definitely a third-party app opportunity, an awful lot of people use the platform’s stock mail client, and what Mail offers isn’t good enough. (I could say the same for Calendar, too.)
Wait till next year, as the saying goes.
State of the betas If you’re thinking of jumping to macOS Monterey this summer, the usual caveats apply: This is a beta release, and beta operating systems can be buggy and weird. That said, I’ve been pretty impressed with the stability of all of Apple’s betas this year. My 24-inch iMac has had some issues waking some sleep with the current beta, but it does eventually wake—it’s just sluggish in doing it. This kind of stuff is par for the course; if you’re not looking forward to a summer of struggling with your Mac, consider waiting till the fall. Or if you’re insatiably curious, consider installing the beta version on an external drive and starting up from that volume for a little operating-system tourism.
There’s so much in macOS Monterey, and indeed, in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, that it will take the entire summer to process it all. The arrival of Shortcuts is one of the best developments on macOS in many years. I’m encouraged by Focus Mode, and look forward to seeing if all of Apple’s improvements to FaceTime and the addition of SharePlay can come together.
As for Safari, I hope Apple is listening to the criticism of its choices and is remaining flexible to keep adjusting its design over the summer. As it currently stands, it’s a failure that makes it harder to use Safari and essentially poisons the well of the new Tab Groups feature. At a minimum, Apple needs to let users opt out of the new tab design—but really, it’s so bad that a “use old interface” preference would be a cop-out. Apple shouldn’t defend a lousy design choice by telling users they can opt out if they want. It needs to fix this—not just on the Mac, but on the iPad and iPhone, too.
Fortunately, this is just the beginning of the summer. And while most of the features Apple rolls out in June are largely unchanged (just polished and debugged a bit) by fall, occasionally there are big changes. I hope this is one of those years. Apple, you’re on the clock.
In the aftermath of Apple employees pushing back on return-to-office policies and negative reactions to that (and again and likewise), Charlie Warzel wrote at length about why companies need to listen to the concerns of their employees in his Galaxy Brain newsletter:
Every manager/executive… who is good at their job and works at a company with employees who aren’t broadly miserable employs a similar strategy: they listen to their employees. They listen and they do it regularly. I don’t mean sending out end of year feedback forms and having HR compile long reports nobody reads — I mean they actively seek their employees out and, humbly, listen. They listen not to confirm their priors, but to gain some new understanding. They do this, in part, because they give a shit about their employees, but also because it’s good business. It turns out that your employees — the ones doing the day to day labor of making the business run — are quite good at sending signals about the real status of the company’s culture. You just have to be willing to listen.
The issue of how a company should structure its workspaces and work policies post-COVID is incredibly complex. There’s no single right answer because every company and every job is different. It’s true that most Apple employees took their jobs with the knowledge that they’d be required to be present in Cupertino (even if that didn’t necessarily make sense, even at the time, for many groups). But surely the last year has changed things, at least somewhat?
More broadly, is Apple’s corporate culture1 the secret to its success, and should it never change?2 Are some aspects of it more important than others? If Apple changes its culture in any way, does it risk not being the company that made it so successful?
The truth is, no memo could ever truly change Apple’s culture. That’s not how corporate culture works. Corporate culture (for good and ill) is an invisible force built into the structure of a company. It exerts its power even when all the individuals in the company agree that changing the culture is appropriate. It takes real effort, and commitment, and time to change corporate culture.
At this point, if Apple’s work culture changes, it’ll be because circumstances force it to. Apple will have star employees who insist on being remote, so the company will make exceptions for them. It will try to hire talent and fail because of its insistence on everyone being in Cupertino, and that failure will lead to a readjustment of policies. The existing policies, when compared to those from other tech companies that have embraced remote work, will likely lead to a brain drain within Apple—and those in charge of hiring and recruitment will realize they need to counteract those effects by offering jobs that don’t require spending three-ish days a week in Cupertino.
But unless the world reverts back to a pre-2020 state as if nothing happened, Apple’s culture will probably have to change, regardless. And the pain of that change will be magnified by the fact that Apple’s executives seem so resistant to it. Maybe they should listen—really listen—to what their current employees are trying to tell them.
- Apple is so concerned with company culture that it has an entire group, Apple University, designed to codify and reinforce it. ↩
- An argument for change and flexibility: Steve Jobs’s last advice to Tim Cook was “never ask what he would do. Just do what’s right.” ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Here at Apple, we are delighted that America’s excellent progress in combatting COVID-19 means that we will this fall be able to welcome our employees back to Apple Park in person.
Face-to-face collaboration has always been key to Apple innovation and creativity, and that’s one significant reason why we created Apple Park in the first place, despite what you might have heard from other, less reputable sources.
As a result, we are encouraging our employees to prepare for a return to the office starting in September, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Also Saturdays, half days on Sundays, Blursdays, and some holidays. We’re sure you’re as excited as we are to reconnect with old friends and co-workers, catch up on podcasts during your lengthy commute, and generally sit at a desk for hours that you would have once been forced to spend at home, able to share more time and experiences with your loved ones. We’re saving you from that, just as we do by not offering daycare, so you can leave your home at home.
Of course, we’ve accomplished a lot while separated these past eighteen months. We’ve introduced new products, we’ve held two virtual developer conferences, and Craig has very nearly finished construction of a ziggurat made almost entirely out of dry macaroni.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
After a couple of developer betas, iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are now available as part of Apple’s Beta Software Program, alongside beta versions of tvOS 15 and watchOS 8. A macOS Monterey beta is listed as “Coming soon.”
Federico Viticci at MacStories has, as always, a good look at the next version of Apple’s mobile operating systems:
Let me cut to the chase: I don’t think iOS and iPadOS 15 are massive updates like iOS and iPadOS 13 or 14 were. There are dozens of interesting new features in both updates, but none of them feels “obvious” to demonstrate to average users like, say, dark mode and iPad multiwindow in iOS and iPadOS 13 or Home Screen widgets in last year’s iOS 14. And, for the most part, I think that’s fine. The wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented every year, and the pandemic happened for everyone – Apple engineers included.
Over at Tom’s Guide, our old Macworld colleague Philip Michaels has similar thoughts:
iOS 15 poses a challenge that recent iPhone software updates haven’t had to face. Those recent iOS updates were pretty easy to sum up. Sure, each update contained its fair share of new features and enhancements to existing capabilities, but it was usually easy to pinpoint the biggest changes and summarize them in a couple bullet points.
Try doing that with iOS 15, and you’ll soon spiral into madness.
The Verge’s Chaim Gartenberg concurs:
iOS 15 and iPad 15 are kicking off their public betas today, and after a few weeks with the developer betas of the new software, Apple’s OS updates feel like more of a grab bag of new features than ever before.
A major rethinking of either platform, this year’s updates are not. The two updates were clearly born in 2020’s norm-shattering pandemic. The feature list at WWDC and on Apple’s website wears last year’s remote-first influences firmly, from the heavy emphasis on FaceTime features to a better system for corralling notifications into “work” and “personal” buckets.
There are at least two months before Apple releases these updates, and while that time will probably largely be spent squashing bugs, there’s always the possibility of changes and tweaks along the way. Of course, you can always find out for yourself—though, as usual, we recommend being careful about what devices you install this software on: it is, after all, a beta.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
How we handle email, the potential of Shortcuts on the Mac, our latest tech delights, and whether we prefer our social media to be fed to us by the algorithm.
Go to the podcast page.
Old habits are hard to break, and when it comes to my very online life, there’s no habit older than email.
I’ve had an email address since roughly 1994, and over the quarter-century since, I’ve used everything from command line programs1 to webmail to native apps for reading, sending, and organizing my mail. But since around 2001, my mail client—Apple’s built-in Mail app—hasn’t changed.
Also, Apple Mail, well, it hasn’t changed.
That’s one big reason I was so eager to check out Big Mail, an app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad which aims to use AI and machine learning to improve the email experience. Because, believe me, the email experience could stand to be improved.
Unfortunately, after the better part of a week of using Big Mail—even making a game attempt by replacing Mail in the dock on all my devices—my general conclusion is that while its full of good intentions, it’s hampered by an (admittedly somewhat Apple-like) insistence that it knows how to make your email work better. In sum: I don’t think it’s quite ready to be my email replacement yet, but what it’s doing ought to push the needle for mail apps everywhere.
At root, Big Mail’s guiding principle is that it should triage your email so that you don’t have to. This is one hundred percent something that I agree with, and if I take anything away from my time with Big Mail, it’s that I would very much prefer to spend less time thinking about email.
The way Big Mail accomplishes this is by identifying a variety of types of messages that you might receive, then categorizing them so that you can quickly look at only the mail that you really want to see.
Big Mail’s not the first to attempt this. Many mail clients and mail providers—including big ones like Gmail—have done this for some time, weeding out things like promotions and social media emails. Big Mail takes it a step further by breaking things down into a handful of common categories: conversations (emails with actual people), newsletters, purchases, and events. (There is no option for creating custom types, though Big Mail’s developers suggest that could come in a future version.)
Other emails get moved into more catch-all categories like Notifications or the not-quite-aptly-named Everything category. A top-level section called “The Latest” provides a sort of dashboard of your email, showing you the things that you might be most interested in.
To facilitate this organization process, Big Mail uses a tool it calls the Bouncer. When you receive emails from addresses that you haven’t corresponded with before, they’re collected into the Bouncer, where you go through and approve or ignore the messages. Approved senders are filtered into the appropriate category, and ignored senders vanish into the ether, never to be heard from again.
In theory, this is great. We all get a ton of email that’s not necessarily even spam so much as just notifications that we don’t generally care about: emails from services that we’ve signed up for or mailing lists full of discounts and sales. And so on and so on.
The Bouncer at work.I occasionally go through fits of trying to unsubscribe from all the unsolicited email I get—an at-times Sisyphean task made all the worse by the fact that, in my earliest days of being a tech writer, I unthinkingly put my personal email address on a PR list for CES, an epic mistake which will no doubt haunt me until my dying day.
The idea of the Bouncer would seem to solve this issue, given that instead of trying to break free of those endless emails, I just never see them. And, to a certain extent, it works. When I ignore senders, their emails are sucked into a black hole and don’t show up.
For the most part, that works pretty well. You can fix accidentally approving or ignoring a sender, though it’s not obvious at first—you have to use the thumbs up/thumbs down icons in the Bouncer to see messages you’ve previously approved or ignored. (And I’m not entirely sure how long it takes for mail to scroll off those lists—my Ignored list seemed far smaller than I thought it was.) Part of me does wish the algorithm was a little smarter: given the amount of mail I get—which is a decent volume, though certainly not as high as some people—it still requires a fair amount of overhead to constantly approve or ignore senders.
There’s another sticky wicket with Big Mail’s approach: while I appreciate that it doesn’t touch my email account’s organizational hierarchy so that if I do pop over to another email client, my messages haven’t been moved into weird folders and whatnot, it also means that those ignored messages…well, they are literally ignored, meaning that they will sit in your inbox, unread. Seemingly forever.
The compulsive deleter in me was thus horrified to open up Apple’s Mail client and discover all those unread, undeleted messages just…sitting there, taking up space. I understand the complexity of the issue, and given that, I think that I’m glad they erred on the side of not messing with my inbox structure. However, it still meant that I ended up doing double-duty, triaging all those ignored emails in Mail at a later date.
Overall the design of Big Mail is not bad, though it does somewhat insist upon making everything look like a reader app in the vein of Flipboard or Apple News, which sometimes is a bit much when you’re just trying to look at an email reminder. The Events and Purchases sections, while very clever, ended up being somewhat less useful than I’d hoped. The same went for the Files section. Perhaps the opportunity to use them just didn’t arise during my trial period.
I also ran into some reliability problems. I tried to reply to one of my contacts and was not sure that the email went out, since Big Mail doesn’t seem to drop those in your email server’s sent box. (I ended up re-sending it from Mail.) Update: Big Mail’s developers reached out to mention that copying sent messages to your sent mailbox isn’t something iCloud does by default, and there’s an option to enable it in the preferences of the latest update. Sometimes the interface, especially on iOS, seemed to die, not responding to taps.
And more than a few times, I got an error saying “Big Mail couldn’t understand your mail provider” which…I mean, sure, been there, but as I’m just using iCloud, that seems a little surprising.
Additionally, I ran into some problems with state syncing between Big Mail on different devices. On my MacBook Air, the Newsletter section would only show a single issue of the New York Times daily newsletter (from a few days prior), whereas my iPhone had many other things that I’d also categorized as newsletters. (I also wish that Newsletters were more clearly dated.)
Big Mail’s design is, at times, overwrought.If you notice that this review has been a little short on features beyond categorization, well, that’s because there isn’t a lot beyond that in Big Mail. Yes, you can star a message or dump it in a Reply Later queue, there’s a decent search feature, and it blocks tracking by default, but that’s about it. Big Mail, when it comes down to it, is about one thing: email triage.
I also have to mention one little pet peeve: the use of red at the top of the app’s icon, which out of the corner of my eye always made me think I had unread messages. It also reduced contrast when there legitimately was a new-email badge on the icon.
Look, I get that a lot of these are things that can be chalked up to my personal usage of email. But the very longevity of email’s existence makes it by definition personal. Many people have been dealing with email for decades, and we all have our own systems—there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.2
Of course, Big Mail has its work cut out for it, not least of all because most people probably don’t pay for mail clients, much less spend a subscription fee. Big Mail costs $10 a month—subscribing for a year upfront lowers that monthly cost to $6.49. I certainly don’t begrudge the developers for charging: I prefer it over wondering how exactly a product is supposed to make money (and generally suspecting that it’s somehow on my information). But, that said, if I’m going to spend that much money on a product, it has to provide a measurably better experience than what I’ve got. Right now, for me, it doesn’t.
In the end, what I loved the most about Big Mail was its ambition. For a little while there, email was bothering me less, and I appreciated that. If nothing else, I hope Big Mail jolts some folks at other mail providers and email client developers (including Apple, who seemingly love to tout the virtues of AI and machine learning everywhere else) to realize that email can be improved. Because it’s not going away anytime soon and, frankly, it’s kind of a mess.
pine: it ain’telm, friend. ↩- I pride myself on keeping my unread count at 0, but my inbox has over 100,000 emails in it because I don’t file things. That’s just how I roll. ↩
Running a shortcut via the command line on macOS Monterey.Last week, Dr. Drang wrote an excellent post summing up where Shortcuts on the Mac fits in with all of the Mac’s existing automation frameworks:
Two years ago, shortly before WWDC 2019, Guilherme Rambo told us that Shortcuts was coming to the Mac as a Marzipan app. I wrote a post about the levels of automation on the Mac and how a Marzipan Shortcuts would add a new level. I was concerned with whether Shortcuts would carry on the tradition of allowing communication between the Mac’s different levels. Since Shortcuts didn’t come with Catalina—or with Big Sur, for that matter—I haven’t had to revisit that post. But with WWDC 2021 and the official announcement of Shortcuts coming to Monterey, it time for an update.
The post comes with some helpful visuals about how all the layers in macOS interact.
When I started imagining Shortcuts coming to the Mac, I steeled myself for disappointment—namely that Apple would ship a version of Shortcuts that didn’t do much more than talk to Catalyst apps and iOS apps running natively on Apple silicon.
That didn’t happen. What happened is much better.
Running a Perl script inside a Shortcut on macOS Monterey.Shortcuts in macOS Monterey lets you run AppleScripts and shell scripts. It comes with its own shortcuts command-line utility that lets you list, run, and open shortcuts. And now in developer beta 2, which was released Monday, is the “Shortcuts Events” process, which lets AppleScript scripts run shortcuts, including passing and receiving input.
A script that passes BBEdit text to a shortcut.Add this to the fact that I could get some complex shortcuts running on the Mac with no modification, and things are looking good. I know it’s just the beginning of a longer transition, but macOS Monterey is shaping up to be a great release for anyone who wants to use automation to make Mac tasks easier.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
The Upgrade Summer of Fun kicks into gear with new beachwear, a very special summer-themed edition of Ask Upgrade, dreams of larger iPads, and a bunch of streaming news. On the less fun side, we discuss why Apple has reacted the way it has to threats of new laws and regulations that might change how it does business.
Go to the podcast page.
Pass audio between applications on your Mac with the power of Loopback. Need to play a recording into Zoom? Add sound effects into a podcast? Include music in a streamed event? Loopback gives you the power to do just that with just a few clicks. It’s like a high-end mixing board, right inside your Mac.
Loopback’s virtual audio devices merge audio from multiple applications and input devices into a single source. These virtual devices appear on your Mac just like a real, physical device, and can be selected for use in any audio app on your Mac. It’s incredibly powerful.
Fortunately, it’s also incredibly easy to use. Loopback’s intuitive wire-based setup makes it easy and obvious to understand exactly how your virtual devices work. Configure, adjust, and experiment, just by clicking and dragging.
Whether you’re a podcaster, a live performer, a tabletop gamer, or even just someone stuck on too many Zoom calls, Loopback can help you. Check out Loopback today, with a free trial. Through July 15, Six Colors readers can save 21% with coupon code RAINBOW21.
New audio equipment, beta software, and the pace of Apple app updates.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
This is the story of how the new Apple TV remote cost me hundreds of dollars, but in a good way.
We were happy earlier this month to take delivery of a new Apple TV 4K, to replace one that I had given to my daughter when she returned to college last fall. (I thought a new model might have been imminent—oops.) And along with that new Apple TV box came a new remote, which has earned a lot of praise for not being the old Apple TV Siri Remote.
It was a single button on that remote that started it all: the new Power button. While the Apple TV has been able to control external devices for a while now, the Power button is so much more explicit: You should be able to use this button to turn your TV on and off.
Which is great, except that I have a complicated setup that includes a home-theater receiver and a TiVo, neither of which can be controlled via HDMI-CEC1, the protocol that Apple TV uses to control other devices.
I’ve also been frustrated by the number of remotes we have to keep around. We’ve got a TiVo remote, an Apple TV remote, a Logitech Harmony remote, and even a Lutron Caseta remote for our living-room lights.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
In iPadOS 15, Apple is making another round of changes to iPad multitasking. It would be easy to consider this yet another spin on the merry-go-round as Apple struggles to figure out how to break the iPad out of the iPhone’s fundamental one-app-at-a-time interface.
But I don’t. Instead, I think Apple is finally assembling all the pieces of the puzzle that will allow the iPad to become more Mac-like than ever before—all the while retaining its unique position in Apple’s ecosystem.
Is Apple waiting for the right moment to unveil proper external-display support on the iPad, perhaps alongside the release of a new Apple display? I’m not saying it will definitely happen, but I want to believe. So let’s look at the evidence.
Continue reading on Macworld.
As I was reading Jason’s excellent Macworld piece about the future of iPadOS multitasking this morning, I was simultaneously poking around the iPadOS 15 beta when something struck me.
As of iPadOS 15, all apps now include those three-dot multitasking controls at the top. It’s certainly an improvement over the previously existing flat bar: tap on it, and you get options to put the window in Split View or in Slide Over1—illustrated using glyphs that are nearly identical to what you’d see on the Mac if you hover over a window’s green “full screen” (formerly Zoom) control.
Familiar-looking glyphs.But what hit me was something so obvious it was a bit like missing the nose on your face: this multitasking widget is always there. Always. Even in apps that don’t support Split View or Slide Over. In those cases, tapping on the multitasking control will still show the Split View and Slide Over icons, but they’re grayed out.
Now, that might seem obvious, but if you think about it a little more, it’s also remarkably telling. Because in the past, given that multitasking was kind of hidden away—or, at least, a power feature that appealed mainly to savvy users—an app that didn’t support Split View or Slide Over was mainly an annoyance only to those aware that it was even an option.2
Name and shame: iPad apps that don’t support multitasking are now much more obvious.In iPadOS 15, by contrast, multitasking is now way more obvious than before, which will likely lead to greater adoption. And that means that any user who taps on that control will see when an app doesn’t support these features, letting them join in on the frustration.
To me, this reads as Apple providing a tacit encouragement to all developers that they’d better start thinking about embracing Split View/Slide Over/windowing, because users are going to notice when they don’t.
That makes even more sense when you think about this as part of a gradual transition for multitasking on the iPad. If Apple had, by contrast, implemented a full-fledged windowing system in iPadOS 15, a lot of developers who hadn’t implemented these multitasking modes might have had to hustle to make their apps work properly.
Instead, the next year is going to introduce multitasking capabilities to a lot more users, which may in turn drive app developers who had not previously enabled Split View and Slide Over to build support into their apps. With the end result that when iPadOS 16 (or 17) rolls around and Apple takes multitasking to the next logical step, the company can pull out its time-honored method of saying “And hey, if your app already supports Split View and Slide Over (and, say, multiple instances), you don’t have to do a thing—your app already works with all these new windowing features!”
It also makes sense from the perspective of using these controls as drag handles, because it implies a future where even apps that don’t support multitasking will need these controls—say, if apps need to be dragged or sent to an external display. Look back up at the Mac full screen widget and its support for Sidecar, which lets you send any app to a connected iPad. Not hard to imagine that the iPad version might some day let you send an app to another monitor.
All in all, it’s a good old traditional Apple slow pedal. There are those amongst us—myself included—who had been hoping that this year Apple would just rip the band-aid off in one fell swoop, but the company has demonstrated in the past that it’s perfectly capable of slooooowly peeling it off when it wants to.
- One odd choice: when you go from full screen to Split View on iPad OS 15, you only seem to have the option to put the current app on the right side of the screen. Why can’t I choose whether a window be in the left or right Split View or Slide Over? I get that it provides fewer options, and is thus less overwhelming, and I can always change it later, but it seems weirdly arbitrary. ↩
- Looking at you, Google apps. Took you long enough. ↩
Apps and tech we use to fall asleep, our tech pickiness, our single- or multi-monitor setups, and interface changes we’ve never gotten used to.
Go to the podcast page.
The legislative challenges to big tech, including Apple, are beginning:
A House panel pushed ahead Wednesday with ambitious legislation that could curb the market power of tech giants Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple and force them to sever their dominant platforms from their other lines of business. Conservative Republican lawmakers haggled over legislative language and pushed concerns of perceived anti-conservative bias in online platforms but couldn’t halt the bipartisan momentum behind the package.
I share John Gruber’s view on how unnecessary this whole thing is. As Gruber put it:
What’s weirdest about Apple’s antitrust and PR problems related to the App Store is that the App Store is a side hustle for Apple. Yes it’s earning Apple $10+ billion a year, and even for Apple that’s significant. But it’s not Apple’s main business by a longshot. To my knowledge no company in history has ever gotten into antitrust hot water over a side business so comparatively small to its overall business. Apple doesn’t need this.
The downside of Apple opening up parts of the App Store, including its payment system, is arguably negligible. Apple would lose some revenue, but not all of it. And to Gruber’s point, the App Store is not Apple’s core business.
But some of the proposed legislation in Congress would be no less than an existential threat to Apple as we know it. All of the company’s strength in integrating hardware, software, and services would be put under scrutiny. Why risk everything that makes your company and its products unique and successful for chump change?
It’s never too late, but it sure feels like Apple is playing a spectacularly dangerous game of chicken and time is running short.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
One of the oldest arguments for having employees all work in the same office (and, within that space, out in the open and not behind office doors) is the idea that if you have a bunch of people bouncing around together in person, something magical will happen.
Or as Tim Cook put it, “Innovation isn’t always a planned activity… It’s bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had.”
So about that. As Claire Cain Miller reports for the New York Times, there’s no evidence that it’s true:
“There’s credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation,” said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. “But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever.”
“All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,” he said.
And, as Miller’s article details, believing the fantasy also requires you to ignore all sorts of arguments that cut against it. The practice can also drive out other kinds of innovation and stifle contributions from some members of a workforce.
To be sure, some companies and some jobs really do require being together in person. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for creating a good workplace. But we’d all be better off—Apple included—if the fantasy of the miraculous conversation by the coffee pot was dispelled once and for all.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
We discuss the future of the Apple Watch, from new materials to new shapes to all the sensors Apple might want to put on any product that touches your body. And then we talk about the risks Apple might face by failing to learn the right lessons from the pandemic about altering its corporate culture.
Go to the podcast page.
With Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference firmly behind us, we’re taking our sweet time picking our way through everything coming to Apple’s platforms this fall. As usual, there were way more changes than Apple talked about onstage, and between watching the conference sessions, scrolling through long webpages of features, and keeping a gimlet eye on Twitter, even more have come to light.
But with such a preponderance of information, it can sometimes be hard to suss out which changes are likely to make a big impact on the lives of Apple users, and which will end up disappearing into the pond without so much as a ripple. Will we still be talking about iPad widgets a year from now? Will everyone have switched to Apple’s new two-factor authentication generator? Some features will have staying power; others won’t.
With that in my mind, here are my bets on which of Apple’s new features will make the biggest difference for its users.
Continue reading on Macworld.
To my surprise, as much as anybody’s, I’ve ended up using Apple’s Notes app a lot over the last several years. I use it when I want to jot down things about my novels, when I’m taking notes for podcast episodes, and even for making checklists.
But I don’t use it because it’s the most full-featured note application around, or because it’s even the most attractive. Simply put, the one thing that Notes has going for it is its ubiquity: I can guarantee that anything that I put in Notes will immediately be available across all my devices. And with the next updates to Apple’s platforms, that ubiquity just got a whole lot… more ubiquitous(?), thanks to the introduction of Quick Note.
Quick Note in use on iPadOS 15.Quick Note is a fascinating feature from both usability and philosophical standpoints. On the iPhone and the iPad, there’s nothing else that’s had this kind of systemwide support; and only Picture-in-Picture has boasted a similar interface: a floating window that can appear, hovering atop everything else, no matter what app you’re in. But Picture-in-Picture is a far more passive feature, without the complexity of interaction that Quick Note has.
In and of itself, that would be enough to get me interested.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
WWDC hangovers, the Globe key, and some live pinging.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
I’ve seen the future of the iPad, and it’s hidden under a key.
The future of an entire platform is a lot to pile on a single plastic square, but here we are. Down in the bottom left corner of Apple’s keyboards is a new key labeled with the picture of a globe. Initially intended for supporting multiple languages, in iPadOS 15 the Globe key has become something much bigger: it’s a symbol for global keyboard shortcuts.
In iPadOS 14, if you hold down the Command key, you can see a list of app-specific features and their key equivalents. It’s like a quick-reference card for keyboard shortcuts. In iPadOS 15, Apple has expanded this feature to make it more like the iPad equivalent of the Mac menu bar—not only does it list keyboard shortcuts, but it can list every command in the app, and you can click any of them to execute them. iPad apps that build out the Mac menu bar for their Catalyst version can pick this feature up for free. It’s another way that the Mac and iPad are increasingly complementing one another.
Then there’s the Globe key. Hold it down in any app in iPadOS 15, and you’ll see a different set of commands, all of which can be applied globally. (Get it?) These menus are full of shortcuts to switch to the home screen (Globe-H), open a Quick Note (Globe-Q), activate Control Center (Globe-C), and pretty much any other system-level area.
The Globe menu also contains loads of keyboard shortcuts to control multitasking. You can put apps into Split View and Slide Over, pop them back into full screen, and cycle between apps, all via Globe key shortcuts.
My first reaction upon realizing how Apple was retasking the Globe key was to wonder why we need another modifier key when Command, Control, and Option exist. It’s an embarrassment of modifiers, yes, but all of those other keys are already being used for all sorts of in-app shortcuts—I guess you could say that they act locally. The Globe key is unencumbered by any app’s conventions—it’s a free space for Apple to think globally, without any fear of colliding with individual apps.
On the Mac, systemwide shortcuts and individual app shortcuts can collide and interact in strange ways. It’s kind of a mess. On the iPad, Apple seems to be saying that global shortcuts use the Globe, and apps use the other modifiers. That makes… a lot of sense.
The potential on the iPad is enormous. It seems almost inevitable that Shortcuts will let users assign Globe-key shortcuts that will work in any app, giving users keyboard control over their automations. (In fact, I’m a little surprised this isn’t already a feature of iPadOS 15!)
It feels like it’s inevitable that Apple will add hardware and media controls to the Globe key. I’m writing this on Apple’s Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, which is a great keyboard—but frustratingly lacks a function row. So when I want to adjust the device’s volume or brightness, pause music, or skip to the next track, I have to use Control Center1. It would make sense for all of those controls to have key equivalents, and assigning them to the Globe means they won’t collide with keyboard shortcuts available in individual apps.
Clearly, there’s a lot more work to be done, but I’m excited that Apple is staking out space for keyboard shortcuts that can work across different apps. This Globe-key kid has potential. We should keep them around and see what happens next.
- Or take my hands off the keyboard entirely and reach up to the volume buttons on the iPad. No thank you. ↩
Apple’s been crowing about the pace at which its users install software updates for ages. Rapid uptake of updates is a sign of a healthy ecosystem—and yet, as announced last week, Apple has made a change that threatens to derail the iOS update train. Just as it unveiled all the features that threaten to make iOS 15 a must-have update this fall, Apple also announced that iOS 14 users who aren’t ready to board will have the opportunity to step off and wait it out.
“iOS now offers a choice between two software update versions in the Settings app,” reads a page on the iOS 15 website. “You can update to the latest version of iOS 15 as soon as it’s released for the latest features and most complete set of security updates. Or continue on iOS 14 and still get important security updates until you’re ready to upgrade to the next major version.”
It’s not quite the end of iOS updates as we know them, but it’s a fascinating change that has a lot of ramifications for the future of iOS.
Continue reading on Macworld.
If you’ve spent any amount of time troubleshooting network connections, you’ve probably used good old ping. But as I discovered recently, sometimes you need a little more information out of it. For example, ping by default does not tell you when the packets you receive come in, which can sometimes be helpful—especially if you need to reconcile information from different servers.
Fortunately, ping on macOS lets you easily add a timestamp with a single additional option. Just enter ping --apple-time <IP address> to see the time a packet was received, right down to the microsecond.
Of course, ping is replete with other options too, including setting intervals between packets, using specific IPs, and even playing an alert sound when packets are dropped or, indeed, when any packet is received.
And if your network troubleshooting needs are more in-depth, you can always check out a GUI tool like PingPlotter.
Apple’s new podcast subscriptions, our favorite under-the-radar WWDC news, the last game we got into, and which big tech companies we’d break up.
Go to the podcast page.
WWDC 2021 is over! This week we discuss a lot of the hidden details of Apple’s announcements, and share our first reactions to using the first developer betas. (Jason isn’t mad at Safari, just disappointed.)
Go to the podcast page.
If there is one thing that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is fundamentally about, it’s tools. This is the company’s opportunity to lay the groundwork for the big OS releases that will debut this fall, yes, but we’re also talking about Apple here. And Apple is a company that looks at the long-term—it’s the kind of attitude you can afford to have when you have billions of dollars and are into your fifth decade.
But the reason tools are important is because they point to the kind of things that Apple thinks are important. That’s not always to say that the company is infallible, but it’s a good indication of where it thinks the future is heading. And, of course, in cases where it’s a future that Apple itself has in mind, that gives it a leg up.
So, by looking at the kind of tools and technologies that Apple has laid out for developers to take advantage of this year, you can get a pretty good idea of at least some things that are coming down the pike for the company, whether in the short term or farther off in the future.
Continue reading on Macworld.
TechCrunch’s Mathew Panzarino got an interview with Apple marketer Bob Borchers and exec Sebastien Mariners-Mes in which they addressed the changes to multitasking in iPadOS 15:
“It was a very deliberate decision on our part,” says Mariners-Mes about adding this new element. “This really brings a new level of productivity where you can have, you know, this floating window. You can have content behind it. You can seamlessly cut and paste. And that’s something that’s just not possible with the traditional (iPadOS) model. And we also really strive to make it consistent with the rest of multitasking where that center window can also become one of the windows in your split view, or full size, and then go back to to being a center window. We think it’s a cool addition to the model and we look really look forward to 3rd parties embracing it.”
I’m of the opinion that the changes in iPadOS 15 aren’t rearranging deck chairs, but resetting the iPad’s multitasking metaphor so it’s capable of growing into a new take on a multi-window interface.1 The floating center window and QuickNote are both examples of Apple being a lot less precious about preventing windows from overlapping other windows on the iPad. It sure feels like this is the first step in a much larger interface overhaul.
- In advance of fully supporting large external displays. I want to believe! ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
When Apple’s annual updates ship this fall, Safari will be at version 15. Each new version of Apple’s browser is marked by security and performance improvements, but this year Safari is getting an all-new design as well.
Apple seems to be unhappy with the traditional browser design that includes navigation tools at the top, with websites being forced to live in their own view down below, and with Safari 15, it has blurred the line between browser and web content. This goes far beyond the mere splashes of color that Safari users may be used to seeing behind their navigation controls when scrolling a long webpage.
Now, the new tab bar takes on the color of the website, letting the entire window take on the personality of whatever website is visible. Apple says that this lets browsing feel more expansive, as the browser’s UI is now yielding to the content.
The color the tab bar takes on can be manually set by including setting a meta tag named theme-color in the head of the webpage.1 (Optionally, different values can be set for light and dark modes.) If this value isn’t set, Safari will choose its own color from the website’s background color or header image. Thankfully, Safari is smart enough to not use colors that interfere with UI elements like standard window controls in macOS.
Tab Groups are a new way to organize tabs and save groups of them for later. Conceptually, these are different from bookmarks in that they dynamically adjust as you open and close tabs and move to different webpages, but if you’ve ever used the trick to open a folder full of Safari bookmarks at once, it’ll feel a bit familiar. Tab Groups sync across iOS, iPadOs and macOS via iCloud. They are accessible via the sidebar in Safari and appear as a menu item in the tab bar itself.
To further minimize Safari’s UI, the tab bar and address field have been collapsed into one new user interface. When a tab is active, it expands into a full address field. Taken all together, Safari looks radically different than before:
On the iPhone, things get even weirder. The tab bar is now at the bottom of the screen and will minimize as the user starts scrolling. This new tab bar works a bit the Home indicator on a Face ID device. The user can swipe horizontally between tabs, like swiping between apps. A swipe up brings up an overview of open tabs and a UI to swap between Tab Groups.
Safari 15 brings big changes, and surely not everyone will be a fan. I, for one, think the expanded use of color is distracting, and the tabs-aren’t-just-tabs-anymore design confusing at times. I hope Apple might reconsider some of these more drastic design changes during the beta process this summer.
- Six Colors readers on Safari 15 will have already noticed. -J.S. ↩
Did anything happen this week? Oh, just a few things.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
My thanks to Coherence X4 for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Coherence X4 allows you to turn any website into a chromium-powered app on your Mac. You pick a site, enter a name, and pick an icon, and Coherence turns that web app into an isolated application separate from your main browser.
The new version includes features such as Microsoft Edge and Opera support, Incognito apps, quick resume, an app library, and it’s the first Chrome-based single-site browser tool built for Apple silicon.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week—use the promo code SixColors at checkout. There’s also a free 14-day trial, and it’s also available as part of any Setapp subscription.
Apple announced the winners of its annual design awards today, and it’s a really impressive collection of iPhone and iPad apps1.
Here are the winners:
Apps
- Inclusivity: Voice Dream Reader
- Delight and Fun: Pok Pok Playroom
- Interaction: Carrot Weather
- Social Impact: Be My Eyes
- Visuals and Graphics: Loóna
- Innovation: NaadSadhana
Games
- Inclusivity: Holovista
- Delight and Fun: Little Orpheus
- Interaction: Bird Alone
- Social Impact: Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
- Visuals and Graphics: Genshin Impact
- Innovation: League of Legends: Wild Rift
- Technically two also run on tvOS, two on watchOS, and one on macOS. ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
For many years, power users have been able to use plug-ins to extend the capabilities of macOS’ built-in Mail application. And for years, those users have been accustomed to those plug-ins breaking as Apple has updated Mail and the operating system.
This year at WWDC, Apple introduced MailKit, a new Mac-only framework for building modern Mail.app extensions. This framework is based on the same underlying technology that powers Safari app extensions and share sheet extensions.
There are four types of Mail extensions:
- Compose extensions will allow new workflows when composing mail messages.
- Action extensions help people manage their inbox by providing custom rules on incoming messages.
- Content blocking extensions provide WebKit content blockers for Mail messages.
- Message security extensions can provide further security by signing, encrypting, and decrypting messages when people send and receive mail.
These extensions can be bundled into existing Mac applications, or be offered on their own, but must pass through the Mac App Store.
Time will tell what types of Mail extensions are possible in this new framework, but if Apple’s WWDC session about them is any indication, this should be an exciting change to an app that hasn’t seen much excitement or change in quite a long time.
Apple is clear that extensions are the future; existing Mail plug-ins will stop being supported in the future. While this means that some favorites may not be long for this world, I’m excited that Apple is now offering a sustainable, official way for developers to make Mail.app on the Mac more useful and flexible.
The early years of smart home tech have been a morass of competing standards and technologies, often hindering broad adoption by consumers who don’t want to figure out which devices work with which systems.
To combat this, most of the major industry players—including Apple—have recently signed on to a new interoperability protocol dubbed Matter (formerly Connected Home over IP or CHIP).
Matter accessories have not yet hit the market, which is why the support Apple is rolling out in the newest versions of most of its operating systems—iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and tvOS 15—is only billed as a “developer preview” targeted at those making smart home apps or accessories.
The arrival of Matter does not signal the demise of HomeKit—in fact, HomeKit will continue to exist as a layer on top of Matter, positioning it as a parallel to existing accessories.
Matter will exist as a parallel protocol inside HomeKit.Apple’s stated goal, according to Selina Zhang from Apple’s Home Engineering team, is seamless integration of Matter with HomeKit. From the user’s perspective, interacting with a Matter accessory should look pretty much identical to interacting with a HomeKit accessory. When adding a Matter accessory to another app, the workflow will be basically the same: using a QR code, then selecting the correct home, rooms, scenes, and automations. Matter accessories can, at the user’s discretion, appear in the Home app, be accessed using Siri, and show up in Control Center, all right alongside HomeKit accessories.
From a developer perspective, interacting with Matter accessories should likewise be very similar to the way that they may already work with HomeKit accessories. Existing HomeKit APIs will work with Matter accessories as well; a new API will allow Matter accessories to be set up with other, non-HomeKit smart hubs. A future release will add the ability to access Matter custom features via HomeKit as well.
So if Matter just looks like HomeKit, what’s the real advantage? The main appeal is the interoperability, which should broaden the devices available to HomeKit users. Once Matter accessories exist, or existing smart home devices add support for the protocol, you’ll be able to interact with them just as with your existing HomeKit accessories.
As a user, you’ll be able to choose more easily which apps and hubs to use to manage your smart home devices.The addition of Matter also puts more control in the hands of users. If you decide that you want to use a system other than HomeKit to intermediate all your smart home accessories, you can do that. Updates to the Home app will allow you to see which home hubs are connected to a given accessory, as well as pair accessories with a new home hub, or manage all your existing home hubs.
As mentioned, full implementation of Matter is still a little bit away. While the Matter framework in Apple’s upcoming operating systems is fully certified, it will require a developer profile to enable. And though the majority of Apple’s platforms will gain support, macOS is conspicuously absent in the list.
If I had to wager, I would guess that full Matter support might appear as early as a point release to iOS 15, and likely by the time iOS 16 comes out next fall—hopefully on the Mac as well. But keep your eyes peeled for Matter-compatible accessories to start hitting the market as early as later this year.
John Voorhees provides a really good overview of how far Shortcuts has come:
The second thing that struck me about Monday’s announcement is how well Shortcuts has been set up to succeed on the Mac. Although I’ve wanted Shortcuts on the Mac for what feels like forever, I think the wait will be worth it in the end. Had Shortcuts been brought to the Mac too early, it would have been starting from a full stop. By waiting until Mac Catalyst apps matured and iPhone and iPad apps could be run on M1 Macs, Shortcuts will enjoy a long list of third-party apps that support it day one. I migrated my M1 MacBook Air to an M1 iMac that I’m testing, and when I installed macOS Monterey, I already had more than a dozen third-party apps to test with Shortcuts. Add to that the fact that AppKit apps can add Shortcuts support, and it’s clear that Apple is sending the message that Shortcuts is the future of automation for all apps, not just a subset built a certain way.
It’s not just exciting that the Mac will now have access to the same great automation tools that have been growing on iOS. It’s exciting that Apple has a plan for user automation across all its platforms, and is executing it.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
If you thought the addition of precipitation alerts and a redesigned Weather app in iOS 15 meant that Dark Sky, which Apple acquired back in 2020, was not long for this world…well, it’s gotten a bit of a reprieve, according to an update on the Dark Sky blog
Update: Support for the Dark Sky API service for existing customers will continue until the end of 2022. The iOS app and Dark Sky website will also be available until the end of 2022.
Dark Sky has been my weather app of choice for several years, and while Apple’s Weather app seems to be improving quite a bit thanks to the addition of the app’s back-end and technology, I’m glad that I don’t have to make any immediate changes.
I guess Apple needs until 2022 to finally port its own Weather app to the iPad.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
When iOS and iPadOS 15 launch later this year, the App Store will have new tools for developers to optimize their product pages to better stand out in the busy marketplace.
The first tool to do this is called the custom product page, which will let developers market their app differently to different sets of users. Each version of the product page can have a different set of videos, screenshots and text, and each one comes with its own unique URL for sharing.
In App Analytics, developers will be able to see which page performs best, giving them data to better reach potential customers in the store. The backend will provide both retention data and average proceeds each custom product page.
Each app can have up to 35 different custom product pages, so developers will be able to go wild if they are so inclined.1
The other addition to the App Store is product page optimization, which will let developers set up and run automatic A/B testing on their pages to see what works best for them and their app. Each test can have up to three options, and developers can set what percentage of users will see a given option. These tests have to go through App Review.
The iOS App Store is a big place, and it’s hard to stand out. With these new tools, Apple is hoping that developers will be able to manage their product pages more effectively. I don’t think this was at the top of anyone’s App Store wishlist for 2021, but I am very interested to see how developers will use this once it launches.
- Nobody tell James Thomson. ↩
Our thoughts on Spatial Audio in Apple Music, if we’re excited about Shortcuts on the Mac and our other WWDC favorites, if SharePlay will convince us to use FaceTime, and how we feel about Universal Control for iPad and Mac.
Go to the podcast page.
Last year Apple introduced Car Keys, which allows Apple devices to unlock and start cars that are equipped with the proper technology. While it was clear that the first wave of cars to support this feature would use the same NFC reader technology used by Apple Pay, it was also obvious that Ultra Wideband (UWB) would be the technology that would ultimately be more predominant.
Here we are a year later, and Apple will officially support UWB car keys in iOS and watchOS, for all devices equipped with a U1 chip. Because UWB can provide much more precise position data and longer range than NFC, they’ll be able to work while you keep them in your bag or pocket. UWB-equipped cars will even know which device is entering the car through the driver side-door, to unlock personalized settings like seat and mirror positioning, and won’t allow the car to be started unless someone with a valid key is inside the car.
UWB’s enhanced range and location savvy will also allow cars to react when you are getting close, but aren’t yet within unlocking range, to do things like turn on headlights and start climate control. Likewise, cars can set out a “lock zone”, to automatically lock your car when you step a certain distance away.
Though UWB is vital in determining positioning, most data transfer between the car and the iPhone or Apple Watch comes over Bluetooth LE, including initial authentication and exchange of cryptographic keys. Car Key can also use that data connection to provide access to remote keyless entry controls right within the Wallet app.
And since Apple is a part of the Connected Car Consortium industry group, all this work is based on standards that should mean that in a few years, lots of cars will support this technology.
Also forthcoming later this year is support for Home Key, which appears to be very much like Car Key was last year: an NFC-based way for iPhones and Apple Watches to unlock your front door with a tap. I’m looking forward to that, not just because I suspect that many existing smart locks will be upgradeable via a new NFC-savvy module, but because it’s a lot cheaper to buy a new lock than a new car.
What’s not in your Wallet? Expired passes remain, but are hidden.Speaking of the iPhone and Apple Watch replacing things that would otherwise live in your pockets, Apple’s rolling out updates to Wallet and Apple Pay this fall.
If you’ve ever laboriously downloaded individual passes for an airplane flight or a concert or sporting event ticket, you’ll be happy to hear that Apple is finally supporting the downloading of multiple passes in a single file. Behind the scenes, it’s literally just a Zip archive full of individual passes. But the net result is, you should eventually be able to click once and get all your tickets.
Wallet in iOS 15 will also hide expired passes. (Relax, people who keep old passes as souvenirs, they’ll still be there, and accessible via a View Expired Passes link at the bottom of the screen. I still have my pass for Game 5 of the 2014 World Series, so I’m one of you.)
Apple Pay updates for this fall include a new Apple Pay interface built in SwiftUI. Apple has added a simplified way to add a payment card right from the Apple Pay sheet, which is pretty important since once someone has decided to pay, the last thing you want to do is make them cancel out of that screen! Payment information has been expanded to include discounts and subtotals, and you will be able to enter coupon codes during the payment process—another way to keep people from exiting the Apple Pay screen when they’ve already decided to pay.
Apple made a lot of WWDC announcements…but first we talk about Nintendo, Playdate, and audio.
Go to the podcast page.
Steven Aquino, writing at Forbes, has an excellent round-up of all the things that Apple announced which have implications for accessibility. In particular, Steven does a good job of looking at features that may not have even been explicitly designed for accessibility, but confer benefits nonetheless:
Thus, digital representations of IDs and keys are not only more modern, they can be infinitely more accessible. TSA checkpoints can be extremely stressful for disabled people as it is—I speak from experience—so having to just wave your phone at the official is much better than hurriedly and clumsily trying to find your ID in your wallet or bag. And the experience is even more accessible if you have an Apple Watch.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
I bet there’s nothing you like more than dealing with passwords. Coming up with strong passwords, remembering them, saving them to password managers, entering verification codes. Is there anything more fun?
Well, sorry1 as I am to rain on your parade, the writing is on the wall for the good old password, and the first step to its demise is being rolled out in macOS Monterey and iOS 15—though it will probably take at least a couple years before it comes to fruition.
Passkeys to the kingdom iCloud Passkey has a lot of advantages compared to passwords.The reason for that is a new standard called WebAuthn. I know, I know: another standard. But WebAuthn is a spec from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that basically makes the rules for the web; the spec is also part of the FIDO2 framework backed by the eponymous alliance that includes Microsoft, Google, Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, AmEx, and yes, Apple. Both FIDO and WebAuthn have as their goal the elimination of the password, replaced instead with a framework that relies on public key infrastructure (PKI), the same technology behind nearly all modern encryption.
Apple’s native implementation of this system is called Passkeys in iCloud Keychain, and a technology preview is included in both iOS 15 and macOS Monterey. Disabled by default, it’s intended for testing, not production, but it’s clearly a case of Apple skating to where the puck is heading.
Using Passkeys in iCloud Keychain is pretty simple: when you create an account in an app or on a website, you’ll make your username, and the system will pop up a sheet that asks you to confirm you’re creating an account. Hit Continue, it’s confirmed with Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode, and that’s it. The passkey for the service is stored in your keychain—strong, unique, and with no need for you to remember it.
Setting up an account with iCloud Passkey is simple.Later, when you open an app or visit a site and have to log in to your account, you’ll tap a sign in button, and the system will ask if you want to login with your passkey (or another compatible security method—more on which in a bit). Tap Continue, authenticate with your biometrics or passcode, and done.
At first blush, this might seem pretty similar to the way that iCloud Keychain already works, generating strong passwords and remembering them so you don’t have to. But there’s one key advantage: because of the use of the asymmetric public key infrastructure, apps and services don’t have to store a copy of your password. Instead, they get a copy of your public key—and because that information really is designed to be public, it doesn’t need to be secured. That’s great for users because it means that they don’t have to worry about their secret information being stolen, and it’s great for companies because it means that they won’t be targeted to steal people’s passwords. It’d be like trying to steal the text of the King James Bible.
It’s hard to overstate just how significant this change is. While we’re still a few years away from this transition, the fact that Apple has implemented it in its new operating systems is important. Given the company’s huge installed base, it exerts major influence on the tech industry and the adoption of new technology.2
There are still some implementation questions to address: for example, I’m not sure how this works in cases where, say, you want to log in to your account on someone else’s device or in a scenario where you have no devices at all with you. Currently, it’s possible to fall back to other authentication methods, including passwords, but it does eliminate one of the major advantages of Passkeys.
That said, not adopting a system with such potentially momentous security improvements across the spectrum because of edge cases would be a cases of shooting yourself in the foot to spite your face.
A better password today So, if it’s going to be a while before passwords meet their bitter end, what are we supposed to do in the meantime?
macOS Monterey and iOS 15 can now generate two factor codes for your accounts.Well, we’re not being hung out to dry. Apple’s made some quality-of-life improvements to the existing password infrastructure. Best of all, iCloud Keychain now includes a generator for Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP), those verification codes that you may have previously generated with an app like Google Authenticator or Authy.
And, like one-time passwords sent to you by SMS, macOS and iOS can now automatically fill in those verification codes for you when you log into an account, eliminating the dance of opening a separate app or retrieving a separate device.
Setting up TOTP is easier too: when you create a new account or upgrade an account that offers these codes as a security option, developers can now simply allow users to click a link or tap a button to configure it. Previously, that workflow often required scanning a QR code with a separate device.
Safari can detect a QR code used for authentication and offer to set up the account for you.Even cooler, if developers set up their system correctly, Safari can automatically detect QR codes and offer to set up the code generation option for users. Mind officially blown.
All of this is intended to encourage developers to move away from sending verification codes via SMS, a practice that is much less secure than password generators, which do all their work locally on your device and thus can’t be intercepted.
The future soon There are some other password improvements in macOS Monterey and iOS 15 as well. For example, Apple’s systems have expanded their support for hardware security keys, offering an API that all macOS and iOS apps can use.
Between this and the verification code framework, Apple users are poised to see even better and easier to use security in the immediate future. And with Passkeys in iCloud Keychain, the future for secure and easy authentication has never looked more promising. If this is the death knell for password, I’m the one enthusiastically ringing the bell.
- Not sorry. ↩
- Apple Pay’s a great example of this. Contactless payments existed prior to it, and were even common outside the U.S., but the U.S. market didn’t really take off until Apple made its move. ↩
I’ve sort of fallen in love with SF Symbols, Apple’s library of thousands of iconographic representations that’s intended to let app developers build interfaces without custom art while standardizing the look of Apple’s platforms. Recently the SwiftBar utility added SF Symbols support, and I got to modify all my menu-bar status scripts to display little symbols from the SF Symbols library. It’s delightful.
Since it’s WWDC time, it’s an opportunity to get an update on the state of SF Symbols. While a lot of Apple’s stuff is released on an annual cycle in the fall, Apple keeps introducing and updating SF Symbols throughout the year during various OS releases. Overall, according to Apple, there are more than 600 new symbols being added this year, including more images for Apple products, video game controllers, health related symbols, and a bunch of interface and window management icons that go way beyond the three icons used in iPadOS 15 for multitasking.
Coming with the fall releases, however, are two huge additions to the ways SF Symbols can be displayed in apps. In addition to the existing Multicolor and Monochrome modes, symbols can be displayed in Hierarchical or Palette modes.
Hierarchical icons contain varying opacities.Hierarchical-formatted symbols are displayed in a single color, but parts of the symbol have varying opacity. This can be especially useful in a group of icons that share characteristics, in order to point out what’s different—imagine a series of text-entry icons that all display multiple lines of text, but different symbols to represent just how clicking on the icon might modify that text. With Hierarchical symbols, the text could be displayed with a reduced opacity, while the important symbols would display at full opacity. That will have the effect of making the important part of the symbol pop, while retaining a consistent color scheme.
Hierarchical symbols can have three different levels of opacity. Apple suggests that shapes that don’t touch be assigned primary and secondary levels, and that shapes that touch or are inside of other objects be assigned a tertiary level, which is 25 percent opacity.
Icon sets in various two-color palette styles.The Palette mode uses multiple colors, but follows the same primary-secondary-tertiary concept as Hierarchical mode. Essentially, Palette mode varies colors rather than opacity. Developers can assign the same color palette to a group of symbols to have them be harmonious, while still fitting in with their apps’ color schemes.
Given Apple’s focus on bringing its platforms together, it’s not surprising that Apple is also working to add consistency in color palettes across all platforms. Brown, a color that was previously available only on the Mac1, is now available across platforms. Apple has also redefined a few colors in order to make them consistent across platforms. Indigo and purple are now more consistent, and teal has been entirely redefined. Fortunately, if you were really attached to the old shade of teal, it’s still available—it’s just been renamed “cyan.”
Finally, among the other new features that SF Symbols will gain this year are a few clever bits of localization: Symbols that include text have been localized for more languages, so for example a page icon with a letter “A” on it in English might appear with appropriate script in Korean. Also, some icons have been optimized for right-to-left scripts — for example, the battery icon would have its bump on the other side in right-to-left languages.
Along with updating symbols, Apple has also updated its SF Symbols app to version 3, with support for custom icons, copying images right out of the app, previews of all the new icon coloring modes, and more.
- A statement that made me snort when I wrote it, but you know what I mean. It wasn’t available for SF Symbols on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. ↩
Web extensions got a big overhaul for the Mac last year, and though the uptake has not exactly been gangbusters, the potential for a bigger impact landed this year when Apple announced that they would be available on iPhone and iPad as well.
Why is that a big deal? Simple: Apple’s mobile devices are brand new territory for extension developers, and they’re a big wide open field. We’re talking about tens of millions of potential users who have simply not had access to this type of software on these devices.
One of the big advantages of web extensions is that they’re compatible across platforms. You can now, in theory, develop an extension for Google Chrome on Windows and convert it to one that can be used on the iPhone.
Apple’s trying to make this easy: they’ve updated their web extension converter, introduced last year to help developers port their existing extensions to the Mac, so that it automatically generates an iOS version as well. (You can also use it to update your existing Mac extension with iOS support.)
There are, of course, some limitations in designing an extension to work on Apple’s mobile devices. In particular, concerns about resources: many extensions use persistent background pages that keep scripts running whenever an extension is installed and activated, but those pages can chew up as much memory and power as an extra open tab. Instead, iOS/iPadOS extensions require non-persistent background pages that only get loaded when something triggers them.
Designing an extension for iOS dos require specific considerations, such as different screen sizes.But that does mean that developers who count on the existence of a background page to keep track of information will instead need to rely on other solutions, such as the browser storage API. There are a few other cases where certain APIs aren’t available, including ones that just behave differently on iOS/iPadOS from elsewhere (the Window API, for example, or mouse events like clicking). There are, as well, design considerations that must be taken into account when porting an extension to mobile devices—especially the iPhone, with its screen configuration. However, in one piece of good news, it does sound as though extensions will be allowed to offer keyboard shortcuts on mobile devices.
Unsurprisingly, privacy is a big focus of the way Apple deals with extensions. Extensions will have to request permission from the user before they’re activated on iOS, though Apple has some suggestions to ease this workflow, including limiting an extension to viewing the current active tab, where permission is implicitly granted by user action.
Safari 15 allows extensions to take over the new tab page on both the Mac and mobile devices.Beyond the addition to Apple’s mobile devices, Safari 15 also brings one other new major type of extension: the new tab override. This lets extensions create custom pages that appear when you open a new tab in Safari, letting users have even more control than Safari’s own Start Page. And those are available on both the Mac and iOS/iPadOS.
The barrier to entry still remains that creating an extension for Apple’s devices means you need to have a Mac that runs Xcode, which isn’t feasible for some developers. Moreover, extensions for iOS are, like the Mac, tied to apps, which means dealing with the App Store. For those developers used to the freedom of the web, that may be a hard sell, even considering the opportunities.
How one can define what a “Mac app” is has gotten more complicated as time has gone on. In the early days of Mac OS X, developers could choose between Cocoa, Carbon and even Java. As the latter two faded, we saw the rise of wrappers around web apps that via technologies like Electron.
But Apple has made the water murky as well, thanks to Mac Catalyst and more recently, the ability of M1 Macs to run iPhone and iPad apps natively.
One of those applications is built with Mac Catalyst.Mac Catalyst To recap, Catalyst allows a developer to take an iPad app and tweak it to run on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. These apps can pick up a lot of native Mac UI and UX features along the way. Messages, for example, is a Catalyst app as of macOS Big Sur. Apple has done a lot of clever things to give developers incentives to use Catalyst. If an iPad app supports multitasking, for example, the Mac version gets multi-window support out of the box.
This year at WWDC, Mac Catalyst didn’t get the massive improvements it did last year, but Apple still took some time to go over how it can be used to make a great Mac app.
Apple has continued to improve the things Xcode does automatically when the “Mac” button is checked and a developer builds an app. Beyond that, though, developers need to fine-tune the Mac experience.
At first, all Mac Catalyst apps felt a little weird, as they were all displayed at a reduced scale of 77%, owing to the differences between iPad and Mac display. That’s has since been changed—now apps can be set to run in the “Mac idiom” at 100% scale. These apps also utilize native AppKit controls, making them look and feel like more traditional apps.
Apple encourages developers to think about the various display sizes that a Mac Catalyst app may encounter—it’s a far cry from what’s found on iOS and iPadOS. Not only are there a bunch of non-Retina MacBook Airs and iMacs still running around, but there’s probably a daredevil out there somewhere who’s running apps in full screen on a Pro Display XDR at 6K resolution.
Likewise, Macs are hooked up to a wide range of input devices, none of which is a touchscreen. Apps can’t assume that everyone has a trackpad, either. Any navigation that requires gestures will need to be re-thought for the macOS environment.
In many ways, creating a good Mac Catalyst app is just like writing a good AppKit app. Apple’s tools are good, but making something truly great requires time and care. Even if Catalyst ends up being a transitionary technology in the long haul, it’s an important step, and one that seems to be going well. It’s getting harder and harder to tell what apps are using Catalyst, and that’s a good thing.
iOS and iPadOS apps on M1 Macs There are over one million iOS and iPad apps already on the Mac App Store for users of new M1 Macs. While developers of many, many major apps have opted out of this program, Apple is working in macOS Monterey to improve the experience for users and hopefully make developers more willing to look at Apple silicon Macs as a reasonable target for their mobile development.
To be frank, these apps still stick out on macOS Big Sur. They work well enough, but they look and feel a bit foreign, even when compared to apps built with Mac Catalyst. But for developers who don’t go through that work, it’s a painless way to have their applications in front of Mac users.
In macOS Monterey, Apple is working to conform these apps to feel more at home on the Mac. In addition to mapping iOS functionality to things like the menu bar and Mac input devices that started in Big Sur, these applications on Monterey can now support Shortcuts for Mac, Apple Pay, full-screen video with HDR and new gesture support when a trackpad is present.
On the App Store side, developers can also now confirm that their app has been tested to work well on macOS, and they can set a minimum OS that they support, or let Apple automatically set that on the app’s needs.
Additionally, Apple is tweaking the Mac App Store to make these titles easier to find. No longer will users have to switch to the “iPhone and iPad Apps” tab to discover these apps; they will appear in-line with traditional Mac titles in the Store, blurring the line between Mac-first and Mac-second apps even more.
Last year, in the grips of a sudden and shocking global pandemic, Apple continued rolling. New product announcements kept dropping. A new set of operating-system releases were announced, went into beta, and shipped. The transition to Apple silicon started.
Everyone at Apple deserves a lot of credit for keeping the machine chugging along during 2020, but the company was helped out by the its policy of working well in advance, laying the groundwork for products and features over a long stretch of time.
Unfortunately, that approach also has a downside: it reduces the company’s nimbleness. Last spring it was clear that masks were going to be a major feature of public life for a while, but there was no way the next iPhone could be adapted to add Touch ID to its home button in time. Apple did manage to invent a mask workaround for Apple Watch users—but even that quick fix didn’t arrive on iPhones until an iOS update in May 2021.
Apple takes its time, for better or for worse. This week at its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple finally unveiled a bunch of features that appear to be based on hard lessons learned during the last year-plus of pandemic life. It’s great to see Apple reacting to changes in the world, but given that nothing showed off this week will ship until this fall, is the timing all wrong?
Continue reading on Macworld.
I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more machine-learning based audio analysis.
The bulk of Tuesday’s WWDC session, “Discover built-in sound classification in SoundAnalysis,” is going to appeal to developers who want to write code into their audio apps. But I found it strangely fascinating just as an example of what Apple’s machine-learning-based models are capable of.
Presenter Jon Huang of Apple’s audio team demonstrates a built-in audio recognition model that allows his Mac to dynamically recognize different sounds as they occur around it: talking, music, elements of the music like vocals and guitars, Huang snapping along to the music, pouring tea, stirring the glass, and more. (The Mac is literally annotating every sound that’s happening in the room—it’s a very cool demo, and I was immediately struck by the potential accessibility power of this technology.)
Following up Huang’s demo is a pretty nice one by audio software engineer Kevin Durand: he uses Shortcuts on a Mac running macOS Monterey to process a folder full of movies, looking for any that contain the sound of a cowbell—and then clipping out that movie and saving it to a new location. It’s a great demo of the utility of Shortcuts and of the speed of Macs running Apple silicon, and sure enough, in moments Durand’s shortcut has found one video—of Huang roller-skating backward while striking a cowbell.
Shortcuts doesn’t have audio classification built into it (yet?), but Durand has built a simple app using Apple’s new SoundAnalysis APIs that identifies whether a particular sound is found inside a particular file. It’s a good way to demonstrate these APIs to developers, but I think it’s also a good example of what Shortcuts enables on the Mac—Durand’s app doesn’t really even need an interface to be useful, because it’s lending all its power to Shortcuts, where users can add it in to whatever workflows they want to build.
But in the meantime, maybe Apple should try to build actions like Durand’s right into Shortcuts. These SoundAnalysis APIs are really impressive, and Shortcuts provides a way to put that kind of power into the hands of users without anyone standing in the middle.
TestFlight on the Mac at last.Apps don’t spring, full-featured, onto our devices. App developers have to put the code and all the other assets together and create that thing—and it’s a whole process. Developers rely on beta testers to take their in-progress code and discover all sorts of ways in which the software fails—so they can be fixed before the app is released to the general public.
On iOS, developers use an Apple tool called TestFlight to send beta versions of their apps to testers. It’s got a lot of convenient features, but hasn’t been available for macOS before. On Monday at WWDC, Apple announced that TestFlight is (finally) coming to the Mac, and it’s good news for developers and testers alike.
TestFlight for Mac will support regular Mac apps, but it’ll also support iOS apps running on Macs with Apple silicon. (Developers decide who gets to see their iOS apps, controlling whether an iOS app is available for Mac testers on a group-by-group basis.)
As a user, TestFlight will work more or less like it does on iOS today. There’s an app you can use to add or remove apps you’re testing. You can choose to automatically update to the latest builds as they’re uploaded by the developer, or take control of that process manually. Beta apps from TestFlight will appear with a yellow dot next to their name in the Dock and in Launchpad, and in the Finder their Kind will be labeled as Beta Application.
Developers will need to provide a provisioning profile for their apps to be distributed via TestFlight, but that’ll be handled automatically by Xcode if the app is handling signing. If signing is being handled manually, a developer will need to explicitly include that profile.
A workflow in Xcode Cloud.And then there’s Xcode Cloud, which Apple also announced on Monday, and is rolling out in a limited beta now, with a larger group of testers later this year, and broader availability next year. Apple’s goal with Xcode Cloud is to allow developers to build and test apps faster, especially when collaborating with other members of a development team. While developers will still build their apps on their local Macs, Xcode Cloud lets developers design custom workflows that can allow, for example, commits to specific branches to result in custom builds or TestFlight distributions.
In addition to being integrated directly into the Xcode app, Xcode Cloud has a web app version as well. It will allow developers to test their code on virtualized Apple hardware, which might be a great alternative to having to keep a bunch of devices around and laboriously build and deploy on each of them. Apple also says that it’s focused on security in Xcode cloud, because every build environment is temporary—and securely torn down between builds—and all code is encrypted when it’s not being used.
With watchOS 8, Apple isn’t setting out to radically change the experience of using an Apple Watch, but the new capabilities the release will give developers will make it feel more dynamic and useful throughout the day.
The biggest change in this regard is how applications will be able to work in the “Wrist Down” position. In watchOS 7, apps were dimmed and blurred out when the Watch was inactive, with the time overlaid in the upper-right corner:
With watchOS 8, the blurring will be replaced with a new dimmer state, that is ready to become inactive with just a single tap:
watchOS tells the application the state of the Watch, and the app should be able to quickly dim and hide personal data that shouldn’t be visible to others when the user’s wrist is down.
In this dimmed state, a watchOS app can still receive data from the system and update their UI. Workout apps or audio apps can update once per second when there is an active session going on to keep the user informed with a mere glance. Out of session, this time between updates is once per minute to preserve battery life.
In watchOS 8, Apple is also updating how apps are sent updated information from HealthKit. Critical data — such as fall events, low blood oxygen saturation and heart rate events — is sent immediately. Other data types are delivered hourly, if not longer.
If you use a Bluetooth heart rate monitor or other equipment and pair them directly with the Apple Watch, watchOS 8 has some features for you, too. Bluetooth device will be able to connect when their corresponding application is in the background, as long the app is being used as a Complication. From there, data from the device (such as heart rate) can be kept up to date directly, up to four times an hour.
Lastly, text entry is being sped up this year as well, as the Watch will remember if the user prefers Scribble or Dictation, on a per-app basis.
The Apple Watch has always been about small interactions, and with watchOS 8, Apple has continued to work in making those faster and smoother than before. Starting later this year, the Watch will be more up to date all the time, even when your wrist is down, while Health data and even text entry will be faster as well. These small interactions are often just seconds long, but time matters when it comes to the Watch.
Shazam! It ain’t just a movie starring Sinbad.1 Apple integrated the song-recognition service into Siri back in iOS 8; four years later, it bought the whole company. Last fall, iOS and iPadOS 14.2 added a button for Shazam to Control Center, and as of this year, the company has rolled out an API for developers to take advantage of the technology: ShazamKit.
ShazamKit allows developers to add the song recognition feature into their own apps, but with a couple of interesting additions. For one thing, ShazamKit isn’t restricted to Apple’s own devices: in addition to the latest versions of iOS/iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS, Apple has also provided documentation for building ShazamKit apps on Android.
In addition to being able to match against Apple’s extensive song catalog, ShazamKit allows developers to create a custom catalog of audio which it can then match against. This enables apps and services to provide audio-matching technology that’s not just limited to commercial music.
Shazam can match audio playing live or in a pre-recorded piece of audio or video. To protect user privacy, Apple suggest developers only use microphone access for as long as they need to identify a song—and because it uses a lossy sample to match the audio, other sounds in the track are discarded and can’t be reconstructed.
In iOS 15, users who don’t have the Shazam app installed can still view past matched audio in Control Center.In a glance at a previously unannounced iOS/iPadOS 15 feature, those who don’t have the Shazam app installed will still be able to access their list of previously matched audio by pressing and holding on the Shazam icon in Control Center.
- Yes I know. ↩
Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin:
The FBI teamed up with Australian Federal Police to target drug trafficking and money laundering. They “strategically developed and covertly operated an encrypted device company, called ANOM, which grew to service more than 12,000 encrypted devices to over 300 criminal syndicates operating in more than 100 countries, including Italian organized crime, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and international drug trafficking organizations,” Europol said today.
Holy cow. That’s kind of brilliant. Why try to compromise a secure network that might compromise the privacy of law-abiding citizens when you can just roll your own?
My personal favorite part is that the messaging app was installed on phones under the guise of a calculator app:
The cellphones sold by the FBI-run company were “procured on the black market” and “performed a single function hidden behind a calculator app: sending encrypted messages and photos,” The New York Times wrote today. The cellphones were “stripped of all normal functions,” with the faux calculator being the only working app.
Your move, James Thomson.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Now that Apple has shipped an improved remote for the Apple TV, it might seem like your tvOS woes are over—but even with a better input device, entering login credentials by picking one letter at a time is still a bummer.
However, starting in tvOS 15 this fall, developers will be able to implement a new authentication method for logging in: using another Apple device like an iPhone or iPad.
Previously, users have been able to use their iOS device’s TV remote feature to type in text on their Apple TV, or even fill in passwords from iCloud Keychain, but this takes things a step further. When you select the Sign in with Apple Device on tvOS, a notification gets sent to a nearby Apple device.
That notification will summon a prompt where you can sign in with suggested password from iCloud Keychain, and authenticate via Face ID. (Or, presumably, Touch ID, on a compatible device.) You can also manually enter the password directly on your iPhone or iPad, if need be. Once authenticated, you’ll be logged into the app on your Apple TV.
This method joins a roster of other methods that Apple has used to attempt to simplify the login process in tvOS apps, including signing in with TV providers, zero sign on, Restore Purchases, and so on. Unfortunately, some of the options that required adoption by third parties, such as cable providers, have been slow and only cover certain cases.
Signing in with an Apple device seems like it will make this process easier in many cases, it will be interesting to see how many developers integrate the feature (seeing as how dedicated many of them seem to be at reinventing the wheel).
But while the preponderance of options might make signing in more versatile, they don’t necessarily make it simpler. And Apple could still improve the process of setting up a new Apple TV from scratch, rather than having you go through this login process for every single app that you own—when it already presumably has your passwords for all of those services stored conveniently in iCloud Keychain.1
- My presumption for why the Apple TV can’t simply summon passwords from iCloud Keychain is that it lacks the necessary authenication options—such as Face ID or Touch ID—and entering your iCloud Keychain password via the remote would be a lateral move at best. But who knows, perhaps the next version of the Siri Remote will include Touch ID. ↩
When Apple’s latest operating systems debut this fall, many of their users will benefit from a whole new kind of built-in privacy protection in the form of iCloud Private Relay.
While your actual web traffic has long been generally secured by encryption using HTTPS connections (that little padlock we all got used to looking for in the address bar), there have remained ways in which your ISP or the website you’re visiting could learn more about your traffic and perhaps even use that information to build a profile of you.
iCloud Private Relay, which will be available to anyone paying for an iCloud storage plan, aims to protect against two of these loopholes. The first is when your ISP can tell what site you’re visiting: for example, that you entered or clicked on a link to apple.com. While it can’t necessarily tell what pages or content you accessed, it does often know the top-level domain because that has to be translated into an IP address using the Domain Name System (DNS). Combine with all the domains that you visit on a regular basis, that could allow your ISP to build a profile of you that advertisers might be interested in.
The other loophole is that the website you’re contacting knows some information about you, because it can see your IP address. For one thing, that allows the server to trace that IP address back to a specific geolocation. (Precision varies, but usually at least your city, if not even more specific—when I geolocated my IP, it gave me a location about half a mile from my house.) But it can then cross-reference that IP address with other sites, companies, advertisers, etc. in order to build a richer profile about you.
iCloud Private Relay helps combat both of these loopholes through the use of a dual-hop architecture. Essentially, any traffic from Safari on an Apple device, as well as DNS queries, and a subset of app traffic (specifically insecure web traffic), will be routed through two separate servers: an ingress proxy managed by Apple that hides your IP address (by essentially slapping its own IP address on the request), and an egress proxy, run by “a content provider,” which only sees the server you’re trying to access.
This means that your traffic still goes to the website in question, but it gets only the ingress server’s IP address. There are several ingress proxies which bundle together users from specific regions, providing broad geolocation powers. (So, for example, the server might know you’re from North America, or even from the northeast—Apple says a list will be provided, though I wasn’t able to locate the document at the time of this writing.) Apple urges websites to stop using IP addresses for identity, relying instead on having users login or by explicitly asking for location information only when really needed.
While iCloud Private Relay will affect the bulk of web traffic from the devices of iCloud+ users, it does not apply to traffic over the local network or via private domains, transmitted via VPNs, or using proxy servers.
Most apps won’t have to make significant (or, in many cases, any) changes to use iCloud Private Relay, as long as they’re using modern APIs for network access—the system comes baked in.
One area that might run into challenges, however, are content filter and parental control services that aren’t run on a device. But apps that use use the Screen Time API will still be able to see and filter websites before those sites can be accessed. (Given that local network traffic is exempt, filtering at a local network level seems like it would continue to work, but it’s not entirely clear.)
For institutions that have policies requiring monitoring or intercepting traffic on a entire network (such as enterprise or education), blocking the hostname of the iCloud Private Relay ingress proxy will effectively disable iCloud Private Relay. Users who join that network will be notified and prompted to continue using the network without iCloud Private Relay, or not using the network.
All in all, iCloud Private Relay is poised to be one of those services that’s essentially transparent to users but has significant benefits in terms of decreasing tracking. It obviously won’t solve all privacy concerns: at the end of the day, if you’re logging into a website and have already given them your personal details, they can still build a profile on you and your activities on their site. But it may make it harder for that information to be collected without your knowledge or combined with details from other sites.
For years, automation on the Mac has been an onion of sorts. Automator and its ability to create Quick Actions, Folder Actions and even Applications has given Mac users the ability to create workflows with drag-and-drop efficiency since its introduction with Mac OS X Tiger way back in 2005.
Applications can donate actions for use in Automator, but this never took off the way it was intended.
Thankfully, Automator came with an escape hatch: the ability to run scripts within workflows. This meant that bailing out to something like AppleScript or even a shell script was simple.
None of this even touches the wide range of third-party tools for automation on macOS such as Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Alfred and more.
As good as these utilities are, as the platform owner, Apple needs to steer the ship when it comes to automation on the Mac, and with macOS Monterey, it’s poised to do just that … with Shortcuts.
What was once Workflows on iPhone and iPad, then bought by Apple and reworked as Shortcuts is coming to Mac later this year, and so far, I’m impressed. Shortcuts on the Mac looks like it does on iOS, and feels like a Mac app. Its data even promises to sync over iCloud to other devices seamlessly.
It’s important to know what sorts of applications Shortcuts can be used to automate. Here’s what Apple says on the macOS Monterey features page:
Run compatible iPhone and iPad shortcuts on Mac with M1 or on Intel-based Mac systems with Catalyst apps.
However, things are actually a bit more complex than that. Developers of traditional Mac apps — even those built with AppKit — can add Shortcuts support to their projects via Intents, just like support is added in iOS apps.
That might seem surprising, but considering that Apple pitched this as the start of a longer transition, getting traditional Mac apps on board is going to be required if Apple wants to discontinue Automator somewhere down the line. Even though the app future is probably more SwiftUI or maybe Catalyst, almost every major Mac app uses the much older AppKit framework. Ignoring those apps really wasn’t an option.
Moving workflows from Automator to Shortcuts couldn’t be easier. Drag and drop your .workflow file onto Shortcuts, and it will be transformed into a Shortcut automatically.
To make this work, Apple has added many new actions to Shortcuts, based on the most popular actions in Automator. Here’s the complete list:
In short, the importer crawls your Automator workflow and translates it, step by step, into the correct Shortcuts actions. If for some reason it can’t be translated, Shortcuts will let you know. Given Automator’s rather thin support, my guess is that most people’s workflows will just come over without any issues.
Additionally, Shortcuts for Mac brings with it new actions extending what the software will be able to do on macOS:
With these new actions, I think Shortcuts is going to feel Mac-native from day one. Most people won’t miss Automator.
You may have noticed that in those screenshots, Apple highlights AppleScript, JavaScript and shell scripts as actions within Shortcuts for Mac.1 Like Automator before it, this will allow users to fall back to more traditional automation methods within their larger workflows, bridging Shortcuts’ new fanciness to the ~~old~~ solid foundations under macOS.
Over the last several years, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what Shortcuts would mean for old-school Mac automation. It is clear to me that Apple thought about this, and has designed Shortcuts for the Mac to be able to support the old and new, all at the same time. That’s not always Apple’s modus operandi, but it was the right move in this case.
- Shortcuts for Mac comes with command line support, so you can run a Shortcut via shell scripts, or run them by name in Terminal. ↩
Last month I wrote about how I’ve been building automations on iOS that were hard to replicate on macOS, and why that led me to believe the Mac needed to adopt Shortcuts:
The more I use Shortcuts, the more I realize that in many ways, user automation on iOS has outpaced automation on the Mac. Let me give you an example: On iOS I built a shortcut to grab the contents of selected text in Safari and open the results in a text editor—converted to Markdown, with the title of the page set as the title and its URL set as a link. It’s not remotely the most complicated shortcut I’ve built, but it’s great—and has saved me a lot of time while improving the quality of my link posts. (Copying and pasting text from Safari straight into a text editor strips out hyperlinks and formatting; converting the rich HTML to Markdown brings them along.)
On Monday Apple announced that macOS Monterey would support Shortcuts. I installed the first beta version of Monterey last night and decided, just for kicks, to try to run the shortcut that I use to post stories directly into WordPress from my iOS text editor—but from BBEdit. I checked the box in Shortcuts to offer it as a macOS Service. I switched to BBEdit, selected my story, and chose the posting shortcut from the Services menu.
And it worked. The first time. With not a single change to the shortcut.
This is going to be fun.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Coherence X4 allows you to turn any website into a chromium-powered app on your Mac. Simply pick a site, enter a name, and pick an icon, and Coherence will turn the app into an isolated application separate from your main browser.
Unlike resource-hogging Electron apps, Coherence apps are fully powered and completely customizable. You can use the vast majority of Chrome extensions, customize app assets, and even use features like whitelisting to turn websites like Gmail into an email client that will bump links to your default browser.
Coherence X4 includes a number of significant new features, including:
- Microsoft Edge & Opera Support: You should never be forced to give your data to someone you don’t want to. In addition to Chrome, Canary, and Brave, X4 adds support for Edge and Opera.
- Incognito apps: You can now combine the isolation benefits of Coherence with the privacy benefits of Incognito. Incognito apps always launch in Incognito, and will clear your data between sessions.
- Quick Resume: Coherence X4 is the first Chrome-based SSB tool that behaves like a Mac app should. If you ever close a window in Coherence, it will return to where you left off when you click on the dock icon, as opposed to requiring a restart.
- App Library: A new way to quickly install apps and manage created ones.
- M1: Coherence X4 is the first Chrome-based SSB tool built for M1.
You can use Coherence to do things like:
- Create a Google Drive app that works as well as Chrome without having to use Chrome as your default browser
- Create a desktop app for Roam Research, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet
- Make a customizable app for Slack, Whatsapp, or any other electron-based app with the ability to add extensions or customize
- Create isolated, incognito workspaces for multiple sites like your banking applications or email and messaging.
Six Colors readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Coherence X4 or when you use the promo code SixColors at checkout.
You can also try Coherence for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!
There was a time when Apple rolled out the next versions of its operating systems and the story went like this: The iPhone and iPad added a bunch of new features, and the Mac got a few of its own and, if it was lucky, a subset of what the iPhone and iPad got.
Apple has spent the last few years unifying its platforms. The subsystems that are shared between macOS, iOS, and iPadOS have been brought back into line. Apple’s newest Macs run on the same processors that power iPhones and iPads. Macs can run apps from iOS—either directly on the M1 processor, or indirectly on Intel or Apple silicon via Catalyst.
The WWDC 2021 Keynote on Monday showed that Apple, after years of work, is moving its platforms forward in lockstep. Nearly every feature Apple announced was followed by the statement that it was available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac alike. Yes, each operating system is still different—iPadOS continues to show signs of being positioned right between the Mac and the iPhone, similar to both but not quite either—but the most important stuff rolls out to all of the devices at once.
Take Live Text, a banner feature of the iOS segment of Apple’s keynote presentation. It automatically recognizes text in images and makes that text searchable, selectable, and editable. A few years ago, that would be an iOS-only feature, but it’s also in macOS Monterey, where you’ll be able to open a screenshot and copy out the text without missing a beat.
Similarly, the redesign of Safari and the introduction of Tab Groups spans all of Apple’s platforms. Tab groups are the same on all devices; add a browser tab in a particular group on the Mac and it’ll be there when you switch over to an iPad.
Reinforcing all of this is the new interactions Apple has built to connect its devices. A couple of years ago macOS Catalina introduced Sidecar, a feature that lets you turn an iPad into an additional display for your Mac. You can use the Apple Pencil on certain windows in certain Mac apps, which is kind of fun. But it’s more one device taking over another than the two of them cohabiting.
Universal control is a team-up, not a takeover.Contrast this with Monday’s announcement of Universal Control, a feature I don’t think anyone saw coming. With Universal Control, you can still place a Mac and iPad next to one another, and use them both—but when you point, click, and type on the iPad, you’re no longer just using it as a Mac monitor—instead, it’s still an iPad! It’s just being driven by your Mac keyboard and mouse. The Mac and iPad are allowed to remain true to themselves—but you can control them both without having to move from one set of input devices to another.
And then there’s my favorite announcement of the day: Shortcuts for Mac. With one move, Apple has re-invigorated user automation on the Mac—and it did so by bringing over the system it used to add user automation to iPhone and iPad a few years ago. It seems almost obvious now, but in context this move is a real mind-bender—after all, the Mac is supposed to be the platform for nerdy computery stuff like automation. How in the world could iOS contribute the foundation of a new era in macOS automation?
It turns out that iOS was acting as an incubator, allowing Apple to figure out what it saw as a modern take on user automation… and then, with all its platforms aligned, Apple was able to bring that new approach over to the Mac.
Of course, any iOS apps running on the Mac will be automatically supported by Shortcuts. But Apple isn’t planning on limiting Shortcuts on the Mac: It will support AppleScript, shell scripts, and even import Automator workflows. And in a sign that Shortcuts is here to stay, developers of native Mac apps will be able to add support for Shortcuts, as well.
It took years, and presumably a lot of pain and hard work inside Apple, but the company’s focus on bringing its platforms together is paying off—and the Mac is a huge beneficiary.
Myke and Jason break down the WWDC 2021 keynote, which brought Apple’s various devices together in some surprising ways. Were the changes to iPadOS exciting or disappointing? Are we excited about Shortcuts on the Mac? Will Focus modes keep us focused? And the Upgrade Draft results take an unexpected turn.
Go to the podcast page.
Speaking to Fast Company’s Michael Grothaus, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi detailed a little more about the privacy-related announcements Apple made at its WWDC keynote, including iCloud Private Relay:
When you navigate to a website through Safari, iCloud Private Relay takes your IP address, which it needs to connect you to the website you want to go to, and the URL of that site. But it encrypts the URL so not even Apple can see what website you are visiting. Your IP and encrypted destination URL then travels to an intermediary relay station run by a third-party trusted partner. Apple would not name these trusted partners, but says the company is working with some of the largest content providers out there. Before getting to this relay station, however, your IP address is anonymized and randomized, so the relay partner can’t identify you or your device. Then at the relay station, the destination URL is unencrypted, so the third-party provider can send you on to the website you want to go to.
Because of this dual-hop architecture, neither Apple nor the relay station knows both who you are and where you are going. Apple knows who you are (because you are using iCloud Private Relay), but it doesn’t know where you’re browsing. Its third-party partner knows where you are browsing–but not who you are.
There’s a real Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to this: one entity knows who you are, the other knows where you’re going. But Apple and its unspecified “trusted partners” are going to be moving a lot of data here if every Safari connection is passing through their servers.1
What was interesting—if unsurprising—is that iCloud Private Relay only works in Safari. That makes the sense, certainly, since it’s the place where users are visiting arbitrary sites, rather than apps where it’s often communicating with the developer’s server. But it also means that third-party browsers are out of luck.
This is of a piece with other changes Apple has made in recent years, including the Private Address feature in iOS 14, where Apple’s devices use a unique MAC address on each Wi-Fi network, to avoid tracking.
Also “in the notable and not at all surprising department,” iCloud Private Relay is not designed—as many VPN services are—to let you route around geographical-based locks that allow users to view content not available in their region. And Reuters also confirmed with the company that it also won’t be available in several regions, including China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Egypt, the Philippines, and other restrictive regimes.
However, iCloud Private Relay will be compatible with both third-party consumer and corporate VPN services; in those cases, some or all traffic will be transmitted through the VPN rather than the relay.
- Not sure if it makes sense, but to my ears that sounds like perhaps they’re using CDNs from Akamai and other similar companies? ↩ Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
While Apple’s keynote focuses largely on the company’s consumer audience, the Platforms State of the Union is where things start to get technical, really targeting the core WWDC audience: developers on Apple’s platform.
Apple made a ton of big announcements at WWDC this year, and the State of the Union delved into just a few big categories of those. But in doing so, it gives a look at what Apple’s emphasizing for developers over the next few months leading up to the official release of its next major operating systems.
Code faster and in more places The import of Xcode Cloud may not have registered for most non-developers in the keynote audience, but this substantial new system that Apple is rolling out has the potential to vastly streamline developers’ workflows in two ways. First, by integrating a lot of the various tasks that developers do—from working with teams to distributing betas—directly into Xcode; and second, by offshoring some of the most time-consuming tasks, like building and testing apps, to a cloud-based system.
Xcode Cloud shows hints at development workflows to come.Obviously, moving parts of this process to a cloud-based system can bring major advantages. For one thing, you’re not strictly limited by the hardware on which you’re writing your code. While developers often favor getting the most powerful system to help build their apps faster, letting users take advantage of the cloud opens the door for those who may not be able to afford high-end systems.
For another, it suggests a glimmer of future development workflows that don’t strictly rely on the Mac.
In that latter case, it ties in neatly with another big reveal mentioned during today’s keynote: the ability to build iPhone and iPad apps in Swift Playgrounds for the iPad. This marks the first time that developers have been able to write apps for Apple’s mobile devices on those devices. Moreover, Swift Playgrounds lets you export projects that are compatible with Xcode on the Mac, opening up new possibilities for developers.
Of course, Swift Playgrounds doesn’t support developing macOS apps yet, so your iPad probably won’t be replacing your Mac for full time coding work just yet, but again, the glimmers of a future are there, and this just marks the first steps.
Augmenting reality just got easier Apple’s been talking up augmented reality for years now, and the fact that it got a prominent mention in the State of the Union—sandwiched in between the company’s tools and APIs—is a strong indication that its interest isn’t waning in the slightest.
In particular, this year’s marquee feature is the ability to easily create photorealistic AR objects by taking pictures of objects in real life, something that used to be painstaking and time-consuming, and now—if Apple’s technology proves effective—can be done in a matter of minutes. The end result is to make it easier than ever to create AR experiences.
Apple’s AR ambitions are alive and well.The big question hovering over that, naturally, is why. Reports of the company’s ambitions in the AR (and occasionally virtual and mixed reality fields as well) have been plentiful, with many of those rumors coalescing around the idea of some sort of AR headset.
All of the time Apple has spent pushing AR over the past several years, combined with this latest set of tools to make it easy to implement what were previously more complex parts of the experience, points to Apple wanting to have a host of developers familiar with all the parts of the AR pipeline when the company eventually rolls out whatever hardware it has up its…sleeves?
People, not data Every year, Apple highlights its new APIs, pushing for developers to adopt them for the latest OS updates, and 2021 is no different. The company called out a handful of those frameworks during the State of the Union, all related to technologies that were at the forefront of this year’s keynote.
First and foremost, the improvements to notifications and the new Focus system, which work in concert to allow users to more easily manage all the distractions that come with their devices. Developers are being urged to think about how their notifications might fit into that framework, including not only the special types of communication notifications (which emphasize a person’s avatar over the app icon), but also how less time sensitive notifications will end up grouped together in the new notification summary.
That last is significant, because notifications have traditionally been a one-size-fits-all approach, and developers now need to expect that their notifications may not always be immediately delivered to a user, and thus act accordingly. But it may end up with developers jockeying for position in those two larger notification summary spots, which will prioritize notifications with large thumbnail images and those that are judged more relevant to users.
SharePlay got a big push from Apple during the Platforms State of the Union.Also emphasized was the new SharePlay API, one of the core improvements to FaceTime that Apple announced. This framework allows for what the company is calling “Group Activites”: experiences like listening to music, watching a TV show or movie, or sharing a screen—all while on a FaceTime call.
What the keynote perhaps didn’t express is how simple and powerful this SharePlay API can be. A demonstration of how to implement a shared video experience in an app took only moments. Another demo showed a shared whiteboard app that allowed all users to interact with it simultaneously. It’s not hard to imagine developers harnessing this power for some really interesting multi-person and multiplayer experiences, and it’s pretty easy to understand why Apple would urge them to design around it.
There were a few other APIs featured, such as ScreenTime (which now allows for third-party parental management apps) and widgets (especially for the iPad), but the clear focus from this year’s features is that Apple is trying to push the idea of interacting more with people and spending less time on the stuff that comes with our technological present. Given the experiences over the last year, it’s not surprising to see the company making these kind of decisions, but it is kind of refreshing to see how fast the company can move when it wants to.
Even with a nearly two-hour keynote, Apple didn’t have time to discuss all the new features coming to its platforms in the next major updates. So I’ve gone through and pulled out an even half-dozen of my favorite features that didn’t merit screen time. (But don’t worry, there are a lot more.)
Super Password Apple seems to be making a hard play at being your password manager with its latest software updates. In macOS Monterey there’s a new Passwords pane in System Preferences, which not only bodes poorly for the venerable Keychain Access app1, but also perhaps mounts a challenge to third-party competitors. You can even import passwords from other password mangers—though you can export too.
Even better, all of Apple’s platforms now get the ability to generate two-factor authentication codes and automatically fill them in when you’re logging in. That ought to make doing the multi-app dance a thing of the past.
Shortcuts gets easier for power users In addition to making a much-needed jump to the Mac, Shortcuts has gained some benefits for all of its users. For one thing, sharing shortcuts with others has gotten easier—Apple says it will no longer require managing “complicated security settings”, which was always a pain on iOS devices.
More over, Mac users who are embracing shortcuts will not only have the ability to import Automator workflows, but also the option to enable compatibility with AppleScript and shell scripting, which will unlock a lot of possibilities.
Don’t remind me Yes, Reminders gets tags that can get be collected into Smart Lists, great. But the big news here is that there is finally an option to quickly delete all of your completed Reminders, something which I’ll certainly make use of. What’s unclear is if you can set those completed tasks to automatically expire, but baby steps I suppose.
Separation anxiety All of us who have ever left home without our keys or our phone can now sweat a little less. A new feature for Find My lets you set separation alerts for your items (either devices or AirTags), and let you know when you’re leaving your current location without them.
More like weCloud iCloud+, Apple’s new enhanced cloud offering, will allow you for the first time to use a custom domain with your iCloud email, and lets you share that custom domain with people in your family group.
Also, in an uncharacteristically generous move when it comes to iCloud storage, if you’re updating to a new iPhone or iPad and don’t have enough room for your iCloud Backup, Apple will loan you the space for up to three weeks, so you can be sure to transfer all your data and settings.
All a(key)board Recognizing that people are using external keyboards more than ever with their iPads, Apple has revamped a bunch of features connected to them. That includes adding global keyboard shortcuts for multitasking and contextual menus, the ability to use the globe key as a modifier, and a redesigned interface for the keyboard shortcuts view that organizers commands into categories like File, Edit, View…hmm, where have I heard those before?
- Not that I’d be sad to see it go, you understand. ↩
With just hours to go before the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off, I find myself wondering if Apple—a company that has long maintained an unparalleled mastery of storytelling—can indeed narrate its way out of the drama in which it’s become enmeshed.
Apple’s been in jams before, to be sure. Like the entire 1990s. But the challenges it withstood in those days came predominantly from the outside, even as its most loyal customers sticking by its side to ride out the storm.
These days, that selection has inverted: while Apple’s financial success and external consumer support have reached stratospheric levels, the criticism now comes from those who have traditionally been its most ardent supporters—and, more to the point, the very developer audience that WWDC is designed to appeal to, highlight, and uplift.
This morning, Dieter Bohn’s piece at The Verge laid out the case that perhaps the most apt metaphor for Apple’s recent behavior is that of the carrier. And though, like any metaphor, the comparison is imperfect, parts of it ring true in a deeply uncomfortable fashion.
It’s not fair, but the tune sounds familiar because the parallels strike a chord. And the bitter harmony that I hear is the stifling of innovation to maximize profit.
Apple forces all apps selling digital goods of any kind to use its payment system and pay its cut. The arguments for why Apple thinks that is necessary are well-known. But the effects of that (and other) rules are that new and innovative business models simply aren’t possible. Instead of paid upgrades, developers must resort to subscriptions. The nascent market to pay creators directly on services like Twitter and Substack must account for Apple’s platform fees. Instead of game streaming apps, there is… well, nothing.
I don’t want to get into arguing the nuts and bolts of this particular discussion, because it’s not really about this piece itself. It’s that this is the prevailing narrative right now. When it comes to Apple, this is what people—or, at least, the tech press, pundits, and outspoken developers—are talking about.
Usually, the hours before Apple’s keynote event are filled with speculation and excitement, but this year there is far more frustration and antipathy than I can remember seeing in my decade and a half covering Apple. There’s always been some degree of dissatisfaction, especially amongst developers, but it’s hard to escape that the current story about Apple is less about its products and more about its attitude.
Throw in the recent kerfuffle over Apple’s decision to have employees return to the office for the majority of the week starting this fall and it has more than a few folks less excited and wondering if Apple even really listens.
WWDC marks Apple’s opportunity to take control of the story. Whatever its executives announce when they take the stage later today has the potential to dominate the tech news cycle for days and weeks to come.
But the real question is whether, by sheer compelling nature or simply by volume, it can drown out the existing narrative.
Short of announcing a massive overhaul of the App Store and its developer policies—which seems unlikely, given that the company just engaged in a lengthy trial which it seems likely to win—it’s hard to imagine that any flashy feature or product announcement could wipe away the undercurrents of dissatisfaction, though it may mute them for a while.
In the past, Apple’s live events have fed off the energy of the crowd. It’s unclear whether or not this year’s WWDC keynote, which Apple merely says will be “streamed directly from Apple Park”, will be the same slickly produced videos we’ve seen over the past pandemic year, or eschew them in favor of a presentation more like the traditional in-person event, but it occurs to me that, if the latter, it’s not out of the question that Apple employees themselves might be in attendance.
And, as is traditional for the WWDC keynote, there may come a moment when an Apple executive—perhaps Tim Cook himself—boasts about the amount of money the company paid out to developers, potentially teeing up a moment where that figure is wildly applauded by a cadre of Apple employees. I can think of no more tone-deaf moment that would truly encapsulate the moment in which we find ourselves.
Anticipation on the precipice of WWDC week.…
Become a member to listen to our exclusive weekly podcast and get more benefits.
After a decade, technology can often start to seem a bit boring, but the iPad experienced a bit of a resurgence in the last year, thanks in no small part to a pandemic that saw a lot more people working from home. But despite the iPad’s popularity and its amazing hardware, the general consensus seems to be that the tablet’s software just can’t keep pace. So all eyes are on Apple’s imminent Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company will likely take the wraps off the latest update to iPadOS and we’ll discover whether our wishes have been granted.
Until then, our hopes and dreams for the iPad remain in a quantum state, like Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously bestowed and rejected. And while we won’t know which will be which until Apple opens that box, that certainly doesn’t deter me from thinking about the iPad updates I’d like to see.
Continue reading on Macworld.
If you ask a bunch of people in Apple community if WWDC is a hardware event or not, you’ll get a bunch of different answers, but I think most people consider WWDC to be a software event mostly aimed at developers.
I don’t think that’s wrong. The bulk of WWDC takes place in sessions and labs, where developers get an in-depth look at what makes Apple’s updated operating systems and platforms tick.
Over the years, however, WWDC has also become a place for Apple to speak to the public. Sure, most users don’t know what it is, but for those who are plugged into what the company is doing, the WWDC keynote is a big deal.
As such, I got wondering. How many WWDCs actually feature hardware announcements in addition to the traditional software news?
I decided to look back twenty years. It’s a nice round number, and it’s roughly the start of the modern era, as Mac OS X was taking shape pretty nicely by 2000. And in fact, WWDC has been used for hardware product announcements in 13 of those years.1
I have to admit, I was pretty surprised by the number. A full 65% of the time, Apple has hardware news to share from the WWDC stage:
- 2001: A 17-inch LCD, joining the 15 and 22-inch models
- 2003: The Power Mac G5 and iSight camera
- 2004: Updated Apple Cinema Displays, now in aluminum, in 20, 23 and 30-inch sizes
- 2005: Intel Developer Transition Kit
- 2006: The first Mac Pro and Intel Xserve
- 2008: iPhone 3G
- 2009: iPhone 3GS and updated MacBook Pros
- 2010: iPhone 4
- 2012: Updated notebooks and the first Retina MacBook Pro
- 2013: Trash can Mac Pro preview
- 2017: Updated notebooks and iMacs, HomePod and iMac Pro previews
- 2019: Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR previews
- 2020: Apple silicon Developer Transition Kit
Other than that rash of iPhones in the late 2000s, when Apple has hardware news to make at WWDC, it usually pertains to high-end Mac hardware.…
This story is for Six Colors members only. Become a member to get access to exclusive stories, podcasts, and community..
Will new MacBook Pros be announced at WWDC next week? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure Apple wouldn’t mind thrilling developers with new power laptops, since they are so often those very developers’ tool of choice.
But new MacBook Pros would require a chip more capable than the M1 chip currently residing in—let’s see here—the low-end Mac mini, the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, the 24-inch iMac, and the iPad Pro. Is that chip ready? Reports suggest that these new MacBook Pro models are on the way, but might not arrive until “Q3 2021.”
An optimist would point out that Q3 2021 starts in less than four weeks—plenty of time for Apple to announce them on Monday and ship them in July. While Apple usually resists announcements of new hardware with long lead times, this year has been different, due to some serious shortages in the supply chain. Add to that the unique circumstances of the move to Apple silicon—most MacBook Pro buyers are already holding back on their purchases due to the chip transition, so sales won’t be harmed by an early announcement—and it seems like Apple wouldn’t mind jumping the gun a little bit if it provided a shot in the arm to developers during WWDC week.
A pessimist, of course, would point out that Q3 2021 ends on September 30, an awful long time from now. And it’s certainly possible that new MacBook Pro models just won’t be ready until the fall.
But back to that new chip. Right now, all we know for sure about Apple’s approach to using its own chips in Macs is what we’ve seen with the M1. A single data point isn’t really great in terms of understanding trends, philosophies, or anything of the sort. But a second chip allows us to understand what Apple’s really up to—and how the Apple chip architecture can extend to support higher-end devices that are more powerful than any Apple has yet been asked to design.
Here’s how Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman described these new chips:
For the new MacBook Pros, Apple is planning two different chips, codenamed Jade C-Chop and Jade C-Die: both include eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores for a total of 10, but will be offered in either 16 or 32 graphics core variations.
So following up on my Apple silicon speculation of last year, I thought I’d sketch out on the back of an envelope just how well these MacBook Pro models might fare in terms of raw multiprocessing performance:
Though Gurman’s report suggests these would be 10-core systems, the important number is the number of high-performance cores—eight. Though energy-efficient cores are very helpful in keeping a Mac bubbling along nicely, they don’t make enormous contributions to the overall top performance of a device. It’s all about the performance cores. And eight is—follow me here—twice as many as four.
So if an M1 processor scores around a 6180 in GeekBench 5’s multi-core score, I can extrapolate and guess that a new chip—let’s call it the M1X1, because I’m guessing that this chip is based on the same cores as the M1 and the A14 chips—would score roughly double the M1—let’s say 12,500.
To put this in context, I’ve included the current high-end Intel MacBook Pro models in the chart. The M1 models already surpass the existing 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, but the eight-core 16-inch model still wins out in overall multiprocessor performance. (I’m leaving aside single-core performance, graphics power, and energy efficiency here and just focusing on top CPU speed.)
The 16-inch MacBook Pro would pale in comparison to the M1X, though. And it’s not hard to imagine Apple executives appearing in a video next week and declaring that the new MacBook Pros are roughly twice as fast as their predecessors.
Just for kicks, I also threw together a chart based on Gurman’s report that Apple is also planning Mac Pro models based on the same chip design, but variants with 20 and 40 performance cores. Yep, that’s a lot of cores. Just for kicks, let’s make a guess about future Mac Pro performance and compare it to existing Intel-based Mac Pro models:
The back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a 20-core Apple silicon-based Mac Pro would be quite a bit faster than a 28-core Intel Mac Pro at multiprocessor performance, making it the fastest Mac of all time. And that 40-core model would be… well, yeah, more than twice as fast as the previous speed champion.
Those Mac Pros, when they come, won’t come cheap. But keep in mind that even the rumored M1X processor will be faster than every Intel Mac ever made that isn’t a high-end Mac Pro. You’ll probably be able to get that power in a MacBook Pro, and (presumably, at some point later this year) a Mac mini and iMac.
Will it all play out this way? We’ve had years to track iPhone and iPad chip patterns—and only have that one data point for the Mac. I’m hoping we find out more at WWDC next week—not just for the data point, of course, but also for the speedy new hardware that would be enabled by that new chip.
- Apple may well call it the M2—it’s just marketing. But I wonder what you call the next-generation low-end chip then… ↩
Apple says it’s adjusting how AirTags deal with privacy implications, in a statement provided to CNET’s Ian Sherr:
The tech giant said Thursday it’s begun sending out updates to its AirTags, changing the window of time they’ll make noises when potentially being used to track another person. Initially, the Apple device would play in three days. Now it’ll begin to play at a random time inside a window that lasts between 8 and 24 hours.
To further reassure people about its AirTags, Apple said it’s developing an app for Android devices that will help people “detect” an AirTag or Find My network-enabled device that may also be unsuspectedly “traveling” with them. Apple iPhones already have a similar alert system built into their devices. The Android app will be released later this year.
We knew that Apple could adjust some of the privacy measures remotely—the company said as much when it introduced the product earlier this year. But it’s good to see that it’s following through on the promise of finding better ways to deal with the problems raised by potential stalking and location monitoring.
If there’s any indication that it’s serious about this, it’s that Apple’s going to build an Android app. Not exactly waters that it tends to dive into willingly.
I wouldn’t expect this to be the last change to AirTags either. Apple’s made a big deal about its continuing commitment to privacy; I imagine they’d like to see how these changes are received before they go about making more adjustments.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.
Twitter:
Starting today, we will be rolling out our first iteration of Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada. Our hope with this initial phase is to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more 🔥.
A handful of assorted premium features, including bookmark folders (meh), undo-able tweets (ooh), a better thread reader (hmmm), and customizable app icons (¯_(ツ)_/¯). It’s launching in Canada and Australia first, for $3.49 CAD/$4.49 AUD per month, with more countries to come.
This has been rumored for a while, with Twitter feature sleuth Jane Manchun Wong first posting about it a few weeks back, including a supposed U.S. price tag of $2.99/month, which is pretty squarely in between those international prices.
Twitter making a play for direct subscription revenue isn’t surprising, given that everybody seems to be getting into the direct payment sphere, and this is essentially free money for the company.
But what is interesting is one thing that you won’t get with Twitter Blue: an ad-free experience. Advertising is still the biggest chunk of Twitter’s revenue, and they’re not going to replace that with direct subscriptions anytime soon.
It’ll be interesting to see what the pickup of this is: undo-able tweets seems like the most attractive part of the package; it’s not quite the long sought-after Edit button, but it’s the closest there is right now, and I imagine some will feel miffed that it’s behind a paywall—though others will be all too happy to shell out for the feature.
Twitter says it’ll add more features to Twitter Blue in months to come. There is currently no date for its launch in the U.S.
Go to the linked site.
Read on Six Colors.