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One of the big differences between the Mac and Apple’s other platforms is that, by design, it’s an old-school “general computing” platform—you can install and run whatever software you want, from any source.

That’s a good thing. It’s what makes the Mac the Mac. But it also makes the Mac more vulnerable than Apple’s other platforms, where the company can strictly limit what software is allowed to run on the device behind layers of developer memberships, code signing, scanning, and App Store approval.

For the last decade or more, as the Mac has become more popular, Apple has been trying to ratchet up Mac security. But because the Mac is open, securing it brings some unique challenges, as I found out when I got a chance to discuss these issues with some members of Apple’s security team recently.

Back in 2018, the company introduced notarization for apps, a system that used developer code signing and automated scans to provide a slightly increased level of scrutiny and security. While you can run apps that aren’t notarized on your Mac, it’s become increasingly difficult to do so—on purpose.

That’s because as Apple gradually ratchets up its Mac security approach, it’s increasingly playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with malware makers and scammers who are trying to take advantage of Mac users. Adding notarization made it harder for users to install malware without taking additional steps, so scammers switched to social engineering, talking users through the process of bypassing the warnings for non-notarized software. Apple eventually made bypassing the warnings so onerous that most scammers moved on.

They generally moved on… to the Terminal, which is why macOS 26.4 introduced warnings about code being pasted into Terminal. Scammers were giving users long strings of mostly unreadable code to paste into Terminal to “fix” problems—and this code would, when entered, grant permission and download software. In 26.4, Apple looks for specific strings on the clipboard and blocks them with a warning—while also looking for the presence of various developer tools on the system as an indicator that the user is more sophisticated and therefore the blocking should be a bit more lenient. It’s a clever approach to spare confused novice users without getting in the way of more expert ones. (Malicious AppleScript scripts are also being checked these days. You can’t be too careful.)

Apple has also, over the years, increased Mac security by structuring the way macOS is stored on disk. Much of the operating system is stored on sealed volumes that are cryptographically signed, meaning they can’t be tampered with. System Integrity Protection prevents tampered OS versions from booting. Drivers have been moved into limited-access user areas, out of full-access admin areas. Admin users, who used to have ultimate power (without ultimate responsibility), are now more limited in what they can do.

A few years ago, I complained that Apple’s warning dialogs were out of control, especially when migrating to a new system. Since then, Apple has made a bunch of improvements, including honoring many older permissions choices when migrating. The security team seems to have also acknowledged that there are certain circumstances where installing a lot of software might not be as big a security threat. That’s why during the first 24 hours of setting up a new machine, Apple’s security warnings are now throttled.

Among other recent changes in macOS 26 updates are new background security improvements that allow Apple to install small updates in the background between normal system updates.

And as our own Glenn Fleishman reported last year, Apple began syncing FileVault keys via iCloud. What began as a gentle roll-out is now mandatory in macOS 26.4, where all users who are syncing FileVault keys will have them stored via this method.

The Mac is never going to be as secure as iOS, and that’s okay. That extra insecurity is the trade-off for the Mac being an open system, and that’s what makes the Mac special. In 2018, at WWDC, I watched as a representative of Apple’s security team stood on stage and promised that Apple would never prevent Mac users from running any code they wanted. He never promised it would always be easy, and it’s not—but that promise has been kept, and I get no sense that Apple envisions a world where it will ever be broken.

In the meantime, the good news: When you consider that the game of Whac-a-Mole has reached the “paste long strings of text into the Terminal” phase, it makes you wonder how desperate those scammers have gotten. Maybe after years of ratcheting up security, Apple’s made it just too hard to talk users into installing malware on their Macs. That has required a lot of extra effort that’s not necessary on the iOS side—and I’m glad Apple is making that effort to keep the Mac as safe as possible while it still remains open.

Indigo makes it easy to cross-post to the services, which is unsurprising given its pedigree—its creators, Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy, made the cross-posting app Croissant before they made this. Since the services offer different character limits, Indigo shows you countdowns for both in one place. The app offers some other cross-service niceties, like identifying very similar posts on both services and de-duping them—though I still see not-quite-identical posts from time to time.

Indigo excels at scrolling through a timeline. Get too far beyond that, though, and you’ll find that it’s still definitely a 1.0 product. There’s no way to search within your timeline, tapping to expose an entire thread can be very slow, there’s no support for Bluesky lists, mute filters aren’t applied immediately to all items in a timeline, and occasionally I found that it just wouldn’t let me interact with some posts until I quit and re-launched the app. I also found the app’s choice of colors—blue for Bluesky, purple for Mastodon—to be impossible for me to differentiate as a colorblind person. (Fortunately you can add a badge on each account’s avatar, but it would sure be nice to pick a better color scheme.)

While I prefer Indigo because I want to scroll a timeline once and only once, it’s not yet at the level of a dedicated app like Tapbots’s Ivory for Mastodon. But this is a brand-new app, so I accept that it’s got room to grow. Ben Rice McCarthy has a nice blog post about how the project came to be, and another about how its design evolved.

Indigo is available for free on the App Store. For the Ultraviolet level, which allows interaction with posts, you can pay $5/month, $35/year, or $120 for a one-time purchase.

Go to the podcast page.

A lot of Mac users don’t remember a time before Mac OS X (or macOS, or OS X, depending on the era), but before OS X arrived on the scene, the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic Mac OS, which was with us from the Mac’s launch in 1984 through the funeral Steve Jobs held for Mac OS 9 in 2002.

The original Mac OS evolved a lot across those 18 years. And perhaps its single most important update, System 7, arrived 35 years ago this month, in May of 1991.

It seems like a footnote now, but so much of what we take for granted on the Mac today was introduced in System 7. Take it from someone who was there—I wanted System 7 so badly, I downloaded a load of floppy disk images across my college computer network so I could install it. And I wasn’t disappointed by what I got. System 7 really did show the way to the future of the Mac.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Go to the podcast page.

My friend Lex Friedman wrote an app, Gnome, that makes it easy to post GIFs:

Gnome lives in your Mac’s menubar. You hit a hotkey. A little search window appears. You type what you’re looking for — weird al, shrug, nailed it, that’s a paddlin’ — and a grid of GIFs appears. Click the one you want. It’s now on your clipboard. Paste it wherever you were typing. Joke saved. World improved.

My favorite bit: You can also add in a local folder of GIFs, so your own go-tos are always at the ready, in addition to stuff from the wider Internet.

Maybe my second favorite bit:

Wait, why is the app called Gnome? Because that’s how I pronounce the “G” in “GIF.”

The app costs $7, one time, to unlock everything. Otherwise, after five minutes you’ll be limited to “Weird Al” and Rick Astley GIFs. I’m not kidding.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

ZenStand is a charger that doesn’t feel like a tech product. It sits on a desk or nightstand the way normal stuff does, without announcing itself. It’s made from real wood, solid dark walnut that looks nice in a way that molded plastic never will. It’s got a weighted and adhesive base, so your phone lifts off cleanly with one hand. There are no LEDs, on purpose. A charger doesn’t need to show off that it’s a charger.

What you end up with is a MagSafe stand that does its job properly and then gets out of the way. Which, in ZenStand’s view, is what good objects are supposed to do.

Shop the ZenStand. Use code SixColors2026 for 15% off.

I could hardly remember writing it. But write it I did, at a time when we were deep in a news-aggregation desert. It seemed like RSS had experienced a conceptual death, through neglect and intent. Google first hijacked usage by creating Google Reader during RSS’s heyday in 2005, which sank the market for paid RSS apps and led to near hegemony for Google.

Then, typical of fickle Google, the company killed off Google Reader in 2013. Because Google Reader was web-based, its loss revealed a barren marketplace. Small developers tried to fill the gap, but the pattern of usage for many people had ended.

Couple that with the emergence, by that time, of the expectation of very low prices for single-purpose apps, and little chance yet of convincing people to pay for a recurring subscription. RSS readers persisted, but it seemed like their time had come and gone.

But I was too pessimistic! Today, I’m back to daily—or multiple-times-per-day—use of a newsreader, the same one that got me addicted back in the early 2000s. Hurray, I’m an RSS news junkie again!?

Rather straightforward standard, when you think about it

For those of you too young to remember RSS (Really Simple Syndication), or who have buried the memory of what we lost, it’s an open syndication standard.¹ Any Web-reachable resource, whether a website or a service endpoint that could deliver a file in the RSS format over a web connection, could publish items that RSS newsreaders could parse and display, like articles or entries. RSS became—and remains—the basis for podcast distribution.

RSS embodies what was once the primary ethos of the Internet. No, not “information wants to be free.”² Rather, wherever possible, produce protocols that allow decentralized use of the same kind of thing: HTML, web servers, email, and so forth. Nobody owned RSS; no central RSS system dispensed RSS; nobody could get tired of running RSS and turn it off for everyone.

The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more. Back then, I even offered an RSS feed for any book by its ISBN through my price-comparison service, isbn.nu.³ Yahoo’s Pipes service, of the mid-oughties, let you combine and filter webpages, RSS feeds, and other sources, and then output the results as another RSS feed.

For some people, a second inbox was a nightmare: more unread things that piled up like the unblinking eye of unwatched Netflix DVDs sitting on their red envelopes! I, however, liked to scan through the latest headlines or results, and then mark everything as read. Using RSS like this gave me a snapshot of what was happening. When I was actively writing regular columns and pitching articles for several publications, RSS was a way to get leads on breaking news, obscure topics, and product updates.

My favorite newsreader for the Mac, NetNewsWire, went through a couple of owners, and updates were delayed significantly, making it less appealing to use. I switched to another RSS reader. Meanwhile, after spending more time on Twitter, I found it to be a better source of up-to-date information.

In that 2015 article, I wrote:

I haven’t checked RSS for more than a few minutes here and there in the last year, and I don’t think I’ve looked at the aggregator I use at all in a couple of months. It’s not intentional; the need seems to be gone. It’s been replaced by a change in my needs and a combination of other sources.

I made this claim, too:

In the meantime, despite the amount of time I spend on Twitter, I enjoy the feeling of less pressure to keep up with what’s going on. I can walk away for hours or days, and put my toes in and get a read on what the world and my friends and colleagues are saying without the tick-tock tick-tock of hundreds of headlines dropping hourly upon me.

That didn’t last.

The once and future RSS king

The founder of Friendster launched a beta of a news aggregator, Nuzzel, that pulled from your Twitter and Facebook social graphs—the people you followed, specifically—to rank stories people were talking about. Jason Snell inserted into the article an aside as an editor’s note, that he was using Nuzzel, and I soon followed. While it lacked the breadth and coverage of an RSS reader, it scratched most of my itches and reduced that feeling of “less pressure.” (I think we were all delusional in the maximum Twitter period.)

Of course, all good tools are acquired and die, and Nuzzel was no exception. A company called Scroll bought it in 2018, and then Twitter purchased Scroll. Instead of using it to increase engagement and stickiness, and offer a premium flavor, they shut it down on its acquisition in May 2021, during a high-demand period by us pandemic-constrained people dying for news, nearly a year before Elon Musk’s purchase bid.

In a tweet—later deleted—I wrote (and was quoted via the above link by John Gruber):⁴

Nuzzel has been since it launched nearly the only app I’ve ever let put notifications on my lock screen, and something I consult 20 to 50 times a day. I don’t blame Twitter, though: the model didn’t pan out (though I would have paid $25–$50 a year as a service!).

Fortunately, a few years after my article, NetNewsWire’s creator, and first and fourth owner of the name, revived the app.⁵ In 2018, Brent gave us new hope with version 5.0d1, which was an open-source RSS reader he was developing. He was able to rename this fresh take as NetNewsWire. Brent has since released versions 6 and, recently, 7 for macOS and 7 for iOS.⁶

I started playing with NetNewsWire again following the 5.0 release. I discovered that my old file of feeds still existed, and I was reading many of the same blogs and news sources. I started trying to add sites I wanted to read and services that seemed useful—most turned out to have a straightforward RSS option or a way to acquire it.

You can also track most webpages using tools or services dating back to the early 2000s: feed extractors or converters. For instance, Boston University, where my older child attends college, has a so-called BU Today news page with no RSS feed. I dug around and wound up at Fetch RSS, which has a nice free tier and several paid upgrade options. Several other sites offer similar services, which can fill gaps for websites that aren’t up to date with 25-year-old standards.

Gotta get my RSS hit

I don’t know if RSS is good or bad for my mental health. I believe it prevents me from obsessively visiting lots of sites and scanning them for changes, reduces the number of notifications in my inbox, and gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world. It’s also let me tune into new blogs—yes, new blogs in the 2020s—like Nick Heer’s excellent Pixel Envy.

Jason recently went through an RSS re-examination and came away with a different conclusion: maybe some of his feeds he should stop viewing in a newsreader and instead read as email newsletters, and maybe some feeds should aggregate their multiple items into a newsletter. He’s done this with Six Colors, offering members a newsletter that’s derived from the site’s posts.

I’m trending the opposite way from Jason, I think. Anything that I don’t need to know about on a timely basis, I want to have appear as an item in NetNewsWire, where I can approach it as something I might scan and then read and skip over.

As the number of apps and controls in the menu bar have continued to proliferate, users have had to constantly find ways to keep them in check. For years, the de facto solution was the Mac app Bartender, but after an awkwardly managed ownership transition in 2024, a slew of alternatives sprouted up to take on the venerable utility and vie for the crown.

The team behind Bartender has continued to plug away, however, and the latest release is Bartender 6, which not only continues the app’s legacy of menu bar management, but also extends into an interesting new area: the omnipresent notch of the MacBook.

The menu bar management options haven’t changed much from Bartender 5 to 6; you’ll find all your usual options, including the ability to customize layout, behavior, and look and feel.

There’s also beta feature called Widgets, which lets you make your own menu bar items with a plug-and-play interface that feels like a combination of Shortcuts and Yahoo Pipes. It’s interesting but feels more than a little underbaked at present; I had a hard time getting it do anything that it was supposed to do, including simply showing the current CPU usage. With some more work, it might be more competitive with the likes of SwiftBar, but right now, it’s a beta in the classical sense.

Bartender 6 is available as a four-week trial; after that time you’ll need to buy a full license for $20, though generous upgrade pricing is available for owners of previous versions. If you purchased Bartender 5 in 2025, you can even upgrade for free. Note that Bartender 6 does require macOS Sonoma or later and that if you do update from 5 to 6, your settings won’t transfer—the developers say this is because of changes in Tahoe, but it’s a shame they didn’t provide an export/import option.

If that were the whole story, it might make Bartender 6 an unremarkable update. However, in addition to all of those features, there’s also Bartender Pro, a $15/year subscription that promises not only all future Bartender updates, but also advanced features, starting with what it dubs Top Shelf.

Shelf awareness

Top Shelf is part Dynamic Island, part clipboard manager, part file utility. Frankly, much of it also feels like the kind of feature Apple should building itself, because my experience over the last year or two with the notch in the MacBook displays continually makes me annoyed at just how user-unfriendly it is.

To trigger Top Shelf, you bring the cursor up to the notch; the interface expands outward from there, just like the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. By default, the first screen contains a pair of customizable widgets for common features like Calendar, Weather, and Music. There’s also a second media-playing widget called Vinyl, though I’m had-pressed to tell you what the difference between the two is beyond aesthetics.

The media playing controls can work with Apple Music or Spotify directly, once you give them permission, but they’re also compatible with any other media-playing app on your system, including web browsers. I did occasionally find it a bit aggressive about controlling playback from those, including times when it wouldn’t “let go” of, say, a YouTube clip even after I’d closed the tab.

Top Shelf offers two other panes, which you can switch to using icons in its top left when it’s expanded: Files and Clipboard.

Files allows you to temporarily store, yes, files that you might want to move between apps. Drag and drop a file in there and then you can drag it back out of Top Shelf into another app. That pane also has an AirDrop section; drop a file there, and it will trigger the system’s AirDrop feature, with the file already pre-populated.

Files can store up to six items, and you can clear them all from Top Shelf’s settings, as well as choose how long items stay in the Files palette, define a keyboard shortcut that brings you directly to this section, and decide whether the AirDrop option is present or not.

Clipboard, as you might expect, is a clipboard manager, showing you thumbnails of text or images that you’ve copied. You can choose the max number of items, how long they’re kept for, whether they’re deleted when you drag them out, and even if it will filter out sensitive info like copied passwords. If that’s not enough security for you, Top Shelf’s settings let you pick apps for the clipboard manager to explicitly ignore.

And, in another example of a feature that Apple bafflingly does not currently offer, you can use a single user-definable keyboard shortcut to summon a floating window to search through the Clipboard shortcut and move the selected item to the clipboard. (Alas, however, it does not automatically paste the result when select it—you still have to hit command-v.)

While Top Shelf would seem to make most sense on a notched display, it doesn’t require one. When not in use on my Apple Studio Display, for example, it simply sits in the center of the menu bar as a little capsule-shaped blob, not unlike on the iPhone. If you run a multiple monitor setup, you can choose where it appears with more granularity, including only on screens with a notch.

I don’t find it generally obtrusive, though I will note that on my Studio Display it doesn’t always play well with my use of multiple desktops in Mission Control—really, it should hide itself when you trigger that feature, otherwise it risks colliding with UI elements there and just generally doesn’t look great.

I also ran into some issues on my Studio Display where Bartender would get confused about whether I was trying to hover over the menu bar and bring up my hidden menu bar items or trigger Top Shelf. Some refinement there could be helpful.

Going dynamic

With Top Shelf, however, Bartender also attempts to mimic a lot of the behaviors of the Dynamic Island on iPhones. For example, when you adjust the volume or brightness of your Mac, the capsule expands slightly and shows your changes; it can do the same for battery notifications when you’re charging or the battery hits a specific level.

But more than that, it also works as an area to show what else is happening on your Mac. For example, if you’re playing music, the notch gets expanded just slightly to show a thumbnail of the album art and a waveform animation. If you hover over the album art, it’ll expand to show playback controls.

If you have the calendar widget available, you’ll get meeting alerts at a specified amount of time before, as well as the ability to click and join a remote meeting (assuming you’ve got a corresponding URL in the event). The Weather widget taps into Apple’s own system and can show precipitation alerts.

A lot of these options are, of course, reduplicative of features available elsewhere in the system. But they are less obtrusive here, in this space that is frankly not being used for anything else, than with, say, your typical Mac notifications. That’s a benefit in the same way as the Dynamic Island in iOS takes the pressure off notifications there.

In some ways Top Shelf feels like a whole new app injected into Bartender—that’s not bad, per se, but I can see why the developers found this a solid way to set their menu bar manager apart from the slew of competitors that have emerged in the past couple years.

Do I use all of Top Shelf’s features? I do not. But that’s okay, because I don’t use all of Bartender’s features either. I appreciate that, in either case, there’s a broad level of customization available, so you can really just use the features that you want.

Notch your best work, Apple

The first MacBook with a notched display came out in 2022 and four years later, the company’s approach seems to remain just pretending it doesn’t exist. Menus that run into the notch simply get shoved to the other side. Menu bar items that don’t fit on the right hand side often just seem to vanish. Apple may be trying to improve matters with its new menu control API in macOS Tahoe, but the result has been lackluster thus far, to say the least.

To the Bartender team’s credit, its Top Shelf feature does what Apple already does on the iPhone and, more importantly, should have done all along on the Mac: embrace the notch. Turn it from a weakness into a strength.

There’s an element of Top Shelf that feels like the old adage about skating to where the puck will be. Even if Apple does end up building a Dynamic Island like feature into macOS—and that’s no guarantee—it will surely not offer everything that Top Shelf does; in that way, it feels a bit like the team behind Bartender is trying to Sherlock-proof themselves. And if Apple never goes there, well, then Top Shelf can claim that island all to itself.

Go to the podcast page.

Your Mac doesn’t have one kind of sleep—it has several. That fact is generally uninteresting until you find you can’t easily put your Mac into display sleep or system (idle) sleep automatically when you walk away from it or close a laptop’s lid. Let me help you help your Mac drift into the arms of Morpheus by digging beneath the surface.

Scattered sleep settings

Recently, I got frustrated with this recurrent problem on the Mac in my studio. Generally, I want this Mac’s displays to sleep and the system to lock, but to remain active, since I access it remotely and it handles networked Time Machine backups. I thought I’d correctly configured the various System Settings, scattered across different panes, several releases ago.

There are three settings to be aware of:

• Lock Screen: In the System Settings app, select Lock Screen, note the “Turn display off… when inactive” setting or settings: “on battery” and “on power adapter” appear on a laptop; nothing on a desktop.¹ You can choose an interval here. Never is an option, and could be your problem.

• Battery: On a laptop, go to the System Settings app and select Battery and click Options. There, you can enable “Wake for network access,” which is set to “Only on Power Adapter” by default, to wake your Mac as needed for certain incoming network traffic. Your Mac will wake up—and sometimes your display will, too. If set to Always, this can wake your laptop while it’s on battery power, and potentially leave its display active, which could drain your battery.

• Automatic sleeping: Apple enables a setting by default that keeps your Mac active when the display goes to sleep. The location and phrasing are slightly different between laptops and desktops. On a laptop, the setting is in Battery’s Options dialog, as above, and reads “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.” On a desktop, find it in the Energy preferences, where it’s called “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off.” Disable this switch if you want your Mac to sleep when the display powers down.

Conversely, if you’d like a quick, manual way to put your display to sleep, you’ve got two options:

• In the System Settings app, go to Desktop & Dock, click Hot Corners (found at the bottom), and choose Sleep as an action for one corner.

• Press Control-Command-Q to activate Lock Screen, or choose Lock Screen from the Apple menu. I don’t love this keystroke, to be honest, because it’s perilously easy to type Command-Shift-Q, which logs you out of your account, shutting down all the apps.²

Unfortunately, tweaking these settings didn’t help my situation. The answer lay in Terminal, where I ran commands to reveal low-level information about what was keeping my Mac from display sleep.

Power management shows who’s keeping you awake

Apple does provide an excellent tool that shows what’s affecting power management and lets you control it: pmset.³ Even better, you can paste in the following to use that command to extract just sleep-related assertions, or activities that have an impact on sleep:

pmset -g assertions | grep -i sleep

When I typed this just now, I had a modest list, preceded by a summary:

PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
PreventSystemSleep             1
PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x00022a4d00018492] 00:36:44 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"  
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x0001fc3c0001a751] 03:53:17 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"  
pid 64802(Music): [0x00022a4c00018a52] 00:36:45 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.Music.playback"  
pid 35328(QuickTime Player): [0x000200bb0001894d] 03:34:06 NoIdleSleepAssertion named: "com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX - disable system sleep"  
pid 68171(screensharingd): [0x00022c1e00078cbd] 00:28:59 PreventSystemSleep named: "Remote user is connected"  
pid 437(powerd): [0x00022b5900018bb7] 00:32:16 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "Powerd - Prevent sleep while display is on"

The first three lines tell me the off/on status as a 0 (off) or a count (1 per set of connected items) about whether any application or other process affects those categories:

• PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep: When showing 0, as it is for me, there’s nothing that will block the display from sleeping on your Lock Screen delay choice. If this is 1 or higher, the display will not go to sleep.
• PreventSystemSleep: A non-zero value, as in my case, means something is actively preventing the system from sleeping at all, even if I tried to put it to sleep manually.
• PreventUserIdleSystemSleep: With a value of 1 or more, a process prevents your Mac, when idle, from engaging system sleep. If you perform an action, like choosing Sleep from the Apple Menu or closing the lid on a laptop, it will sleep.

You can see that I have several typical items in the filtered list below. The three lines listing com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep (twice) and com.apple.Music.playback relate to my current situation: I’m listening to the Music app via my Mac’s headphone jack, which is connected to speakers.

I have no idea why QuickTime Player, shown next, would prevent idle sleep—that seems strange, as it was inactive and had no open files. Quitting it removed that assertion. (Apparently, the specific language it uses is a legacy assertion, so it isn’t properly counted in the summary.)

Screen Sharing (screensharingd) is also an odd duck. Normally, if you have a Screen Sharing session connected to your Mac, its display can go to sleep, but the system stays active. In this case, this is a transient state: I use Bartender, which has to use Screen & System Audio Recording, which appears as a form of screen sharing when active, to determine which system menu items are currently visible.

The final item, powerd, is the setting noted earlier: “Prevent sleep while display is on.”

When previously looking through this list, I came across an online reference to a Mac utility called caffeinate. Folks, I’ve said before I have to keep humble despite being a technology writer for what is now nearly 30 years: I had never seen this command-line tool before, to my knowledge, and, according to Google, I have never mentioned it in my archived writing.

caffeinate was introduced 13 years ago by Apple as a cutely named option you can use to keep the display awake. For instance, to keep the display forced awake for an hour, overriding other settings, enter:

caffeinate -d -t 3600

Now, I was aware of Amphetamine (free from the Mac App Store). But I didn’t quite understand—or, let me be honest, maybe have forgotten—that it performed the same function, relying on the same system hooks caffeinate employs, and putting a friendly menu bar wrapper around it.

Finding the caffeinate reference led me to look for Amphetamine, which in turn revealed the problem. Perhaps due to some errant menu bar clicking, I had activated Amphetamine, thus locking my display on. My confusion might stem from three factors. First, I forgot I had it installed. Second, I used Bartender to put the icon in its Hidden list, so it wasn’t displayed in the active bar. Third, I used the icon selection option to change the menu bar picture from a pill to a tea kettle—you know, drinking tea might keep you awake? I regret my decision, as I didn’t recognize what it was when I made that decision, seemingly years ago.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just turn it off in the app—I had to quit the app, then toggle the active state to turn it off. Sadly, we humans can’t turn off our caffeinated mode to go to sleep.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices. Users will know that a conversation is end-to-end encrypted when they see a new lock icon in their RCS chats. Encryption is on by default and will be automatically enabled over time for new and existing RCS conversations.

Apple first talked about adding this feature more than a year ago, and first beta tested it in a previous version of iOS. With today’s release of iOS 26.5, it’s now available—pending carrier support, of course.

I’m glad to see the company implementing this: while iMessages have always been encrypted, which Apple points out in its press release, security of our messages should be table stakes.

This news does mean encrypted RCS messaging will functionally be available in Messages on macOS as well, since texts and RCS messaging are already facilitated by your iPhone, as long as your phone is running 26.5 and it’s supported by your carrier and your account.

Updated at 2:51pm Eastern.

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Now Culpan reports that Apple has decided how it will solve the problem:

Apple recently made its decision and opted to put more units of the Neo in customer hands… As a result, it’s now asking suppliers to prepare capacity for 10 million units of the debut version of the Neo, up from an initial estimate of 5 million to 6 million, my sources tell me.

This renewed commitment to meeting demand means Apple must also ask TSMC for a hot lot of A18 Pro chips, the same processor used in the iPhone 16 Pro. The system-on-chip is made using TSMC’s N3E process, with the initial production run underway at least two years ago.

The net result of this is that the cost of making MacBook Neos is going to go up, but Apple has (quite rightly, in my opinion) decided that it’s more important to keep MacBook Neo momentum rolling than to maintain higher margins.

Apple recently cut some Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations as it manages RAM costs and shortages, and Culpan says that it’s certainly on the table for Apple to do the same on the MacBook Neo.

The simplest answer is probably to eliminate the $599 model entirely, but changing the base price point threatens to undermine the entire premise of the Neo. It’s a tricky one. This is how John Ternus earns his paycheck, I suppose.

Go to the linked site.

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With Hovercraft, you stay on camera. Your slide sits next to you, big and legible. You reach up, pinch it, move it where you want it. You never stop talking. No clicker. No option-tab. No moment where you lose the room.

It’s a virtual camera (so, compatible with pretty much any videoconferencing app) in which case your slide deck (a PDF) is a movable object within the frame. You use hand gestures to position it and shrink it. It hovers—hence the name— in front of you, and you can also use keyboard shortcuts or hand gestures to toggle it on or off or send it full screen.

What I like about this is that it’s using the camera system rather than requiring screen-sharing modes that sometimes just mess up what you’re trying to do. In my brief testing I struggled to get the hand gestures right, but I would imagine that in time—I can only aspire to be as laid back as Adam is in his video demo—I will get the hang of it. This will be a nice addition to my user-group Zoom presentation arsenal.

Go to the linked site.

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Macs don’t do well when they start to approach full storage. The operating system doesn’t provide enough safeguards and backoff options to help you cope with what can become a disaster, requiring a full drive restore! I wrote about this happening with my younger child’s MacBook two years ago. That article was about the abject failure of attempts to get a Mac working after it had reached maximum Mr. Creosote levels. What about avoiding this altogether?

Six Colors reader John wrote in with this particular problem, which has been plaguing him across multiple Mac laptops but doesn’t occur on his Mac mini. John pays Apple for 6 TB of storage and is using nearly 4 TB. Logging in and out of iCloud seems to resolve his full-storage issue, but it comes with a lot of wasted time and some syncing problems.

I suspect one or more things in his case:

• iCloud eviction delays: iCloud isn’t properly evicting data (deleting the local copy, as there’s a cloud copy), or doing so rapidly enough, as the drive starts to fill. The nature of iCloud Drive and iCloud storage for apps and the system is that only as much is cached locally as needed, and the oldest, least-used data is evicted with no user involvement. See below for help on that.
• Aggressive Photos iCloud syncing: Photos is aggressively retrieving data in such a way that, even with Photos: Settings > iCloud > Optimize Mac Storage enabled, it’s filling up the drive. (John has over 100,000 items in Photos, so it’s a likely suspect.)
• Local temporary backup caches: Some form of locally cached backup might be filling his drive before it uploads or transfers the files. Both Time Machine and Backblaze use local caching as a technique, and if you have slow Internet service or haven’t backed up to Time Machine in a while (more common with a laptop, if you attach a drive for this purpose), it can get out of hand.
• APFS snapshots: You can also wind up with what are called “APFS snapshots” that correspond to Time Machine backups that take up space on a drive. These are managed by Time Machine, and the oldest should be deleted automatically over time, but I found in 2021 that some people were having issues with these snapshots growing to occupy an ever-larger portion of their storage. (See “How to manage Time Machine snapshots using Disk Utility in macOS Monterey” at Macworld. And see the DaisyDisk discussion, next.)

After reviewing the above, if none of that explains the problem or helps, I’ve got more advice ahead.

Diagnose what you’re storing

You can use System Settings: General: Storage to get a look at what’s using storage across your drive, but I find it both unreliable—it crashed while testing—and frustrating, as the granularity isn’t high enough.

Instead, I turn to one of my all-time favorite utilities: DaisyDisk ($10, lifetime license), an app that scans your drives and reveals the kinds of data stored by category, including the important “hidden space” section. I don’t need it often, but when I do, it’s usually the only tool that can diagnose unsolvable problems.

DaisyDisk lets you peer into the innards of your drive with color-coding to help you visualize how your usage is distributed among file types. One extremely useful feature is that you can drag and drop at any level of the navigable directory hierarchy to a “collector” spot in the lower-left corner to target items for deletion. Then click Delete and confirm, and it’s gone. This is particularly helpful with the APFS snapshots discussed above.

Manually evict files from iCloud

Apple does offer a manual tool to dump files from local storage without deleting them from iCloud. In the Finder, Control/right-click any item in iCloud Drive, and choose Remove Download. This only works for files that are currently downloaded.¹ You can use it on folders, too, but every item in a folder must be downloaded to evict the folder and its contents.

Monitor storage levels

If you, like reader John, see this filling-up issue regularly, installing an app that warns in advance can be critical. The easiest and cheapest way I’ve found for this kind of monitoring is via iStat Menus ($12). While its primary purpose is to provide a live visual display of the state of various hardware (CPUs, drives, sensors) and other information (time, weather), it can also notify you when any of several conditions are met.

One of these is whether a chosen volume has less than a specified amount of storage remaining or has exceeded an entered percentage of storage used. But this isn’t integrated with email or text, so you need to be in front of your device to know the drive is about to start bulging.

I felt, however, that there was a gap for an on-device monitoring app that could email or text you when something is on the verge of going wrong.² So I wrote one! Welcome to Mister Plimsoll, a simple, free Mac monitoring app currently in beta that lets you set which internal or external volumes to monitor, the percentage above which you should be notified, and choose to get a Mac alert, an email, an iMessage—or all three. You can set the refresh rate for checking and the number of notifications you get each day when the percentage is exceeded. (Please send your feedback.)

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Meet the Silver Winner of the New York Product Design Awards

Most tech accessories are useful. A few are beautiful. The rarest ones are both.

The ZenStand just won Silver at the New York Product Design Awards, recognized for its quiet, anti-industrial aesthetic. A nice moment for us — and a sign the idea behind it resonates beyond us.

The idea was simple: a charger that stops feeling like tech. One that sits on a desk or nightstand the way a good object does, without announcing itself.
We made it from solid dark walnut because real wood brings a warmth to a room that molded plastic never will. We designed a weighted and adhesive base, so the phone lifts off cleanly with one hand. We left the LEDs off on purpose — a charger doesn’t need to perform being a charger. It just needs to charge.

What you end up with is a MagSafe stand that does its job properly and then gets out of the way. Which, in our view, is what good objects are supposed to do.

[Shop the ZenStand]

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Once again, I have ventured out of my home country and winged my way overseas.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about my travel experiences. I detailed some wins and losses from my last international trip in 2024 and even wrote a post way back in 2015, in which I was considering not traveling with my Apple Watch out of fears it would get lost or stolen. Oh, how times have changed.

That said, we were attempting to travel light this time: just two carry on bags and two backpacks for two adults and one small child. And part of that was minimizing the number of devices that we needed to carry and all their attendant cables.

Overall, I think we did pretty well.

Power to the people

One of the things that I get most annoyed about when traveling is charging. I have a couple of super basic plug adapters for Europe and the UK that are fine, if bulky. But I’d been on the lookout for a nice universal power adapter—preferably one that would fit nicely in my go-bag of chargers and cables.

This time around, I found it in the form of the Anker Nano Travel Adapter (affiliate link). What I like about the Nano is first, that it’s not a giant box: it’s only about an inch thick, two inches wide, and a little over three inches long. In that, it’s not too far off from my Anker MagSafe power battery, which means it fits perfectly into the aforementioned bag.

While it doesn’t have every single power port known to humanity, it does at least cover some of the most common: Type A (US / Canada / Japan / China), Type C (Europe), Type G (UK / Singapore) and Type I (Australia). It also packs two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, so you can charge your USB devices directly, as well offering a plug passthrough if you need to use a Type A or Type C plug.

It’s not the beefiest of charges: just 20W max, or 15W for the USB ports when sharing them, but it was plenty to charge a phone and Apple Watch overnight. (I did run into one or two instances where it seems like something didn’t charge correctly, though I wasn’t able to figure out exactly why).

I still ended up needing those extra power adapters for some additional electronics we brought for my kid, like his white noise machine and a baby monitor for our Airbnb. (We also lucked out, with the apartment we stayed at in Paris having a power strip that could accept US plugs.)

One thing I ended up surprisingly not needing on this trip very much: backup batteries. I brought three: the Anker MagSafe model, an older Jackery one with Lightning and micro-USB connectors, and the beefy one included in my Away luggage. Of those, I think the MagSafe model got used once or twice, but only by my wife. The iPhone 17 Pro’s battery held out just fine for all-day usage, including plenty of wayfinding and picture taking.

Make sure you’re connected

As I mentioned in my 2024 piece, eSIMs have made it super easy to stay connected while you’re traveling internationally. Apple’s continued to try and smooth the experience: when I activated my Airalo-provided EU & UK eSIM—unlimited data for a week for about $20—after arriving in France, I was prompted to use it as a Travel SIM, which would allow me to still get FaceTime and iMessages via my U.S. phone number.

That largely worked this time, though I did still run into a couple of weird glitches. For one thing, some contacts weren’t showing up in various places in iOS (Messages, Find My) with their names, but just their phone numbers. I eventually concluded it was because their U.S. phone numbers were not formatted correctly in Contacts for some reason.¹

And despite having my AT&T data roaming off, I did notice that my phone would download a kilobyte of data every once in a while—maybe 4KB total over my entire trip. This kind of “data leakage” is not unheard of, but I haven’t yet been able to find out whether the carrier is going to try to charge me their international rate—I suppose I’ll see when I get my next bill.

But between my eSIM and plentiful Wi-Fi, I never lacked for connectivity. And, thanks to my Tailscale network, I was even able to access the U.S. version of streaming services so that I could download videos for my trip home.

Tripping the light fantastic

I remarked on it during my last overseas trip in 2024, but Apple Pay has truly changed the experience of going to other countries. Before I left this time around, I popped a few leftover UK pounds and some Euros into my wallet, just in case.

I ended up never using them.

In fact, I think I only took my credit card out once, when I thought Apple Pay had failed, though in retrospect, I think it was just because the terminal wasn’t ready yet. Otherwise, I used my phone and watch to pay for everything on the entire trip, from cafés to transit. The experience was just completely seamless—a far cry from days of yore where I used to worry about exchange rates or how to get cash in country.

Tap-and-go transit remains the best experience; I was a little disappointed with Paris’s system, which still requires you buy tickets on its transit card, rather than just using a contactless payment. It meant I had to make sure to buy a ticket every time I was about to use the Metro—not especially onerous, as the Transit Card is supported by the Wallet app and you can buy tickets right from there with Apple Pay, but another point of friction. Especially compared to my trips on the London transit system, where I never had to do anything but tap my phone or watch on a gate or while boarding a bus and go.

(My thanks, by the way, to my pal Jeremy Burge, whose excellent compendium, Express Transit, prepared me for what I would experience in both Paris and London.)

And while we didn’t get to take total advantage of Wallet’s latest boarding pass features, I had an easy enough time on both our flights and our one long train journey storing all of our boarding passes digitally. Honestly, the only real challenge was physically juggling my phone and passport—hopefully some day those Digital IDs will be acceptable for international travel.

Left to my devices

I of course brought my iPhone 17 Pro and AirPods Pro 2—I rarely leave home without the two of those. I also packed my Apple Watch Series 7—no worries about it getting lost or stolen, 2015-era me—and the Apple Watch Series 10 I use for sleep tracking.²

I also packed my M1 iPad Pro because an iPad is a great device for watching video on the plane. And I was very glad that my kid had his own iPad (an old 10.5-inch iPad Pro that will, at least, run iOS 17 and, therefore, many—but not all—of the modern streaming apps and games).³

But beyond pulling out my iPad for the plane and train trips, I didn’t end up using it at all. I got far more mileage from my Kobo Libra 2 and even from—gasp—paper books. Though the iPad itself is not particularly heavy or bulky, I did find myself wondering what if I didn’t have to bring it. I mostly got by just fine with my phone—all I would miss is having a larger screen for watching videos.

You probably see where I’m going with this. What if I could just unfold my iPhone into a larger screen for those few occasions, but the rest of the time just have a phone? Hmm. It’s a compelling idea. I especially like the idea of reducing the number of devices I carry that require charging. Maybe one day I can truly get away with one device to rule them all.

Every year we ask the Apple IT/Mac admin community for their opinions about how Apple fared in past 12 months. You can read our 2026 Enterprise Report Card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read all the comments from the panelists who were willing to share in public—all 27,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.

(The text below has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.)

Enterprise Programs

Andrew Laurence: A banner year for the Enterprise programs: AxM APIs, AxM-managed MDM migrations, and a first-party MDM solution. Is Hades wearing ski gear?

Charles Misson: ABM is finally moving again, with some interesting new features, but nothing really groundbreaking!

Guillaume Gète: There have been very nice improvements on the Apple Business Manager side, i.e., management of Activation lock, APIs (!), and the incredible improvement of being able to move from one MDM to another very easily straight from Apple Business Manager—definitely a game changer. However, there is still some effort much needed on the Volume Purchase Program side, as it is still not possible to purchase subscriptions for VPP. Which is really weird and annoying, as Apple pushes subscriptions from its own Creation Studio suite… and admins can’t purchase them for their company’s employees!

Christopher Cook: Apple has made improvements to Apple School/Business Manager over the past year, adding the ability to better manage password resets, activation lock, and making the transition to managed Apple accounts more visible. However, App Store application management continues to stagnate with no meaningful changes or improvements for many years. The rollout of Creator Studio was a mess. It coincided with the start of the spring semester, and Apple released a version of Logic that was incompatible with VPP licensing. The App Store auto-updates the apps but provides no way of rolling back to a previous version. This resulted in an entire course going offline until a new version of Logic could be released to deal with the error. While the VPP issue itself was unfortunate, it put a spotlight on the shortcomings of using the App Store for deploying and managing applications.

Michael Jon: There’s genuine progress to acknowledge here, but we also have to talk about the parts that are still a mess. Apple Business Manager continues to improve. The API additions are a welcome move, particularly for asset inventory tooling that needs accurate device data from ABM and ASM. That’s the right direction. What isn’t the right direction is still relying on SMS-based two-factor authentication for administrator accounts in 2026, and the continued cap of five administrators per ABM and ASM instance, regardless of organization size. For a company managing tens of thousands of devices across multiple countries, five admin seats isn’t a policy that reflects reality. Apps and Books haven’t seen meaningful movement, and the volume purchase program model, while functional, still feels like it could do with some modernization in how it surfaces and manages licenses at scale. Managed Apple IDs are still doing the right thing overall. Domain capture was a smart addition in prior years and has genuinely helped administrators pre-capture accounts at scale. The frustrating gaps are around continuity features like Sidecar, which require both devices to be signed into the same Apple ID at the system level before the feature is even available. Being able to add a Managed Apple ID as a secondary account on a personal iPad so users could actually use Sidecar at work would be a meaningful improvement. On storage, I’m not going to pile on about the five-gigabyte limit. Your productivity suite should be carrying that load anyway. Then there’s the Developer Program, which remains one of the most infuriating enrollment processes I’ve encountered on any platform. Six months of being kicked around trying to secure a single developer account for a 2,400-person organization is not acceptable, and this isn’t an isolated story. I’ve heard it from administrators across multiple organizations. Google Workspace lets you sign up for a Play developer account directly from Workspace and use it organization-wide. Microsoft has a comparable model. Why Apple, a company with registered business customers and a mature enterprise program, can’t offer the same is genuinely beyond me.

Erik Kramer: Apple School Manager has maintained a heavy-handed user interface, but at least it hasn’t gone all Liquid Glass! The additional functionality of API access has been a good start for asset management purposes, but not much else. Federating Apple Accounts with Google Workspace was a nasty implementation—reading email logs to see who it affects!?!—, but after everything settled, it is seamless. Despite shortcomings in functionality, these tools have remained stable and working.

John Wetter: I would characterize the overall performance as uneven. Some parts of the Apple Enterprise program have been and continue to be solid, like Apple School Manager, while things like Managed Apple Accounts continue to be a mystery in what works, how they work, and what value they bring to the organization, given both the positive impacts and seemingly arbitrary restrictions.

Tom Bridge: Apple took a major step forward this past year by adding an API to Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager (collectively after AxM). Giving Admins the ability to query AxM for device information, as well as move devices between device management systems, is a welcome improvement. In addition, the ability to enforce device management system migration for the 26 series of operating systems on macOS and iOS is a game-changer for organizations that want the freedom to choose new solutions without having to maintain multiple solutions for years. While Managed Apple Accounts continue to benefit from improvement, there are still major impediments to the adoption of Account-driven User Enrollment, mostly due to inflexible application delivery systems that don’t support side-by-side versions of applications. Apple needs to take major steps to keep up with what have become table-stakes approaches to app management on Android. There still isn’t a great experience for orgs that want to do light-touch management or mobile app management on iOS.

Jeremy Leland: The addition of new access controls for device management, MAC addresses visibility, and API accounts is all helpful. ABM account holders still need the ability to check non-ABM devices in bulk for coverage information.

Justin McMahan: We use Jamf Pro as our MDM, and its integration with Apple’s platform is great.

Andrew B: It’s really nice to see new features in ABM, including the MDM migration API. But the development of features seems to take a very long time. New features arrived just in time for Apple to transition away from ABM to Apple Business mid-cycle, so who knows what the future holds.

John Cleary: Many of the past concerns have been addressed; however, I knocked 1 point off as I still can’t buy extra storage for a managed iCloud account. This makes it much harder than it needs to be to adopt iCloud in the enterprise.

Jeff Anderson: Apple is clearly working to make macOS more prevalent in the enterprise. Recent additions such as the ability to remove activation lock in ABM, and the recent changes to Apple Business, show their common to Enterprise.

Michal Moravec: This year, we got two features Mac Admins wanted for a long time: Apple Business Manager public API and automated migration between MDMs via ABM with Automated Device Enrollment. Apple also added missing hardware identifiers (e.g., MAC addresses) to ABM, so we can now use it as a source of truth for our inventory system. I am writing this one day after ABM became Apple Business. While I understand why Apple wanted to merge ABM, Apple Business Essentials, and other business-oriented services, the result is a giant mess. Apple Business’s web interface feels more like an early prototype than a production-level system. The launch was most likely rushed and not very well coordinated between various teams at Apple.

Armin Briegel: Many ongoing issues, challenges, and works in progress here. On the one hand, Apple introduced a management service migration workflow, which is great, and an API for ABM/ASM. On the other hand, Apple still does not provide managed volume purchases and deployment for App Store subscriptions and in-App purchases. Apple has announced it will expand Apple Business Essentials, now named just “Apple Business” and ABM functionality worldwide this week, which is promising, but long overdue. However, expanded iCloud storage for Managed Apple Accounts and warranty is still only available in the US.

Jeffrey Hoover: They are certainly trying harder than they did 10-15 years ago

Shane Thompson: As always, Apple’s enterprise and education programs are a mixed bag. On the positive side of things, migrating MDM providers using School/Business Manager is a great new feature and allows organizations to more easily change MDM providers if required. Purchasing apps and books from the App Store is still a painful process of searching for the app, purchasing licenses, assigning it to an MDM Server and then pushing the app via MDM. I feel that this is something that can be simplified. The introduction of the School/Business Manager API does feel like an exciting new feature that I have started experimenting with to sync warranty information with devices within my MDM, and I am hoping to explore it more over the next year.

David McMonnies: While reasonably static from a feature perspective, AxM remains a reliable platform, and Managed AppleIDs are similarly reliable. Feature improvement is coming with the April 14 update to ABM, so potentially more to report on in this space soon.

Alex Meretten: No news is good news here, and basically everything works the way it did a year ago. I can even finally move devices between ABM accounts, and that’s just lovely. Curious how the changes to business work out – at first blush, I’m not impressed – but we’ll see.

TJ Draper: I don’t think there’s much change from their performance last year

John Delfino: They exist, which is something — but there are huge quantities of headaches. Enabling enterprise functionality disables a disproportionate quantity of features users desire on the endpoints (can’t use wallet on any managed devices?); VPP is a headache, and in-app purchases don’t exist; Shared iPad functionality is only supported by some MDM software; the list goes on and on. It’s inconsistent and inconvenient— but again, the features exist.

Bob McGillicuddy: The basics like DEP and app push are fine, but domain capture for managed accounts is messy and filled with gotchas. WEIRD gaps chronically remain, like the inability to buy IAPs and subscriptions, even to Apple’s own software like Creator Studio.

Chris Carr: The Apple Business Manager APIs have been utilized by folks to make some nice open source projects

W. Andrew Robinson: The first that comes to mind is the recent ‘Apple Business’ rebranding/ combining of services that enterprises need (ABM/ASM) and that other, smaller SMBs might use like Connect and the Maps integration (US only) as well as device management, etc…I like that that Apple is working on this though really it’s not very ‘enterprise-y’. Another item that is polarizing is moving to a subscription model for their ‘new’ Creator Studio… some enterprises might see this as a win for an alternative to Adobe, though I dislike the inclusion of the ‘iWork’ apps there, as it might not bode well for those apps to remain free in the near future, especially (for me) Keynote. Improvements to Managed Apple Accounts over the last year were mostly positive, but still, pain points remain. I’m glad to get more features that MAAs have like purchasing business apps, TestFlight and Developer logins helping to eliminate the need for personal Apple Accounts there, platform restrictions to company-owned device logins and some good stuff in bulk-domain ‘unmanaged account’ management, but all these still point out things that are missing – Not all ‘Apple Account’ features are available with MAAs still, and I think this still prevents enterprise adoption. MAAs are not ‘easy’ as I would hope they would be, and I’m thinking here of iCloud Keychain and Universal Control, among others. After so many years since we got MAAs, we see these ‘incremental’ improvements show up, and it makes me feel like they are not as much of a priority as I’d hoped. Very ‘second-class citizen.’ Still, not gonna complain about the things we DO get! Sometimes, slow and methodical is how we get stuff.

Joel Housman: Overall, they’ve made improvements across the board to the MDM framework. I’ve seen small but noticeable improvements that have made managing our fleet of Macs easier and better.

Allister Banks: The black box of Apple Account domain capture reared its head on a timed release, as obviously most end users just ignored it and are slowly dealing with @temporaryappleaccount.apple.com username resets, which is only mentioned in passing, practically undocumented since it’s apparently not written with the intention of being end-user facing. Issues have cropped up if you were logged in with that account. I can’t imagine how disruptive it was for places that were more accepting of having end users create the Apple Account they log in to their work Macs with, and use the work domain. The MDM migration path for Tahoe Macs worked great to the point we migrated over 1k computers a day at its peak, but the flakiness of the interface and inability to reliably know why a device isn’t ‘deadline eligible’ among other API and interface gaps was unfortunate – I know people who had to web GUI script with selenium-ish tools and got their account flagged but with no API option and worse DISCREPANCIES between what bulk-actions what supposed to perform and what the GUI showed for an individual device what did they expect us to do?

Brian LaShomb: Privileges and roles remain a vulnerable spot in Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. There’s no way to scope read-only access for third-party integrations with the API, and built-in roles like Device Manager lack meaningful guardrails against bulk device changes.

Marian Albers: Many great improvements overall, but unfortunately, the launch of Apple Business Manager on April 14th introduced many controls (Brands/Ads) which shouldn’t be mixed with Device/User controls in my opinion.

Kevin: MDM’s, Configuration profiles and their management on Apple platforms are still way too complex in 2026, no matter which device management frameworks you use.

Craig Cohen: The ongoing and rapid additions to Apple eBusiness Programs have accelerated our offerings to customers.

Emilio Garcia: We’re in a large federated environment, and managing Apple School Manager leaves a lot to be desired (all users can see all devices, or all MDM servers, or can change the default MDM server for the whole environment, etc.). But for its intended use-case, and how Apple wants us to use it, it does its job reasonably well.

Luca Accomazzi: We are a mostly Windows-based reality, but still, when I contacted the online Apple Store representative for a leasing of four MacBooks, I would have expected something more than that lukewarm, slow answer.

Gabriel Marcelino: Apple Business was a huge upgrade, and we see that they are making Enterprise more important. I hope the improvement continues next year.

Cameron Kay: OS and Device Management are getting better, but their enterprise services still need a lot of work. Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager still has incorrect MAC Address info for devices, and the API for looking up warranty information is so show it makes it almost impossible to populate warranty info for my entire fleet. AppleCare Enterprise Support also doesn’t hold enough stock of spare parts, especially for high-end systems like Studio Displays and Mac Studios, where you can wait up to a month before they can do the repair. Apple also needs to add PassKey authentication support to Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager, AppleCare Enterprise portal, GSX, and allow us to use the same Apple Account on all of these services.

Marcus Rowell: The new consolidated Apple Business is a great progress and appears to be a good foundation for the future. API access was very nice to have last year; in our AI-driven future, it will be essential.

Luke Charters: Free MDM, a proper API, detailed hardware information and centralized brand management. This is a huge leap from where we’ve come in just the last few years and points to a renewed focus from Apple on the SMB and enterprise market segments. If there’s anything to criticize here, it’s Managed Apple Accounts. No access to subscriptions or in-app purchases is becoming a bigger pain point, particularly with the introduction of Apple Creator Studio. The sign-in, identity verification, and subscription renewal experience with Apple Developer accounts that are also Managed Apple Accounts needs significant improvement.

Kale Kingdon: Overall, Apple has shown good progress and direction in the last year with changes to Apple Business, AxM API’s and other minor additions. Top marks are held back due to underdeveloped and inconsistent Managed Apple Account features globally, as well as regional storage limitations, errors, logs and remediation tools. Limiting MAA Sign-in on Supervised Devices as a Global AxM Setting is also a feature that falls ever so slightly short. The feature is good, but the limitations on scoping make it unusable.

Peter Loobuyck: It is surely improving, but the enterprise program may need speed improvements. For instance, ABM is still not snappy to work with.

Martin Piron: The Apple Business Manager improvements have been very welcome, especially the API, MDM migration and device metadata, which have made it so much easier to manage the fleet of devices. You could say these were long overdue, but I’m still very happy to finally have those capabilities.

N Clarke: Apple Business is an interesting introduction. Currently waiting to see what is offered for Education, and how it might compare to current established and functional MDM providers such as Jamf, Iru, and Mosyle.

Matthias Choules: The release of Apple Business marks a very important milestone in opening up for a whole new customer category. This will be really great for the whole ecosystem.

Jered Benoit: Apple’s enterprise programs are functional, but stagnant. There isn’t much that changes, which is both good and bad. The reliance on third-party providers for mobile device management is a double-edged sword, as there are always edge cases and differences between the documentation of both parties that lead to lots of trial and error.

Chris Pommer: Given our relatively stale needs after a big upgrade cycle a couple of years ago, our use of Apple’s services has remained static. The launch of Apple Business is encouraging, but the main interesting features aren’t launching in Canada yet.

Bart Reardon: They could only improve on the functionality in the Business/School Manager API, and improve they did. Access to device purchase records and warranty information is super easy (and critical for effective lifecycle management), so this is a huge plus. Being able to set other properties like MDM assignment or even release devices just makes things easier. More API’s, I say.

Morgan Schönberger: Allowing admins and IT professionals to use Apple Business (Manager) through its new API is a welcomed change. It makes glances at the data much easier, especially in larger environments.

Enterprise Service and Support

Chris Pommer: Our business rep is fine, but not outstanding.

Michael Jon: I’ll be upfront that my direct engagement with Apple’s enterprise support at my current organization is limited, but my experience at a prior role has permanently coloured my view of this space, and not in a good way. In 2024, I was working at a non-profit news organization that had engaged Apple for enterprise coverage on their existing Mac fleet. What Apple neglected to mention was that doing so would effectively cancel their existing AppleCare Consumer coverage, which had covered full device failures, and replace it with a tokenized model where you needed to order 50 units to earn a single replacement credit, for an international non-profit, which was a complete non-starter. The organization lost tens of thousands of dollars in AppleCare credits that had already been paid for. That’s not a miscommunication; that’s Apple essentially conning a previous IT manager, and the organization paid for it. Beyond that, AppleCare for Enterprise has a broader reputation problem in the administrator community. Being allocated a small number of support ticket credits per year, only to be told you’ve run out when you raise an issue, is a terrible experience. Raising a critical issue and hearing nothing back for months isn’t an edge case; it’s a common story. The whole system feels designed to minimize Apple’s support obligations rather than actually help customers. Getting one ticket credit per year and then being told that’s not enough when something goes wrong is not real enterprise support. For contrast, say what you will about Microsoft, their Premier and Unified support models at least give you a named Technical Account Manager and a clear escalation path. You know who to call, you know what you’re paying for, and you know what the response commitment is. Apple’s model feels like it was designed by a company that doesn’t really want enterprise customers but tolerates them because the hardware margins are too good to walk away from. This is a 2 until Apple seriously overhauls both the transparency and the structure of how they engage with enterprise customers on support.

Gabriel Marcelino: Getting better, but some beta releases still do not have all the information when they are released. 26.4 was a good example where the beta they fixed the keychain issue on the 3rd party login api and then when GM was release it broke again. Or where release patches things that were not released during a beta.

Jeff Anderson: ACE has been very solid in providing hardware support. My team always has a good experience when needing to contact Apple Support. Also, our Apple rep is very responsive when we need to purchase equipment, and he keeps us informed of upcoming changes to Apple that could affect our business.

Jason Hedrick: Feedback assistant has improved for my issues

Kale Kingdon: While AppleSeed, Beta Program Documentation & Feedback Assistant improve the overall confidence in the enterprise frameworks as a whole, direct support models such as The Disappointingly Underdeveloped AppleCare for Enterprise Portal, Non-Scalable Support Agreements and Reduction in Regional System Engineers & Apple Staffing leave SMB & EDU without clear lines of support. Considering the potential impact of the MacBook Neo on the EDU & Enterprise market, I’m concerned by the current (potentially regional) underdeveloped repair network and how this might negatively impact uptake long-term. Speaking as someone who manages 10,000+ devices 1300km’s away from the nearest Apple Store and Apple Authorized Repair Agent with limited onsite options, accidental damage repair is the only area that gives me considerable pause when discussing rollouts.

John Wetter: Documentation has been the standout positive in the last couple of years, while the feedback program continues to too often feel like you are tossing comments and feedback into a black hole. At the same time, betas have felt stable with what seems like better regression testing for enterprise services.

Armin Briegel: Communication between Apple and the Apple management community is improving. One can tell that the feedback from AppleSeed for IT and other channels is being considered. New features will often have management options from the start, or they will be added quickly after feedback. The release notes for Enterprise are generally good, but admins still often have to gather information from various sources (AppleShare for IT notes, developer release notes, normal release notes (which often just say “improvements”, security notes and enterprise notes. It would be nice for all if they were available in one spot.

Martin Piron: Having clear instructions on how to leverage our AppleCare Enterprise support to get our deployment blockers looked at during the beta season made a big difference. Seeing those bugs fixed from one beta to the other is amazing.

Christopher Cook: The Apple employees I get to directly work with provide more knowledge and support than any other vendor in any field I’ve ever worked in. They’re fantastic. I bring this up because Apple has created a support structure that allows its staff to work directly with customers like me. It’s invaluable. Despite us working for different employers, we share a common goal: to do whatever we can to make these platforms as great as possible. Apple is a massive, enigmatic machine, but it’s made primarily of people who genuinely care. This structure allows for a direct line of feedback for Apple to see how its technology is used and adopted in the enterprise and to provide guidance on best practices. While their feedback structure is imperfect (cough Feedback Assistant cough), I have been around long enough to see feedback alchemized into meaningful change and improvements. I want my users to have the best possible experience with their managed devices, and Apple has provided both things deserving of feedback and people who can help me navigate it.

Tom Bridge: Feedback remains an area of concern for Mac Admins. Unless you have an expensive support contract, you might as well write your concerns down on a piece of paper, fold it into a paper airplane, and sail it south of Salesforce Tower toward Apple Park. While Admins will still file feedback, because it’s the right thing to do, Apple could do a lot more to respond to Admins’ concerns and acknowledge where fixes are available.

Joel Housman: For what little I use these programs, I haven’t seen a huge improvement, but I haven’t seen any degradation of their previous service either.

Jeffrey Hoover: Still want a portal like TechDirect. Calling for all the things is not needed.

Jered Benoit: The few times I have had to reach out to support, it has been convoluted to get to the enterprise support team. I have spent plenty of time in the non-enterprise support queue to only be handed off when we get through the laborious basic troubleshooting. The documentation, as mentioned previously, is thin at best. Reddit provides better documentation than Apple. There is no ‘known bugs’ list that I can refer to, and I can only figure out if an issue is resolved by recreating it and seeing if the problem has been fixed.

Peter Loobuyck: Support is good, but we always need to go through all the obvious questions

Marcus Rowell: The feedback loops with Apple and Enterprise customers via the AppleSeed for IT program are still improving every year, especially those associated with the Appleseed community in the Mac Admins Slack. Nearly all Mac Admins, and most 3rd party developers, are now on board with testing early during the betas and filing feedback as soon as they can. The Enterprise Release Notes are extremely valuable.

Guillaume Gète: Globally, support was OK. But I find it really terrible that Apple sometimes pushes changes in management without any warning in the betas, and the final release has some unseen “new feature” or “bug fix” that breaks something else. And I still have Feedbacks I wrote ages ago that are not fixed, or things that have been fixed for which I got no notification of the fix in Feedback Assistant!

N Clarke: Why is it impossible in the year 2026 to have an email ticket chain with Apple Support and instead have to find a time where you and they can have a phone call together? That said, support has always been very friendly and has worked hard on trying to find fixes to the presented issues.

W. Andrew Robinson: Apple’s documentation web resources look better than ever, and I think they are a ‘gold standard’ when compared to others. Well done! Sure, there are gaps, but we know Apple does not document everything we wish it would. Still big improvements this year! Appleseed for IT improvements is welcome, and the expansion of functions in Apple Business (née Manager) is really good – I count at least twelve feature announcements for it, including warranty & hardware status info like battery health and MAC addresses for some devices, API and admin role improvements… the list is long. But the biggest in my mind is the support for migration between device management services (i.e., MDM…more about that later) – this is huge, and addresses a massive pain point that directly benefits enterprise customers, allowing us to choose device management solutions based on need and features, and not remain with a vendor out of ‘migration pain avoidance.’ Also, I want to point out professional training improvements from Apple, including language localization and accessibility features of fully online courses. It’s nice when tech companies remember the world is not North American and is diverse in training needs. Well done, Apple! That said, Feedback and feedback responses, and their bug bounty programs have fundamental issues that could see some attention… but let’s focus on successes rather than lack of improvements.

Bob McGillicuddy: Fine. Programs like Appleseed could be more proactive ahead of major O.S. updates because so many small features change and aren’t well documented AT ALL

Allister Banks: Return to service workflow documentation could use an overhaul so our warehouse can more easily just-in-time update devices before shipping and refresh returned devices, with hints about using a hub and properly supporting multiple devices. Apple Configurator and DFU reliability have been a sore spot that I think makes moving off USB sticks a non-starter.

Andrew B: Apple Feedback remains a black box. Enterprise AppleCare, if you’re lucky enough to have it, has become useful, particularly during testing. I’ve never filed more bugs for a major release before, but I’ve also never had as much vigorous engagement from AppleCare, who in turn appear to be engaging the Product teams (?) behind Feedback. Thanks to this, as well as judiciously invoking the “Deployment Blocker” incantation, a lot of bad bugs got squashed in Tahoe betas and minor versions before they were released. The test burden that comes back on tickets is often high, but when this testing yields results, or feature or implementation improvements, it feels less odious.

Emilio Garcia: I really wish there were more acknowledgment when submitting feedback. It’s difficult to convince colleagues to submit feedback when it feels like yelling into the void. I have one feedback still open for an issue that was resolved several releases ago, never marked complete — it gives the impression that it was never read.

Chris Carr: AppleSeed is useful

Michal Moravec: I am still very much demotivated to write feedback about mundane things. I will rather take a walk and shout at the sea. Feels much better and productive. The best interaction from Apple’s side is the unofficial one. We really appreciate certain members of the Mac Admin Slack.

Justin McMahan: Any time I need to contact them, they’re very helpful. One of the best support teams I work with regularly in my role.

Bart Reardon: Generally speaking, I find enterprise support to be excellent.

John Welch: Apple’s problems aren’t things like the programs or support themselves. Those are solid. The problems are the “little” things, like documentation. The deployment docs are fantastic, but god help you if you need documentation of things like logging, because god will literally help you before Apple will. I’ve spent countless hours repeating the same thing over and over while watching the log file scroll so that I can find the sender. I can get docs on connecting to the log system, but nothing on the log system itself. This is a problem Apple has had for decades, and I see no sign of it being fixed. Documenting stuff well is not sexy, it’s tedious, and necessary. If you want to really see how bad Apple’s docs are, compare Microsoft’s developer and scripting documentation to what Apple passes off as documentation. It’s not even close. It’s taken until macOS 2026 for Apple to properly support PIV login. Prior to 2026, if your first login used a PIV card, you didn’t get a filevault token so that you couldn’t reboot your computer. Even worse, you couldn’t have an admin with a “high” user number fix that; it had to basically be an admin account created locally. 2026 fixes that, but the fact that it lasted that long is not good. Still no proper PIV card support for iPadOS.

Erik Kramer: In this corner of the US, we have great access to support from SE as well as standard AppleCare. I’d like to especially give a shoutout to the free ClarisConnect instance that is available and fully supported for ASM schools. It is a gem.

Shane Thompson: There are some nice changes in how you can manage enrolling devices in the AppleSeed for IT program via DDM, which allows us to invite more people into the beta testing program. The documentation is still of decent quality, but the release schedule of betas seems extra chaotic this past year, so you’re just kind of left wondering when Apple is going to be releasing a different build of a beta.

Luke Charters: Apple laid off most of the system engineers who supported our region, which has significantly degraded our ability to get tailored advice about how new features and technologies will impact our environment. We also no longer have a line of communication for simple questions and clarifications that don’t justify creating an AppleCare Enterprise support ticket. With all the new features in Apple Business and the popularity of MacBook Neo, reducing your boots on the ground staff helping IT departments migrate to Apple feels like a major strategic blunder.

David McMonnies: Enterprise support has been fairly static, representing neither significant improvement nor degradation. Documentation is reasonable, but often poorly communicated.

Craig Cohen: The beta programs are always helpful, but any response to real feedback is nonexistent. It feels like a placebo.

Cameron Kay: Hardware support needs work, especially for high-end systems. Feedback Assistant still seems like a black hole, and you don’t see any response unless you log an AppleCare Enterprise Support case referencing the Feedback Assistant case number. Appleseed beta release notes are getting better. Unfortunately, there is still a gap between new features being released and Apple adding controls to manage them. It’s sometimes taking a year or more for those management controls to be added.

John Delfino: Documentation is barely existent and rarely helpful. Often, I figure out the problem, and then I have no way to even let Apple know the solution to the issue.

Hardware Reliability and Innovation

Charles Misson: Pretty solid year in terms of hardware!

Bart Reardon: Hardware team is just killing it: wizards, all of them.

Chris Carr: MacBooks continue to be nice products

Cameron Kay: Hardware is generally very reliable. The one exception is the external iMac power supplies. We’ve had a lot of those die in the past 12 months. The Ethernet port has stopped working until the power supply is unplugged and replugged.

Erik Kramer: Reliability remains top-notch. Innovation has not been quite as impressive, but the Neo turned up to impress just in the nick of time.

N Clarke: M5 is the biggest improvement. As for reliability, MagSafe cables are showing better longevity in EDU environments than the past USB-C cables. Pity they can’t charge an iPad!

Martin Piron: Reliability remains high, innovation was a bit flat until the Neo came out. Everything else felt like an incremental upgrade, because they were.

Shane Thompson: If there is one area where someone can have no complaints about Apple, it’s with their hardware. We are a mixed environment, and we are seeing a steady uptick in our Mac numbers, and our Windows numbers are staying flat or decreasing. Our end users love the hardware, our desk-side tech teams deal with way fewer tickets from our Mac users, and we expect this to be an ongoing trend.

John Welch: Apple still makes some of the best hardware out there.

Kale Kingdon: I can unequivocally and wholeheartedly give top marks to Hardware Reliability and Innovation. The inexorable march towards more performant and battery-efficient lower-cost models is now consistent and extremely well-received. Capping the already stellar line of Macs off with the MacBook Neo as the latest release, during the time of such market instability, is a Tour de Force for Tim Cook’s Supply Chain-focused Apple. Not long ago, I never would have expected to hear fleet management peers, even the most committed Apple skeptics, openly praising a Mac as the most performant, best-built, fastest to procure, and most cost-effective option on the market. Add the Neo’s impressive repairability and improved resilience against accidental damage, and this year gets a 5/5 easily.

Dennis Logue: Working in an organization that supports end users on both Apple devices and Windows devices from various manufacturers, the superiority of Apple’s hardware is on display on a daily basis

TJ Draper: Hardware continues to be best-in-class. There just isn’t any better hardware in any category that Apple is in. I’m still on a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro. It’s so good, I have no thoughts of upgrading yet. This is the longest I’ve had any Computer where I haven’t wanted to upgrade at least a little.

Chris Pommer: Everything we have purchased since the Apple Silicon launch has been rock solid.

David Rizzo: The MacBook NEO is finally an affordable option for education. Hopefully, it reverses the trend towards Chromebooks.

Gabriel Marcelino: Hardware has been getting better and better, faster and more reliable. There is no beating it in the PC market. With the new Neo, we see that the PC will not be the value machine anymore.

Alex Meretten: My only problem with the state of Apple hardware is that channel inventory dries up after a new chip is announced – and especially now, getting new machines is nigh on impossible. With how things are, we need Apple to keep production going until it can match existing volumes. We’re going to be very short on laptops very soon.

Marcus Rowell: Apple Silicon-based hardware is amazing. We have solid, great value options for all users. With the MacBook Neo, MacBook Air, through to the MacBook Pro’s range of CPU/GPU/Display and storage options, coupled with the Mac Mini and Studio, we are covered from extremely cost-effective (yet still great) to extremely powerful, where we need it.

John Delfino: Devices are extremely reliable. The pace of innovation has slowed, but it’s still happening.

Michal Moravec: MacBooks and iPhones are still great! Very high reliability and good value for the company.

Emilio Garcia: We’ve really only had to bring one or two devices to a repair shop in the past year for hardware-related failures, and those devices were in tough environments where power loss was frequent. I can’t recall a single issue for devices operating under good conditions.

Craig Cohen: Although Apple silicon impresses, Apple QA has dipped. We have had more issues this year than in previous years.

Tom Bridge: There isn’t anyone making the same caliber hardware as Apple anywhere in the market today, and it’s not even close.

Jeffrey Hoover: In general, the hardware shines. It is mostly user-caused issues.

Andrew B: It’s the best compute hardware on the planet. Fast, cool, power-efficient, a joy to use…until you start grappling with the software that makes it go, and the wheels fall off.

Jeff Richardson: Apple hardware is dependable and works incredibly well. No other company really compares to Apple in this area.

Peter Loobuyck: The Apple hardware is best, even better than before, in terms of repairs

Jered Benoit: Apple’s hardware is unrivaled in reliability. I don’t look for innovation in the enterprise; I need proven solutions, and Apple’s hardware is just that.

Michael Jon: Apple continues to knock it out of the park with the M-series lineup. The contrast with the Intel era is stark. A decade ago, you were paying a premium and feeling genuinely underwhelmed by what you got for it. The M-series is so far above and beyond what the rest of the industry is offering right now that it’s not really a close comparison. My M1 Pro in a 14-inch MacBook Pro is still running strong, and I use it almost daily. Battery health has held up exceptionally well, too, which isn’t something you could say about Intel-era MacBooks a few years in. The MacBook Neo’s use of unused A19 cores from the iPhone line was a genius move. It meaningfully elevates what would otherwise be a fairly unremarkable entry-level machine, and keeping the RAM and storage options modest correctly signals that these are not supposed to be your high-end business workhorses. They’re for students and everyday users, and Apple has positioned them correctly. The rumored touchscreen MacBook doesn’t excite me. It’s not something the MacBook needs, and it feels like a feature in search of a justification. The persistent issue is repairability, and it’s getting harder to ignore as we head into what’s looking like a rocky economic period. Apple’s insistence on soldered storage and the ongoing resistance to consumer-accessible repair is a standout compared to their peers. I understand the argument around serialization and paired components, and I’ll give them some credit on RAM specifically since their unified memory architecture is probably part of why they’ve been able to absorb the memory price increases we’ve seen heading into 2026. But storage is a different story. The cost difference between Apple replacing your storage and a consumer doing it themselves is significant, and as recession signals build, that’s going to matter more and more. The broader economic picture makes this worse. The tariff environment in 2025 and 2026 has been chaotic. On the component side, DDR5 module prices surged 120 to 200% compared to early 2025, and DRAM suppliers are pushing for another 50%+ increase on 2026 contracts. Apple’s scale gives it more room to absorb that than Lenovo or Dell, but the pressure is real. For enterprise procurement teams, the combination of rising hardware costs, soldered components that can’t be replaced, and stretched refresh cycles means the total cost of ownership conversation around Macs is getting harder to win internally. Repairability and the mounting cost pressure are holding this back from a 5.

Jeremy Leland: Our fleet has been impervious to all but user-induced accidental damage this year. Device changes and improvements seem to be well thought out. Apple still needs to fix the charging port placement on the mouse.

Armin Briegel: Even with the demise of Mac Pro and the new displays being a bit disappointing, Apple’s hardware is Apple at its best. The MacBook Neo will change the market for education and enterprise.

W. Andrew Robinson: My first ‘top grade!’ This was a great year for hardware. MacBook Neo, the M5 chip lineup, iPhone 17 series and the ‘Air,’ iPads,… all make for great innovation for the enterprise and continue the Apple Silicon juggernaut at full-steam ahead! I think the MacBook Air and Neo are amazingly versatile devices for business use… Neo especially could be huge for struggling budgets if handled by enterprise IT deployments well – not everyone needs a top-spec MacBook Pro. Of course, those Pro-level devices are crazy good as they always seem to be in recent years. Pour one out for the Mac Pro, however – you never really got your chance in the Apple Silicon era, did you? There’s not a lot more to go into here, as the benefits and successes are pretty self-evident—all in all, a pretty great year for Apple’s hardware.

Morgan Schönberger: Our company had one computer failing on its own; every other incident is of no fault to the computer and rather the users.

David McMonnies: Hardware reliability on silicon devices remains top tier, and the introduction of the Neos is a nice market share play. Overall, innovation seems to be lacking and has dropped my score from a 5 to a 4.

Bob McGillicuddy: Hardware remains great. The laptops are just about the best you can buy

Justin McMahan: We have many Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, and other Apple devices throughout our organization. Their longevity and reliability are great.

John Wetter: Apple is definitely hitting on all cylinders when it comes to hardware. I am looking forward to seeing how the numbers work out over the long-term with the brand new Apple Neo, while we still try to figure out what the long term goal of the Apple Vision Pro platform is.

Marian Albers: MacBook Neo is probably the best improvement since the introduction of Silicon for enterprises, as it covers many low-level use cases.

Joel Housman: We mainly have been purchasing M4 and M5 MacBook Airs over the last year, and they’ve all been rock-solid reliable.

Christopher Cook: Only letting us rate Apple’s hardware lineup to a maximum of five seems unreasonable.

Jeff Anderson: We rarely have problems anymore with Apple hardware that isn’t caused by the fact me user, damaging a device.

Guillaume Gète: Nothing but praise here. Hardware is stellar, and the number of repairs for computers and devices is at an all-time low, I think. No bad issue, no huge repair program… Apple is playing above and beyond the other guys here.

Luke Charters: The hardware lineup, top to bottom, is just amazing right now. The biggest issue with it is the lead times on orders.

Software Reliability and Innovation

Luca Accomazzi: Worst OS upgrade since macOS 7.5, this year…

Luke Charters: When it’s easy for users to figure out where things are and how to get things done in an OS, it means they are more productive, and the organization as a whole is more productive. It also reduces support overhead on the IT department. macOS Tahoe is the first time I’ve seen Apple take a backward step in this area. Apple is very lucky that Tahoe’s competition is the abysmal current state of Windows.

Bart Reardon: You know, people are going to have a rant about liquid glass, but it’s fine. The OS’s are fine, the apps are fine. Everything is fine. My experience is the rough edges can be found in areas where an admin is trying to run $old_workflow on $new_os – this does require being on one’s toes, and new OS’s do break things, but usually there is a good reason for it. Point deducted for the weird placement and behavior of Background Security Improvements, though wth.

Kale Kingdon: Aggregating marks across Usability, Design, Innovation & Reliability across all platforms is difficult – But I appreciate the complexity of increasing the scope of the report card. Standard User UIX remains reasonably unchanged, outside of liquid glass design changes and subsequent, initially limited accessibility options across nearly all platforms. There’s a prevailing feeling of needing a Bug Fix / QOL release to resolve some of the core OS limitations that I believe have existed for so long that the developers and long-time users have since built up workflows or muscle memory to avoid them. Simple Mac UIX quirks like not surfacing a per-app volume mixer, not showing file transfer speeds, Scroll direction for Trackpad & Mice cannot be set separately, and the mess that is control center, notification center & menu bar come to mind. iOS/iPadOS redesign and multitasking are honestly appreciated to breathe vigor into the platform, but minimizing the UI now requires more taps for common quick actions like Saving To Files & Switching tabs, which have a larger impact on the younger and more inexperienced user. Shared iPad remains a niche use case considering overall platform adoption, but one critical to breaking into and increasing adoption in Education & Specific Multi-user device industries. It is criminally underdeveloped and undertested, with consistent bugs introduced by the Core OS. I’ve seen everything from failed OS Updates due to incorrect storage calculations, an issue I’ve not seen for years outside of SI, Account Login loops with no error to the user, BFU Passcode Unlock requests with zero device user accounts, Augmented Reality applications crashing upon using the Camera and much, much more. Apple Creator Suite is extremely appreciated for the Creative apps such as Logic, Final Cut & Pixelmator, but is baffling for the iWork Suite. I’m not inherently against Generative AI within these apps, but a mid-cycle redesign of the core UI of these applications is extremely disruptive to an Education environment that relies on the stability of these apps. MDM Controls do not go far enough to disable these features. Similarly, the fact that these features have not been made available at an organization / AxM level is a missed opportunity. Either let me buy in or remove it in its entirety. Not this. Apple’s consistently failed implementation of Siri and external AI models is an interesting showcase of how the Apple of 2026 can become horrendously myopic when it comes to certain areas of innovation. By rights, Apple should have a home-field advantage. The history of Performant ML Cores, Integrated Software & Robust Privacy Controls should enable a thoughtful implementation of world and personal-context-aware models. It’s curious to consider, with all the ancillary projects over the years that would benefit from such a thing, The Car Project & Home Devices especially, that they would allow Siri to lie Fallow for the better part of a decade.

Michal Moravec: The software quality continues to slide downhill. This year’s releases fleshed out Apple’s inability to create good UI/UX anymore. Instead, they focus on flashy effects, which sometimes make the user experience downright hostile. A UI that is supposed to elevate the content distracts from the content or makes the content less readable because of a bad background color + glass translucency condition. The UI overhaul was extremely rushed. This was very visible on macOS, where users immediately discovered tons of glitches, inconsistencies, and broken things. macOS 26 really made me nostalgic for the late-2000 era of Mac OS X. The systems back then were not without issues, but the UI was simple, functional, and objectively very good-looking. Compare that to today’s UI, which is not simple, not functional, and the visual appeal is controversial.

Christopher Cook: “Innovation” is a funny word to use to describe all of the advertising/upselling Apple is pushing into their apps and operating systems. Apple’s marketing to personal customers has spilled over into the enterprise with nonsensical, embarrassing, and inappropriate results. Here are a few examples: Opens Pages (sorry, “Pages: Create Documents”) and creates a new document. The first thing you’ll see is an advertisement for all the templates and things you could do if only you were a CS subscriber. Scroll down, and you’ll immediately notice “premium” content mixed in with the included templates. It’s everywhere. When you start your blank document, the “Creator Hub” popover is there to show you more things you can’t use. The best part of seeing this everywhere? Creator Studio is unavailable for EDU enterprise customers to purchase even if they wanted to. Also new this year is getting marketing notifications about Apple services for your enterprise-managed device. One of Apple’s strengths has always been interoperability between devices, and this is made possible by having an Apple Account. If you use any of these features by signing into both a work and personal device, you’ll get System Settings badge notifications about AppleCare coverage for your managed devices on all of your personal devices. There is no way to programmatically suppress this behavior, because Apple has apparently never considered that someone might sign into their work device with a personal Apple Account to use features like Messages. I’ll leave Apple’s macOS innovations on corner radii, excessive and cluttered menu iconography, and broken scrollbars for others to comment on.

N Clarke: Liquid Glass shows an interesting new trajectory for the interface, but with some new issues, such as the misaligned corner grips and lack of contrast when content moves under controls. I have not encountered anything I would deride as ‘unusable’, I still think it’s early days, and I’m curious to see where this leads. The new ability for app developers to have items within the control center inspires hope that a notched laptop may have a usable menu bar without third-party tools, but the lack of developers making use of that means I’ll continue to run my MacBook at one custom resolution lower to shrink the menu bar below the notch. Come on, Apple, let us scroll the sides of the notch!

Alex Meretten: For all the bluster about 26, it’s no more buggy than any recent release. It’s fine. People needed some education on where their cheese moved, but it’s fine.

John Wetter: As strong as hardware is, software is not.

Armin Briegel: It is tough to admit, but software is turning into Apple’s weakness. They have a strong, solid foundation that they have been coasting on for a long time, but the cracks are widening and getting painful. Most choices in Apple’s software, whether it is the productivity apps, the App Store, Maps, etc., seem to be made with the goal of increasing services revenue, rather than actually improving the user experience and making software that “just works” and delights. This has hampered the iPad and Vision Pro forever. Apple software is so entrenched in its own walled garden that they seem to have forgotten how to compete on quality.

Joel Housman: While I subjectively do not like the UI changes they’ve made with macOS 26, specifically related to Liquid Glass, I haven’t seen a degradation in their software reliability.

Jeff Anderson: macOS still gives us problems at times with strange bugs that we have to work around. We always defer major OS upgrades for at least 90 days and up to 6 months. Tahoe has been OK overall, but I wish the software were as reliable as the hardware.

David McMonnies: Software reliability has taken a hit over the last year. A number of persistent and significant bugs are notably present in Tahoe more than in the last few years of releases, and mitigation/amelioration of these issues does seem to come more slowly.

TJ Draper: I’m not a Liquid Glass hater, I actually like it overall. I actually wish they’d do more Liquid Glass with macOS, which is the OS where they implemented it the least. But the core reliability problems remain, and needless bugs were introduced and shipped with Liquid Glass. In addition, it seems that macOS 26 wants to be restarted more often than its predecessor, as performance noticeably starts lagging over the course of a week or so. Restarting due to performance is incredibly disruptive to state and workflows (despite the setting, “Reopen windows when logging in”). In addition, iOS has taken to full phone lock up at random times (though it seems to happen most when the phone is in Sleep focus) when swiping up to unlock. It will sit on the partially swiped-up home screen for about 3-5 minutes, frozen, until it finally “re-springs.” This issue continues to be present in iOS 26.4. It feels like there are more bugs now than there were in previous OSes, so Apple is not getting a good grade from me here.

Marcus Rowell: Liquid Glass mostly feels like a change for change’s sake. With so many rough edges and inconsistencies, our users are unhappy with it. Hopefully, this year’s WWDC brings a focus on usability and consistency. Repeating myself: Notifications are still confusing, too small and easily ignored. PPPC needs a rethink. It needs to be a simple way for an App to ask for its required approvals in one dialog. Our users basically ignore notifications.

Martin Piron: The move to a unified version number across Apple’s OSes was a great change. I don’t personally mind Liquid Glass, but I can appreciate why some people do.

Jeffrey Hoover: better and better. Chasing down those bugs and CVEs

W. Andrew Robinson: I probably rewrote this section three times, trying to organize my thoughts, and that tells me something. This past year hasn’t been the best, but really, it hasn’t been the worst, either. Is Tahoe the best macOS we’ve had? Nope. Is it the worst? Also, no, I think. It is sloppy, and that makes me sad, but Apple excels in iteration, and I am sure they will course-correct as needed. The new UI changes of ‘Liquid Glass’ are not signs of the final downfall of Apple. I think we are in one of those cyclic times where Apple’s hardware excellence is in ascendancy, and its software is not. But we’ve been here before, and I haven’t lost confidence in Apple because of a rocky macOS rollout. Apple still has the best OS and software for my stakeholders in my business, so for that, I’m grateful. I will also say there are standouts – DDM, Platform SSO, Private Cloud Compute and the Gemini-Siri-whatever-it-will-be, plus a whole list of other things I do appreciate. Liquid Glass is in everyone’s face, all the time, so we might tend to focus on that, but in the end, it’s a UI that has greatness under it, powering the best OS for business.

Chris Carr: meh nothing great, but nothing horrible

David Rizzo: I feel like I’ve seen more problematic software (especially in iOS 26) than I have in previous years. I’m still not a fan of the annual OS cycle… take some time to get it right first.

Emilio Garcia: macOS Tahoe is not a total dumpster fire, but the experience is definitely worse. Liquid glass did not feel like a cohesive UI overhaul — just a skin. I used to download Windows themes from DeviantArt way back when, and now and then there’d be an icon or UI element the author forgot to skin, and that was acceptable because they were usually just one person trying to keep up with a massive organization. When Apple does it, and corner radii don’t match, or text is illegible, or context menu icons are reused, it’s much less acceptable, and concerning for a company that used to pride itself on attention to detail. One of my favorite recent additions to macOS was native window snapping, which took years to implement after every other OS under the sun already had it — those kinds of delays were acceptable because the impression was that Apple takes its time. After all, it’s crafting something to perfection. If we keep the slow feature rollout without attention to detail, it’s hard to find the upside.

Morgan Schönberger: While the core software remains reasonably stable and robust, I’d rather see less on the innovation side. While the OS updates were a mixed bag design-wise, the new Creator Studio updates were a complex task to manage. While we still cannot buy subscriptions on an enterprise level, it took quite some time to be able to suppress those subscriptions via a configuration profile, which made it even more of a task to communicate the change to our users.

Andrew Laurence: In terms of IT integration and underlying systems, the 26 OSes have been peaceful. Pity that it is coupled with the Liquid Glass upheaval.

Cameron Kay: Liquid glass is a disaster, especially for macOS, with the stupidly rounded windows where content is clipped, and they’re hard to resize. Safari UI has gotten worse, and it’s hard to read content. Hiding the menu bar background and providing no management control to re-enable it by default continues to be a support issue. DDM is still a work in progress, but it is usable for things like Software Update now. Still, it’s not a replacement for all config profiles and MDM commands yet. Some of that has to do with DMS vendor adoption. It will be interesting to see when DDM can be used to implement security baselines from the macOS Security Compliance Project. It’s also frustrating that Simplified Setup for Platform SSO is taking so long for vendors to implement, and not at all clear if they will implement enough to support Auto Advance in Setup Assistant for shared Macs. There continue to be issues with automatically upgrading the OS on devices at DMS enrolment. Macs are not compatible with macOS 26, trying to upgrade and then failing to enroll with the DMS. There are other enrolment issues with iOS/iPadOS devices if automatic OS upgrade is enabled as well. And the Apple management agent still breaks at times and stops executing commands until you reboot the device.

Dennis Logue: There’s been much angst this year over Liquid Glass in the 26 OS release cycle, but the overall reliability of Apple software continues to be better than its competitors in my experience

Jered Benoit: If there were an option to completely opt out of iOS 26 and the entire liquid glass paradigm, I would have for my entire organization. The bugs that have been introduced as part of the “upgrade” have confused users and made supporting them more difficult than it needed to be. That being said, I delayed adoption as long as I could, but by policy, I have to run the latest supported software, so now the mass upgrades have begun.

Peter Loobuyck: The Apple part is reliable, but 3rd party software often isn’t always so. Maybe Apple need nog address this issue, but it does not improve the brand name either.

John Welch: This is a hard category because everyone has their own view. Apple has a lot of legit innovation, but again, their documentation of it is completely random, so you never know if you’re going to get the information you need to properly use things. I mean, a command line utility without a man page, absolute amateur hour nonsense like that. And once again, I will point out that Apple still has no form of automation strategy (Shortcuts absolutely do not count here), and has not had an OS wide automation framework on the Mac since Mac OS 9. Meanwhile, on the Windows side, you can do almost everything you’d need with PowerShell, and it’s documented really well. Sigh.

John Delfino: Software is inconsistent, and doesn’t seem to be advancing in any straightforward way.

Justin McMahan: I typically have to fiddle with Apple’s major upgrades a bit to get them deployed to our end-users’ machines, but they have pretty good affordances for managing updates and upgrades through MDM.

Michael Jon: This year, we were blessed, slash cursed, with macOS Tahoe. The Liquid Glass visual overhaul looked great in the keynote, but had a real cost in production. The excess compute required to render all of that transparency and compositing is a measurable drain on battery life across the fleet, and for what? It’s not a productivity improvement. It’s not making the OS easier to use. It’s a visual spectacle that costs real power on every device in the organization, every day, for no functional gain. That’s a bad trade, and it was a stupid implementation to ship as a default with no way to dial it back. Platform SSO is still stuck in an awkward middle ground where it’s not quite delivering on its promise, and the vendor ecosystem hasn’t caught up. Our Tahoe rollout made that painfully obvious. When issues came up, Okta engineers told us to go to Apple. Apple’s response loop wasn’t much faster. Nobody owned the problem, and administrators were left stuck in the middle. Microsoft has had a functionally equivalent feature on Windows for years, and it works. The fact that Apple, a company famous for tightly controlled software integration, still can’t nail this is genuinely baffling. The screen recording permissions model is something I want to flag here, and I’ll cover it further under Security. The short version is that Apple’s first-party apps get a fundamentally different experience from third-party apps when requesting screen recording access, and that inconsistency is a software design failure before it’s anything else. DDM for macOS updates are a genuine bright spot. I’ve rolled it out to the fleet and had solid results. The forced restart requirement is the sticking point for a lot of administrators, and I get it; most enterprises aren’t fans. But I think there’s room to build better end-user education around it and make the whole experience feel less abrupt. As a mechanism, it’s working well. Apple Intelligence is the other topic I need to address here. I want Apple to do more with it, and I think the foundation is there, but the exclusive partnership with ChatGPT feels like it gimped them out of the gate. I’d love to see the option to bring in other providers; Gemini, Claude, whatever makes sense for the user or the organization. Google just shipped Gemma 4 as a fully open, Apache 2.0 licensed model family that runs on-device on both iOS and Android, with genuine multimodal capability including audio. The AI Edge Gallery app is already on the App Store. That’s the kind of ecosystem Apple should be embracing, not locking out in favor of a single vendor deal. Beyond the provider question, the geozone restrictions on Apple Intelligence features need to go. The capability should be available worldwide, not drip-fed by region. If Google can ship on-device models globally with no geo-lock, Apple has no excuse.

Guillaume Gète: Liquid Glass. Should I say more? Also, the lack of some controls for some apps through Privacy policies is baffling. I.e., it’s still not possible to force an app to accept local network connections.

Andrew B: This is all going to be about macOS Tahoe. As I said above, “I’ve never filed more bugs for a major release before”. And these weren’t “The radius on the corners of this window element doesn’t match the radii of the other elements”, they were “this is utterly broken”, and in some cases, “this blocks additional testing.” I suspect that teams inside Apple don’t use macOS in an Enterprise context. There’s simply no other explanation for how so many show-stopper bugs made it into betas and releases. Particular friction points: Network-related System Extensions, PPPC UI display, System Settings crashing and interactions with security products. The other thing that seemed to plague Tahoe was regressions; file a ticket about an issue, wait two or three betas, get an RC that fixes your issue, close the Feedback and AppleCare, get a second RC or later beta, only to discover that the issue is no longer fixed. I lost count of how many betas, RCs, and minor releases would delete existing printer queues during upgrades. To be blunt: keeping up with testing of betas, filing bugs, testing the fixes, the regressions, and the fixes that became regressions, performing tests for AppleCare, then updating the tickets was exhausting this year.

Shane Thompson: Do I hate Tahoe as much as some other people? No. I think there are some nice new features. The new Spotlight stuff is killer. Actions within Spotlight have allowed me to create some nice new automations, and after a couple of updates, the stability for myself and for most of our users has been pretty decent. There are some concerning trends with macOS, such as clutter, lack of attention to detail, readability issues, etc. I am hoping that macOS 27 starts to clean this up and we start going down a path to macOS being a first-class citizen again because it is getting tiring seeing all updates as mostly “let’s take this thing from the iPhone and force it on the Mac”.

Jeremy Leland: While Apple is making unpopular UI choices, I do also see some improvements. Many small details that have annoyed admins for some time have been improved, such as inaccessible (grayed-out) toggles for MDM-managed settings now displaying the correct state. The new UI needs more fine-tuning – there are some inconsistencies and places where the visual hierarchy has been compromised.

Allister Banks: I wish I could control my iPhone from my iPad, control sound or pair an Apple Watch to an iPad; there are so many corner cases that feel obvious in my personal day-to-day, things that could (yes, with not-insignificant effort) reasonably be overcome. I feel the mask unlock of iPhone is really reliable, network-ish auth at pre-disk unlock/FileVault got added (with asterisks), works more magic! 😉 Tahoe on Macs must be somehow less buggy than other recent releases, but iPhone connection to public wifi has become laggy to the point I have no idea how to jiggle its handle, I’m talking 1 minute+ times or no DHCP where I’d much rather be able to download a stores app or get at photos without racking up a cellular overage, spamming captive.apple.com and always seeing “success” 🫠. Also, is VisionOS still a thing? Would someone wake up the tvOS intern? Even watchOS feels stagnant.

Gabriel Marcelino: MacOS i have to be a little more picky, I have not seen any better performance from last year, but worst. I think the liquid glass was a fail for some, in my opinion i didn’t mind it too much, but a lot of people did not like it at all. however overall performance crashes and slowness, where hardware has been great, software has been hitting us hard and needs improvement in OS 27 across the board.

Jeff Richardson: Compared to the other platforms that we use, the Apple platform is fantastic. Having said that, it often seems that Apple isn’t living up to its full potential.

Tom Bridge: Woof, this was a rough year. The beta cycles were particularly fraught this year, with a lot of bugs coming and going, and several releases that had a lot of people hitting the delay button. All of that comes hand in hand with the worst visual design refresh in decades. Liquid Glass caused a lot of our users to just say “Ick” on the benign side, and others delayed their own adoption of macOS 26 until we made it mandatory in March. Even then, the complaints about the new interface choices were stronger than in years past. This isn’t an irredeemable design system, but it is the most difficult user interface adjustment in years, and it feels only half thought through. Apple has a lot of work to do to make this internally consistent and functional for end users.

Craig Cohen: Apple QA has dipped. We have had more issues this year than in previous years. We want to use and promote Apple native apps. We have had to move to a third-party for functionality, quality and support.

Chris Pommer: Nagging irritations and the growth of what can only be described as sloppy software (especially in the OS) continue to disappoint. That said, at least I’m not having to manage Windows machines.

Security and Privacy

John Wetter: The only thing keeping this from being a five is the uneven maturation of platform SSO.

Jeffrey Hoover: Leading the way.

Jeremy Leland: While I hate to just accept that there will always be new security issues, Apple has been extremely vigilant and responsive. Newer tools like DDM help ensure that Apple’s responses can be implemented quickly on our fleet.

W. Andrew Robinson: As is mostly true with our favorite Fruit Company, security and privacy are their self-stated ‘in our DNA’ priorities. And I think this past year mostly plays that out — but I am very much not an expert in this area. Two things like to point out — security researchers, like developers, seem to have a love/less love (I won’t go as far as to say ‘hate’) relationship with Apple. Bug bounties and information sharing should, it seems to me, be easier than I see commented on in the community. The other is that, I think personally Apple is still better than the others… but I also think that’s a low bar. In sum, though, I’d give this a great score.

Cameron Kay: Hasn’t got any worse, but it hasn’t got any better either. Apple still doesn’t provide the management controls needed to comply with various security baseline rules. Provides no real framework for application/binary execution control. Forced updating of apps if they’re running is still an issue—no method to force users to register their Mac with Platform SSO if the Mac is already setup. The UI on macOS needs to be redesigned so that passwords are referred to as Passcodes, like on iOS, and macOS needs to be able to tell the difference between simple numerical passcodes and complex alpha-numerical ones in Passcode policies and the UI. And for organizations where the security policy dictates users can’t run as admin, better control for all users to perform some tasks without admin permissions, without having to hack authorizationdb directly.

Joel Housman: They continue to excel in this category.

Andrew B: The number of uncontrollable, un-actionable pop-ups in macOS presented to Enterprise end users is out of hand. Users are being Windows-Vistaed to death by notifications they simply don’t have the background, let alone the time, to read, comprehend, and then make the correct choice. This is training users to simply click OK on a dialogue they neither understand nor care about, simply to get their job done. If an app asks to scan the local network for devices, how is the VP of Global Widgets supposed to know if that’s a good thing, or a massive security risk? In an Enterprise environment, any dialogue or setting potentially presented to the end user should be MDM-manageable and appropriately suppressible. We literally own the hardware, we put a banner in front of the user that tells them that everything they do may be monitored, so why does macOS continue to plague Enterprise end users with what are arguably administrative concerns that are often beyond their comprehension? Our goal as engineers is surely to protect the user to the best of our ability. This means managing everything we can in order to adhere to security policy and best practices, and get out of the way of the user while doing so. The proliferation of unmanageable, un-actionable dialogues and settings questions is the opposite of that.

Allister Banks: Is it great to have curl | bash protections? Yes! If you don’t document them when they’re still in beta (and you may as well not beta them if you don’t acknowledge they exist!), you’re actively harming supportability. Still no way to have MDM allow apps local(host) network access, not distinguishing it from loopback interfaces? Very frustrating. Just like how they apparently distrust Zoom to the point they still don’t allow us to manage, e.g., Location Services access for emergency services (911 in the US) or microphone or camera. The friction/struggle continues.

Michal Moravec: Apple’s platforms are probably still the best thing out there on the market in this aspect. I really appreciate the team behind Passwords.app and Passkeys. New features are added regularly, and the app is heading in the right direction (which can’t be said about the majority of apps Apple bundles with macOS). Apple could do much better in the security features intended for the enterprise. There almost isn’t an update that doesn’t fix something related to network extensions, endpoint security extensions, or content filtering.

John Delfino: Best of the major platforms for privacy, and security seems solid.

John Cleary: Apple likes to state in its marketing that “Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values”. (https://www.apple.com/au/privacy/) Their choices say otherwise. It was simply disgraceful that instead of maintaining the security of all devices running iOS 18, Apple chose to force users onto iOS 26 if they wanted to stay secure. This is especially true on phones such as the iPhone 13, where iOS 26 is a significant performance downgrade. I note, of course, that Apple did maintain patches for iOS 18 for those devices that can’t run iOS 26 — so it wasn’t a software development limitation. Only a week after the Darksword vulnerability was published on GitHub for anyone to use and exploit, iPhone users’ security and privacy were compromised, and even then, it took Apple a week to publish the patch for iOS 26-capable devices. Given the high risk of the vulnerability, most iOS 18 holdouts had finally capitulated and gone to 26 to mitigate against a really bad vulnerability, only to have an iOS 18 patch published days later. 😡 I have never thought less of Apple for this choice. 😢 At a time that I should be celebrating Apple at 50, I am instead frustrated and disappointed. Even during the years-long “butterfly keyboards that constantly fail” era of MacBooks, at least millions of users’ privacy and security were not put at risk.

Brian LaShomb: It’s long past time for Apple to adopt One-Time Password over SMS for Apple IDs that require Multi-Factor Authentication.

Jason Hedrick: I would just like enterprise devices to have a different security and privacy experience than consumer devices.

Marian Albers: A middle way of high-class security and allowing managed devices specific controls without user interaction is about time.

Michael Jon: Security and privacy in the Apple ecosystem really depend on which layer you’re talking about, and the answer is very different depending on whether you’re looking at endpoints or services. On the endpoint side, not much has changed. Gatekeeper is still there, XProtect is still there. It’s stable, which is fine, but it’s also basically the same story as the last two years. Solid, not exciting. On the services side, the SMS-only two-factor authentication on Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager is, frankly, embarrassing in 2026. We live in an era where SIM swapping and phone number spoofing are trivial. Telcos around the world are putting out statements saying, “Hey, this is illegal, stop it,” while doing nothing meaningful to fix their own processes. So what exactly are administrators supposed to do to protect their ABM and ASM accounts? It’s ridiculous. What makes this even more galling is that Apple already supports passkeys on consumer Apple IDs. The infrastructure exists. They built it. They shipped it. They just haven’t brought it to the administrative accounts that control entire device fleets. Consumer accounts get phishing-resistant authentication. The accounts that manage thousands of devices and hold the keys to your entire MDM enrolment pipeline are still protected by a six-digit SMS code sent to a phone number that any motivated attacker can port in an afternoon. The inconsistency here doesn’t feel like a resource constraint; it feels like a deliberate deprioritization of enterprise security tooling. Multiple countries are now actively moving to eliminate SMS OTP as an acceptable authentication factor for financial services. The UAE mandated it in March 2026, and India followed in April. If regulators in banking think SMS isn’t good enough for your savings account, it sure as hell isn’t good enough for the administrative console that controls your corporate device fleet. On the positive side, Apple’s zero-day response cadence has been solid this year. The patches for WebKit vulnerabilities discovered in coordination with Google’s Threat Analysis Group were shipped promptly across all platforms. The broader pattern of “extremely sophisticated attacks against specific targeted individuals” being the discovery vector for these flaws is a reminder that Apple’s endpoint security story is genuinely strong when it comes to keeping up with nation-state and spyware threats. The Image I/O vulnerability earlier in 2025, where malicious code could be hidden inside an image file, was another example of Apple patching quickly once the flaw was identified. Credit where it’s due; the response pipeline works. Apple’s updated App Review Guideline 5.1.2(i), which now explicitly names third-party AI as a regulated category requiring disclosure and consent before user data is sent to external services, is a welcome move. It puts a clear obligation on developers to inform users when their data is being shipped off to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or anyone else. The requirement for per-feature consent rather than blanket opt-ins is the right approach. Whether Apple enforces it consistently during review is another question, but the policy itself is sound. The screen recording permissions model is the other thing I have to call out here. Apple is effectively running two different security philosophies depending on whether your app is first-party or not. FaceTime and Safari get a single inline prompt when requesting screen recording access. Chrome, Firefox, Slack, and everything else get sent to a settings menu, require a force restart, and still sometimes break after a vendor update. That’s not a difference in security posture; that’s preferential API access for Apple’s own products dressed up as a security feature. I’m actively looking into whether this is something an Australian government body would consider anti-competitive, because I genuinely think it warrants the question. The consumer endpoint story is solid. The enterprise services story still needs real work.

Jeff Richardson: Security and privacy are incredibly important for my organization (a law firm), and Apple’s intense focus on these areas makes a big difference.

John Welch: I genuinely think Apple is the sole OS provider outside of edge cases like OpenBSD taking this seriously, and they take it more seriously than everyone else combined.

Marcus Rowell: Apple OS and Hardware security are amazing and continuously improving. BUT Apple continues to mishandle the government interventions I mentioned over the last few years. Government intervention in the Apple ecosystem is now becoming a global norm and risks the entire platform’s security. If Apple doesn’t fix the “gated” reputation of the platforms (especially the Apps store with its opaque rules), then governments will continue to intervene and impact the reliability, security, and privacy we expect from Apple. There is still an 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. macOS should move to passcode to be consistent with our Apple hardware platforms, especially once PSSO is configured. This would greatly ease user confusion between the SSO password and the macOS password.

Jeff Anderson: I feel Apple still has some work to do to allow enterprise admins to have more control over endpoints. If we have MDM, we shouldn’t have to ask the user to allow our remote support tool to have access to screen recording, for example. I understand Apple is trying to provide privacy for the end-user, but in an enterprise, there is no expectation of privacy from the org. However, security on macOS is fairly solid.

Alex Meretten: I can turn off GPT integration in the OS. This alone is huge. Please, keep this up, Apple.

Armin Briegel: Apple remains fairly strong in this for individual privacy and security. For enterprise and education environments, Apple does not always provide the management controls required to override the built-in security, which often requires complicated workarounds for MacAdmins. It would be nice to have managed controls for all settings in the most common security benchmarks (and beyond) without needing to revert to scripts.

David McMonnies: The deprecation of RSRs in favor of BSIs is an interesting move, but not wholly unexpected given that RSRs went basically unused for several years. There’s not much else to comment on in the security space outside of the fact that Tahoe seemed to have had fewer issues in breaking third-party security tooling on day 0.

Craig Cohen: There will always be the “next” exploit. Apple’s built-in, not bolted-on, security allows for rapid response to new attack vectors.

Erik Kramer: Improvements to managed Apple Accounts have been welcome: you can use the Passwords app, now!

Peter Loobuyck: Still a lot of extra things need to be set up, which could be included by default.

Jered Benoit: Apple is great for device security. There are some annoying things related to privacy that would be improvements in my opinion, including the ability for corporate-joined devices to have public MAC addresses.

TJ Draper: Overall good work from Apple, as usual. I do always believe them when they talk about security and privacy as their focus. However, the reason for the slightly lower score than a 5 is that I think they’re a bit misguided on security in some ways. This misguidedness is particularly apparent with macOS. The nagging pop-up and modal dialogs are actually detrimental to security. I consider myself a very tech-savvy user (as a software engineer), and yet, just recently, a dialog popped up asking for permission to do… something… but out of reflex, I clicked “allow” before my brain registered anything, and then I wondered what the heck I had just permitted to. This is a phenomenon known as “banner blindness,” and the way Apple does this induces it to a very high degree. They need to fix this ASAP. It’s not very good. Additionally, once I have given permission to something, why must Apple continue to ask about it, again and again and again? Once I’ve approved something, I want Apple to NEVER ASK ME AGAIN.

Gabriel Marcelino: I think privacy is always key for Apple, and I am good with where they stand today. but can always use improvements. I feel that with the use of AI technology, there is a concern with Privacy and we need to feel that our personal data will still remain private with the use of this technology.

Dennis Logue: This has been an easy 5 in past years, but lately, some of Apple’s decisions regarding account security and privacy, while great for personal use, create an unnecessary burden in a managed education environment.

Justin McMahan: Apple prioritizes security and privacy really well. They balance it correctly with convenience for the user and handle the complicated bits themselves.

Bart Reardon: The bar for having better privacy than literally anyone else these days is so low it may as well be on the ground. The rest of the industry sold its soul for a dollar, but Apple chose to keep doing this properly.

Emilio Garcia: Apple does very well on privacy, or at least, admittedly, the vibes feel correct. On security, there were more ways to patch vulnerabilities than updating the OS (which feels like the only “fix” available sometimes). Users are certainly experiencing upgrade fatigue (OS and application alike), and the deployment process for BSIs leaves a lot to be desired for user experience (I’ll echo most other admins and say, how “background” is it when a restart is still required and users still receive prompts and notifications?).

Chris Carr: Apple seems to want to keep privacy in its DNA

Luke Charters: Great to see Apple adopting post-quantum hybrid cryptography with the current threat of harvest now, decrypt later attacks.

David Rizzo: Compared to their competitors, Apple is far above the others.

Deployment

Peter Loobuyck: Depends on where you set it up. With some MDM providers, all works great, but for some, it is really slow.

Martin Piron: As good as ever.

Marcus Rowell: The Apple deployment story is amazing. The OS Upgrade mechanisms can still be a little janky, but have improved drastically. The story with Background Security Improvements needs to be improved. Are they OS Updates or not? Should we install them ASAP or not? Why do they require a reboot if they are Background updates?

Guillaume Gète: Improvements in Declarative Device Management made a huge difference to ensure computers and devices are properly updated.

Armin Briegel: Apple has been consistently chipping away at issues and pain points here. DDM-driven updates have improved the managed software updates significantly. Automated Device Enrollment remains solid, with the new PSSO workflows looking quite promising, if a little more convoluted than maybe necessary. Account-driven enrollment workflows are still suffering from the slow adoption of Managed Apple Accounts.

Damien Barrett: It’s getting better. Improvements in ABM are stellar. OS Software Update via DDM is still far too hit-or-miss. Other OS manufacturers have figured out this basic tenet of fleet management decades ago; why can’t Apple? Is it better? Sure? But that’s like saying a pile of horseshit is better because you spray-painted it with gold paint. We continue to have to “bolt on” tools to nudge our users to run updates. If I actually enforce updates, there remain far too many endpoints that don’t get patched — for a wide variety of reasons. It’s 2026. Just fix this ridiculousness already. ADE works, as designed and advertised. My Windows counterparts wish they had such a reliable system for auto-provisioning endpoints. Autopilot is coming along, but it remains, uh, a work-in-progress.

Jeff Anderson: ADE is great. We have a solid zero-touch deployment strategy. OS updates are getting better with DDM, but there is still some work to do until I can ditch our 3rd party app, Nudge, that we leverage to help maintain OS updates.

Tom Bridge: There’s still room for improvement here, and I hope that this past year’s adjustments to the deployment platform give them space to grow a bulletproof version of software updates.

Craig Cohen: The ongoing evolution of Declarative Device Management has been a slow build but has reached a real world “out of preview” result driven goal.

John Welch: Deployment issues are so dependent on the tool you use that it’s hard to say how well or not Apple is doing. There’s no “reference” deployment tool to judge by. Overall, Apple provides solid deployment tools. As someone who has to regularly build deployments on Windows in SCCM, deploying in the Apple world is light-years easier.

David McMonnies: No change to report on since last year.

Michael Jon: I’ll correct myself before I even get started: deployment hasn’t stayed flat this year, it’s actually improved. The continued refinement of DDM has genuinely made OS upgrade enforcement easier to manage, and that’s worth calling out. There’s still room to improve the end-user experience around forced restarts and update timing, but from a compliance standpoint, I’m not losing sleep over it. Devices are updated, I’m happy. Automated Device Enrollment continues to do its job reliably. Zero-touch provisioning for new devices remains one of Apple’s strongest enterprise stories, and it hasn’t regressed. Lifecycle management via MDM is stable, and the combination of ADE with a well-configured MDM setup means onboarding and offboarding workflows are largely handled without manual intervention. App deployment hasn’t changed much, but it doesn’t need to. The tiered approach still makes the most sense: VPP licenses direct from Apple first, individual MDM uploads second, and your MDM provider’s catalog after that. It works, and there’s no reason to reinvent it. Appleseed continues to be a genuinely valuable program. Getting IT administrator and enterprise feedback into the beta cycle early matters, and Apple’s continued investment there is the right call. The standout this year is Apple’s new MDM migration tool, which allows end-user machines to move between MDM providers cleanly. That is genuinely groundbreaking. I don’t think the industry has fully absorbed what this means yet, but I think we’re going to see a wave of MDM vendor switching over the next couple of years as a result. Jamf in particular has a problem here. They’ve been at the top of the hill for so long that they’ve stopped innovating, and when the switching cost drops, that complacency gets exposed fast. Their per-device pricing has been climbing year over year while their feature velocity has been flat. That’s a hard sell when the migration tool means you can actually leave without a six-month re-enrolment project. Upstarts like Fleet Device Management, Iru, Mosyle, and Addigy all suddenly look a lot more viable when the wall between providers comes down. Fleet, in particular, is interesting because of its open-source model and its approach to treating MDM as infrastructure rather than a product you’re locked into. Iru has been aggressive on the Apple-native features front and is catching up quickly on the enterprise side. Mosyle continues to carve out a strong position in education and SMB. To be clear, the MDM migration tool is an Apple win, not a Jamf problem. Apple has done something here that genuinely reshapes the competitive landscape, even if that wasn’t the primary intent. Healthy competition in the MDM space means better products for administrators, and that’s good for everyone.

John Delfino: Inconsistent here as well; I wish I could, for instance, push updates deployed App Store software. When ADS works it’s magic; when it doesn’t, it’s frustrating beyond compare.

W. Andrew Robinson: I deal with this section every day. DDM I’ve already mentioned as coming along nicely, and ADE is (IMO) the key ‘secret sauce’ to successful enterprise deployments… I just can’t see anyone NOT using this now. OS upgrades have improved, as well as software updates. I will point out one recent example of where I am less than perfectly happy — the new ‘freemium’ Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps…. I know WHY they deployed them and removed the old versions from the App Store, but how it was done was a bit bumpier than I’d hoped. With the very recent introduction of Apple Business (née Manager), maybe the app deployment methods — while I’m used to them, I still don’t like them very much — will see some improvements. I’ll be watching this space.

Michal Moravec: There aren’t that many features in this area. Enforcing software updates via Declarative Device Management has become more reliable. However, on macOS, the user-facing UI (just notifications) is not sufficient. Admins still need to deploy custom UI, such as Nudge or DDM-OS-Reminder, which is more prominent, so users actually notice there is a pending update with a deadline. I wish Apple would provide a full-screen UI similar to what happens on iOS. We expect tighter integration of Managed Apple Account with Automated Device Enrollment in a future release. Currently, it is the only enrollment method that does not support the coexistence of a Personal and Managed Apple Account.

Gabriel Marcelino: Automated Device Enrollment has been good, and with the new DDM, we can see a light at the end of the tunnel. However, OS upgrades still need improvements—there is still no way to force updates when users are able to cancel updates, even if they are past their due dates. Users are still able to go around these updates by simply leaving software open, like a web meeting, or a simple computer being asleep can interrupt the update. We still need a way to have OS upgrades be forced on end users in an enterprise environment.

Erik Kramer: ADE is still magic after all these years. The rest of device management is whatever you can make of it. Shoutout here to the MacAdmins Slack as a resource.

Joel Housman: There have been a number of improvements in this area that we’ve been able to take advantage of.

John Wetter: Significant growth in this area over the years; however, some details continue to make deployment more difficult than it needs to be. For example, while rapid return to service has been an often-discussed workflow, there are still significant challenges where this needs to mature, especially while respecting user data on devices. Managed & enforced updates are still overly cumbersome with uneven implementations across MDM vendors.

N Clarke: OS Upgrades still a sticking point, managed devices should be able to prepare the update and be ready to install upon restart without requiring user authentication. That said, I have seen the other side (autopilot, Intune), and I am glad that this is my only issue.

Allister Banks: Letting us manage Migration Assistant? 😍 Heart to the folks at Apple who pushed that through!

Jered Benoit: Automated Device Enrollment is fine, but mobile device management is specific. A new device enrolls in my Apple Business account when purchased through some providers, but not others, based on how I am required to procure the device. Additionally, all software updates, app deployment and OS upgrades are dependent on the MDM being used. Intune is fine… but not great when interacting with Apple devices.

TJ Draper: Mostly good. Auto device enrollment is great. Pushing updates to existing devices sometimes lags.

Bart Reardon: Software updates are still a PITA, but are gradually becoming less of a PITA than they used to be. The bottleneck is always users who ignore update prompts for whatever reason (it’s amazing the amount of inconvenience some of them will put up with to avoid a reboot).

Dennis Logue: Steady improvement.

Andrew B: Enterprise Mac Admins swim in a world of foot-dragging vendors, products owned by teams that do not manage Mac, some of which have console version dependencies or show-stopper bugs on other platforms, vendor contracts, SLAs beyond their control, as well as requirements from regulators and auditors. On top of this, they have to contend with Apple’s release timing while trying to minimize negative outcomes for end users. Apple seems divorced from this reality, particularly as it relates to the timing of releases. This was starkly illustrated by the release of macOS 26.2 on a Friday afternoon, two days before the 90-day maximum on the Major OS Deferral profile expired, making macOS 26 Tahoe available to all users. This left admins with a choice of either properly testing 26.2 while leaving the 90-day deferral in place, consequently serving up macOS 26.0 (an under-baked cake) to end-users, or YOLOing by lifting the major OS deferral profile so that users would see 26.2. I don’t think this is how you want to roll out a major OS update in an Enterprise environment.

Jeremy Leland: Apple continues to provide new and improved deployment options and better management for first-run options seen by users. However, the first Background Security Improvement in some time was not a smooth process. Many admins struggle with poor MDM implementations of DDM and software update settings.

Alex Meretten: OS upgrades remain a black eye – there’s just too many edge cases where you need to rely on an XKCD-style stack of open source software maintained by one guy. But really, at this point, in 2026, it is far, far easier to deploy a macOS device than a Windows machine. I could never have imagined that ten years ago.

Cameron Kay: We still have issues enrolling Macs on our enterprise Wi-Fi. Why it can’t be as reliable and simple an experience as iOS is very frustrating to admins and users alike. There are still some edge cases with DDM software updates on macOS. I hope Apple can fix them before macOS 27. And I wish iOS/iPadOS had Bootstrap tokens so we could push out OS updates without having to wait for users to unlock their devices.

Shane Thompson: Commenting on Apple’s handling of deployment is tough to do because I absolutely love Automated Device Enrollment, but out of the box, it is pretty bare bones; however, we have built out a wonderful deployment system utilizing tools from our MDM vendor that blows away what is happening on our Windows devices. I guess I’ll give Apple credit for allowing MDM vendors to be creative and come up with good solutions, and it is nice to see Apple staying out of the way to allow this to happen. Software Updates via DDM are a complete game-changer for us. Due to that change, our fleet is more easily kept up to date, and we are able to create one DDM configuration that can be set and forgotten to ensure our devices stay up to date.

Jeffrey Hoover: Honestly, this is mostly third parties.

Emilio Garcia: DDM, or at least the concept behind it, for OS patching, is a good idea. The MDM commands previously available were reliably unreliable, and we’re happy to move away from them. However, when compared to just running softwareupdate, the experience still feels worse. There’s a big loss in control, which is sometimes sorely missed. We desperately need maintenance windows for DDM updates (had an experience with machines restarting mid-exam after they missed their midnight-scheduled update deadline), and when DDM fails, the process is so opaque that it becomes incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. Between the secure tokens, bootstrap tokens, system logs, MDM logs, etc., it’s hard to understand what’s really going on. Some sort of validation tool from Apple would go a long way.

Brian LaShomb: While DDM for Software Update is a good start, it’s still fairly limited. Without reliable scheduling and enforcement controls, we still see better compliance using Nudge.

Andrew Laurence: Compared to other platforms, Apple’s Automated Deployment Environment is best in class.

Morgan Schönberger: It is great, that Apple has implemented a way to move MDM vendors through Apple Business (Manager). While it still has some caveats and possible problems, it’s a great first attempt at an issue many admins face sooner or later.

macOS Identity Management

Joel Housman: This is not something we use.

Tom Bridge: Apple does not yet have a consistent story for Platform Single Sign On, and it shows in the implementations that are scattershot, and in some cases, slipshod, by major identity providers. Apple needs to do more to tell this story more accurately, provide a clear reason to adopt, and get buy-in from major identity players for a soup-to-nuts story for this important function.

Jeffrey Hoover: Still waiting on implementation, but that may happen soon. I think it is mostly on Microsoft for us.

Cameron Kay: It’s frustrating that Simplified Setup for Platform SSO is taking so long for vendors like Microsoft to implement, and not at all clear if they will implement enough to support Auto Advance in Setup Assistant for shared Macs. Apple and Microsoft are supposed to have a close working relationship concerning Platform SSO, but it seems Microsoft hasn’t found the implementation easy. Apple also needs to add PassKey authentication support to Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager, AppleCare Enterprise portal, GSX, and allow us to use the same Apple Account on all of these services.

Alex Meretten: I don’t trust it as far as I can throw it – Jamf Connect + Okta for me, please.

Bob McGillicuddy: Needs more IdPs for Platform SSO

John Wetter: This is by far the most difficult to assign a number to, as there has been so much progress in this area, yet still basic frustrations remain. The extremely slow progress by IdPs to fully support all of the SSO frameworks seems to speak to either gaps or ambiguity in potential implementation practices.

Shane Thompson: This is a tough one to grade, as the biggest issue we have with Platform SSO has nothing to do with Apple. We have been rolling out Platform SSO via Secure Enclave on our devices over the past year. For the devices where it is enabled, it has been a big quality-of-life improvement for our users. However, to really experience the best of Platform SSO, Microsoft needs to update the Company Portal app to allow simplified enrollment, authenticated guest mode, etc. Once that happens and we are able to test and roll out those features, we’ll have a better idea of how well Apple has developed Platform SSO, but at the moment, we are excited to see what the future holds.

Michal Moravec: There are some nice improvements in macOS 26, such as simplified Platform SSO setup, Authenticated Guest Mode with PSSO, and Tap to login with PSSO. The problem is that these features are mostly a preview. It takes many minor updates (sometimes even a major release) for Apple to fix the major bugs that make the feature unusable. Then we wait for MDM and Identity vendors to implement new features. Depending on the combination of these vendors, it can take many years for the features to become available for orgs/admins to use. My opinion is that Apple should engage more proactively with the vendors in order to get these features out there sooner.

David McMonnies: sPSSO seems to be a great feature, and while not an Apple issue, Okta requires ODA licensing to use it, and the Microsoft iteration isn’t even in GA yet.

Andrew B: Slowly getting better, on a pace not dissimilar from ABM.

Karsten Fischer^: I would have rated it a 5, but there’s too much work to be done by IdPs to fully support this.

TJ Draper: It works, usually.

John Welch: pSSO may be technically far superior to AD/LDAP binding, but it is nowhere near as easy to set up. Usability improvements are desperately needed, and this is exacerbated by, as with deployment, there being no reference implementation, so you can’t automate pSSO; you have to automate a given vendor’s implementation of pSSO. I’m not saying Apple should try to build their own MDM, but if there were a coherent OS automation framework, then some of this could be much easier. To paraphrase The Steve: automation isn’t something just bolted on, automation is a part of how things work.

Kale Kingdon: This is understandably difficult to grade, as Apples implementation of the framework is reliant on Identity vendors implementing the features to allow the benefits to trickle down to the end user. I grade this not based on the innovation of Apple’s frameworks but on the experience of the average IT Sys Admin & End User, which is poor. PSSO was announced at WWDC 2022. We are nearing 4 years on from that announcement, and I am struggling to implement PSSO in any configuration, simply, without direct IT touch and without bespoke tooling to improve the UIX. Currently, implementations are limited to environments with low risk, high touch and a reasonably technical user base. PSSO Simplified Setup & Authenticated Guest Mode are still a pipe dream 12 months on for their announcement. Those Veritable Paragons of Patience and Virtue are testing in production in the MacAdmins Slack post nigh on weekly, with complexities and edge cases that make my blood run cold. This is coupled with seeming strategic inconsistencies around things like User Channel Declarations. Two terms thought to be entirely incompatible and unholy in the new scripture of management, now impossible in any multi-user environment, as even secondary users of a PSSO-enabled Mac cannot become MDM-managed and not have a user channel! Pray tell how this Declaration is meant to be implemented on a multi-user Mac if not AD Binding with mobile accounts? Please excuse the theatrics. Login window agents such as JamfConnect & XCreds are still practically required for nearly all our use cases in Education, but they are consistently broken with minor point releases due to adjustments to background tasks, keychains, securetokens or otherwise. The grace I provided in the first few years, stating that “it will be great just wait for the IDPs to catch up,” is long since gone – The well of my patience lies dry. Regardless of how much the onus may still be with the IDP, I do. Not. Care. The experience is poor, and Apple needs to gather whatever leverage it has to solve the issue.

Peter Loobuyck: Maybe also work on expanding the platforms supporting identity management? Now, just a few support PSSO

W. Andrew Robinson: I will hold out hope for better cooperation and synergy between Apple and the IdP providers, but all in all, it’s been a steadily improving process. Slow, but maybe that’s not bad in this space. We don’t need big jumps forward in process if we risk big mistakes. I am happy with a slow buildout here.

Chris Carr: hard to know unless you have used the tech

Armin Briegel: The new PSSO setup workflows are a big improvement and a step in the right direction. But this is a topic where Apple has thrown out a solution implementing how they think something should work, but would have greatly benefited from more communication with the parties involved (identity providers, device management service providers and administrators) beforehand. Also, this is very much hampered by having to wait a year for major changes and updates.

Jeff Anderson: Apple is moving in the right direction with PSSO.

Gabriel Marcelino: Platform Single Sign-On has been eye-opening since it was announced, and I wanted to jump on it as soon as it was released. However, it’s been such a disappointment in my opinion. I feel that since only two companies right now are able to use the framework, it limits the choice of who you can use. I don’t think this is Apple’s fault, of course, but I do think the framework makes it far too difficult to implement, so companies do not invest time to implement it—and that’s what makes it a problem. Also, even these companies, Okta and Microsoft, do not fully have all the features that were announced at release, so we couldn’t test everything at once and had to wait. Even today, Okta still doesn’t have Secure Enclave support, which is huge for our environment to have, and we’re waiting for it to be released. I think this needs a massive update next year so that we can see a future where it can be a native replacement to something like Jamf Connect built into macOS.

Andrew Laurence: Simplified enrollment for Platform Single Sign-On looks great. As I write this, only Okta has shipped support; we need more.

Marcus Rowell: Platform SSO Simplified Setup seems to be app-handling over the Identity Management story to other vendors, which would be ok if they actually implemented the full PSSO Simplified Setup. It seems to be very difficult and hard to do.

Martin Piron: PSSO seems to be in the right place now, but it needs to be more widely adopted, without any additional costs. Being able to log onto a device with a Managed Apple Account would be amazing.

John Cleary: Platform SSO is amazing. 🎉

Allister Banks: TwoCanoes or GTFO when it comes to innovation and support. Apple is obviously not leaning on or steering partners like Okta and Google (with their Workspace’s LDAP-alike features) to deliver proper cloud-sync’d sign-on and telemetry about devices and not just individuals (Okta is terribad about signals for proper device attribution and attestation.)

Erik Kramer: Not there, yet. Apple’s horse is ready to pull, but the identity vendors need to do their part, and they don’t even have their harness hitched to a wagon, yet.

Emilio Garcia: I understand that Apple is not in control of Microsoft, or Okta, or Google, or whatever other IDP someone might be using. But it’s honestly a very poor experience to have Apple announce and promote certain PSSO features that aren’t available for use until many months later. Management constantly asks about implementing new features that we simply cannot yet, but Apple continues to promote them. I don’t know if Apple could make features available to IDPs longer before they’re announced, so they have a longer time to build them out, or work with the IDPs to speed up development, but it’s far too disjointed as it is now. Believe it or not, I miss AD binding sometimes.

N Clarke: I appreciate how Apple is building the tools for IDPs to use, and I appreciate how IDPs are using this to try to lock admins into their own system for (I’m looking at you, Intune). However, Macs are still treated as one-user-one-device for management purposes, and there are lovely configurations are assigned-user only (wifi certificate, dock web shortcuts). Also, file providers requiring the user to agree to sync is a sticking point for multi-user setups with follow-me data. I use Microsoft SSO, and the secure enclave PSSO makes for an amazingly smooth authentication experience across configured apps, so 5 stars for reliability but 3 stars for setup.

Michael Jon: Platform SSO is simply not at the maturity level that enterprises need it to be, and there’s no clear signal that a meaningful fix is on the way. The Extensible Enterprise SSO framework is the right foundation conceptually, and the SSO extension model gives identity providers a path to deeper integration. The problem is that in practice, the federation between Apple’s identity layer and third-party providers like Okta is still fragile. Device trust attestation is where it falls apart most visibly. I’m fielding questions about keychain pass issues, attestation failures with the identity provider, and having to fully remove and re-enroll devices to resolve them. For a company that markets itself on the tightness of its software integration, shipping an identity feature that generates this kind of friction in production is hard to defend. What I’d love to see, and what I think would be genuinely transformative, is Apple IDs as a proper front-end for enterprise account sign-on. The ability to federate Apple IDs with something like Okta, so that users authenticate through an Apple ID, but the credential validation happens upstream in your identity provider, would be a game-changer. Microsoft already does this. If you’re running Okta or Google Workspace as your primary IdP, you can federate with Microsoft 365 (more like 300 after the past year), have Microsoft accounts provisioned for your users, and the sign-on experience is seamless. Set and forget. My Windows users, small fleet as it is, never raise issues with it. The cloud identity synchronization just works. On the Mac side, that same confidence doesn’t exist yet. Three out of five, and that’s being generous.

Mike Stirrup: Really useful features, however, we are still waiting for vendors to release support, hopefully it won’t be 3.5 years like it took for PSSO

Craig Cohen: Although Apple is achieving great gains in Identity Management, the adoption of third-party providers has stunted real goals. This is a huge frustration.

Guillaume Gète: Platform SSO is still a promise, but the lack of support from vendors (especially Google) is baffling, and its implementation is still way too complicated (too many things to validate from the user side before having Platform SSO up and running), although the new Platform SSO baked in Setup Assistant is way better than before—still a WIP.

David Rizzo: I have yet to implement PSSO, but I’m looking forward to it and am pleased with its availability.

Dennis Logue: From what I can tell, Platform SSO has a lot of promise once IdPs fully support it

Luke Charters: Identity still needs a lot of work to be a great experience for enterprise users. Regardless of enrollment type, managing separate work and personal identities has a lot of rough edges, especially on iOS. Android’s work and personal profile management is vastly superior to Apple’s implementation.

MDM protocol and infrastructure

Peter Loobuyck: Apple is number one in maintaining MDM protocols.

Martin Piron: Declarative software update management seems to have finally hit the mark. Final tweaks required to get our head around Background Security Improvements. It would be good to avoid any odd released for specific machines, like the 26.3.2 for the Neo only. That really messed things up.

Guillaume Gète: I’d love to give a 5, but DDM is still a bit too finicky and difficult to troubleshoot.

Justin McMahan: Jamf Pro + Apple’s MDM framework is a winner.

Joel Housman: Major improvements to the protocol. There are a number of features they’ve added that we’ve needed in the past but simply didn’t exist. We’re taking advantage of these changes and are seeing benefits.

Michael Jon: MDM protocol and infrastructure are one of the areas where Apple has quietly been putting in solid work, and the results are showing. DDM continues to mature and has meaningfully improved the administrator experience, particularly around OS update enforcement on macOS. Personally, I’ve had reliable results rolling it out across the fleet, and the direction of travel is good. The protocol’s reliability on the macOS side is in a strong place. On iOS and iPadOS, the MDM command and payload reliability has been consistent. Supervised device management on iOS continues to be one of the more dependable parts of the Apple MDM story, and that hasn’t changed. The declarative management story on mobile is still catching up to where macOS is, but it’s moving in the right direction. The MDM migration tooling Apple introduced this year deserves a mention here because it directly touches the protocol layer. Making clean device migration between MDM providers possible is a significant infrastructure improvement, and it has real downstream effects on the vendor ecosystem. It lowers switching costs, which is healthy for competition and long overdue. The one drag on the score is the interaction between MDM and Platform SSO. Attestation failures that end in a full device re-enrolment aren’t just an identity problem; they’re an MDM reliability problem, too. When the fix for an SSO issue is “wipe the enrolment and start again,” that friction sits squarely in this category. It doesn’t happen constantly, but it happens enough to notice. The other gap I want to flag is the continued absence of a proper MDM event log or audit trail on the device side. When something fails, you’re relying on your MDM vendor’s interpretation of what happened rather than having a first-party, device-side log that tells you exactly what command was received, when it was processed, and what the result was. For an ecosystem that’s increasingly dependent on MDM for security compliance, having to guess at what happened on the device when a command fails is not acceptable. The last thing I’ll mention is preference and configuration keys for apps. Apple needs to dramatically expand the set of manageable preference keys available to administrators across both first-party and third-party apps. The ability to configure app behavior at scale via MDM profiles is one of the most powerful tools in an administrator’s toolkit, and right now, the coverage is patchy at best. Too many Apple apps ship with behavior that can’t be overridden or configured via a profile. Third-party developers are even worse; most don’t document their preference keys at all, and there’s no enforcement or incentive from Apple to change that. This needs to be a priority over time. Every app that ships on a managed device should have a documented set of configuration keys that administrators can set via MDM.

Chris Carr: MDM keeps getting better incrementally

Craig Cohen: Apple has added wonderful and fruitful capabilities for device management; the reliance and inconsistency of the third-party device management providers diminish our real-world strategy.

Bart Reardon: You know something must be doing OK when you realize you haven’t had to think about it in a long time.

Armin Briegel: Solid progress here. DDM has become a useful and necessary part of device management. Still work in progress, though in this case, the slow and steady approach is appreciated. Major changes and updates more than once a year might be useful here, too.

Chris Pommer: Auto-enrollment seems rock solid. “It just works.”

Jeremy Bodokh: DDM still needs some work, but it’s definitely a huge step in the right direction

W. Andrew Robinson: Another top score for me… Device Management and the subset of MDM tools here seems better than ever. My focus is on macOS here, and I think back even 5 years, and I see things then I don’t have to worry about now. In the past year, I can’t think of anything that would downgrade this score… well done, everyone!

Emilio Garcia: The concept of DDM makes sense, and I think it’s a good direction to head. But it’s still simply not as reliable as we’d like. Or, perhaps it is reliable under the circumstances Apple expects us to be working under, but it’s unreasonably difficult to reach that point (e.g., managing device tokens or MDM trust when they fall out of line). In any case, the experience we have with DDM has been that it does mostly work, and it’s more reliable than some of the old MDM commands, but it’s not perfect, and is more difficult to troubleshoot than previously.

Dennis Logue: Declarative Device Management has been an improvement, but still needs further refinement regarding monitoring (some of this may be MDM vendor issues)

Marian Albers: Providing the MDM protocols is the one thing, but Apple should introduce some score or label for MDM Vendors and their implementation (looking at you, JAMF, with your IDP Force to get DDM).

Jered Benoit: You can truly control almost every aspect of the device. This is one place where Apple shines.

Jeff Anderson: We use Jamf and are pleased overall. I do wish Apple would allow a little more control of MDM-managed devices, as per my previous comment about Privacy.

David McMonnies: Rollout of new DDM functionality is quite slow. I would have expected a much more aggressive deployment of new and existing management features to DDM over the last year or so, but this has not eventuated. Similar to a previous response, communications on these are poor, and often fall to MDM vendors to get the word out to the broader community.

Andrew Laurence: The protocol YAML files on GitHub are a godsend. Apple introduced Declared Device Management (DDM) at WWDC 2021; going on five years later, vendor adoption remains a mixed bag.

Jeremy Leland: It still appears that Apple can improve in its communications with MDM vendors, especially around best practices with DDM and software update management. Also, declaring certain MDM features deprecated while at the same time not having information about their replacement can be confusing for admins. Finally, Apple needs a more centralized way to control the OS and Apple products integrated with AI.

Jeffrey Hoover: The current and future solution.

Gabriel Marcelino: With the coming of DDM, I think this is going to get better, and we need to look into the future of transitioning fully to DDM in the coming year. I feel like MDM companies, however, at least Jamf, are still catching up to DDM in m

John Welch: The diversity and capabilities of the MDM marketplace, and the fact that MS is trying in its own tedious way to move to MDM says that Apple basically created the foundation of computer/device management with MDM.

Kale Kingdon: Overall, when I look at the march towards DDM, I am consistently struck by the elegance and grace of the framework, with a variable amount of impatience depending on the use case that I want a status channel for, on that particular day. But those are the days of future thinking and hope, rather than being stuck in the trenches, wondering why it’s 2026, and we still don’t have a “Set Once” enforcement for things like the Dock, Homescreen, Safari or Finder—truly lost knowledge from WorkGroup Manager. Some example limitations or omissions in the Profile Spec seem glaringly obvious to me, but YMMV. – Force Bluetooth On or Off, rather than freeze it in its current state on MacOS. – Restrict MacOS only to connect to Managed Networks, like in iOS. – Choose/Default the Windowing/Multitasking mode for iOS for the user, either normal or Shared iPad, especially. – The iOS app does not have a managed app config for UI customization or mounting a network share. – iWork Suite does not have Managed App Configurations, or at least they are not surfaced and documented. Ensuring any UI changes and quirks from using keys to Restrict External AI Providers are not consistent. – Continuing to use the User Channel for Declarations (Safari Extensions) long since the User Channel was seemingly abandoned. These examples and many more undocumented make me believe the team implementing DDM is under-resourced and under extreme pressure, with little time to go back and adjust keys already implemented.

Jeff Richardson: My only MDM complaint is with Microsoft, not Apple, and its failure to provide MDM support to the Apple Vision Pro through its Intune software. Apple has made the tools for this available, and Microsoft has been saying for a long time that it is coming, but we are still waiting.

Erik Kramer: The protocols are often mature and working, but the vendors sometimes just don’t implement them in the best way. It’s like a third-party monitor for a Mac Studio.

TJ Draper: No real change from last year.

Shane Thompson: We are at a point of transition, DDM is replacing more and more MDM commands, and it seems that MDM vendors are having to find a way to handle that; some are doing it more elegantly than others. In my experience, DDM is far more reliable than MDM, and it seems like there is a bright future with this transition.

**Jeff Wimer **: While Apple does have documentation for MDM protocols, because every MDM provider implements them differently, it’s hard to determine what they do without extensive testing, which takes time and resources

Allister Banks: DDM app delivery for iPad/iOS apparently (due to HTTP error codes we see) fails in Apple infra – they want vendors to adopt protocols and then fail to admit reproducible symptoms exist, making us fall back to v1 of the MDM spec. It’s also a nightmare to orchestrate updates on iPad/OS in 2026, to the point we just wipe/redeploy instead, ignoring Autonomous Single App Mode and how old the app versions are, still using Guided Access for signage/appliances… in 2026, what year is it 🤪

Cameron Kay: DDM is still a work in progress, but it is usable for things like Software Update now. Still, it’s not a replacement for all config profiles and MDM commands yet. Some of that has to do with DMS vendor adoption. It will be interesting to see when DDM can be used to implement security baselines from the macOS Security Compliance Project. The Apple management agent still breaks at times and stops executing commands until you reboot the device. Apple needs to add Update Inventory, Restart, Shut Down, Set Time Zones, Enable Remote Login (SSH) and Manage Login Window wallpaper commands for macOS. Apple Business Manager/Apple School Manager API should also handle the automatic renewal of certificates and tokens with Device Management Services. A management command that allows the MDM-created local admin account’s password to be changed without breaking Secure Token access for LAPS solutions is also needed.

Michal Moravec: Same as last year, some new areas can be managed. Some of the new management areas are only manageable via Declarative Device Management (DDM), which is good (example: Safari management). However, Apple has been awfully slow with the migration of the old profile configurations to DDM. Also, there are certain areas, such as the ManagedApp framework (introduced in iOS 18.4), which are still not available for macOS.

Bob McGillicuddy: Declarative still feels messy and incomplete, which is often the case with MDM software makers. However, the fish can rot from the head if not done as full-throated as it should be. Could improve

John Wetter: Solid progress here as I expect non-DDM commands to start being deprecated very soon.

Morgan Schönberger: For me, DDM got way more stable in the last year. Especially, software updates have become more reliable and are much less of a burden. The real task here is with the MDM vendors to integrate the new capabilities into their products.

The Future of Apple in the Enterprise

Kale Kingdon: The closer I get to the end of the survey, the more verbose, conversational and agitated my responses usually become. Now, enter the feeling of catharsis and gradual acceptance. I am intrinsically tied to Apple management. It is a chosen profession, and I enjoy it immensely. Providing anecdotal responses to these surveys over the years has provided perspective. I do firmly believe that Apple has improved and will continue to improve on its delivery to the Enterprise long term – This does not, however, mean they can afford to take their foot off the accelerator. I cannot understate how the MacBook Neo is a once-in-a-decade opportunity for them to acquire market share against their competitors, and it’s utterly imperative that all other facets of their business attempt to keep pace with the hardware team and ensure they are taking full advantage of the opportunity that has arisen. Don’t let “It Just Works” lie on the cutting room floor, to be used as a meme to denigrate the product. Make it the guiding star again.

Jered Benoit: I feel like they are hesitant to be in the space at all.

Chris Carr: I think it will continue to creep in bit by bit

John Delfino: It will be interesting to see what the Business restructure means, and whether MDM built in solves problems for anyone.

Marcus Rowell: I’m still wondering: With all our data, apps, and now AI, residing in the CloudOS and delivered by a browser, where does Apple fit? Apple currently seems to have an edge for the adoption of on-device AI (almost all the 3rd party AI tools are macOS first). Maybe “Private Cloud Compute” tied to our Apple devices’ security will bring us a privacy-first CloudOS. All the large AI companies are building AI-controlled browsers. It would be wonderful to have an AI browser that uses a Private Cloud Computer to run the models, instead of one that is focused on harvesting everything it can from our lives.

Luke Charters: Never in my career have I seen this volume of schools investigating a move to Apple. The MacBook Neo could not have come at a better time, as sharply rising PC prices are prompting schools to look for other options. Apple has a unique opportunity here to pick up significant market share in the education space with a product that cannot be beat on the combination of price and performance. I sincerely hope they don’t somehow squander it.

Shane Thompson: Apple seems to be taking enterprise more and more seriously every year; they have to be seeing the increase of Macs in everything from SMB to higher ed to full-on enterprise. The tooling is getting better, it seems that the communication and documentation are improving, and we are even hearing from our Apple rep more regularly than we ever have in the past. I think due to the quality of hardware, improvement in management protocols and identity, this is going to become something that keeps this momentum, and we start seeing more businesses choosing Macs as their standard computer of choice.

Martin Piron: I’m very confident in Apple’s enterprise future, especially given the AxM improvements in 2025. If Apple stays on this trajectory, and with the Neo likely to accelerate adoption in education, the future is bright.

Bart Reardon: Everyone I speak to at Apple who is adjacent to this area wants the experience to be good and wants to know if/how it can be done better.

Christopher Cook: The enterprise landscape looks great thanks to even the lowest-spec’d Macs being so capable and power-efficient. The problem with the enterprise is Apple’s lack of leadership in enterprise management. They create APIs and protocols, but leave the management of the devices to third parties who implement them differently. By way of comparison, Microsoft says, “This is how you update Windows,” and it works exactly the way they say it does because they also designed the tools to manage it. Apple says, “This is how macOS should be updated,” and their MDM partners all handle it differently. Apple exerts far more control over third-party apps in the App Store than they do management over its own operating systems, and it’s maddeningly backward.

Andrew Laurence: This last year, Apple delivered on pent-up asks: AxM APIs, AxM-managed MDM migrations, simplified Platform Single Sign-On enrollment, and – wonder of wonders! – a first-party MDM offering. Apple’s combined enterprise value has gone up.

Craig Cohen: Apple, always the visionary, has become a good partner to the enterprise. We need our other partners to stop the multi-year preview of Apple technology.

N Clarke: One thing I’ve experienced is that a lot of conversations come down to money. The MacBook Neo: cheap, powerful, much desired. On the other hand, if you use Microsoft anything, why not use the bundled products on your tier? Why spend money on a responsive MDM if we get the same-day Intune bundled in? Why investigate more performant AV products if local Defender came with our Cloud Phishing Protection? Excel doesn’t perform as nicely on Mac as on Windows and occasionally loses data… Why don’t we just use Windows? I am looking forward to the European Union’s migration away from Microsoft services in the hope that either Microsoft will step up its game and make better products, or that there will be strong alternatives in the File collaboration + Data Storage + Security + IDp combined space. It is my opinion that Macs don’t do particularly well in the Enterprise, both despite (lack of competing players) and because of (low quality Mac-specific services), Microsoft.

Jeff Anderson: Apple will continue to gain market share in the enterprise.

Tom Bridge: The hardware is saving the software’s bacon, and has been for years. Apple has a lot of work to do to make its software justify its hardware, in terms of reliability, operability, and configurability. I hope that this is a change that Apple will invest in, because the hardware is universally loved, while the software this year has been unexpectedly weak in the face of the new design system, challenges with reliability in the OS functionality, and continued weakness of the management platform as compared to Android and Windows. Apple could do so much better here to shore up its future.

Cameron Kay: Apple in the Enterprise is making progress, but it does still feel the pace needs to pick up considerably. There’s definitely a bottleneck in what they can implement. As I said before, if Apple had 1000 engineers in the Enterprise team as they have in the iPhone Camera team, we’d see a lot more progress. I’m not sure Tim Cook’s Spreadsheet is quite willing to go that far, but we can hope.

Jeff Richardson: I feel confident about the future of Apple in the enterprise market in the foreseeable future, not only because of Apple’s efforts in this area but also because individual users love using the iPhone and iPad, which means that enterprise customers who want happy users will devote the resources necessary to make everything work.

Jeremy Leland: Apple devices continue to be my most manageable end-user devices. They should be considering how much vertical integration Apple has in place. Apple Silicon devices have been reliable and show real staying power, still feeling useful and relevant after 4+ years of use.

Michael Jon: Apple is on the right track with enterprise, and I’ll defend that position even when others won’t. A lot of the foundational work is already there. Security on these devices is genuinely good; I can’t fault a MacBook against a Lenovo or a Dell. If you’re an enterprise with the budget for it, Macs should be what you’re doing. The MDM migration tooling has been a significant addition this year, and the overall device management story continues to mature. Where Apple needs to focus now is on the niche use cases that are still being handled with a sledgehammer. Personal Apple IDs on managed Macs are a prime example. Right now, it’s a tenancy-level switch: personal IDs on or off. That’s too blunt. What I actually want is a preference key that lets me define which Apple ID domains or addresses are permitted on a managed device. A blanket policy doesn’t work when you’re managing executives who have a personal Apple ID tied to years of purchases and genuinely don’t want to give it up. That’s a real conversation I’ve had, and “sorry, it’s all or nothing” is not a satisfying answer. Platform SSO reliability also needs to be resolved. That’s not a future wish list item; it’s a current problem that’s actively eroding confidence in the platform among administrators. The longer-term concern I have is the competitive pressure from Linux. It’s not quiet anymore. Valve’s continued investment in Linux compatibility, Framework and their repairable and upgradeable hardware and a developer community that’s increasingly comfortable on Linux means I’m seeing more engineers and developers opting out of the Mac ecosystem entirely when given the choice. Right now, my Mac fleet is primarily finance, HR, and customer-facing roles, and that’s probably where it stays if Apple doesn’t address the customization, storage, and repairability gaps that are pushing power users elsewhere. And it’s not just Linux eating from the top. ChromeOS Flex is quietly eating from the bottom. For the “I just need a browser and an email client” tier of enterprise devices, which is where a lot of those finance, HR, and customer-facing roles actually live, ChromeOS Flex on commodity hardware is a compelling alternative. If Apple’s answer to budget-conscious enterprise is the MacBook Neo, they need to be honest about what it’s competing against. It’s not just Windows anymore. It’s a $300 refurbished Lenovo running a managed browser OS with zero-touch enrolment and Google Workspace baked in. That’s a hard conversation for Apple to win on cost alone, and the Mac’s advantage in that tier comes down to ecosystem lock-in more than capability. Apple has the bones of a great enterprise platform. The question is whether they’ll do the detail work to keep the people who are starting to drift.

Erik Kramer: They’ve shown improvements in their products this year, and the Neo is just the latest example of Apple showing that they care about this market.

Michal Moravec: Enterprise management of Apple platforms is pretty good when you compare it to other vendors. If you look at it in isolation, there is so much potential for it to be better. The problem is that Apple is unable to focus on nearly anything lately. From the outside, it looks like the company is spread thin on so many things, which is weird when you consider Apple is one of the wealthiest businesses in the world. Personally, I think the current leadership knows very well how to build and sell physical products. This is not surprising since Tim Cook is well known for his skills in supply chain management. I wish Apple would have similar success with software engineering. Apple needs to learn how to create good software again.

W. Andrew Robinson: This past year saw better progress for enterprise initiatives than in other years… whether it’s a combination of market share or adoption or something, Apple seems to be paying more attention to this part of their business. Apple’s priorities shift in this space year to year, but I think it’s a good ‘thumbnail guesstimation’ to say this year’s been more good than bad.

Peter Loobuyck: Future looks great, sure, now pc competitors are getting nervous since the release of the Neo.

Gabriel Marcelino: Apple Business changes, we now see a better future, but not quite there yet. We still need to get better with macOS updates and better control for Mac Admins to roll out Updates.

Guillaume Gète: The MacBook Neo is a game changer, and the new features in Apple Business should make companies even more eager to invest in Apple.

David McMonnies: With the Neo marking a significant play into new markets, I would hope this would come with significantly improved enterprise focus. The April 14 ABM changes do represent a positive direction. I would hope to see a greater impetus on larger-scale uptake of macOS into the enterprise, with OS functionality being the key driver.

Emilio Garcia: With the release of the MacBook Neo and a renewed focus on education, I’m hoping for an increased focus on the challenges of managing fleets of computers assigned to users with varying levels of trust (e.g., things like allowing us to manage the pop-up for applications to access the network).

Justin McMahan: Apple does feel like it’s focusing more on the enterprise. Some pieces of their platforms still feel like they’re designed with consumers in mind, but they’re gradually improving.

Morgan Schönberger: I‘m looking very optimistic into the future of Apple in the enterprise. I’ve seen a solid foundation with great hardware products standing on it. The new MacBook Neo is a great addition and allows for some low-cost workstations that mainly rely on one or two web apps. We see several departments considering those instead of their Dell PCs, which they had before.

Armin Briegel: The foundation is solid. There is real momentum. We will have to see how the MacBook Neo and Apple Business work out in detail, but they are very likely to have a positive impact.

Andrew B: The future of Apple in Enterprise is a coin toss. On the one hand, the unmatched hardware, ease of deployment and zero-touch capabilities are all easily sold in Enterprise. On the other hand, the lack of crucial controls and management for Apple Intelligence and end-user-facing security prompts, the failure to recognize the constraints imposed on Enterprise that are beyond the admin team’s control as it relates to Apple’s release cycle, are liabilities that Apple currently seems to be underestimating.

John Welch: This is not on the server side. Apple is not a server provider, and that’s not a bad thing. The Enterprise is fertile ground for Apple with good reason. They’re not perfect, but ye gods, compared to their actual competitors, they’re killing it.

Jeffrey Hoover: I have to compare Apple in the past with Apple now and in the future. Past Apple had Xserves and in-house training. Now, anything like that is gone. The next two to three years will be telling, particularly around how gracefully they handle the DDM transition for organizations that are behind, and whether they invest meaningfully in the macOS management surface and Business Essentials. But overall, it’s a reasonable bet, but you should plan for continued dependency on third-party MDM vendors, build in a change management buffer around annual OS releases, and watch the DDM adoption deadlines closely.

Alex Meretten: The rate of improvement on Apple Silicon and the importance of local power for LLMs is no joke. So yes, Apple has a long future in the enterprise. But this question also asks about “[Apple’s] decisions will help IT administrators in the enterprise”, and the answer to that is, “lol, lmao”. At best, we can continue to hope they ignore us.

Joel Housman: I think their refocus on “Apple Business,” which is an Apple Business Manager 2.0 of sorts, is great. We’ll continue to stick with our 3rd party MDM provider, JumpCloud, as they allow us to manage Windows devices over Windows MDM as well, but I think AB for small organizations or small businesses is fantastic. I could see this being super useful for educational institutions as well.

Dennis Logue: The MacBook Neo is a potential game changer….IF Apple keeps a regular, predictable upgrade cycle and the price remains in the current range.

Marian Albers: macBook Neo.

Chris Pommer: Hoping for better.

AI adoption and management

Erik Kramer: This topic is too big for one comment box!

Luca Accomazzi: My company believes this to be a game-changer. Top management is in both “all in” camps, the “we don’t want to be Nokiaed” and the “this will multiply individual performances by 3x”.

TJ Draper: AI has great potential, and it should also be entered into cautiously and judiciously.

Andrew B: Enterprise needs an “off” switch for Apple Intelligence. As in, “disable all of it, and prove that it’s disabled.” Again, this isn’t a preference; it’s a requirement imposed by C-levels, regulators, and auditors. Apple seems to think that this is because Enterprise doesn’t understand the benefits of Apple Intelligence. It’s not about that. It’s about having empirical, auditable control over where company data goes, regardless of how “safe” the destination may be.

Michal Moravec: We appreciate AI vendors that think about enterprise use cases and implement policy management for their tools. Claude Code is a good example of a vendor trying to provide necessary control for enterprises.

Allister Banks: I hear a huge majority of rank-and-file business workers are being told they must use developer tools to e.g. leverage MCP servers and access data to do their jobs now, which is false in several ways: 1. the data is usually incomplete so they draw poor conclusions/are investing in the intuition a robot deigned worthy and 2. the tools are IDEs or command line heavy, designed and supported by under-resourced devtools teams – this is not for mere mortals to snap their fingers and be savvy with. Atom’s lineage with VS Code and its clones that release an update if you look at it funny means an absolute shitspray of Electron versions clogging pipes.

Chris Pommer: Individuals in the office (several non-native English speakers) have been using chatbots to help with translation of professional jargon in correspondence (we’re architects), and some light use reviewing RFP documents and the like to summarize them before we draft proposals.

N Clarke: The biggest concern with AI features is data exfiltration to unmanaged external providers. Apple Intelligence purports to be safe (for now), but the lack of custom integrations via the ‘Extensions’ section leaves a lot to be desired. Copilot is making a compelling argument (You trust us with your data, how about your drafts? “), but how secure is the cloud itself? There does seem to be an interesting rise in the ability to host your own models, I’m looking forward to seeing if anything comes out of the M5 generation in local cloud machines (Mini, Studio).

Cameron Kay: Selected vendors’ tools are made available to all full-time staff and part-time staff, and students have access to a smaller set of less expensive tools. I have no real knowledge of how widely these tools have been adopted, but I suspect that for most users, for work purposes, it’s still very experimental.

Chris Carr: A lot of AI products are garbage and marketing hype. Or they are security nightmares. But some generative coding tools are useful.

Gabriel Marcelino: We host our own AI and implement other companies’ AI models as well, but for our medical devices, we do not use AI for HIPAA compliance

Joel Housman: We use Google Workspace, so we’re steering our staff to Google Gemini, because through Google Workspace, Google is giving us document retention and data controls over how our staff uses Gemini. It’s built into our existing product and licenses, whereas if we wanted to use ChatGPT or Claude, we’d have to sign a contract with OpenAI or Anthropic and would need to pay additional money for our staff to use these. We’re a non-profit, so we don’t have a huge budget to go out and acquire new software when we already get a similar product from Google.

Morgan Schönberger: While some people use AI with a great effect, others still expect it to just create their PowerPoint presentations, complete with company design and without any need for proofreading. There is still a way to go to teach users the capabilities and caveats of AI tools.

Chris Waldrip: All in, but only with approved and vetted vendors.

Marian Albers: Local AI needs more support/marketing from Apple, which is already happening, but hasn’t reached real enterprise use cases.

Emilio Garcia: We are beyond “trying it out”, as we have an official vendor (Google Gemini) and it’s available and in use by our users. However, I would hesitate to say we are “all-in”, as it’s been purely up to the user to decide if they want to participate or not. I’m not aware of any unit that is mandating AI use, or so heavily pushing it, to consider us “all-in.”

Bart Reardon: I’d like to see more effort and research put into how AI can be made sustainable from a resource usage point of view (RAM, electricity, etc.) and more ethical in the source of training materials. LLM tech is fascinating—the way in which it’s made available, less so.

Jeffrey Hoover: We are using it to keep ahead and stay ahead of the competition.

Martin Piron: We are moving from early experimentation into broad AI adoption, with GenAI now embedded in company OKRs, core products and internal productivity tools. We manage this through a central AI Gateway that routes most LLM traffic, applies shared guardrails and observability, and a Responsible AI framework (policies, training, and ISO-aligned guardrail POCs) that governs which tools are approved, how data is used, and how risks are controlled across the organization.

John Wetter: There are still significant concerns around data security and respecting your privacy with many artificial intelligence services currently available, with some AI vendors choosing to embrace shadow IT and worse as their marketing/adoption strategy. Short to medium term, our most likely adoption will be around specialized tools with a fixed source of information and strong data controls.

Jeremy Leland: There will always be a new avenue into AI, whether it is a web-based tool, drag and drop app that is user-installable, or integrated into an existing app. We are trying to focus on user education and providing viable options that help enhance what users can do. That way, the tools in use stay predictable and manageable, allowing us to fine-tune things for our users’ needs.

Michael Jon: We’re all in on AI at [large software company in the renewable energy industry], but we’re being deliberate about it. The goal is to build AI into how we work in a sustainable way, not chase every shiny thing and end up looking like a company that got swept up in a fad. On the infrastructure side, we’ve introduced LiteLLM as an LLM and AI gateway, which gives us a centralized layer to manage model access, usage, and spend rather than having teams spin up their own GCP projects every time they want to experiment with a model. That sprawl was becoming a problem, and consolidating through a gateway was the right call. We’re also actively reviewing our enterprise use of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s recent posture around government engagement and the general direction the company is heading has raised enough flags that it warrants a proper look. Honestly, OpenAI has become the McDonald’s of the AI world. Ubiquitous, convenient, and fine if you’re not thinking too hard about what you’re consuming. We’re shifting our attention toward Claude and properly integrated tooling like Gemini, where the enterprise story is more mature, and the vendor behavior is easier to stand behind. Our internal philosophy is that AI is an accessibility tool first. It’s there to help people close gaps, cover tasks they struggle with, and lower barriers to entry. A good example is people with ADHD, where AI-assisted dictation and scheduling tools can address real stopgaps and interruptions in their workflow. Transcription tooling is probably the clearest case where AI has genuinely delivered on that promise; that problem is largely solved, it’s being used by a lot of people, and I love that. It doesn’t need to be reinvented; it just needs to keep working. My apprehension is around the other end of the spectrum, where AI is being used to do someone’s job for them entirely. There are engineers out there having AI pick up a task, write the code, open the pull request, and conduct the review before anything ships to production. They’ll say it works fine. I’ve even heard “It’s only a problem once it hits production”, ridiculous and negligent to say the least. The problem is that executives see those case studies, and the mental leap isn’t “great, our engineers are more productive.” It’s “Why are we paying this person?” Mass layoffs are already happening, and when someone can point to a workflow where AI handled the full cycle, that becomes a justification. That’s the trajectory I’m worried about, and it’s why we’re building guidelines around AI use rather than just opening the tap and seeing what happens. Vendor scrutiny is part of that, too. We use GitHub Copilot, and after X’s well-publicized controversies around child safety and AI-generated content, I raised the question of why we were still routing usage through XAI models in Copilot at all. Those models got blocked promptly. Knowing what your AI tooling is actually running under the hood, and being willing to act on it, matters. We’re not sending money that direction.

Andrew Laurence: This institution is strategically AI-forward.

Marcus Rowell: I’d love to run a major model in Private Cloud Computer with security tied to our Apple devices. I am concerned that without moving to inspecting and policing all external traffic and implementing tooling like DLP, data will end up everywhere with AI usage. Without strong traffic-based guardrails, I think trying to “manage” our data will be a losing battle. Previously, to lose control of data, the user had to actively upload information, or an attacker had to compromise your systems. In an AI & Agentic world, your organization’s data can be scanned, assessed and extracted without the user or IT understanding what is happening.

Personal use of AI features

Joel Housman: I use it to help me quickly write basic scripts to automate simple tasks.

Armin Briegel: I have been evaluating AI for coding and other use cases. Overall, I find there are some tasks that are well-suited and others where the benefits are questionable at best. The ethical, economical, ecological, and social implications of the technology and especially the corporations that are pushing them and how they are being sold and marketed concern me deeply, and I am holding back on those grounds.

Jeffrey Hoover: Amazing at debugging large logs. Write nice responses given the information.

Allister Banks: Tech, and by extension robots/clankers/LLMs, is about seeing through lies and proving out usefulness. (I don’t think so poorly of proper research like ML by actual scientists.) I wish I could hibernate for like 4 years. I would miss nothing, and the dust would have settled (hopefully). When I wake up like Stallone in Demolition Man, if I need to bake bread or fix bicycles as a career because no jobs, so be it

Jeff Richardson: AI will be as transformative as mobile technology. Apple is not currently in the lead in this area, but I would much rather Apple take the time to get it done right. Apple didn’t sell the first MP3 player or the first smartphone, but once they fully got there, they did it right. I hope to see the same with AI.

TJ Draper: I use it often as I’m writing code. It can, at times, be very helpful. Other times, it misses the mark so badly as to make me wonder how it could get it so wrong. Judgment Day is not very near…

John Welch: It’s useful for specific things like “Give me a syntax example for running PowerShell commands in .NET.” Not perfect, but useful. Beyond that, I am fully capable of both reading and writing emails, Teams messages, and Slack messages. I am neither a CEO nor a billionaire, nor am I trying to decimate my workforce to goose my next yearly bonus.

Andrew B: Meh.

Peter Loobuyck: mostly lookups and checking code

Mike Stirrup: Finishing the UI on apps/utilities that nobody else would write (yes, I got the idea from Fedderico)

Morgan Schönberger: My main use for AI features is in coding assistance. I’ve made many little tools and apps to support my work. Tools I probably wouldn’t write myself, because the effort wouldn’t be worth it.

Karsten Fischer^: Sometimes hilarious results when asking for a simple task, sometimes nice when exploring things I haven’t looked into and utterly useless when asking for the latest changes Apple did incorporate.

Cameron Kay: It’s still early days using AI with Apple device management. It helps write scripts, but is not mature enough to provide in-depth reporting or automation of management tasks. Apple and DMS vendors will have to provide better APIs to allow the Apple Admin Community to explore the possibilities. I’m sure more sessions making use of AI will show up at conferences in the coming years.

Luca Accomazzi: We’ve tried them all. Nowadays, my team, for development, uses Claude Code, CodeSense, GitLab Duo, Aikido AI for security, Gemini Gems, you name them.

Chris Pommer: Beyond assessing whether there may be uses for our team that would be productive, I have primarily found AI tools useful in helping with writing more complex scripts and Shortcuts to help other team members and me with specific tasks. Early days.

Marcus Rowell: I’ve had some amazing success with AI Agents writing code and building new systems with simple prompts in minutes. I’ve also spent many hours trying to build something that I thought would be easy for the AI. I think this is mostly down to me identifying and scoping the requirements, and understanding what AI is good at. I see a lot of work in our Org for the next year in making systems (e.g., logging, MDM) accessible to AI Agents so that they can do their work efficiently.

Emilio Garcia: I tried Gemini once to help with a specific CGEvent command in Swift. The first prompt was not successful, and the second was. However, I felt gross, like my project was tainted — it no longer was a product of my own creation. I haven’t tried using it since, but I’m frequently in calls where colleagues offer “Gemini said this, and it’s less than helpful.

Jered Benoit: Claude is my IT intern, helping me work through troubleshooting and process, project, and policy management.

Michal Moravec: Chatbots are very helpful in making me faster when I work with things I know and understand. It’s quite risky to rely solely on chatbots in areas where I don’t have much knowledge. Two examples: (1) When I ask questions about more obscure subjects (e.g., macOS device management), chatbots are happy to hallucinate solutions that don’t exist or suggest something that Apple deprecated/removed years ago. I can easily spot the problem because Apple Device Management is my area of expertise. If I ask about a different area, I can’t fully trust the information. I need to verify it constantly. (2) I have written some Python/shell/etc. programs over the years. I can use a chatbot to generate code so I don’t have to write it or find a place to copy it from. I can course-correct the chatbot because I have some idea about what I am doing. When I generate code in a language/framework I have never worked with, I need to choose between blind trust (dangerous) and continuous verification (somewhat decreases the speed I gained by the code generation).

Michael Jon: I try to use AI in an accessibility context first and not let it dictate how I work day to day. A good example of that is using it as a glorified grammar tool rather than a writing replacement, which is closer to what these models were originally built for anyway. Outside of LLMs, I find AI genuinely exciting. Language transcription in meetings, translation tooling and real-time captioning; these are the applications where AI is quietly doing meaningful work for people and not getting nearly enough credit for it. In my actual role, I use AI for reviewing code rather than writing it. I’ll use it to spot inconsistencies and flag things I might have missed. That’s where it genuinely earns its place for me. Working in a remote-first capacity, largely on my own side of the world, I don’t have the luxury of leaning on colleagues to sanity check my work outside of the Mac admins community. AI fills that gap practically. It’s not replacing my skills; it’s acting as an observer and reporter on how I do things and helping close the accessibility gaps that come with working solo at odd hours. I don’t let it do the work. I let it watch the work and tell me where I’ve slipped up, but I don’t let it jump into the driver’s seat. It’s a backseat passenger that I can choose to hear out.

Craig Cohen: Helping organize my thoughts to help respond intelligently and not emotionally.

Bart Reardon: My world is full of short-form tasks. Scripts or tasks that do a specific thing and are relatively short. AI is amazing at this stuff, once you learn how to prompt it efficiently, and it can read a few hundred lines of log files much faster than I can and tease out issues that make troubleshooting bugs a heck of a lot easier. The other thing it does well, that I suck at, is writing documentation (not the writing so much, but getting around to writing). “Write a readme.md for this thing” is something that an LLM can spit out in 5 seconds and take me a minute to review and correct if needed. Personal rule, though, I don’t ask an LLM to do anything that I couldn’t do myself if given time and motivation. If I can’t review it and know what’s going on, it becomes a liability for future me.

Erik Kramer: I work with sensitive data too often to invite AI into the majority of my work.

David McMonnies: AI is useful for speeding up existing workflows that were kludgy and manual, being something of a sceptic I do not trust it to wholesale replace what I do more broadly. I dislike using it for code reviews or to suggest improvements. It is useful for me, as it is mostly around transcription summarisation and formatting documentation. I also prefer to learn what I don’t know instead of having things done for me, so I’m not exactly all in on it.

Andrew Laurence: LLM tools are increasingly, materially helpful in IT tasks: the grunt work task you might fob off to a junior staff member, or as a learning/coaching/editor tool in an area you’re familiar with but not an expert. Like Cliff’s Notes, a useful companion to actually doing the work.

Christopher Cook: AI tools are great for getting through the “writer’s block” of starting something new, before we do all the work and write the analogical novels ourselves. It’s like having an eager, junior member of the team whose work absolutely cannot be trusted. Every time they try to help, a senior engineer grumbles under their breath and says, “Never mind, I’ll do this myself,” and gets to work.

Jeremy Leland: I have found AI useful for vendor research, especially now that so much information (pricing, tech documents, feature details) is gated behind “contact us” buttons and forms. It has also been helpful in creating support documents – taking vendor-supplied information and rewriting it in terms of what the AI tool has been taught about our operations and infrastructure.

Charles Misson: Claude and Claude Code are both helpful!

Gabriel Marcelino: I am all in with AI and use it almost daily. I was one of the first to embrace AI, or we will be the ones being replaced by AI, is what I used to say. If we didn’t know how it worked, we would be the ones replaced by it.

Marian Albers: mlx

John Cleary: The AI that I use is never Apple’s. 😂 I love Apple’s Machine Learning, which the system uses all the time. Apple Intelligence is a total bust. Maybe if they announce it for a third time at WWDC this year, they’ll actually ship it! 😂

Martin Piron: AI has made my scripting, documentation, and research work both faster and in a more effective way. Different tools excel at different tasks, so it’s crucial to know which one to use for what. Our internal AI platform, wired into enterprise data, has been especially invaluable for surfacing old threads and documentation I didn’t even know existed.

David Rizzo: I’m a novice script writer. ChatGPT has helped me with some quick BASH scripts.

In 2021, device-management startup Kandji (now Iru) 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 sixth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of about a hundred admins, 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 Iru commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so again—it had no control over the survey results or the contents of this story.

Overall scores

There weren’t too many radical changes in this year’s survey. Respondents are most positive about Apple’s hardware, with another strong score honoring its commitment to security and privacy. And optimism about the future of Apple in the enterprise skyrocketed, up half a point to tie for second-highest score in the survey.

Most scores didn’t move as much as the future did, but trends were generally positive, even in the software category—a bit of a surprise, given all the grousing around this cycle from the user-experience perspective. The only score that trended down was enterprise service and support.

For the fifth straight year, we also asked about the pace of operating-system adoption.

Speaking of software surprises, half of the respondents felt that this year’s OS adoption pace was more or less the same as usual. Only 17% felt this was a slower year, up slightly from last year. What’s interesting is that there’s been a two-year trend in this category, with “quicker than usual” and “about the same” switching places. Perhaps the pace of change has just become the new normal.

Last year, we asked a lot of questions about Apple Intelligence, and as a sign of how well that rollout went, this year, we asked more broadly about AI in general instead.

Only 8% of panelists reported that AI is not allowed in their organizations. More than half specified that AI was only allowed from approved vendors, while another quarter were willing to take requests. And 13% were loosey goosey—use whatever AI you want!

In terms of where our panelists’ organizations are in terms of AI adoption, it looks like uptake is fairly strong: 39% are all in, and 43% are actively trying it out.

We next turned the spotlight on our respondents to check if they are finding AI features useful to their own jobs. (This wording is designed to make it explicitly about utility, rather than measuring which organizations are forcing AI on their employees.) Essentially, 84% say they are, and the rest say they aren’t.

We asked this same question last year, and the changes are fascinating. The “Yes, it’s somewhat useful” number grew 5%, and the “Yes, it’s very much useful” number grew a staggering 24%. Meanwhile, “Mostly not useful” dropped 19% and “Definitely not useful” dropped 11%. This strongly suggests a rapid uptake and embrace of AI among the Apple pros in our survey group.

Read on for category-by-category scores and comments from participants.

Enterprise programs

Grade: B (average score: 3.7, last year: 3.5)

After a step back last year, this category continued on its generally rising path for the life of our survey. Large sites and businesses felt better about the category than smaller sites and education.

Panelists were enthusiastic about some specific new features, but there are still long-standing gaps that generate frustration. And what’s Apple Business, anyway?

Praise for AxM API:

• “Apple took a major step forward this past year by adding an API to Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager…. The ability to enforce device management system migration for the 26 series of operating systems is a game changer.” — Tom Bridge
• “This year we got two features Mac Admins wanted for a long time: Apple Business Manager public API and automated migration between MDMs via ABM with Automated Device Enrollment.” — Michal Moravec

So… Apple Business, huh?

• “Apple Business’s web interface feels more like an early prototype than a production-level system. The launch was most likely rushed and not very well coordinated between various teams at Apple.” — Michal Moravec

• “The introduction of new access controls for device management … [is] helpful. [But the] April 14th [launch] introduced many controls (Brands/Ads) which shouldn’t be mixed with Device/User controls in my opinion.” — Marian Albers

• “At first blush, I’m not impressed — but we’ll see.” — Alex Meretten

Subscriptions and VPP

• “Apple still does not provide managed volume purchases and deployment for App Store subscriptions and in-App purchases.” — Armin Briegel

• “It is still not possible to purchase subscriptions for VPP. Which is really weird and annoying, as Apple pushes subscriptions from its own Creator Studio suite… and admins can’t purchase them for their company’s employees!” — Guillaume Gète

• “Weird gaps chronically remain, like an inability to buy IAPs and subscriptions even to Apple’s own software like Creator Studio.” — Bob McGillicuddy

Privilege and role problems

• “Privileges and roles remain a vulnerable spot in Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. There’s no way to scope read-only access for third-party integrations with the API, and built-in roles like Device Manager lack meaningful guardrails against bulk device changes.” — Brian LaShomb

Enterprise service and support

Grade: B- (average score: 3.5, last year: 3.6)

After hitting a high in 2023-2024, the service and support category has dropped slightly in two consecutive years. In this category, smaller sites seem happier than bigger ones. Panelists whose organizations have direct Apple account reps or active relationships seem to feel better about the whole thing, but those relying on Feedback Assistant or AppleCare are far more likely to despairingly refer to a “black hole.” Structural issues with enterprise AppleCare were also singled out for criticism.

Woe is Feedback Assistant

• “Feedback remains an area of concern for Mac Admins. Unless you have an expensive support contract, you might as well write your concerns down on a piece of paper, fold it into a paper airplane, and sail it south of Salesforce Tower toward Apple Park.” — Tom Bridge

• “The beta programs are always helpful, but any response to real feedback is nonexistent. It feels like a placebo.” — Craig Cohen

• “I still have feedbacks I wrote ages ago that are not fixed, or things that have been fixed for which I got no notification of the fix in Feedback Assistant!” — Guillaume Gète

AppleCare frustrations

• “AppleCare for Enterprise has a broader reputation problem in the administrator community. Being allocated a small number of support ticket credits per year, only to be told you’ve run out when you raise an issue, is a terrible experience.” — Michael Jon

• “The few times I have had to reach out to support, it has been convoluted to get to the enterprise support team. I have spent plenty of time in the non-enterprise support queue to only be handed off when we get through the laborious basic troubleshooting.” — Jered Benoit

Praise for AppleSeed beta program

• “Having clear instructions on how to leverage our AppleCare Enterprise support to get our deployment blockers looked at during the beta season made a big difference. Seeing those bugs fixed from one beta to the other is amazing.” — Martin Piron

• “The Enterprise Release notes are extremely valuable.” — Marcus Rowell

Apple employees are very helpful, unless they get laid off

• “Apple laid off most of the system engineers that supported our region, which has significantly degraded our ability to get tailored advice about how new features and technologies will impact our environment.” — Luke Charters

• “The Apple employees I get to directly work with provide more knowledge and support than any other vendor in any field I’ve ever worked in.” — Christopher Cook

What is it about documentation?

• “Apple’s problems aren’t things like the programs or support themselves. Those are solid. The problems are the ‘little’ things, like documentation…. If you need documentation of things like logging, God will literally help you before Apple will.” — John Welch

• “Reddit provides better documentation than Apple. There is no known bug list that I can refer to.” — Jered Benoit

• “Release notes for Enterprise are generally good, but admins still often have to gather information from various sources… It would be nice for all of them to be available in one spot.” — Armin Briegel

Hardware reliability and innovation

Grade: A+ (average score: 4.7, last year: 4.4)

It’s Apple’s top score in our regular Report Card survey, and it’s the top score here, too, with hardware praise shooting up more than any other score on the survey. Do you think the person in charge of hardware at Apple deserves a promotion? Hmm. Maybe. Panelists continue to love Apple silicon on the Mac, and the MacBook Neo was specifically singled out for praise.

Apple silicon Macs put Intel in the rearview

• “The M-series is so far above and beyond what the rest of the industry is offering right now that it’s not really a close comparison.” — Michael Jon

Thoughts on Neo

• “Not long ago, I never would have expected to hear fleet management peers, even the most committed Apple skeptics, openly praising a Mac as the most performant, best-built, fastest to procure, and most cost-effective option on the market.” — Kale Kingdon

• “The MacBook NEO is finally an affordable option for education. Hopefully it reverses the trend towards Chromebooks.” — David Rizzo

Reliability and repairability

• “We have had more issues this year than in previous” — Craig Cohen

• “The persistent issue is repairability, and it’s getting harder to ignore as we head into what’s looking like a rocky economic period…. The cost difference between Apple replacing your storage and a consumer doing it themselves is significant.” — Michael Jon

Procurement and availability issues

• “The tariff environment in 2025 and 2026 has been chaotic…. For enterprise procurement teams, the combination of rising hardware costs, soldered components that can’t be replaced, and stretched refresh cycles means the total cost of ownership conversation around Macs is getting harder to win internally.” — Michael Jon

• “My only problem with the state of Apple hardware is that channel inventory dries up after a new chip is announced… We’re going to be very short on laptops very soon.” — Alex Meretten

• “The biggest issue with it is lead times on orders.” — Luke Charters

• “The product matrix is starting to become overwhelming… why do we need the iPhone 16, iPhone 17e, iPhone Air, iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro all being sold at the same time?” — Shaun Bentzen

Software reliability and innovation

Grade: C+ (average score: 3.3, last year: 3.0)

Apple’s hardware may be riding high, but software is not going great. And yet the score went back up from last year’s low of 3.0. macOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass were the dominant sources of negativity. Complaints ranged from cosmetic inconsistency to serious breakage.

Liquid Glass resistance

• “Liquid Glass is a disaster, especially for macOS, with the stupidly rounded windows where content is clipped, and they’re hard to resize.” — Cameron Kay

• “Liquid Glass mostly feels like a change for change’s sake. With so many rough edges and inconsistencies, our users are unhappy with it.” — Marcus Rowell

• “I’m not a Liquid Glass hater, I actually like it overall…. But the core reliability problems remain, and needless bugs were introduced and shipped with Liquid Glass.” — TJ Draper

• “The software quality continues to slide downhill…. A UI which is supposed to elevate the content distracts from the content or makes the content less readable.” — Michal Moravec

• “Liquid glass did not feel like a cohesive UI overhaul — just a skin…. When Apple does it, and corner radii don’t match, or text is illegible, or context menu icons are reused, it’s much less acceptable.” — Emilio Garcia

More releases, more bugs

• “I’ve never filed more bugs for a major release before…. These weren’t ‘The radius on the corners of this window element doesn’t match’ — they were ‘this is utterly broken.'” — Andrew B

• “Software reliability has taken a hit over the last year. A number of persistent and significant bugs are notably present in Tahoe.” — David McMonnies

• “I feel like I’ve seen more problematic software … than I have in previous years. I’m still not a fan of the annual OS cycle… take some time to get it right first.” — David Rizzo

Creator Studio issues

• “The rollout of Creator Studio was a mess. It coincided with the start of the spring semester, and Apple released a version of Logic that was incompatible with VPP licensing.” — Christopher Cook

• “The new Creator Studio updates were a complex task to manage…. It took quite some time to be able to suppress those subscriptions via a configuration profile.” — Morgan Schönberger

A little positivity

• “The new Spotlight stuff is killer. Actions within Spotlight have allowed me to create some nice new automations.” — Shane Thompson

• “DDM for macOS updates is a genuine bright spot.” — Michael Jon

Security and privacy

Grade: A- (average score: 4.2, last year: 4.0)

Apple’s commitment to security and privacy has always scored well on this survey, and this year saw a bounce back after a couple of years of backsliding. Panelists gave Apple credit for not just paying lip service but taking both issues seriously. However, there were definitely criticisms of specific issues.

Praise for Apple’s approach

• “I genuinely think Apple is the sole OS provider… taking this seriously, and they take it more seriously than everyone else combined.” — John Welch

• “Apple’s platforms are probably still the best thing out there on the market in this aspect.” — Michal Moravec

• “Apple’s zero-day response cadence has been solid this year…. The response pipeline works.” — Michael Jon

SMS reliance is a big problem

• “The SMS-only two-factor authentication on Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager is, frankly, embarrassing in 2026…. Consumer accounts get phishing-resistant authentication. The accounts that manage thousands of devices… are still protected by a six-digit SMS code sent to a phone number that any motivated attacker can port in an afternoon.” — Michael Jon

• “It’s long past time for Apple to adopt One Time Password over SMS for Apple IDs that require Multi-Factor Authentication.” — Brian LaShomb

Mac pop-ups and security alerts are out of control

• “The number of uncontrollable, un-actionable pop-ups in macOS presented to Enterprise end users is out of hand…. This is training users to simply click OK on a dialogue they neither understand nor care about, simply to get their job done.” — Andrew B

• “The constant nagging pop-up, modal dialogs are actually detrimental to security…. Just recently, a dialog popped up asking for permission to do… something… but out of reflex, I clicked ‘allow’ before my brain registered anything.” — TJ Draper

• “Apple’s first-party apps get a fundamentally different experience from third-party apps when requesting screen recording access…. That’s not a difference in security posture, that’s preferential API access for Apple’s own products dressed up as a security feature.” — Michael Jon

• “For corporate-joined devices to have public MAC addresses [and pre-approved screen recording] would be improvements in my opinion.” — Jered Benoit

The continued tension between user privacy and organizational needs

• “I feel like I’ve been seeing IT admins have more control over endpoints. If we have MDM, we shouldn’t have to ask the user to allow our remote support tool to have access to screen recording.” — Jeff Anderson

Deployment

Grade: B+ (average score: 3.9, last year: 3.7)

Deployment is the little engine that could. The score started low in 2021 but has steadily improved, reaching an all-time high this year. Automated Device Enrollment (ADE) was universally praised as rock-solid and best in class, and panelists also praised Declarative Device Management (DDM) for software updates and Apple’s new MDM migration tool. Unfortunately, OS upgrade enforcement remains problematic, and Apple’s release timing was criticized as being disconnected from the realities of fleet management.

Automated Device Enrollment

• “ADE is still magic after all these years.” — Erik Kramer
• “My Windows counterparts wish they had such a reliable system for auto-provisioning endpoints. Autopilot is coming along, but it remains, uh, a work-in-progress.” — Damien Barrett
• “Compared to other platforms, Apple’s Automated Deployment Environment is best in class.” — Andrew Laurence

DDM and Software Updates

• “Improvements in Declarative Device Management made a huge difference to ensure computers and devices are properly updated.” — Guillaume Gète
• “The ongoing evolution of Declarative Device Management has been a slow build, but has reached a real-world ‘out of preview’ result-driven goal.” — Craig Cohen
• “While DDM for Software Update is a good start, it’s still fairly limited. Without reliable scheduling and enforcement controls, we still see better compliance using Nudge.” — Brian LaShomb
• “Software updates are still a PITA, but are gradually becoming less of a PITA than they used to be. The bottleneck is always users who ignore update prompts for whatever reason. (It’s amazing the amount of inconvenience some of them will put up with to avoid a reboot.)” — Bart Reardon

Upgrade enforcement issues

• “OS upgrades still need improvements — there is still no way to force updates when users are able to cancel updates, even if they are past their due dates. Users are still able to go around these updates by simply leaving software open.” — Gabriel Marcelino
• “On macOS, the user-facing UI (just notifications) is not sufficient. Admins still need to deploy custom UI such as Nudge or DDM-OS-Reminder … I wish Apple would provide a full-screen UI similar to what happens on iOS.” — Michal Moravec
• “We desperately need maintenance windows for DDM updates (had an experience with machines restarting mid-exam after they missed their midnight-scheduled update deadline), and when DDM fails, the process is so opaque that it becomes incredibly difficult to troubleshoot.” — Emilio Garcia

Release Timing

• “The release of macOS 26.2 on a Friday afternoon, two days before the 90-day maximum on the Major OS Deferral profile expired … I don’t think this is how you want to roll out a major OS update in an Enterprise environment.” — Andrew B
• “OS upgrades remain a black eye — there’s just too many edge cases where you need to rely on an XKCD-style stack of open source software maintained by one guy. But really, at this point, in 2026, it is far, far easier to deploy a macOS device than a Windows machine.” — Alex Meretten

MDM commentary

• “The standout this year is Apple’s new MDM migration tool, which allows end-user machines to move between MDM providers cleanly. That is genuinely groundbreaking. I don’t think the industry has fully absorbed what this means yet, but I think we’re going to see a wave of MDM vendor switching over the next couple of years as a result.” — Michael Jon
• “It is great that Apple has implemented a way to move MDM vendors through Apple Business (Manager). While it still has some caveats and possible problems, it’s a great first attempt on an issue many admins face sooner or later.” — Morgan Schönberger

macOS identity management

Grade: C+ (average score: 3.3, last year: 3.3)

A middling score indicates complicated feelings about identity management and SSO. Panelists acknowledge that Apple’s framework is sound conceptually, but it’s hindered by implementation from identity providers.

Waiting for identity providers

• “Apple’s horse is ready to pull, but the identity vendors need to do their part, and they don’t even have their harness hitched to a wagon, yet.” — Erik Kramer

• “I would have rated it a 5, but there’s too much work to be done by IdPs to fully support this.” — Karsten Fischer

• “It’s frustrating that Simplified Setup for Platform SSO is taking so long for vendors like Microsoft to implement and not at all clear if they will implement enough to support Auto Advance in Setup Assistant for shared Macs.” — Cameron Kay

• “The Microsoft iteration isn’t even in GA yet.” — David McMonnies

Production issues

• “I’m fielding questions about keychain pass issues, attestation failures with the identity provider, and having to fully remove and re-enroll devices to resolve them.” — Michael Jon

• “Login window agents such as Jamf Connect and XCreds are still practically required for nearly all our use cases in Education, but are consistently broken with minor point releases due to adjustments to background tasks, keychains, secure tokens or otherwise.” — Kale Kingdon

Microsoft is ahead here

• “Microsoft already does this…. My Windows users, small fleet as it is, never raise issues with it. The cloud identity synchronization just works. On the Mac side, that same confidence doesn’t exist yet.” — Michael Jon

• “pSSO may be technically far superior over AD/LDAP binding, but it is nowhere near as easy to set up…. There being no reference implementation, you can’t automate pSSO; you have to automate a given vendor’s implementation of pSSO.” — John Welch

• “I miss AD binding sometimes.” — Emilio Garcia

MDM protocol and infrastructure

Grade: B+ (average score: 3.9, last year: 3.8)

Another category where the scores keep going up. Panelists are optimistic about the trajectory, while still being frustrated by the gaps in implementation, lag from vendors, and Apple’s communication.

DDM trajectory

• “Declarative software-update management seems to have finally hit the mark.” — Martin Piron

• “DDM is still a bit too finicky and difficult to troubleshoot.” — Guillaume Gète

• “DDM got way more stable in the last year. Especially, software updates have become more reliable and are much less of a burden. The real task here is with the MDM vendors to integrate the new capabilities into their product.” — Morgan Schönberger

Vendor adoption lag hurts

• “The protocols are often mature and working, but the vendors sometimes just don’t implement them in the best way.” — Erik Kramer

• “It still appears that Apple can improve in its communications with MDM vendors, especially around best practices with DDM and software update management. Also, declaring certain MDM features deprecated while at the same time not having information about their replacement can be confusing for admins.” — Jeremy Leland

• “Apple has been awfully slow with the migration of the old profile configurations to DDM.” — Michal Moravec

Migration functionality is great

• “Making clean device migration between MDM providers possible is a significant infrastructure improvement…. It lowers switching costs, which is healthy for competition and long overdue.” — Michael Jon

• “Being able to move from one MDM to another very easily straight from Apple Business Manager [is] definitely a game changer.” — Guillaume Gète

Gaps in the details

• “Apple needs to add Update Inventory, Restart, Shut Down, Set Time Zones, Enable Remote Login (SSH) and Manage Login Window wallpaper commands for macOS.” — Cameron Kay

• “Force Bluetooth On or Off, rather than freeze it in its current state on macOS…. Restrict macOS only to connect to Managed Networks, like in iOS.” — Kale Kingdon

• “Every app that ships on a managed device should have a documented set of configuration keys that administrators can set via MDM.” — Michael Jon

The future of Apple in the enterprise

Grade: A- (average score: 4.2, last year: 3.7)

An enormous jump in this category to an all-time high presumably means an injection of optimism about Apple’s role in the enterprise. The MacBook Neo was repeatedly praised, especially as a possible leading product for education and more budget-conscious enterprises.

The MacBook Neo

• “Never in my career have I seen this volume of schools investigating a move to Apple. The MacBook Neo could not have come at a better time, as sharply rising PC prices are prompting schools to look for other options.” — Luke Charters

• “I cannot understate how the MacBook Neo is a once-in-a-decade opportunity for them to acquire market share against their competitors.” — Kale Kingdon

Hardware reigns at Apple

• “The future is bright.” — Martin Piron

• “The hardware is saving the software’s bacon, and has been for years. Apple has a lot of work to do to make their software justify their hardware, in terms of reliability, operability, and configurability.” — Tom Bridge

Apple has under-resourced its own enterprise efforts

• “If Apple had 1,000 engineers in the Enterprise team like they have in the iPhone Camera team we’d see a lot more progress. I’m not sure Tim Cook’s spreadsheet is quite willing to go that far.” — Cameron Kay

• “Apple needs to learn how to create good software again…. From the outside, it looks like the company is spread thin on so many things, which is weird when you consider Apple is one of the wealthiest businesses in the world.” — Michal Moravec

Trouble with Macs in the enterprise

• “On the ‘I just need a browser and an email client’ tier of enterprise devices… ChromeOS Flex on commodity hardware is a compelling alternative…. That’s a hard conversation for Apple to win on cost alone.” — Michael Jon

• “Developers opting out of the Mac ecosystem entirely when given the choice… is not quiet anymore.” — Michael Jon

• “Macs don’t do particularly well in the Enterprise, both despite… and because of… Microsoft.” — N Clarke

Apple delivered in key areas

• “This last year, Apple delivered on pent-up asks: AxM APIs, AxM-managed MDM migrations, simplified Platform Single Sign-On enrollment, and — wonder of wonders! — a first-party MDM offering. Apple’s combined enterprise value has gone up.” — Andrew Laurence

• “Apple seems to be taking enterprise more and more seriously every year.” — Shane Thompson

• “Apple has the bones of a great enterprise platform. The question is whether they’ll do the detail work to keep the people who are starting to drift.” — Michael Jon

Gotta wear shades? Or no?

• “The future of Apple in Enterprise is a coin toss. On the one hand, the unmatched hardware, ease of deployment and zero-touch capabilities are all easily sold in Enterprise. On the other hand, the lack of crucial controls and management for Apple Intelligence … are liabilities that Apple currently seems to be underestimating.” — Andrew B

• “Don’t let ‘It Just Works’ lie on the cutting room floor, to be used as a meme to denigrate the product. Make it the guiding star again.” — Kale Kingdon

AI adoption and management

We asked the panelists about how they manage AI in their organizations. And yes, they had some thoughts.

Concerns about controls

• “Enterprise needs an ‘off’ switch for Apple Intelligence. As in, ‘disable all of it, and prove that it’s disabled.’ Again, this isn’t a preference, it’s a requirement imposed by C-levels, regulators, and auditors.” — Andrew B

• “The biggest concern with AI features is data exfiltration to unmanaged external providers.” — N Clarke

• “Previously, to lose control of data, the user had to actively upload information, or an attacker had to compromise your systems. In an AI and agentic world, your organization’s data can be scanned, assessed and extracted without the user, or IT, understanding what is happening.” — Marcus Rowell

Possible control solutions

• “We manage this through a central AI Gateway that routes most LLM traffic, applies shared guardrails and observability, and a Responsible AI framework … that governs which tools are approved, how data is used, and how risks are controlled across the organization.” — Martin Piron

• “We’ve introduced LiteLLM as an LLM and AI gateway, which gives us a centralized layer to manage model access, usage, and spend rather than having teams spin up their own GCP projects every time they want to experiment with a model.” — Michael Jon

The tension between hype and reality

• “Top management is in both ‘all in’ camps, the ‘we don’t want to be Nokiaed’ and the ‘this will multiply individual performances by 3x.'” — Luca Accomazzi

• “While some people use AI with great effect, others still expect it to just create their PowerPoint presentations, complete with company design and without any need for proofreading. There is still a way to go to teach users the capabilities and caveats of AI tools.” — Morgan Schönberger

• “I hear a huge majority of rank-and-file business workers are being told they must use developer tools to… leverage MCP servers and access data to do their jobs now, which is false in several ways: the data is usually incomplete so they draw poor conclusions… and the tools are IDEs or command line heavy, designed and supported by under-resourced dev tools teams — this is not for mere mortals.” — Allister Banks

Attitudes toward different vendors

• “We use Google Workspace, so we’re steering our staff to Google Gemini, because through Google Workspace, Google is giving us document retention and data controls over how our staff uses Gemini…. If we wanted to use ChatGPT or Claude, we’d have to sign a contract with OpenAI or Anthropic and would need to pay additional money.” — Joel Housman

• “OpenAI has become the McDonald’s of the AI world. Ubiquitous, convenient, and fine if you’re not thinking too hard about what you’re consuming. We’re shifting our attention toward Claude and properly integrated tooling like Gemini, where the enterprise story is more mature.” — Michael Jon

• “We appreciate AI vendors that think about enterprise use cases and implement policy management for their tools. Claude Code is a good example of a vendor trying to provide necessary control for enterprises.” — Michal Moravec

Skepticism

• “A lot of AI products are garbage and marketing hype. Or they are security nightmares. But some generative coding tools are useful.” — Chris Carr

• “I think AI is a waste of water and electricity in the currently popularized manner.” — Shaun Bentzen

• “My apprehension is around the other end of the spectrum, where AI is being used to do someone’s job for them entirely…. executives see those case studies and the mental leap isn’t ‘great, our engineers are more productive.’ It’s ‘why are we paying this person?'” — Michael Jon

Personal AI adoption

At the top of the story, we asked our panelists how they personally use AI. Here are some responses.

Scripting and code review

• “I use it often as I’m writing code. It can, at times, be very helpful. Other times it misses the mark so bad as to make me wonder how it could get it so wrong.” — TJ Draper

• “My world is full of short-form tasks. Scripts or tasks that do a specific thing and are relatively short. AI is amazing at this stuff.” — Bart Reardon

• “I use AI for reviewing code rather than writing it. I’ll use it to spot inconsistencies and flag things I might have missed. That’s where it genuinely earns its place for me.” — Michael Jon

• “Chatbots are very helpful in making me faster when I work with things I know and understand. It’s quite risky to rely solely on chatbots in areas where I don’t have much knowledge.” — Michal Moravec

• “Personal rule, though: I don’t ask an LLM to do anything that I couldn’t do myself if given time and motivation. If I can’t review it and know what’s going on, it becomes a liability for future me.” — Bart Reardon

• “Don’t forget to check their work.” — Adam Tomczynski

Apple Intelligence is bad, others are good

• “The AI that I use is never Apple’s.” — John Cleary

• “My team, for development, uses Claude Code, CodeSense, GitLab Duo, Aikido AI for security, Gemini Gems, you name them.” — Luca Accomazzi

• “Claude is my IT intern helping me work through troubleshooting and process, project, and policy management.” — Jered Benoit

The AI dissenters

• “I tried Gemini once to help with a specific CGEvent command in Swift…. I felt gross, like my project was tainted — it no longer was a product of my own creation.” — Emilio Garcia

• “I wish I could hibernate for like 4 years… the dust will have settled.” — Allister Banks

• “The ethical, economical, ecological, and social implications of the technology and especially the corporations that are pushing them and how they are being sold and marketed concern me deeply, and I am holding back on those grounds.” — Armin Briegel

• “I’d like to see more effort and research put into how AI can be made sustainable from a resource usage point of view … and more ethical in the source of training materials.” — Bart Reardon

Complete commentary and wrap-up

This year, I’ve chosen to summarize comments and present choice quotes. The complete commentary from participants who allowed themselves to be quoted is also available, if you’d like to read even more.

Thanks to everyone who participated: Adam Selby, Adam Tomczynski, Alex Meretten, Allister Banks, Andrew B, Andrew Laurence, Armin Briegel, Bart Reardon, Bob McGillicuddy, Brian LaShomb, Cameron Kay, Casey Scruggs, Charles Misson, Chris Carr, Chris Pommer, Chris Waldrip, Christopher Cook, Craig Cohen, Damien Barrett, Dan Cunningham, David McMonnies, David Rizzo, Dennis Logue, Emilio Garcia, Erik Kramer, Everette Allen, Fridolin Koch, Gabriel Marcelino, Guillaume Gète, Guy, Hüseyin Usta, Ian Magnone, Jason Hedrick, Jason Smallwood, Jeff Anderson, Jeff Grisso, Jeff Richardson, Jeff Wimer , Jeff Zander, Jeffrey Hoover, Jered Benoit, Jeremy Bodokh, Jeremy Leland, Jesper van a, Joel Housman, John Cleary, John Delfino, John Welch, John Wetter, Jordy Thery, Justin McMahan, Kale Kingdon, Karsten Fischer, Kevin, Luca Accomazzi, Luke Charters, Marcus Rowell, Marian Albers, Martin Piron, Matthias Choules, Michael Jon, Michal Moravec, Mike Stirrup, Mike Wells, Morgan Schönberger, N Clarke, Payton, Peter Loobuyck, Philippe Sainte-Marie, Robbie Trencheny, Ross Harrison, Shane Thompson, Shaun Bentzen, Stephen Grall, Stephen Johnson, TJ Draper, Tom Bridge, Troy Greig, W. Andrew Robinson, Zak Winnick, and those who preferred to remain anonymous.

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Pretty soon, we aren’t going to have Tim Cook to kick around anymore. Or at least, when we kick him around, it’ll be a sort of executive chair kind of kicking. (Wait, I was told there would be no more kicking!)

Regardless of pending executive transitions, Apple released its corporate earnings for the second fiscal quarter of 2026, and Tim Cook got to bask in the sun — and dodge questions from analysts — for one of the last times.

The charts have all been generated, and Tim Cook hasn’t yet regenerated into John Ternus, so here’s a quick set of additional observations about what’s going on in the business of Apple.

A new definition of boring

Apple’s business has been very, very seasonal for a long time—certainly back to the introduction of the iPod, if not before. Apple sells a lot of stuff in the last three months of the year, not only because it’s the holiday season, but these days because it’s also new iPhone season.

Those holiday quarters are huge. They stand out on any chart you make. The other quarters, well, they’re the sag in the saddle. They’re important because you need 12 months to make a calendar, but they’ve never had the sizzle of the holiday quarter.

Which is why it’s so impressive that, for two successive “boring” quarters, Apple has generated more than $100 billion in revenue. In 2020, Apple’s “boring” quarters averaged $60.9 billion in revenue. That a company this large can still grow this much in five years is astounding. When I describe Apple as the world’s foremost machine that generates cash, I am not kidding.

Speaking of cash, back in 2018, Apple declared that its policy was to become “cash neutral over time,” because its cash flow had gotten so ridiculous that it was sitting on $163 billion in net cash. In practice, Apple attempted to spend its extra money largely through stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.

Eight years later and more than a trillion dollars of cash return later, things are changing, at least a little. “As we move ahead, we are no longer providing net cash neutral as a formal target, and we will independently evaluate cash and debt,” Apple CFO Kevan Parekh said on Thursday’s call.

Now, I’m sure there are a lot of complex financial reasons Apple has decided to back away from net cash neutral, and Parekh was quick to point out that Apple’s board had authorized $100 billion to be used in future stock buybacks. The company, he said, is still “very committed to returning excess cash to shareholders.”

The key concept here seems to be flexibility. It sure sounds to me like Apple wants the ability to, for example, stash a little extra cash away so that it’s capable of making big moves if it needs to. Maybe that’s capital expenditures involving AI stuff. Maybe it’s keeping enough cash ready to spring if there’s a company it feels like it can acquire, in whole or in part. (Apple’s cash flow is an enormous advantage should it come across a relevant company that’s in fiscal distress.)

I also have to wonder if the company might be considering larger investments to normalize its component supplies. Right now, RAM is at a premium, and Apple’s using every chip TSMC can manufacture for it. Maybe Apple wants the leeway to give billions of dollars to a partner to build a factory and pre-buy all the output of that factory for a certain number of years. Not cheap, but if you’ve got the cash, maybe a good longer-term investment.

We’ll see what happens. I just think it’s interesting that Apple went to the trouble of formally disengaging from its old monetary policy so it can get a little more room to maneuver. Usually, if you’re looking for that, it means you are thinking of maneuvering, right?

Memory costs are starting to affect Apple

Apple’s careful planning meant it could combat the rising cost of memory for a little while, but that time seems to be coming to an end. Here’s what Cook said Thursday:

In the December quarter, we really had a minimal impact due to memory, and you can kind of see that in the gross margin results. We said it would be a bit more in the March quarter, and we did see higher memory costs in the March quarter, and they were partially offset by benefits from carry-in inventory that we had. For the June quarter and what’s embedded in the guidance that Kevan went through earlier, we expect significantly higher memory costs. They are also partly offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. And then, where we don’t give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business. And we’ll continue to evaluate this, and as we’ve said before, we’ll look at a range of options.

What are those options? Cook said he didn’t really want to go into it, but we can all probably guess: Lowering margins and/or raising prices. Apple tends to go about this in very careful ways—base prices may stay the same, with the cost of higher-end configurations seeing price increases. Its huge product margins give it room to maneuver, but Apple’s not ever going to want to give away margin. That’s not how it’s wired. Bottom line: Some Apple products are going to become more expensive in the near future, but it may be more complicated (and less obvious) than you expect.

Can’t sell ’em if you can’t make ’em

While having more demand for your products than you can fulfill is a good problem to have, it’s still a problem. Ideally, every person who wants to buy an Apple product would have their credit cards immediately charged and their product shipped. Unfortunately, we live in a world that suddenly has some dramatic tech supply constraints, and it bit Apple in the second quarter.

Oh, it’s the memory thing again, you might be thinking. But no! Apple’s current supply constraints are actually at Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), which can’t make Apple’s key SoCs (Systems on Chips) fast enough to fulfill Apple’s demand. Apple uses TSMC’s most advanced nodes, and according to Cook, “we’re not at the point where we’re saying this is going to end anytime soon.” There’s no button to push to make the conveyor belt at TSMC run faster.

Who does Cook blame? Himself, more or less. “We just under-called the demand,” he said. This constraint is hitting the iPhone as well as the Mac, and especially the Mac mini and Mac Studio, due to increased demands due to Apple silicon being a pretty great platform for agentic AI applications.

The MacBook Neo was also constrained, which is interesting, since I’m not sure that’s a TSMC supply problem. But Apple rolled it into its description of all the other issues it’s having. “We were very bullish on the product before announcing it, but we undercalled the level of enthusiasm that would be with it,” Cook said.

Memory is going to hit Apple, yes. And this quarter was already a record. And yet… if Apple had correctly forecast demand and made sure TSMC was able to supply that demand, it would’ve sold more iPhones and Macs in the last quarter. As I said, as bad stories go, it’s got good roots—but it’s still not ideal.

Tariff Talk with Tim

During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook could read an obviously prepared statement about tariffs, which included this bit:

In terms of applying for a refund of tariffs paid, we’re following the established processes, and we plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing. These would be new investments and would be in addition to our prior commitments in the U.S.

This is the sort of politics Cook will continue to be plying from the boardroom. Sure, Apple’s going to try to get its tariff money back. But it’s going to do so using the perfectly normal and established process, and if it does get billions back from the U.S. government, it double-promises to reinvest that money in the United States, above and beyond its already stated commitments. Trump Administration, take note.

Remember this moment with Bullish Tim

I’m going to miss Cook on these quarterly calls. He pointed out that Thursday’s call was his 89th, which, yes, predates his era as CEO. (Steve Jobs only attended the calls occasionally, leaving Cook to preside over them even as Chief Operating Officer.)

Anyway, one of Cook’s signature earnings call moves is being bullish on emerging markets. So a tip o’ the cap to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, who used his allotted two questions to ask Cook to play the hits—namely, to ask how he felt about Apple’s business in China and India.

After a few years in the doldrums, Apple’s last two quarters in China have been solid. Cook was quick to point out that the iPhone was the top-selling phone in urban China, the Mac mini was the top desktop in China, and the MacBook Air was the top laptop.

In terms of India, Cook got to point out (as he loves to do) that even with all of Apple’s growth there, it’s still got enormous growth potential:

It’s the second-largest smartphone market in the world and the third-largest PC market, and despite doing extremely well there for quite some time, we still have a modest share. And so I think that really speaks to the opportunity that we have…. Net-net, I’m over the moon excited about India.

I’m going to miss hearing from Tim Cook, the man who can generate the requisite enthusiasm about international business to use a phrase like “net-net over the moon.”

Some advice for John Ternus

During Cook’s introductory remarks on the earnings call, he allowed future CEO John Ternus to drop in and read a 250-word prepared statement. It was a necessary mutual-admiration society where Cook praised Ternus (“a brilliant engineer, a deep thinker, a person of remarkable character, and a born leader”), followed by Ternus immediately praising Cook (“one of the greatest business leaders of all time”). The whole point of this is to send the message to Wall Street that Apple’s got this and nobody needs to be worried.

What wasn’t quite as necessary was the door opened by Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani, who asked Cook if he could share any advice he had for John Ternus, given that Steve Jobs famously told Cook not to ask what he would do, but focus on doing what was right.

Here was Cook’s response:

I think Steve’s advice to me lifted a huge burden, and so that advice did well for me over the 15 years. For John… what I’ve told him is that one of the most important decisions he’ll make is where to spend his time. And I would spend it where the greatest benefit to the company and the users are, and never forget the north star for the company. We’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives, and if you keep focusing on that and make your decisions around that, it will produce a great business, and we’ll be able to build more products and do it all over again.

Now don’t get all misty on us, Tim. There’s still your 90th analyst call to come, sometime in late July. I hope someone remembers to bake a cake for that one.

Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe brag a little about setting an all-time record or two. And oh, who’s this?! It’s future CEO John Ternus joining as well!

This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call for April 30, 2026.

Tim Cook’s introduction

Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for joining the call. Before we get into the quarter, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the transition we recently announced. I just celebrated my 28th anniversary of being here at Apple, 15 years as CEO. In fact, this will be my 89th earnings call.

I’ll always be proud of the impact Apple has had on our users’ lives. And I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for our amazing teams. It’s because of them that there is no company like Apple, and I truly believe there never will be.

This moment for the transition is the right one for a number of reasons. First, our business has been performing extremely well. The first half of this year was very strong, growing double digits year over year. Second, our roadmap is incredible. And most importantly, we have the right leader ready to step into the role. As I have said, there’s no one on this planet I trust more to lead Apple into the future than John Ternus.

John is a brilliant engineer, a deep thinker, a person of remarkable character, and a born leader. I know he will push us to go further than we think is possible in order to deliver the greatest products and services for our users. I have been so proud to call him a colleague and a friend, and I will be even more proud to call him Apple’s CEO.

Over the coming months, John and I will be working closely together to make sure this transition is perfectly smooth. I very much look forward to stepping into the role of Executive Chairman on September 1st. As I’ve told John, I will be here to support him in any way he needs and in any way I can. I am incredibly optimistic about Apple’s future and I know we have the right team in place to deliver on the promise of this company.

I also want to take just a moment to share my profound gratitude for our shareholders, especially our long-term shareholders, for believing in Apple and for your support over the years. It means a great deal to all of us. With that, I’d like to bring John on the call for a moment to say a few words. John?

John Ternus’s statement

Thanks, Tim, and thanks to everyone on the call. In my view, Tim is one of the greatest business leaders of all time. Stepping into the role of CEO is an incredible honor and it means a great deal to me to have Tim’s trust and confidence. I want to echo Tim’s sentiment about our shareholders, especially those who have been with us for many years. Thank you so much for your confidence in our company. As you know, one of the hallmarks of Tim’s tenure has been a deep thoughtfulness, deliberateness, and discipline when it comes to the financial decision-making of the company, and I want you to know that is something Kevan and I intend to continue when I transition into the role in September.

This is an especially exciting moment for Apple. As Tim mentioned, we have an incredible roadmap ahead, and while you’re not going to get me to talk about the details of that roadmap, suffice it to say, this is the most exciting time in my 25 year career at Apple to be building products and services. There are so many opportunities before us and I couldn’t be more optimistic about what’s to come.

For now, let me simply say, I am deeply grateful to Tim, to the executive team and to everyone at Apple, and I look forward to all of the important work ahead. And with that, let me turn it back over to Tim.

Tim Cook’s opening statement

Thanks, John. Now let me turn to the quarter. Today, Apple is proud to report $111.2 billion in revenue, up 17% from a year ago, and a March quarter record, which was above the high end of our guidance range despite supply constraints. Customer enthusiasm for iPhone has been extraordinary, with revenue growing 22% year-over-year to achieve a March quarter record. Services reached an all-time revenue record, growing 16% from a year ago, while EPS set a March quarter record of $2.01, up 22% year-over-year.

We set March quarter revenue records and grew double digits in every geographic segment including strong double-digit growth in Greater China and the rest of Asia-Pacific. We also achieved March quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets and saw double-digit growth in nearly every emerging market we track, including India.

We recently marked Apple’s 50th anniversary with celebrations in our retail stores and with users around the world. It was a special moment for us to reflect on the incredible journey we’ve shared with our users, to thank everyone who’s been a part of it, and to look forward to writing the next chapter in our story of innovation. We have always believed that people who think different can change the world, and we have been proud to build tools and technologies that allow them to do just that.

In March, we put an amazing showcase of human creativity and ingenuity in action with updates across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Through an unforgettable week of innovation, we also unveiled MacBook Neo, giving us an opportunity to bring the power of Mac to more people than ever before.

I’ll have more to say on that and all the incredible things we delivered for our customers over the last few months. Now let’s take a closer look at results from across our product line, beginning with iPhone.

As I mentioned earlier, iPhone had an excellent quarter with $57 billion in revenue, a March quarter record despite supply constraints. During the quarter, we welcomed iPhone 17e, the newest addition to what is already the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had. It brings outstanding performance and core iPhone experiences at a remarkable value for everyone from enterprise teams to consumers.

Across the lineup, this is the most powerful, capable, and versatile iPhone family we’ve ever created. That starts with the latest in Apple Silicon for iPhone, A19 and A19 Pro, which include neural accelerators in the GPU to deliver a huge boost to AI performance. With incredible performance in battery life and deep integration of Apple intelligence, iPhone continues to set the standard for what a smartphone can be. Customers are capturing stunning photos and videos with our most advanced camera system ever on iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, including an 8X optical quality zoom, and the all-new Center Stage front camera, unlocking entirely new ways to frame, create, and share their moments.

In fact, during their recent mission, Artemis II astronauts captured some truly otherworldly images of Earth and space using iPhone 17 Pro Max. Meanwhile, iPhone Air users are tapping into the pro-level performance in our slimmest iPhone ever. And with iPhone 17, we’re seeing a strong response not only from customers upgrading from previous generations, but also from people choosing iPhone for the very first time.

We’ve been enormously pleased with how the entire lineup has been received. In fact, the iPhone 17 family is now the most popular lineup in our history, when looking at the launch through the March quarter. And according to IDC, we gained market share during the quarter.

Mac revenue was 8.4 billion dollars for the March quarter, up 6% from a year ago despite supply constraints driven by higher than expected levels of demand. We’re delighted with the reception of what is the most advanced Mac lineup in our history. We set March quarter records for upgraders and customers new to Mac, and according to IDC, we gained market share in the quarter. From Mac Mini to MacBook Pro and everything in between, Mac is the best platform for AI, with Apple Silicon delivering exceptional performance, industry-leading efficiency, and the ability to run advanced models locally in ways that simply weren’t possible before. It’s so exciting to see how strongly users are embracing Mac for these capabilities.

There’s tremendous enthusiasm for MacBook Neo, which made its debut during the March quarter, opening up an entirely new way to experience Mac at a breakthrough price. We’ve also further improved MacBook Air, already the world’s most popular laptop, with M5, making everyday tasks faster and more responsive than ever. MacBook Pro reaches new heights with M5 Pro and M5 Max, delivering extraordinary performance and dramatically advancing what users can do with AI on a portable system. And for desktop users, Studio Display pairs beautifully with Mac, while the all-new Studio Display XDR takes things even further, bringing unmatched image quality and an extraordinarily immersive experience to pro workflows.

Turning to iPad, revenue was $6.9 billion, up 8% from a year ago. iPad continues to be a great choice for students, small business owners, artists, and so many others, because it empowers entirely new ways to work, learn, create, and connect. It’s not just about mobility. It’s about versatility, delivering a uniquely flexible experience that adapts to whatever users want to accomplish.

Today, our iPad lineup is stronger than ever, led by the arrival of the M4-powered iPad Air. With a remarkable leap in performance, it raises the bar for what users can do on iPad, from advanced creative workflows to powerful productivity and immersive learning. And with the addition of our latest Apple Silicon along with the N1 wireless networking chip and C1X modem, users can stay seamlessly connected wherever they are.

Across wearables, home and accessories, revenue for the March quarter came in at $7.9 billion, up 5% from a year ago. Apple Watch Ultra 3, Apple Watch Series 11, and Apple Watch SE continue to play an essential role in users’ lives, going far beyond fitness tracking to deliver meaningful insights and support for their health and well-being. From helping users stay active and reach their fitness goals to delivering powerful, science-backed health insights that can prompt meaningful conversations with care providers, Apple Watch is with them every step of the way. It’s tremendously meaningful to see how Apple Watch continues to empower users to better understand their health, make more informed decisions, and in many cases, change and even save lives.

During the quarter, we introduced customers to a new level of audio experience with AirPods Max 2, delivering stunning sound quality and our most advanced active noise cancellation yet. At the same time, AirPods Pro 3 combine an incredibly immersive listening experience with intelligent features that adapt to how users move, train, and live. And whether it’s a call across town or a conversation across continents, AirPods make it effortless to stay connected. AirPods can bridge languages, too, thanks to live translation powered by Apple Intelligence.

In addition to live translation, Apple Intelligence brings together dozens of powerful capabilities from visual intelligence to Clean Up in photos, that are seamlessly integrated into the moments that matter most to our users every day. And we look forward to bringing a more personalized Siri to users coming this year.

What truly sets Apple apart is how Apple Intelligence is woven into the core of our platforms, powered by Apple Silicon, and designed from the ground up to deliver intelligence that is fast, personal, and private. This is not AI as a standalone feature, but AI as an essential intuitive part of the experience across our devices. It builds on years of innovation, from the neural engine, to advanced on-device processing, enabling capabilities that are not only incredibly powerful but also respectful of user privacy.

Increasingly, that same foundation is drawing developers and researchers to our products as powerful platforms for building and running agentic AI, thanks to the unique combination of performance, efficiency, and on-device capabilities. When you combine this level of integration with our relentless focus on the customer experience, it becomes clear why Apple platforms are the best place to experience AI.

Now let’s turn to services, which set an all-time revenue record with $31 billion. We saw double-digit growth in both developed and emerging markets and set new all-time revenue records across most of the services categories.

There’s no better place to find celebrated storytellers than Apple TV. Audiences are applauding the return of shows like “Your Friends and Neighbors,” “Shrinking,” and “For All Mankind,” while discovering new favorites like “Widow’s Bay.” Apple TV has also earned its place among the most decorated names in entertainment with more than 800 wins and more than 3,400 nominations in the six years since launch.

This is a great time for sports fans on Apple TV too. Formula One season kicked off in March, and Apple TV subscribers in the U.S. have one of the best views of the track. The new MLS season is also well underway, and subscribers in more than 100 countries and regions can watch every match with no blackouts. And Friday Night Baseball returned for its fifth year on Apple TV with a full season of marquee matchups.

In retail, we had a March quarter revenue record and saw very high levels of store traffic throughout the quarter. From New York to Chengdu to Paris, it was wonderful to see stores around the world at the center of Apple’s 50th anniversary celebrations. We were also thrilled to open the doors to our sixth store in India. It has been wonderful to see how we’ve continued to grow in India in recent years, part of our larger efforts to connect with even more customers and emerging markets all over the world.

At Apple, we believe powerful innovation and uncompromising quality can go hand-in-hand with sustainability. Over the last year, we’ve reached new milestones in the environment, including the use of recycled content in 30% of the materials in all of our products shipped in 2025, the most we’ve ever had. That includes the use of 100% recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries and 100% recycled rare-earth elements in all magnets. We’ve also achieved our goal of removing plastic from packaging with every Apple product now shipping in fiber-based packaging. All of this is a testament to the outstanding forward thinking and innovative work of our teams.

We’re also making great progress progress in advancing American supply chain innovation. As part of our $600 billion commitment to the U.S., we were pleased to share recently that Mac Mini production is coming to America later this year, expanding our factory operations in Houston with a brand-new facility. In March, we were thrilled to welcome four new companies to our American manufacturing program to help manufacture essential materials and components for Apple products sold worldwide. These include sensors that support key iPhone features like camera stabilization and integrated circuits essential for features like crash detection and activity tracking. These efforts build on the progress we’ve made in the American manufacturing program, including the work we’re doing to advance an end-to-end silicon supply chain across the U.S. At TSMC’s Arizona facility, for example, Apple is on track to purchase well over 100 million advanced chips.

As we’re accelerating our long-standing support for U.S. innovation, we’re also investing in America’s workforce. We’re looking forward to opening the doors to an all-new Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston later this year, which will provide hands-on training led by Apple experts and tailor-made for students, supplier employees, and American businesses.

Whether around the world, or in our own backyard, we’re proud of the difference Apple has made to enrich lives and support the communities we serve.

Looking ahead, we’re delighted to welcome developers back to Apple Park for WWDC 26. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on, from AI advancements to exciting new software and developer tools. It’s going to be an incredible week.

As always, we remain in relentless pursuit of even more powerful innovations guided by our North Star, our users. As we celebrated 50 years of Apple, we are even more excited and more optimistic about the next 50 years and beyond. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevan.

Kevan Parekh’s opening remarks

Thanks, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone.

Our revenue of $111.2 billion was up 17 percent year-over-year, a March quarter revenue record. We saw strong performance around the world with March quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. Foreign exchange was about a 2.5 percentage point tailwind to the March quarter growth rate. We also faced supply constraints on iPhone and, to a lesser extent, on Mac. We believe if we removed the favorable benefit from foreign exchange and add back the unfavorable impact from supply constraints, we would have had a higher growth rate for total company revenue for the quarter.

Products revenue was $80.2 billion. $2.2 billion, up 17% year-over-year, driven by double-digit growth on iPhone, setting a new March quarter record. Our installed base of over 2.5 billion active devices has reached another all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments.

Services revenue was $31 billion, up 16% year-over-year. We saw strong performance across the board, with double-digit growth in the vast majority of the markets we track.

Company gross margin was 49.3 percent, above the high end of our guidance range and up 110 basis points sequentially. Products gross margin was 38.7 percent, down 200 basis points sequentially. Services gross margin was 76.7 percent, up 20 basis points sequentially.

Operating expenses landed at $18.9 billion, up 24 percent year-over-year. This was slightly above the high end of our guidance range due to a one-time expense in SG&A. Net income was $29.6 billion, and diluted earnings per share was $2.01, up 22% year-over-year. Both net income and diluted EPS achieved March quarter records and drove a very strong level of operating cash flow at $28.7 billion.

Now I’m going to provide some more details for each of our revenue categories.

iPhone revenue was $57 billion. up 22% year-over-year, driven by the iPhone 17 family. iPhone grew double digits in the majority of markets we track, including the U.S., Latin America, Greater China, Western Europe, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia. The iPhone Active Install Base grew to an all-time high and we set March quarter record for iPhone upgraders. According to a recent survey from World Panel, iPhone was a top-selling model in the US, urban China, the UK, Australia, and Japan. We have been extremely pleased with the positive reception of the iPhone 17 family. In fact, customer satisfaction for the iPhone 17 family in the U.S. was recently measured at 99% by 451 Research.

Mac revenue was $8.4 billion, up 6% year over year, driven by the strength of the recent product launches, including MacBook Neo. We grew in both developed and emerging markets, with double-digit growth in many emerging markets, including India and Indonesia. As Tim mentioned earlier, we had a March quarter record for customers new to the Mac and this helped drive a new all-time record for the overall Mac installed base. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction for Mac was recently reported at 97%.

iPad revenue was $6.9 billion, up 8% year-over-year, driven by the continued strength of the A16 powered iPad and the M5 powered iPad Pro. The iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, as iPad continued to reach new customers around the world. During the quarter, over half of the customers who purchased an iPad were new to the product. Many of these customers are in our emerging markets, where we grew iPad revenue by double digits, including in India, Mexico, and Thailand. And based on the latest reports from 451 Research, customer satisfaction was 98% in the U.S.

Wearables, Home, and Accessories revenue was $7.9 billion, up 5% year over year, driven by strength in wearables and accessories. We were pleased to see strength in our emerging markets, where we set a new March quarter revenue record. The wearables installed base reached a new all-time high, with over half of the customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. And, in the U.S., customer satisfaction on Apple Watch was measured at 96%.

Our services revenue reached an all-time high of $31 billion, up 16% year-over-year. The strong performance was broad-based, with all-time records in both developed and emerging markets, and as Tim mentioned, we also set all-time revenue records in most of the services categories. We are optimistic about the future of our services business. With our large install base of over 2.5 billion active devices, we have an incredibly strong foundation for growth opportunities.

Both transacting and paid accounts reached new all-time highs in the quarter as we continue to see more customers leveraging our services offerings. And we continue to improve the quality and expand the breadth of our services, from the expansion of features like tap to pay, now available in over 50 markets, to deeper support for enterprise customers. Building on this, we launched Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that combines our hardware, software and enterprise services, enabling companies to officially manage their deployments and scale their business.

We continue to see more organizations and enterprise choosing Apple’s devices for performance and productivity. Marsh, a leading professional services firm, deployed a large-scale refresh of corporate devices to iPhone 17 as part of a commitment to security alongside adopting Mac for internal AI development. With Apple Silicon and its powerful unified memory architecture, leading AI developers like Perplexity are choosing Mac as their preferred platform to build enterprise-grade AI assistants that power autonomous agents and boost workplace productivity.

Across the Mac lineup, customers are finding the right device for their needs. From MacBook Pro and MacBook Air to our newest addition, MacBook Neo, which delivers an unprecedented combination of quality, value, and industry-leading security that is resonating strongly in enterprise and education. Kansas City Public Schools, for example, is switching their high school students from Windows laptops and Chromebooks to MacBook Neo, completing their transition to an all-Apple district. And in India, leading enterprise software provider Freshworks deployed over 5,000 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air to accelerate their AI development.

Let’s turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $147 billion in cash and marketable securities. We had $5.8 billion of debt maturities, and commercial paper remained unchanged at $2 billion, resulting in $85 billion in total debt. Therefore, at the end of the quarter, net cash was $62 billion. During the quarter, we returned $15 billion to shareholders. This included $3.8 billion in dividends and equivalents, and $11 billion through open market repurchases of 42 million Apple shares. Our repurchase activity at any time can be affected by a number of factors that we take into account, and as you’re aware, we recently announced a CEO transition.

Taking a step back, we plan to continue our capital allocation philosophy of first making all the necessary investments needed to support the business, and then returning excess cash to shareholders over time. Net cash neutral has been a valuable framework for our capital structure, and since 2018, we have significantly right-sized our balance sheet and reduced net cash by over $100 billion. As we move ahead, we are no longer providing net cash neutral as a formal target and we will independently evaluate cash and debt.

Capital returns will continue to be important to our overall approach of delivering long-term shareholder value. Accordingly, our Board has authorized an additional $100 billion for share repurchases, and we’re also raising our dividend by 4% to $0.27 per share of common stock. This cash dividend will be payable on May 14, 2026, to shareholders of record as of May 11, 2026.

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. 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 expect our June quarter total company revenue to grow by 14 to 17 percent year-over-year, which comprehends our best view of constrained supply. On iPad, keep in mind, we face a difficult compare driven by the launch of the A16-powered iPad in the prior year. We expect services revenue to grow at a year-over-year rate similar to what we reported in the March quarter, after removing the favorable year-over-year impact from foreign exchange tailwinds. Keep in mind, during the March quarter, FX was a 2.5 percentage point tailwind to the total company growth rate, and for services, that impact was slightly more favorable. We expect gross margin to be between 47.5% and 48.5%. We expect operating expenses to be between $18.8 billion and $19.1 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $250 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 17 percent.

With that, Tim and I will take questions.

Analyst Q&A

Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Thank you very much for taking my questions, guys, and, Tim, I’ll save the “congrats” and the au revoir for next quarter, but it’s been a pleasure working together. I would love, maybe, Tim, if I could ask you just to maybe contextualize the supply constraints you alluded to in your prepared remarks. Meaning, how much did demand outpace supply for iPhone and Mac in the March quarter, and does your June quarter guidance also reflect supply constraints for those segments? Or is that kind of an unconstrained guide as you see it today?

Tim Cook: Yeah. Hi, Eric. Thanks for your comments. We were constrained during the March quarter. This was primarily on iPhone and to a lesser extent on the Mac, and as we talked about in the last call, the constraints were primarily driven by the availability of the advanced nodes our SoCs are produced on. If you look forward to the June quarter, the majority of our supply constraints will be on several Mac models, given the continued high levels of demand that we’re seeing, and we have less flexibility in the supply chain than we normally would.

For Mac, in the June quarter, there’s two factors that are driving the constraints. One is that on the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher than expected demand. The second reason is that the customer response to Mac Neo has just been off the charts, with higher than expected demand, and the March quarter record for customers, we set a March quarter record for customers new to the Mac, partly due to the Neo. We think, looking forward, that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance. And so, hopefully that gives you a view of both Q2 and Q3 on the supply side.

Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: All right. Awesome. Thank you very much for that color, Tim. And then, Kevan, I’d love to maybe turn to you and kind of a surprise little announcement there talking about net cash neutral. So it’s still a great path, but we’re no longer providing this as a formal target. Could you maybe expand on that a bit? Are we thinking about any different type of capital return policy? It doesn’t seem so, but maybe give a little bit more detail when you talk about making investments, is that organic versus inorganic? Just maybe tease that comment out a little bit more for us, that would be super helpful. Thank you so much, guys.

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, sure, Eric. Thanks for the question. Yeah, let me just kind of reiterate what we said, which is really kind of more of a comment on the capital structure, but our goal of net cash neutral has really served us well. It’s been a valuable framework for us, and for our capital structure since 2018. We believe we’re at a stage where evaluating cash and debt independently is really the right approach for us and allows us to make more optimal economic decisions around how we best utilize our debt and cash portfolios to support the business, based on business factors and market conditions. We also believe we can manage this flexibility while also being very efficient and disciplined. So with all that being said, we remain very committed to returning excess cash to shareholders. As we talked about our investment in the business, I think as you know, we invest in the business first and foremost and then look to kind of return excess cash to shareholders. I think we have a very good track record of being disciplined. We’ve returned over a trillion dollars to shareholders from the start of the program, over 850 billion of which has been through share repurchases, and so the other piece as well that’s really important is as part of that, we also have increased our buyback authorization by another $100 billion, and that’s on top of the leftover capacity from the prior authorization. So you can see the capital return piece is something very important to us, and as we talked about in the prepared remarks, important to the overall approach to delivering long-term shareholder value.

Ben Reitzes, Melius: There’s just been a lot of talk and it’s great to, by the way, speak with you, Tim and John and Kevan. The first question is around, there’s been some commentary around an agentic smartphone. By the way, I don’t even know what that means, but there’s comments about AI on the edge and that agents could catalyze smartphones, but also shift the smartphone form factor, or maybe not. I was just wondering, with the rise of agents, how you would like us to think about that. Does this mean there’s new products coming of a totally new form factor? Or does it change the game? Or anything high-level you might want to say about that and that trend or potential non-trend. Thanks.

Tim Cook: Hi, Ben, it’s Tim. You know, we don’t get into our future roadmap, and so I don’t wanna, you know, give too much info there, but I would just say that we’re thrilled with how the iPhone is doing, growing 22% in the quarter and followed up from an incredible Q1, and having the strongest cycle that we’ve ever had in our history from the launch through March quarter, we could not be happier with it.

Ben Reitzes, Melius: Okay. Well, thanks. I appreciate that. I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more. Then with regard to, I guess the question around constraints and whatnot, and Tim, you know, I may push you one more time, try to do it nicely, though, just given my age.

Tim Cook: (laughs)

Ben Reitzes, Melius: You know, the big concern out there is maybe how margins go after the June quarter, given the components and trends and whatnot and all these constraints. I mean, is there some kind of overarching philosophy that you want us to think about? Do you feel, and maybe Kevan wants to weigh in on this, do you see a lot of variability in the model? Or is 47/48 kind of a range you think you might be able to stay in, or is there just no visibility beyond June to answer this question. I think any comfort level there as we go throughout the calendar year would be so helpful. Thanks.

Tim Cook: Yeah, Ben, let me talk about memory specifically, which I think is the root of the question. And I’ll go back to December for a moment and just walk you through the chronology. In the December quarter, we really had a minimal impact due to memory, and you can kind of see that in the gross margin results. We said it would be a bit more in the March quarter, and we did see higher memory costs in the March quarter, and they were partially offset by benefits from carry-in inventory that we had. For the June quarter and what’s embedded in the guidance that Kevan went through earlier, we expect significantly higher memory costs. They are also partly offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. And then where we don’t give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business. And we’ll continue to evaluate this, and as we’ve said before, we’ll look at a range of options.

Ben Reitzes, Melius: Okay, thanks, Tim.

Tim Cook: Yeah, thank you, Ben.

Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Given the success of the MacBook Neo, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how it’s helped drive penetration with new customer segments, whether that be education or value or emerging markets? And then, how do you think about opportunities in underpenetrated markets more broadly? And how will your future product roadmap inform that strategy?

Tim Cook: Yeah, right now we’re supply constrained on the MacBook Neo. We were very bullish on the product before announcing it, but we undercalled the level of enthusiasm that would be with it, and it’s very much focus on getting the Mac to even more people than we were reaching before. We’ve very focused on customers new to the Mac and customers that have been holding on to their Mac a very long period of time. We’re doing well with both of those, and as Kevan alluded to in his comments, we’re seeing school systems like the Kansas City Public Schools that are switching from Chromebooks and Windows PCs to the MacBook Neo, and I’m hearing anecdotally more and more of those kinds of stories, both happening at the school system level and at the individual consumer level, and so we could not be happier with how things are going at the moment.

Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you, Tim. And for the second question, I wanted to ask about advertising within services. I think Apple introduced new inventory to ads on the App Store earlier this year. Has that new ad inventory on the App Store been a notable contributor to the service’s growth and outperformance in the quarter? And then, could you talk more broadly about your ad strategy, given the plans to also introduce ads to maps this summer? Thank you.

Kevan Parekh: Yep. Mike, it’s Kevan. Thanks for the question. Again, advertising, we did see year-over-year growth in our advertising business. As you alluded to, we recently did introduce additional ads across the App Store search results to provide developers with more ways to drive downloads on platforms that users trust. And this summer, as you said, in the U.S. and Canada, Apple Maps will feature ads during key search and discovery moments, creating a new way for local businesses to reach customers and explore new places. But importantly, I think we believe it’s possible to help businesses of all sizes grow via advertising while still delivering a great customer experience, while also importantly respecting people’s fundamental right to privacy.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, you noted higher impact from memory as you look beyond the june quarter. Clearly you’ve got a lot of scale to budget efficiencies, relationships, from a long time relative to your competitors. So when you think about product position and pricing, relative to competition, do you think in such times of dislocation that Apple would be strategically more focused on share gain where potentially you don’t raise pricing in perhaps lower ends of the portfolio where your competitors are struggling, or more focused on profitability? Like, what’s the right framework for us to think through as you enter that period?

Tim Cook: Wamsi, we will look at a range of options with memory costs increasing, and so I really don’t want to go beyond that at this point.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Okay. Okay, Tim. As a follow-up here, how is Apple thinking about the broader monetization, maybe following Ben’s question here in the agentic AI world? What parts of the stack do you think Apple will be focused on internally versus maybe leveraging your partners? I mean we have some early looks into where you are developing relationships, but as we think longer term, do you think Apple will invest more? Where will Apple invest more heavily over the next several years? And is this at all related to your net cash comments in terms of perhaps building out more infrastructure as we enter an AI-centric world.

Tim Cook: We are clearly investing more. You can see that in the OPEX numbers. And if you click down on those a step deeper and look at the R&D area separate than SG&A, you’ll find that R&D is even accelerating much higher than the company is. And so we’re clearly investing, we’re investing in products and services, and we see opportunities in both of those. And we could not be more excited about how the future is playing out.

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, and I think, Wamsi, as we’ve talked about, building on what Tim said, from the start, we said we believe AI is a really important investment area for Apple, and we’re going to be doing that incrementally on top of what we normally invest in our product roadmap. So I just wanted to reiterate that point as well.

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Good afternoon, everyone. First one, maybe just going back to the iPhone performance, which for a couple of quarters you folks have had 20% plus growth despite the supply constraint, and I think the guides sort of implies the momentum will continue in June. I’d love for you folks to just maybe double click and talk about what are the levers that’s driving this sort of impressive iPhone growth despite the supply constraints, and then what is the durability of this growth?

Tim Cook: Yeah, if you look at it, it’s the iPhone 17 family that’s driving it, and that is, as you point out, despite the supply constraints that we’re experiencing. And the things that are driving people to the 17 are, people love the design. People love the performance, they love the durability, they love the camera, they love Center Stage, and they love that Apple Intelligence is integrated across the platform. From where we’re seeing the growth, it is amazing. We’re seeing double-digit growth in the majority of the markets we track. From the U.S. to Latin America, to greater China, to Western Europe, to India, to Japan, to Southeast Asia. And we set a new March quarter record for upgraders as well. And what’s driving all this is that the customer satisfaction for the 17 family in the U.S. as an example is 99%, these numbers are just unheard of. So we’re thrilled with how things are going.

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Perfect, thank you. And then Tim, I think we have you for one more earnings call, but I would really appreciate if you could kind of share a bit about the upcoming transition. You have historically I think talked about the advice that Steve gave you when you took over and I might be paraphrasing this, but it was around, don’t ask what I would do, just do the right thing. That’s really been a big win, I think, for Apple and shareholders over the last 15 years. Would love to understand, what advice are you giving John to help him build on Apple’s strengths while shaping up the next chapter for the company? Thank you.

Tim Cook: Well, I think Steve’s advice to me lifted a huge burden, and so that advice did well for me over the 15 years. For John, I think my advice is that, what I’ve told him is, that one of the most important decisions he’ll make is where to spend his time. And I would spend it where the greatest benefit to the company and the users are, and never forget the north star for the company. You know, we’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives, and if you keep focusing on that and make your decisions around that it will produce a great business and we’ll be able to build more products and do it all over again. Thank you for the question.

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Thank you.

David Vogt, UBS Tim, I want to come back to the supply chain for a second. I don’t think I heard you state in your prepared remarks or in response to a question that the iPhone is constrained in the June quarter. So can you walk through kind of how you’re thinking about your ability to secure not just SoC but also memory? Are you thinking about using alternative sources of memory outside of sort of the traditional partners that you have? And just, what’s kind of driving that confidence that the iPhone isn’t constrained given the amount of share it sounds like you’re taking in that market.

Tim Cook: Yeah, David, the constraint in the March quarter and the June quarter, the primary constraint is the availability of the advanced nodes our SoCs are produced on, not memory. And so, I don’t want to predict our ability for supply and demand to match, because if I look at it realistically, I think on the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, I believe it’ll take several months to reach supply/demand balance. And so, we’re not at the point where we’re saying this is going to end anytime soon. And it’s not because of a problem per se, other than we just under-called the demand. And, you know, there are lead times to this, as you well understand, and it takes a while to correct that. The primary constraint from a product point of view, or the majority of it for this quarter, for the June quarter, will be on the Mac. And it’s Mac Mini, Mac Studio and the MacBook Neo. It’s all of those.

David Vogt, UBS Maybe just on services real quick. Obviously, relatively strong gross margins yet again. Are we getting to a point, given sort of the product mix within services, I know a lot of different offerings are growing double digits, that we’re sort of asymptotically getting to a level where… we’re seeing increasingly more challenging to scale that business from a profitability perspective? Or is there still sort of low-hanging fruit in terms of volume leverage in some of the offerings, or maybe lower losses in some different categories that can continue to scale gross margin across the services space?

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, David, it’s Kevan. Thanks for the question. Look, as you know, our services portfolio contains a wide range of business that have different business models and profitability profiles and also are growing at different rates. So at any given time, the relative performance of those can impact the gross margin. This time in particular, we look at the Q2 services margin. We talked about the fact that it increased 20 basis points sequentially. That’s primarily driven by mix. And so, again, I think it’s hard to speculate how that evolves over time. We’re encouraged by what we’re seeing. We do have some services that are improving in profitability as they gain scale. But again, I think we have a wide portfolio that has different characteristics and can grow at different rates at different times. But overall, we’re encouraged by the overall trajectory that we’ve seen.

Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Tim, my first question, last quarter you did talk about Apple’s foundational models and sort of the two-pronged strategy there of the collaboration with Google as well as continuing to internally sort of work on your own models. Hoping you can give us sort of an update in terms of how you are able to balance those two priorities as well as do you feel like you need to double down and invest more to be able to balance those two priorities side by side?

Tim Cook: Yeah, it’s a good question. We are investing more. You can see that in the OPEX numbers, and as I had mentioned before, the R&D in particular has scaled rather significantly on a year-over-year basis. The collaboration with Google is going well. We’re happy with where things are and we’re happy with the work that that we’re doing independently as well.

Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Kevan, the sequential moderation in the product gross margin this year is relatively muted compared to what you’ve historically seen, at least over the last couple of years. Is it primarily mix, or was it the maybe the FX tailwind as well? How would we sort of break it down in terms of what was different this year relative to what we typically see? And if you could sort of also clarify what the FX impact on gross margin was for the quarter. Thank you.

Kevan Parekh: Sure. Let me start on products for Q2. Basically, products gross margin did decrease by 200 basis points sequentially, driven by seasonal loss of leverage and higher memory costs, as Tim had alluded. If I zoom out, though, I think it’s important just to look at what drove the overall company gross margin performance, and let me just give you a quick kind of rundown of that. If you look at our overall performance, our sequential gross margin impact was 110 basis points positively, and that was driven by favorable mix, lower tariff-related costs, and that was partly offset by seasonal loss of leverage and higher memory costs, and I did want to turn it over to Tim, because we do want to provide some clarity around the lower tariff-related costs and just make a comment on that as well.

Tim Cook: Yeah. Thanks, Kevan. For the March quarter, the gross margin of 49.3 did include the impact of tariff related costs. However, tariffs in the March quarter versus the December quarter were lower because we had lower product volume, as you know, sequentially from Q1 to Q2. And there was the full quarter benefit from a reduction in the IEPA tariff rates, as well as the reduced global tariff rate under Section 122. In terms of applying for a refund of tariffs paid, we’re following the established processes, and we plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing. These would be new investments and would be in addition to our prior commitments in the U.S.

Kevan Parekh: And then one last point on your FX question. We really didn’t see any sequential impact related to foreign exchange as a factor going from Q1 gross margin to Q2.

Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Congrats on the quarter. I wanted to ask about a few of the end markets. I guess particularly, Tim, if you could comment a little bit on what you’re seeing specifically in China. I guess from a competitive perspective, are you seeing advantages from supply constraints impacting some of your competitors? Any thoughts on the China market?

Tim Cook: Yeah, we are thrilled with the performance in greater China. The first half of the year grew at 33%. In the March quarter, revenue was up 28%. It’s a quarterly revenue record for us. The performance is really driven by iPhone, which was also a March quarter record. If you look at the individual products, the iPhone was the top-selling model in urban China, the Mac Mini was the top-selling desktop in China, and the MacBook Air was the top-selling laptop model. And so we’re really doing well, pretty well across the board there. I was over there in March. The traffic in our stores grew by double-digit. We were celebrating Apple’s 50th anniversary there, and it was just amazing to be a part of the community there. And so I’m really happy with how things have gone the first half of this year.

Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Maybe I’ll stick with a similar theme, kind of the same question on the India market. It seems like that continues to be a focal point on these last several quarterly conference calls. How are you seeing the market in India evolve around the base of iPhones and the opportunity of kind of a rising middle class, just the overall opportunity set in that large mobile market?

Tim Cook: Yeah, I think it’s a huge opportunity for us. You know, we’ve been focused on this for a while. It’s the second largest smartphone market in the world and the third largest PC market, and despite doing extremely well there for quite some time we still have a modest share. And so I think that really speaks to the opportunity that we have. There are a lot of people moving into the middle class there, and we’ve got some great products for them both currently and coming. And if you look at the majority of customers in all of our categories from the iPhone to the Mac to the iPad to the Watch, are new to that product there. And so it speaks very well to growing the installed base there. Net-net, I’m over the moon excited about India.

Just after results were released, Apple execs spent an hour on the phone with financial industry analysts, and we have the complete transcript. And at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern, we’ll offer our own live analysis on YouTube.

And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs:

Porsche:

At round four of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship on May 3rd at Laguna Seca, the Porsche works team will show a historic Apple Computer-inspired livery. The special wrap is based on the Porsche 935 K3, which competed in major events in the 1980 season including the 24 hours of Le Mans. The one-time design of the two Porsche 963 celebrates two milestones happening in 2026: the 75th anniversary of Porsche Motorsport and 50 years since the founding of Apple.

From the rainbow Apple logo to the Motter Tektura wordmark, this is glorious.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Modern User Interface modifies the appearance of some control bars and dialogs to be more consistent with other Creative Cloud applications through adoption of Spectrum, Adobe’s multi-platform design system. We plan to modernize the entire user interface over future updates.

Wichary’s reaction to this was very much the same as mine:

On the surface, it feels like a lateral move. I do not personally find the new design language (Spectrum) attractive, or even particularly “modern.” The gestalt remains off and things are still generally misaligned – they’re just misaligned in net new ways.

Like Wichary, Cabel Sasser, and many other people, I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.

But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.

Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have. I also recognize that plenty of creative apps that I have not been using for three decades—Affinity Designer comes to mind—prefer to stick all their toolbars and floating palettes in a single-window workspace, and load documents inside it. I don’t like it, but I can put up with it there. But it’s just not how I use Photoshop.

What frustrates me the most about moves like this Spectrum business, is that companies like to imply that changes of this sort are of benefit to their customers. But they aren’t. They are for the benefit of Adobe, which can standardize its interface across platforms and its own apps. I’m a Mac user who uses Photoshop. Forgive me if I do not care, not one bit, about how Photoshop looks on Windows or how Premiere looks anywhere.

That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.

Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.

The screenshots in this article—and all the images and videos in Wichary’s blog post—are horrific. The new Canvas Size dialog box doesn’t use Mac-standard type; it’s misaligned¹, so the result is woefully ugly and feels wrong in a Mac context.

But as Wichary points out, the true crime is that the “modern” Canvas Size box is also incompetently implemented. Real Photoshop heads know you can enter a new canvas size simply by opening the dialog and typing the width number in pixels, pressing Tab, typing the height number in pixels, and pressing Return. The new dialog has no focus, so you have to click. Tab moves you to the measurement unit (Pixels, generally), not the next pixel count. Clicking in the dialog doesn’t select the pixel count, so you have to backspace or select all to delete it. And if you delete the entire number so that there’s nothing in the box, Photoshop displays a modal error message you have to click through, and then sets the number to 1.

Look, I am a reasonable person who is never going to advocate for nameless, faceless employees at some corporation to be fired for incompetence. But what I will say is that this sort of stuff should never have been exposed to anyone outside of Adobe, and that the people who think shipping this sort of thing is fine deserve a very stern talking-to. That is, if there’s anyone left at Adobe who cares about anything.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

On Thursday afternoon, Apple will announce the results of its second fiscal quarter for 2026. Last quarter was an all-time record, but that was the holiday quarter, which is usually Apple’s biggest. This quarter will be smaller, but Apple projected that revenue would grow by 13% to 16%. That means Apple expected this quarter’s revenue to be between $108B and $111B. This would mark only the second time—after last year’s fiscal fourth quarter—that the company surpassed $100B in revenue in a non-holiday quarter. It’s a sign that maybe $100B quarters are… just routine for Apple now? Astounding.

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 a load of charts and some analysis. At 2pm PDT, there will be an hour-long phone call with analysts that we’ll also transcribe. At 4pm PDT, Dan and I will stream live on YouTube with analysis, including discussion of all of those charts!

This should be an interesting one, in terms of how Apple characterizes the CEO transition, what it might say about early sales of the MacBook Neo, and the lingering concern that RAM shortages are going to impact Apple’s sales and bottom line. And of course, Wall Street will be closely awaiting Apple’s projections for how Q3 will go.

The latest is a story in MacRumors from Juli Clover, which makes the straightforward claim that “Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop“:

Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested.

Now, I’m not privy to MacRumors’s sources but I’m going to say that I’m skeptical of this pronouncement. And I’m not the only one: Jonathan Wight, who worked in Apple’s AR/VR group until 2022, disputed the report on Mastodon, and that jibes with what I’ve heard privately.

But I’m not surprised. The Vision Pro has always been ripe for this kind of commentary because Apple has taken a distinctly un-Apple approach with it, selling an extraodinarily high-priced device in limited volumes. That’s a contrast to most of its products, which operate in very high quantities. And given that one of Apple’s other high-price/low-volume products was recently 86ed, I can see the temptation to think that the company is taking care of all family business.

But intentions matter. From everything we’ve heard, the Vision Pro was never anticipated to sell in high volumes. Likewise, this report declares the M5 revamp of the Vision Pro a “flop” but from a macro perspective, replacing the M5 processor in the Vision Pro was less about making it more attractive to consumers than it was about the fact that it was ramping down production of the M2 chips in the existing model.¹ Heck, if Apple really was killing the Vision Pro, why would it update it in the first place?

Clover’s story goes on to say:

Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025.

These personnel moves feel like the germ of this story, and given that, I can certainly see why the natural conclusion would be to point to the Vision Pro’s demise. Especially when combined with recent stories reporting that incoming CEO John Ternus was “wary of the mixed-reality headset that became the Vision Pro”.² Surely he’s exercising his newfound power to kill this hated product dead!³

But that conclusion is hardly foregone. Look, it’s pretty clear that there are lots of other projects at Apple that are higher priority than the Vision Pro right now. That work on Siri is clearly incredibly significant, especially in light of promises that are now two years old and still haven’t shipped. Rockwell was essentially parachuted into the Siri role as a fixer: it’s no surprise that he would draw from a trusted pool of his reports to get the job done.

Likewise, Apple has reportedly accelerated work on its smart glasses product, mounting a somewhat late challenge to products from Meta and, soon, Samsung. Again, if Apple is prioritizing getting that product out the door, it’s not hard to imagine that the company might shift personnel to work on it—especially if we’re talking personnel who have experience with augmented reality.

I have no trouble believing that Vision Pro development is on the back burner. By all accounts the technology to get to the device that Apple really wants to make just isn’t here yet, and isn’t expected to be anytime soon. Could that mean the Vision Pro will eventually be killed? Absolutely. But not only is the Vision Pro still a genuinely technologically impressive device, but everything Apple developed for it will almost certainly inform future products—especially if the company is still trying to ultimately make a lighter pair of augmented reality glasses. The Vision Pro is fine where it is: even the original M2 model is still an incredibly capable device. Apple can continue as it’s doing now: building up a library of content for the device and working on pushing the envelope of its software capabilities.

Which leads me to my final point: if you want to know if the Vision Pro really is in trouble, then the clearest indication will come just over a month from now, at WWDC 2026. Apple will, presumably, take the wraps off visionOS 27 alongside the rest of its platform updates; look to see not only how much time it gets during the keynote, but, more importantly, the magnitude of updates (or lack thereof). Because the Vision Pro is a story about a platform, and just as macOS was not dictated by the success or failure of a single Mac model, the Vision platform is not merely tied to the Vision Pro as its exists today.

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There was big news from Apple’s boardroom last week. As you know, Tim Cook’s getting kicked upstairs and John Ternus is going to assume the mantle of Apple CEO. But that’s not the news I’m talking about. The other big news is that Johny Srouji is being named Chief Hardware Officer.

Nobody outside of those who follow Apple or the chip industry closely has ever heard of Srouji. (For that matter, they hadn’t heard of Ternus, either.) But this is not a minor executive promotion. The fact that Apple made the announcement simultaneously with Cook’s departure and Ternus’s elevation shows that. Srouji’s promotion—and more importantly, retention— is vitally important for Apple.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

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Monologue is for people who think faster than they type. It combines smart dictation with voice notes across Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, so your spoken thoughts can become polished writing, meeting transcripts, summaries, tasks, and useful context for your tools.

For everyday writing, Monologue is a smart dictation app that works where you already write. On the Mac, it works anywhere you can type. On iPhone and iPad, it works as a keyboard inside the apps you already use. Speak naturally, and Monologue turns your voice into polished text for messages, emails, documents, notes, code, and more.

You can speak with pauses, restarts, filler words, proper nouns, technical terms, and a little bit of chaos. Monologue understands context, remembers your vocabulary, supports 100+ languages, and turns natural speech into clean writing instead of a raw transcript you have to fix afterward.

For longer recordings, Monologue Notes captures the thinking that happens away from the keyboard: meetings, calls, walks, errands, and voice memos that usually disappear as soon as they are over. Start a note on your Apple Watch before a walk, keep recording from your iPhone during a call, review the transcript on your iPad, and pull it up on your Mac when it is time to do something with it.

Monologue Notes can connect to agents and tools through API, CLI, and MCP support, so a transcript can become the starting point for actual work. Ask your agent to pull your latest note and turn it into tasks, summarize a customer call, draft a follow-up email, or use a meeting transcript as context for a code change.

You can start free with 1,000 dictation words and 10 notes, or upgrade to Monologue Pro for unlimited dictation and unlimited notes. Monologue is also included in the Every bundle with Cora, Spiral, Sparkle, and Every’s newsletter.

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Try Monologue today: https://www.monologue.to/?utm_source=sixcolors&utm_medium=sponsorship&utm_campaign=sixcolors_post

When the AirTag first shipped five years ago, I glommed right onto writing about it. I already had a section in a book on security and privacy about using the Find My device feature, enabled for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. I was keyed up to understand where AirTag fit in. Recently, surveying the field, I found a shocking number of Find My network-equipped products, from an inexpensive flashlight to a $3,500 ebike.

Within the Apple ecosystem, it’s worth looking at what’s now available for those of us trying not to lose our things by misplacing them, forgetting to take them with us, or having them stolen.¹ Because more hardware now has effectively unremovable Find My tracking technology, it may be a more effective theft deterrent or way to recover an absconded item. (I’ve got an extra suggestion about that, too.)

A distinct itemization

AirTag introduced a new category: items versus devices. A Find My device can reach the Internet and report its position, and can use a native app to see other stuff via Find My; a Find My item just broadcasts over Bluetooth to any nearby listening iPhone, iPad, or Mac.²

An AirTag lets you track whatever it is attached to or inside by relaying its signal through other Apple devices. This offers something akin to GPS-based tracking without the need for constant battery recharging, while also finding its location and updating it when indoors. GPS works anywhere with a clear line of sight outdoors, while Find My crowdsourcing requires at least one nearby Internet-connected Apple device to relay its current position.

The stuff we track is more likely to be lost inside than outside, I’d wager, with exceptions for stolen bicycles and cars. Or when you park your car in a vast lot and forget where it is. Find My items benefit from relaying through Apple hardware that uses a combination of Wi-Fi positioning, cell tower locations, and GPS and other satellite-positioning networks, as available.³

The short battery life for a GPS-based tracker hands an advantage to the Find My network. While GPS trackers have become progressively more efficient over the decades, they still need to be recharged frequently—every few days to a few weeks, depending on battery capacity and how often they report location. That’s because they typically have both satellite receivers and cellular modems: the GPS location is derived and then transmitted over the cellular network. Find My items typically last at least a year, after which their batteries need to be replaced or recharged.⁴

Apple announced Find My licensing to third parties alongside the AirTag release, and products appeared soon after. These were mostly trackers that cost less, had a slightly different form factor, weighed less, offered rechargeable batteries, or fit better in a wallet.

It took some time for more variety to enter the Find My item market, and I frankly lost track of the sheer diversity of what’s out there. With Find My now built into a wider array of products, you might want to stick a third-party item into something you own, or replace a device with one that has Find My support.

Getting lost in all the Find My items

I set out a few weeks ago to compile a list of all items with certified Find My. Friends, I thought it would number between 20 and 30 items. It started to become unmanageable, so I built a site—FindYourTag—both for my own reference and because why not share it? Reaching over 50 items, I started to get emails and social media replies asking, “Why didn’t you include product X?” Indeed! I didn’t know about product X, but now it’s in. The database now lists 73 devices,⁵ though some are close variations of a single product.⁶

Some of these products have the attribute of supporting two or three kinds of alarms or tracking: some let you pair to both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub; a few expensive items also have their own proprietary movement alarm, managed via an app.

Here’s what I’ve found.

If you want a wallet tracker, you have a lot of choices. Apple has chosen to offer a single AirTag model. Baffling, because why not tap into the wallet-sized market? Apple’s absence is good news for third parties, because 14 different companies make a total of 18 wallet-insertable cards.

They’re all thin, though some are thinner than others. About half are rechargeable, though most of those require a unique magnetically coupled adapter that you are sure to lose unless you have a special place you keep odd adapters. Other cards advertise long battery life (two to three years) and have a discount program on replacing after that point if you return the battery for recycling.

If you’d prefer a wallet with built-in tracking, instead of a card you insert—well, there are eight of those, including the Nomad Leather Mag Wallet (Jason has one) that can hold up to four credit cards, and attaches via MagSafe to your iPhone.

Apple does offer a MagSafe-attached wallet, the FineWoven Wallet with MagSafe (holds up to three cards), but it features a Find My “lite” variant Apple doesn’t license: when removed from its paired iPhone, it only shows the last known location at that moment in Find My—it lacks the crucial ongoing crowdsourcing component.

Stuff you probably will leave behind accidentally. There’s a whole shaggy category of things that you have left behind and aren’t a Kindle that you wished you were alerted about leaving behind (a Find My feature) or could track later. This includes:

• Power adapter: Finding out that Twelve South has a line of four different PlugBug models with Find My built in made me wonder why Apple doesn’t include Find My as a default feature on its adapters? The matrix of the four models is you can choose 50 watts and two USB-C jacks or 120 W and four USB-C jacks; either wattage charger can be purchased in a travel edition, which comes with the full array of adapters for worldwide plugging in.

• Keys: The Ekster Finder Tag ($39) is a key-holding clip with the Find My item in the middle.

• Glasses case: Satechi has the right idea here with its FindAll Glasses Case ($50). I left my distance glasses somewhere in the greater Boston area in March, and, wow, is replacing your glasses with prescription, transition lenses expensive. Oof. Ouch. Get me a Satechi, and send it back through time! (Did I mention they’re vegan, too?)

• Flashlight: Cheap flashlights are now absurdly bright—probably FAA-rules-violatingly bright if pointed upward—but how many flashlights have you lost? The $25 Footnote FlashFinder is compact, recharges via USB-C, and has Find My.

• Camera: Insta360 makes a lot of different camera models. On two of them, the GO 3S ($295) and GO Ultra ($450) are both tiny, making them prone to loss, and trackable.

The expensive stuff that you would highly regret having stolen and being untrackable. You can add a Find My tag in a lot of ways to a bike or scooter, but they typically have to be located in some external location that a thief could remove or cover with foil, blocking the signal. For instance, I have a Knog Scout ($65) which uses a special drive⁷ on the screws you use to attach it to the standard water-bottle mount holes found on most bikes.

But wouldn’t it be better if you had Find My as part of the vehicle, making it effectively unremovable without destroying the bike or scooter? Several manufacturers agree.⁸ You can find Apollo, Segway, Specialized, and Velotric models with just that.⁹ For those serious about measuring their performance, you can even get a 4iii powermeter (the Precision 3+ Powermeter, starts at $335, several models) with integral Find My.

For further reading

I am a big fan of Find My for the obvious reason that it’s let me keep track of my stuff over the last several years. That journey includes pupping part of a Take Control book about security and privacy that had swollen with tracking facts into separate volume: Take Control of Find My and AirTags. If you’ve ever had a question about setting up tracking of your own stuff, locating people, or using the Find My apps, I have so many answers for you.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Over the years we’ve added a bunch of new members-only features to the site. Our weekly podcast has proven to be very popular, so much so that it made me realize that a lot of members are perhaps a bit more inclined to consume podcasts than reading what we write with their eyeballs.

As a result, I’ve built a new “Six Colors Audio Newsletter” podcast feed. Using the same logic as our regular members-only email newsletter, it posts an episode any day there’s at least one full story on the site. Any day we’ve got stuff on the site, a new Audio Newsletter episode drops, complete with introduction and chapter markers per story. Here’s a link to a sample episode.

The Audio Newsletter uses a high-quality text-to-speech engine, so it’s not a human reader, but I’m surprised at how good it is. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the script to make the output better, including alternating two different high-quality voices, using additional voices for lengthy quotes from other sources, calling out footnotes explicitly, and even switching to a “read every character” mode when stuff is posted in code font, which happens frequently in Help Me, Glenn! columns. And the refining of the script continues!

If you like reading our words with your eyes, thank you. But since I began quietly experimenting with this automated read-it-to-you podcast, I have heard from numerous members who say they just don’t have the time to read everything we write, but are happy to have integrated this podcast into their listening queue. I hope it’s useful for a subset of the audience.

If you’re a member, you can subscribe on your Memberful page.

And if you’re not yet a member, here’s a plug: when you join you don’t just support Six Colors, you get access to a weekly exclusive podcast with Dan and me, John Moltz’s This Week in Apple column, Dan’s monthly Back Page column, a full-content newsletter if you’d prefer to read the site that way, the new full-content Audio Newsletter, and access to a really good Discord community. It’s a lot!

And regardless of your membership status, thank you for reading this site. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for eleven and a half years, but here we are.

Outside of friendly card games, I’m not a gambler and certainly not someone who wagers on sports. (If you take nothing else away from this article, “Never bet on anything that can talk” is a good piece of advice for anyone to live by.) I don’t begrudge your gambling fix if that’s where you find some joy in life’s slog, but I don’t want it consuming precious screen real estate when all I want to do is check a baseball score.

At some point, ESPN apparently updated its iPhone app, as the odds block no longer appears in the Scores tab, and there’s no mention of betting in the app’s preferences. If ESPN truly went in and fixed that part of the app, then kudos — but it hasn’t stopped me from exploring other alternatives to following my favorite sports, starting with Apple’s very own Sports app.

Apple released the Sports app a little more than two years ago, launching with the sports in season at the time and steadily adding more leagues and teams over time. These days, you can follow most of the same things in Apple Sports that you can via ESPN. Even better from my perspective, you can banish any betting info should you not wish to see it. In the settings of Apple’s app, there’s a toggle to hide betting odds.

I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks taking a second look at Apple Sports to see if the app’s improved any since its 2024 launch. And rather than kick ESPN to the curb, I’ve kept using this old, familiar score checker, comparing what it offers to Apple’s effort. My goal: find out which app is the better fit for my fandom and make it my permanent app of choice for staying on top of sports from my iPhone.

ESPN vs Apple Sports: Customization

Both the ESPN and Apple Sports apps place a premium on letting you follow your favorite teams and sports, though they take very different approaches to how those favorites are displayed. In ESPN’s case, your favorite teams appear at the top of the top of Scores tab, followed by the leagues those teams play in. The rest of the Scores tab includes other sports, with ESPN highlighting the biggest news of the day — or at least the news related to sports it has the broadcast rights to — in the app’s Home tab.

In contrast, Apple’s Sports app is all about your favorites. Nothing appears on the Home screen unless you put it there. That goes for teams as well as leagues, which can require a little extra work on your part.

Say your favorite team is the Detroit Tigers — and why not? Thomas Magnum rooted for them. Once you mark the Tigers as a favorite, all their games will wind up in your Sports feed… but if you want other Major League Baseball scores to show up, you’re going to have to designate MLB as a favorite, too. It seems like that should be self-evident — who follows a team in a vacuum? — but as far as hoops to jump through, it’s a relatively minimal one.

I’m torn as to which approach I prefer, though there’s a lot to be said for the stripped-back style of Apple Sports. If I’m just interested in finding out what the teams I follow are up to, Apple provides me with that. I think that gives Sports the edge over ESPN, even if it’s a slight one.

That said, sometimes it’s good to be aware of what’s happening beyond your silo of interest. If an NBA game broke out in my kitchen, I’d want to know why LeBron James wasn’t chipping in his share of the mortgage, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate seeing the NBA playoff results in the ESPN app, if for no other reason than to feel slightly more informed about the wider world. I can find those results in Apple Sports — just swipe right from the Home screen, tap on NBA and voila — but as with setting up favorites, it’s an extra step or two compared to ESPN.

I should also note that ESPN’s list of sports and leagues to track is a little more extensive than what Apple offers, even after two years of expansion on Apple’s part. I’m a fan of the Oakland Roots, a soccer team that plies its trade in the second-tier USL. I can include the Roots among my favorites in ESPN’s app, but not Apple’s. Similarly, the US Women’s National Team is MIA from Apple Sports, though presumably that changes when the 2027 World Cup gets closer. All of this is more of a Me Problem, but I’m the guy trying to find a sports app that best suits his needs.

ESPN vs Apple Sports: Information

Sometimes I want to know more than just the score — I want some sense of how the game went. Both ESPN and Apple Sports let you tap on a particular game to get the who, what and how much, though that information gets displayed in different ways.

Let’s look at an in-progress event using a Tigers-Brewers game as our point of comparison. Both apps give you the basics — the score, the inning, who’s pitching and who’s batting, plus an inning-by-inning line score. But even that info comes across in different ways.

Apple Sports seems to take a backward approach, putting the name of the batter and pitcher above the logos for their respective teams; in ESPN’s view, the logo appears next to the scores, making it much easier to see who’s winning and losing at a glance.

ESPN also offers a more expansive view when presenting a lot of the same information you see in Apple’s app. The pitcher and batter appear, but you also get images, including a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of balls and strikes in ESPN’s default view. You can also see who’s on base in the ESPN app.

Weirdly, Apple believes that team stats showing the number of hits, strikeouts, walks and more should be the key data you see first. If you want team box scores, you’ve got to scroll down. That information is easier to access with ESPN.

Apple’s approach to including details about baseball games makes no sense to me as someone who’s followed the sport for most of my life. It gives the impression that no one employed by Apple has spent much time poring over box scores in the morning paper, and that Apple decided to shoehorn baseball into a template designed for a different sport.

Apple continues to shortchange fans once the game ends, at least when it comes to baseball finals. If you want to find out who the winning and losing pitchers were, you’ll have to scroll down to the box scores in the Sports app. That information appears prominently in ESPN’s end-of-game report.

In fairness to Apple Sports, other end-of-game reports are a little better organized. A soccer box score at least shows me who scored, whether I’m looking in Apple’s app or on ESPN. With ESPN, I do get a written match report, though.

ESPN vs. Apple Sports: Extras

As you might expect, ESPN’s app offers a lot more than just scores, with news articles, video highlights and direct access to anything streaming through ESPN. That’s simply a non-starter for Apple, just as you wouldn’t be able to buy an iPhone or a MacBook Neo directly from Stephen A. Smith.

ESPN does a better job listing the channels where you can find broadcasts of games. Checking ESPN’s Premier League scoreboard, for example, I can see which matches are streaming on Peacock compared to which ones are on cable TV. If you want to find that info on Apple’s Sports app, you’ve got to drill down into the actual entry for the game.

However, in Apple Sports, you can jump to other apps that are streaming those games — something ESPN doesn’t offer for non-ESPN telecasts. So with Apple Sports, it’s ultimately easier to tune in on the action — unless, of course, we’re talking about the live sports Netflix is starting to feature more prominently.

ESPN vs. Apple Sports: Verdict

The ESPN vs. Apple Sports debate may be one of those instances where you wish you could pick and choose the best elements from either app to produce the ultimate score checker. Take the depth of ESPN’s information and the more sensible box scores and combine that with Apple’s customization features, and you’d really be on to something.

After giving both apps a try, I’m not sure I’m ready to abandon the Worldwide Leader in Sports, especially now that the ill-considered betting features that had me ready to dump ESPN seem to have been scrapped. But I’m keeping Apple Sports on my iPhone just in case, because in an age where sports gambling is everywhere, I know the value of hedging my bets.

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As a part of the process of reviewing macOS Tahoe, I stopped using my longtime launcher LaunchBar and forced myself to use Apple’s new and improved version of Spotlight.

The surprising thing is, I never went back to LaunchBar. Spotlight in Tahoe was responsive, well integrated, and finally supplied me with the OS-native clipboard history feature I’ve wanted for years. While there were a few features from LaunchBar I missed—most notably, the ability to bring up an app in the launcher window and then drag a file onto it from the Finder—I was able to adapt quickly.

My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).

I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)

Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me. In Spotlight, if I type home and accidentally select an app like HomeControl or HomeBot instead of the regular old Home app, I am then prompted to launch that other app, seemingly forever. In LaunchBar, not only does it seem to recognize that the app I’ve launched hundreds of times is more likely to be my choice than the app I’ve launched once or twice, but LaunchBar will also let the user define a text shortcut that is hardwired to a particular item.

Spotlight in Tahoe will let you define text shortcuts, which it calls “Quick Keys”—but only for Actions, one particular class of item. Why that functionality isn’t available for all items is completely beyond me. But the result is that I end up launching the wrong thing, and I have no real recourse except to try to remember to launch the right thing again and again until it figures it out.

(A sad admission: On several occasions, I have renamed bookmarks and even deleted some installed apps just to stop Spotlight from recommending the wrong thing.)

In any event, Dr. Drang reminded me that there’s an easy solution to my quibbles about Spotlight: Just go back to LaunchBar.

One reason I had been willing to stop using LaunchBar was that it had been increasingly unstable for me, indexing files slowly after startup, failing to find recent changes, and throwing indexing errors. It also hadn’t been updated very much recently, making me wonder if the developer was more interested in its app Little Snitch and had put LaunchBar in maintenance mode. Fortunately, there was a substantial update in March, so maybe there’s life left in the ol’ girl after all.

So, for now, my dalliance with Spotlight is over, and I’ve returned to the familiar floating launcher window of LaunchBar. However, I’m going to keep an eye on Spotlight. If Apple can make it faster, more reliable, and a bit more customizable in macOS 27, it might be on to something.

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While I love dogs and seek permission to pet from the owner of nearly every dog I encounter, I have gone cold on new email apps after decades of losing my greatest loves.

I can’t remember which horrible mainframe program I used first, in the 1980s, but pine—developed at nearby University of Washington—was a standby in my early Unix-plus-Internet days. I adopted Eudora as soon as I found it and used it for many, many years because it only offered text-based email—no HTML! When it petered out around 2002, Mailsmith arose from Bare Bones, with the same text-only front end. Despite friend Rich Siegel and other developers keeping it alive long after its commercial utility had ended, I eventually shifted to Postbox in 2019. Guess what happened in 2024.²

Thus did I approach the relatively newly released MailMaven version 1 with some fear, even as I smoothed its fur, patted its back, and said, “Good mail app! Good mail app!” I’m happy to say that MailMaven gave me the puppy experience: I’m so excited to meet it and get to know it, and I’ll be even more so as it calms down and matures, and I get to live alongside it for what I hope is a long time.

MailMaven can be a good pal to a casual user, someone who wants something better than a Web app, like Gmail, and might have multiple email accounts. It’s friendlier and easier in its default setup than Apple’s Mail—less frustrating and more customizable, but you don’t have to make any substantial tweaks to start using it.

For the true mail nerd, of which I number myself, MailMaven could become your best friend. It has a cornucopia of options that let you wrap MailMaven around your particular needs. And we’re only at version 1.0.

It’s here I should note that I have no financial interest in MailMaven’s success, but I did edit the Take Control of MailMaven book, written by publisher Joe Kissell, who has advised SmallCubed, the developer, and also wrote the regular user manual.³ This was in my paid capacity as executive editor at Take Control Books.

During the late development process and early 1.0 bug-fixing release schedule, I worked with the app quite a lot, reported a number of issues (which were fixed), and had planned to transition to MailMaven last fall. I wound up holding off—part of that was on me, and part on them. I’m glad I waited, because I can give the app a clean look after solving my problems and after the developers have given themselves a good shake and reached release 1.0.14.

Think outside the mailbox

MailMaven emerged, like V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, from what was originally SmallCubed’s MailSuite, a series of components to improve Apple’s Mail for macOS.⁴ When Apple changed its plug-in architecture, the folks at Small Cubed set out to build the mail client they were trying to tweak Mail to be.

You can tell! So many of the frustrations and non-configurable parts of Mail are easily dealt with in MailMaven. And they’ve added sophisticated rule-based processing and a host of other features that came over in part or in whole from their previous add-ons.

This isn’t a copy of Mail, though—neither for copyright nor look-and-feel purposes. MailMaven has its own nature, which I would describe as colorful. It’s not garish, but you wouldn’t accuse the developers of working with a bland palette. They use color as ably and extensively as they do interface design elements. You can change nearly everything related to color, so you’re not limited to the defaults. This is true in many ways throughout the interface.

Like nearly all email clients, MailMaven structures itself around accounts, mailboxes, messages, and threads. Since this is how you set up, store, and read email, that makes sense. By default, the accounts sidebar shows your email accounts, with mailboxes organized beneath each. With a mailbox selected, you see messages in the main view. It uses some elaborate arcs to show you the connections among threaded messages, a step up (if not a step too far for some potential users) from the low-key or hard-to-follow threading in many other apps.

From there, however, I feel like we move into new territory. That account/mailbox view is just one option. The sidebar has four others:

• Favorites: You can favorite an account or individual mailboxes. You can then rename the entry within favorites without renaming the account or mailbox!
• Smart Mailboxes: Familiar from Mail and many other kinds of apps, smart mailboxes show the results of search criteria you set up.

• Tag Mailboxes: Perhaps unique to MailMaven, you can apply tags in many kinds of ways, and then show matches. It’s like a subcategory of a smart mailbox, but one derived from how you have tagged messages. (You can also skip this entirely.)
• Review Mailboxes: This, to me, is a winning feature if it fits how you work. It’s kind of the ultimate way to mark messages you don’t want to file but don’t want clogging up your inbox. You can mark a message as something you want to review tomorrow, on a particular date, or that you expect a reply to, among other variants.

Tags deserve even more explanation, even though I haven’t started using them yet! A number of non-email apps offer forms of tagging that let you cut across other kinds of organization. MailMaven might have the most sophisticated version available. Tags aren’t just metadata—they’re almost supradata? Data that sits above metadata as an organizational scheme.

Without turning this review into a book, I’ll note three important aspects about tags:

• You can set them manually.
• Tags can be keywords, projects (another grouping mechanism), an importance ranking (lowest to highest, 1 to 5), a review date, a background color (see above), freeform notes, an alternative subject line that overrides the original subject, or flag icons.
• They can be used in rules and set by rules. So you can have a rule that says, “Every time I send email to unsubscribe—check the email address, the contents of the message, and so on—tag this message with the ‘unsubscribed’ keyword.” Or, “Every message that has the text ‘Six Colors’ in it should be tagged as high importance, assigned to my ‘Six Colors’ project [another grouping mechanism!], and marked for review.”

Note just above that I mentioned a rule for your outbox: that’s right—you can trigger rules before and after sending messages. You can write a rule that prompts you to make sure you attached a file promised in the email! Or ones that file outgone messages in folders corresponding to the same topics in which you file inbound ones—or that delete certain messages after sending.

You can see that MailMaven has a lot of automation, processing, grouping, and review concepts at its heart. I would argue that if none of that sounds appealing, like you had an “oh, thank goodness!” reaction to the above, I’m not sure MailMaven’s general functionality will overwhelm you enough compared to email apps already out on the market—not Mail, particularly, but others.

However, you might still give it a spin just because it’s fun and easy to use.

My smart path to becoming a maven on mail

Apparently, I have 700,000 stored emails. Do I need all these? Certainly not. Am I going to spend a sizable amount of time pruning these by hand? Can an algorithm help? It already did, dropping 100,000s of duplicates and old automated messages of no value.

When I first attempted to switchover to MailMaven, I was stymied. I don’t need that much email actively online, but I don’t want to lose access to it or the ability to search my archives. MailMaven offers effective import options, so it wasn’t hard to start importing mailboxes. The app can import the standard mbox format, as well as individual email messages in the also standard eml and emlx formats. But it looked like we might be talking several days, if not weeks, of uninterrupted import action. Seemed apt to fail due to entropy, and then I’d have to figure out what was left to do.

So I put this off for a while.⁵ A couple of weeks ago, I strategized: what if I dumped old email into a searchable database that wasn’t part of an email app? With a little heavy lifting, I imported everything, with a lot of parsing, from the early 1990s to the present.⁶ I have this database update nightly with the last 24 hours of filed email.

I then trimmed the email to import into MailMaven to just a year’s worth and imported only the folder structure from that period—about 18,000 emails—which was ready to go in minutes. MailMaven can’t import folders of mailboxes, but it can import the contents of multiple mailboxes at once. I re-created folders, then imported the mailboxes for them.⁷

Because I’d either used a series of modestly featured email apps or I’d used a modicum of features in more heavily built-out programs, the rest of my migration involved just two things:

• Replicating a filtering rule, so that sales receipts from book sales don’t clog my inbox, but are properly filed. That took a minute or so.
• Figuring out which favorites I wanted to put in the Favorites sidebar. That took longer.

With only a few dozen mailboxes organized thematically, I quickly figured out which dozen or so I had manually filed emails into. I am absolutely sure I could make better use over time of keystrokes and keystroke rules. The former requires learning and training my muscle memory; the latter means figuring out what I do repetitively, writing a rule, and then assigning a keystroke. Am I reading an email from Jason Snell, then always filing it in my Six Colors mailbox? I could assign a keystroke! Rules can be just as complex as those for incoming and outgoing email.

Yo, dog, what’s the bottom line?

I like MailMaven quite a lot. And each day I use it, I tweak something that makes me like it more. The developers fixed a synchronization bug that seemed entirely to affect my workflow just after I installed 1.0.12. They suggested I get on the beta track—which you can enable in the app—and the next release, 1.0.13, solved the problem. (In brief: I read email on two Macs, but only filed on one. An automated rule, mentioned above, redirects book receipts. However, it failed to mark messages as synchronized, so my “reading” Mac removed them from its inbox after retrieval. Receipts would still pile up even though they had already been deleted from the server inbox. It works great now.)

SmallCubed offers MailMaven for a flat fee of $75 for perpetual use of the version you purchase, including a year of updates and tech support. After a year, you can pay $75 (at current pricing) to renew the license to receive further updates and support, or you can continue indefinitely to use the latest version included in your original year of updates.

Is $75 a year too much? (Or $75 for the first year, and then when you are annoyed enough to pay for another year?) Given how much I use email, and how much of an improvement MailMaven is over Mail, not to me.⁸ You can try MailMaven free for 15 days.

The bigger question is the issue I mentioned at the outset. How long will MailMaven abide? It’s a small, scrappy company that persisted past Apple pulling the rug out from under plug-ins. It’s not a startup, and they invested years to get to this point.

But the market is cruel. Will MailMaven be around in six months, a year, five years—dare I hope for 10 or 20? Having developed a better pathway for migration for my archives, it might be that I have to think of MailMaven as a foster dog, rather than me providing a forever home.

Nonetheless, I open my heart as I do to all household animals, and recommend MailMaven as something you try to see if it fits you now, and hope that it grows with us all.

Tim Cook didn’t get to be a part of a “thoughtful, long-term succession plan” in 2011. After stepping in for Steve Jobs multiple times during the Apple co-founder’s fight with cancer, Cook became CEO, and Jobs became executive chairman just 43 days before Jobs died. Apple didn’t dictate the executive transition. Jobs’s cancer did.

I get the sense that Cook wanted to give his own successor the thoughtful, long-term plan that Jobs couldn’t give to him. Nearly two years ago, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested that Ternus could be Cook’s planned successor. By the time the Financial Times reported that Ternus was likely to succeed Cook last November, it was clear things were already headed in that direction. I doubt there was a single person at the March unveiling of the MacBook Neo who didn’t know that John Ternus, who spoke to the crowd, was likely to be Apple’s next CEO.

Tim Cook knows he can’t stay at Apple forever. The longer he lengthened his tenure as CEO, the shorter he risked making the transitional period. I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.

And here it is: Cook will give Ternus the CEO job in a little over four months. (Wall Street has ten days to digest that news before Apple reports its latest financial results.) Then Cook will become Apple’s executive chairman, able to provide advice and support to his successor while presumably allowing him to forge his own path. Ternus gets a runway, mentorship, and a trusted adviser at a particularly stressful moment. I’m sure Cook wishes he’d been able to talk to Steve Jobs during his first year as CEO.

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from—for now.

Tim Cook’s legacy

There’s going to be ample time to ponder the highs and lows of the Tim Cook era at Apple. The company is impossibly larger than the one Cook took over from Jobs. The explosive growth of the iPhone, especially from 2014 on, has changed the fundamentals of the company. When iPhone growth finally slowed, Cook swapped in a growing wearables business (led by what I assume is the product Cook is most proud of, the Apple Watch) and a dramatically growing set of subscription services. Those growth lines keep Wall Street happy.

When you’re the CEO, you’re the CEO of the whole company—but I do believe that CEOs come to the job with their own strengths, which reflect on their priorities as CEO. Cook’s focus on efficiency, owing to his background in operations, also served Apple well during this period. Realizing that product margins increase over time, he allowed Apple to sell iPhones at lower prices by keeping older models on sale for much longer.

Cook’s priorities helped make Apple a manufacturing powerhouse, capable of building products nobody else could—at least, until Apple showed the way. But as Patrick McGee so capably showed in his book Apple in China, Apple was also training up China on being a tech manufacturing powerhouse. Between that and Cook’s policy of engaging with the Chinese in order to gain access to the lucrative and growing Chinese market, Cook reaped benefits with the side effect of empowering a global competitor and not engaging with a government whose core principles do not fit with Apple’s.

The same goes for the United States, where Cook has managed to reduce the impact of tariffs by playing nice with the administration ¹, making some made-in-the-USA servers and boasting about its investments in American manufacturing while downplaying its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

John Ternus’s opportunity

For John Ternus, who’s been working at Apple for half his life, to say that this is a huge opportunity is an understatement. Congratulations, dude, here’s the keys to one of the world’s most important and valuable corporations. Don’t break it.

But Ternus’s arrival in the CEO’s office isn’t just an opportunity for him. It’s an opportunity for Apple. Every time a new person takes over, whether it’s in the role of CEO or even just a middle manager, there’s an opportunity for change. Even if you worked for the old boss, once you’re the new boss, you have the opportunity to turn the page. It’s a lot harder for someone to reverse themselves on a decision they made than it is for someone new to come in and see the opportunity to move forward. (Cook re-instituted an employee donation-matching program when he took over from Jobs, just as one small example.)

In spite of its success, or perhaps because of it, Apple has been a company in stasis for 15 or 20 years. When everything’s going great, and all the executives just stick around no matter how rich they get on stock options, it’s really hard to make changes. The arrival of any new person in charge, not just John Ternus in particular, is an opportunity to shake things up. New leaders have the freedom to make their mark. That could be good for Apple.

I’m also struck by the fact that John Ternus comes from a product-focused background. All in all, it was probably for the best that Tim Cook was as different in skill set from Steve Jobs as possible, because that was an impossibly hard act to follow. Cook, as an operations guy, got to put his faith in the product teams that were executing and guided them at a very high level. I think it would’ve been a disaster if Apple’s first post-Jobs CEO had been trying to cosplay as Steve. Cook couldn’t pull off wearing that turtleneck.

But it’s been 15 years, and maybe it’s a good thing for Apple to get a CEO who’s closer to the metal? Ternus knows the ins and outs of product development at a different level than Cook ever could. Given that Apple is, at its heart, a company that makes physical products and sells them, having someone who has spent decades at Apple working on those products feels like an opportunity for a positive change.

The importance of keeping Johny Srouji

As a part of Monday’s moves, Johny Srouji has been named Chief Hardware Officer, reporting to Ternus. This is a new C-suite position for Srouji, previously the senior VP of hardware technologies.

It’s hard to see this move and not consider Bloomberg’s report back in December that Srouji “recently told Cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future,” a report defused by Srouji two days later.

Srouji is the father of Apple silicon, and Apple’s chip efforts are one of the company’s greatest assets. When word of Srouji’s potential exit broke, it only underscored to me just how vital Srouji and his team are to Apple. It also struck me that perhaps this was evidence that Apple was negotiating with Srouji in order to retain him, during a period when one of his peers—Ternus—was about to be made his boss.

The moment your boss of more than a decade decides to hang it up seems like a pretty good time to take stock and consider what your own next move might be. If you’re Srouji, you undoubtedly have all sorts of different opportunities out there. Having a fellow SVP like Ternus be promoted over you also has to sting a little bit, even if you didn’t especially want the top job.

You need to retain key employees, and there aren’t many people more key at Apple than Johny Srouji. No matter how it went down, here’s the result: Srouji gets a C-suite title, and he takes over Ternus’s hardware role. Ternus’s lieutenant Tom Marieb is reportedly taking his slot and reporting to Srouji. This is textbook retention, and Apple has to be relieved that Srouji is staying on.

Still, these won’t be the last changes. With Cook on his way upstairs to the boardroom, I would expect many other long-tenured Apple executives to redefine their positions or even depart entirely. Keep in mind, most of these people have been working intensely for decades and have made enough money to retire in style. I have no doubt they do it because they love it, but once the boss changes and some of your old colleagues step away, it’s not the same, is it? It’s a cascading wave of change that is probably going to continue at Apple for some time.

Managing that change, and making it for the better, will be one of John Ternus’s first jobs. At least he’ll have Tim Cook to lean on for advice.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.

Like so much with Apple these days, the details of this “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process” have been broken by the press, primarily Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, so when the actual event occurs it’s not a surprise. Well, dropping it on April 20, ten days before Apple’s next quarterly results, is a bit of a surprise—but really, just the timing. Not the details, all of which were widely anticipated.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Every Apple device has opinions about when it should make noise. Some of those opinions are reasonable; others will surprise you at 2 a.m.! If you’ve ever wondered why your iPhone alarm blared right through Silent mode, or why your Mac doesn’t have a Silent mode at all, here’s the breakdown.

Everything that makes noise

Before telling you how to suppress, silence, or control audio output, let’s first look at what might provoke a sound and which settings control whether it’s produced. Then I’ll dig into Silent mode and other volume-control options.

Here’s what can trigger audible alerts across your Apple devices, and what controls each:

• Notification sounds: Sounds associated with notifications are governed by both Focus modes and Silent mode. You configure which apps can use sound in Settings: Notifications, either globally or on a per-app basis. Settings: Focus: Focus mode lets you choose when to suppress these sounds when that mode is active.
• Sound effects: System feedback sounds are subject to Focus mode choices on an iPhone or iPad, and to the Alert volume slider on a Mac. Silent mode applies to them on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.
• Ringtones: For phone and FaceTime calls, both Focus modes and Silent mode will suppress ringtones.
• Alarms: Alarms are a wild card. On an iPhone or iPad, you can’t silence them with suppression settings—neither Silent mode nor a Focus mode mutes an alarm. On an Apple Watch, however, Silent mode keeps alarms, well, silent unless you’ve enabled the breakthrough option, discussed below. On a Mac, the alarm sound is controlled by the Alert volume.
• Timers: Timers respect Silent mode on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. On Mac, they follow Alert volume.
• Emergency alerts (iPhone only): Government-originating messages, like AMBER Alerts and public safety notifications, ignore both Focus modes and Silent mode on an iPhone. Apple also offers “Enhanced Safety Alerts” for things like imminent earthquakes, though Apple’s documentation is conspicuously silent on whether these override your audio settings. (Educated guess: yes.)
• Find My’s Play Sound: If you or someone else triggers Play Sound in Find My for a device, that device always plays the Find My sound. It’s designed to help you find a lost device, so Apple bypasses all silencing. It can also help you find a device taken from you, or freak out the taker.

What the so-called Silent mode actually does

Silent mode is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. When you enable it, Silent mode suppresses ringtones, alerts, and system sounds.¹ Silent mode doesn’t disable the audio alarms, timers, music, or video audio—they all play right through it. So do Find My’s Play Sound, emergency SOS sounds, fall and crash detection alerts, and government emergency alerts. Apple’s logic is that these are sounds you either explicitly requested or urgently need to hear.

Your device may also still vibrate, as haptics are controlled separately in Settings: Sounds & Haptics.

Despite this seeming clarity, you will find device-based exceptions:

• On an iPhone or iPad, a Clock alarm ignores Silent mode entirely—it will always make noise.
• On an Apple Watch, though, Silent mode does suppress alarms unless you specifically enable Break Through Silent Mode for that alarm.
• If your Apple Watch is off your wrist and charging, Silent mode is ignored, and alarms always play—the assumption being, I infer, that if you’re not wearing your Apple Watch, you’d want to know when an alarm went off!

How to enable Silent Mode

Each type and some generations of hardware have different pathways or options to manage Silent mode:

• On an iPhone 15 Pro or later (and iPhone Air): Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics and toggle Silent Mode on.
• Older iPhones through the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus: These models have the physical Ring/Silent switch on the side.
• On any iPad: Go to Settings: Sounds: Silent Mode.
• On any Apple Watch: Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Silent Mode.

On all of these devices, you can also toggle Silent mode from Control Center: just tap the Silent Mode icon. If you don’t see it there, you’ll need to add it by customizing Control Center.²

Macs: No Silent mode for you

Macs don’t offer a Silent mode. Apple apparently assumes that if your Mac is awake and making noise, you’re sitting in front of it and can deal with it!

Instead, Macs split audio into two buckets. “Sound effects”—Apple’s long-standing term for system feedback sounds, alerts, error bonks, and the like—are controlled in Settings: Sound under the Sound Effects section. You can route them to a different audio output device, and there’s an “Alert volume” slider you can drag all the way to zero to mute them.

Everything else—music, video, app audio—is controlled by the main Output volume, adjustable via the keyboard volume keys or a Control Center slider.

Pump down the volume

One more piece of the sound output puzzle worth putting in place: on an iPhone or iPad, the hardware volume buttons normally control media volume, but there’s a setting in Sounds & Haptics called Change with Buttons that lets them also control the separate Ringtones and Alerts volume. If that’s off, you need to adjust the ringtone and alert volume with the slider in Settings.

On an Apple Watch, which has no volume buttons, you adjust volume in Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Tap the speaker icons, or rotate the Digital Crown when the volume slider is visible.

For further reading

I suffered to understand all the interactions of Silent mode and Focus modes, so you didn’t have to, when I researched Take Control of Focus. This book explains everything you need to know about what produces banners, sounds, vibrations, and more, and how to tune, tweak, and otherwise customize Focus modes to preserve your peace of mind while getting a piece of work done—or even reading a book!

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Go to the podcast page.

With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad and tracker blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

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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.

Especially in the realm of music production, Pro Tools on the Mac remains the industry standard. Andy Slater told me, “I’ve never seen a PC in a recording studio, and I’ve been in a lot of recording studios.” Michelle Guadalupe Felix Garcia, a blind audio engineer based in Sonora, Mexico, co-founded the Audio Accessibility Alliance last year to advocate for inclusion in audio production (and live sound). “A Pro Tools user who’s blind is exactly as capable as a Pro Tools user who’s sighted,” she told me, echoing sentiments from numerous other blind professional producers and engineers I spoke to.

He also heard about how switching from PC to Mac is different for blind users:

After months of false starts, KALW eventually connected Rachel Longan with Felix Garcia, the blind engineer, who wanted to teach her Pro Tools, but Longan didn’t have access to or experience with a Mac. The differences in screen-reading metaphors on Mac vs. PC are significant, and require far more adjustment than that switch does for a sighted user.

Leland’s article gets real when it comes to problem-solving and challenges for blind producers, and he reminds us just how much of the process involves creatively hacking solutions to meet very specific needs. It’s a long, detailed piece with a ton of resources and tips.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The MacBook Neo is apparently a big hit. So big that Apple is reportedly ramping up production.

Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?

This is a really juicy question. If Apple’s hottest new Mac is limited by the number of A18 Pro chips available, there are only so many MacBook Neos that Apple can possibly sell. And if the chip isn’t being made anymore, what can the company do?

While we are all left puzzling this one, I don’t believe that this is as much of a dilemma for Apple. Even if Neo sales are higher than forecast, I do not believe that Apple simply never imagined that it might have a hit product on its hands! If there’s any company that believes in its own greatness, it’s Apple, which is why I’m pretty confident that Apple’s MacBook Neo strategy always came with a contingency plan for runaway success.

What we don’t know is what that contingency plan is. One possibility is that it would go back to its chipmaker, TSMC, and beg to get some space to build some fresh A18 Pro chips. This doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. Apple’s not using this particular TSMC chip process anymore, and TSMC’s capacity is likely sold out with business from other partners. Beyond that, the profit margins built into the MacBook Neo are based on odds and sods from the high-volume iPhone 16 Pro, not fresh new chips baked just for the MacBook Neo. If Apple asks TSMC to fire up the A18 Pro forge again, one of the main methods of making the Neo affordable disappears.

Short of there being a Mystery Chip out there that we don’t know about, I have to assume that the most obvious solution is the right one: Apple has probably always intended to replace the A18 Pro MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro model as soon as it begins scraping the bottom of the A18 bin.

Another part of Apple’s Neo strategy is a reusable design. I have to believe that the MacBook Neo was specifically designed to be updated to a new chip at very little extra cost, because every time you do major product redesigns, margins go down. That MacBook Neo was designed to last four or five years, at least, with different chips sliding in, probably once a year.

Putting a newer chip in the MacBook Neo is the obvious solution. Now, if MacBook Neo sales really are wildly beyond Apple’s greatest dreams, perhaps the company is scrambling to get an A19 Pro model ready to go. But it’s a matter of advancing an anticipated time-frame, not inventing a strategy out of nowhere. (And again, it’s a good problem to have!)

I’ve seen various arguments against this approach, but I don’t think they hold water. Will people who bought an A18 Pro MacBook Neo be bent out of shape if a newer, faster model gets released six or nine months later? I’d guess that most of them wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t care, and there are always people who are put out when new computers eclipse the one you just bought—that’s life. Would Apple risk losing the momentum of its new, hit product because a few people had their feelings hurt because Apple released a newer version of the MacBook Neo? That’s a hard no.

Another argument is that, essentially, Apple can’t release a new generation of MacBook Neo just six or nine months after it released the last one! Apple has repeatedly shown that it’s willing to ship two versions of the same product in the same calendar year—and may be about to do it again this year with the M5 and M6 MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s unorthodox, but the MacBook Neo is also a really weird new kind of Mac, and maybe the rules are different for a computer like this.

Would Apple even make a big deal out of such a move? Updating some or all MacBook Neo models to a new chip would probably amount to nothing more than a press release. Sites like this one would certainly notice and cover it in detail, but I’m not sure anyone else would notice or care.

I do wonder if Apple might extend the life of the A18 Pro model by splitting the MacBook Neo product line in two. Before the bin is entirely empty, perhaps it could upgrade the $699 model to the A19 Pro while continuing to sell the remaining A18 Pro chips in the $599 model. Then, once there are no more A18 Pros to be sold, the A19 Pro could move down on the price list. These are spec changes that we’d notice, of course, but they probably wouldn’t affect the trajectory of the MacBook Neo in the slightest.

What I don’t expect Apple to do is allow the Neo to lose its momentum by making it unavailable for some period of time while it works on its chip shortage. If that means eating into margins, it’ll do that. If that means making a quick chip change, it’ll do that. But Apple strikes me as a company with a killer instinct, and it knows it’s taking the entire cheap PC laptop market to the woodshed right now. I don’t think it’s going to pause for a moment.

Well, maybe for a moment. It should pause just long enough to ensure that the bin of A19 Pro chips is nice and full, so it doesn’t get into this situation again next year.

Go to the podcast page.

Quick—what’s the most important iPhone ever? The original started it all. The iPhone 6 Plus brought in large sizes for the first time. The iPhone X redefined the phone for a new decade.

But there’s also a strong argument to be made for the iPhone 4, which debuted in spectacular and infamous fashion, generated one of Apple’s most remarkable controversies, and also ended up being one of the most influential iPhones in terms of design.

Most important? Well, maybe. But there’s no doubt that the iPhone 4 is the most interesting iPhone ever.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite.

This deal had been recently rumored. Amazon acquiring Globalstar gives it a leg up in its attempt to take on Starlink, which is the biggest player in this space. But Apple previously sank a billion-dollar-plus investment into Globalstar, whose system underpins its satellite features.

That stake seems to have bought Apple some assurances, including support for not only current but future devices. The ongoing question for Apple’s satellite features is whether users will ever end up paying for them, something that the company has been happy to continually kick down the road. It’s possible the deal is structured in such a way that Apple doesn’t have to pass on the cost to its users, at least for some period of time, but we’ll see what happens this year when the latest round of iPhones comes out.

As for Apple getting in bed with one of its competitors, Amazon is hardly the only other major tech company that Apple now has a close tie to: we know it’s using Google’s Gemini for its forthcoming AI models and, of course, it’s long depended on components made by Samsung. As tech companies get larger and larger, it’s harder and harder for them not to be collaborators.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Time Machine used to be a mess. I would try it with each new macOS release, get frustrated, and give up. My incoming email from readers was sometimes dominated by Time Machine problems, particularly when Apple transitioned from HFS+ to APFS as the Mac’s default startup volume file system. At one point, Time Machine volumes had to be formatted as HFS+ even after APFS became the default startup volume format.

Which is why I’m so pleased that Time Machine generally—generally, mind you—now performs as I would expect as part of my backup-and-archive systems.¹ I use Backblaze for encrypted Internet-hosted backups, Carbon Copy Cloner for nightly local clones, and Time Machine for continuous archiving and backups. I also use Dropbox and iCloud Drive for nearly all of my documents.

Often, however, I want to exclude something—or a lot of somethings—from Time Machine. A file or folder is too big (like Parallels virtual machines), a volume contains a clone of another volume (and thus should be ignored), or some data changes so frequently that it’s not ideal to archive using Time Machine.

Here’s how you can control what Time Machine archives.

Via the main System Settings interface

Open System Settings and go to General: Time Machine. Click Options. The Exclude from Backups list shows everything you’ve added, and anything Apple has included. You can drag items in or click the + (plus) icon to open a file or folder (or volume) selector. Select an item and click – (minus) to remove it.

As you can see from my list, I have many external volumes, and all of them are excluded from Time Machine—all external volumes are added to this list by default, and I’ve left it that way. After many, many hard disk drive failures, including a mirrored RAID, I no longer own enough local capacity to back up all my volumes. I put less-critical files on external volumes and rely on Backblaze.

You may also note that a couple of external volumes have Time Machine icons. Those are included in Time Machine by default, and if you select one, the – (minus) icon is grayed out. Typically, the only entry besides those volumes Apple automatically includes is /Users/Shared/adi, which is related to Apple’s digital commerce—that folder can be removed from exclusions, but I don’t know any good reason to.

Dial in your Time Machine exclusions

If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can also get to know tmutil, which provides text-based control over the same features presented in the Time Machine settings, plus quite a lot else. (In all of these examples, replace /path/to/item or similar with the actual path, of course!)

For instance, if you want to exclude a file or folder, but also may want to move that item later, use:

tmutil addexclusion /path/to/item

Wherever you relocate that item to, the exclusion follows. Or, if you want to use a fixed path and make sure it is invariant, same as the Exclude from Backups, use:

sudo tmutil addexclusion -p /absolute/path/to/item

The sudo command will prompt you to enter an administrative password because it requires elevated system privileges. The -p flag forces the time machine to excluse a path rather than a file.

A neat tip, if you didn’t know it: you can use the Finder to copy absolute paths for items:

1. In the Finder, select a file or folder.
2. Hold down the Option key and choose Edit.
3. Note the Copy “name” as Pathname option: choose it. You can also press Command-Option-C.

The Clipboard stores a path that can be quite short for a local volume, or verge on the absurd for files or folders on iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud-accessible systems. For instance, take a gander at:

/Users/glenn/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Aperiodical\ Projects\ \(iCloud\)/Flong\ Time\ No\ See\ Book/Figures/01\ Flong\ Time/flongs-per-year-chart.png

If you’d like to use the command line to check on items that are excluded or included, you can use:

tmutil isexcluded /path/to/item

You can use shell-based wildcard expansion, too, so if you did a lot of fussing with inclusion and exclusion in nested folders, you can enter the first part of the path, like ~glenn then use ./* to get a list with [Excluded] or [Included] before each directory at that level of the path, like tmutil isexcluded ~glenn/*.²

For further reading

Joe Kissell has written loads about Time Machine in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, including strategies, complements, and alternatives.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

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Every morning, I start my day with breakfast, a cup of tea, and my iPad. This is the latest version of a ritual that began years ago with an actual newspaper that an actual human being left in my driveway. For the last five years, it’s all been mediated by my RSS reader, but it’s an experience that integrates newsletters and RSS feeds together in one place.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the whole experience is not quite as good as it should be. It’s a feeling that was stoked further by Terry Godier, whose essay Phantom Obligation served as an explanation for what motivated Godier to create Current, a newsreader app that tries to escape the tyranny of unread counts and reading debt and other pressures that turn reading from a pleasure into a chore.

Godier’s approach lets you treat different media sources in different ways, which is very clever. A breaking-news firehose might fade away after a few hours; a site devoted to thoughtful longform articles a few times a week or month would have more staying power.

It all makes sense to me, which is why I was surprised that when I tried Current, I bounced right off of it. I realized that the premise of Current is that it’s providing a gentle way to fade out the noise and allow users to focus on what’s important, whether it’s based on time or voice. It’s an app that seems meant for people who check their RSS readers several times a day, perhaps on their phone whenever they’ve got downtime. Makes sense to me—but that’s not me.

I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.

This makes me realize that, rather than being frustrated that so many of my news sources these days offer newsletters but not RSS feeds, I might actually be better off subscribing to more newsletters, and unsubscribing from the equivalent RSS feeds of those sources. Yes, I’m frustrated that the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t offer RSS, but it offers several daily newsletters that pop up in my newsreader in the morning, featuring links I can tap on to read stories in its app or on its website. Maybe that’s… better?

Similarly, I’ve started to look at some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to and realize that they’re just not important enough to drop multiple items in my feed over the course of a day. I’d actually rather have their posts collected into a bundle, whether that’s via a newsletter, my reader app, or some sort of script I write that turns the source’s new posts into a list of links.

That’s not quite the same thing as what Godier is trying to do, but it’s similar, because it suggests that the big-list-of-posts interface for RSS readers might not be quite right. If my RSS reader offered me the ability to select certain RSS feeds and display them as a single summary item with links to the stories, that would probably fit better into my reading approach. (And again, I can probably code up a simple script that generates these newsletter-like summaries and sends them to Feedbin.)

While I didn’t end up clicking with Current, I really like how Godier is challenging the entire idea of the “email inbox” RSS interface that’s been predominant forever. My insertion of newsletters into my Feedbin interface was the first clue that what I want to do is not actually read RSS, I want to read what I want using an app that makes that easy.

What is that app? What would we even call it? If it’s all email newsletters, should I just be reading in my mail client every morning? Mail clients are nice and all, but I wouldn’t call them optimized for longer-form reading. Read-later apps like Instapaper are sort of similar, but focused more on long-term storage. News apps tend to be siloed or impossible to personalize. (I am not visiting Apple News in the morning.)

I don’t have an answer here, but I’m enjoying the uncertainty. After five years of a system that has served me pretty well, I’m realizing that it’s got more rough edges than I had really noticed before. It’s okay, but it should be a lot better.

Maybe we should all revisit the assumptions we make about when and how we read. That was really Terry Godier’s point, and it’s a good one.

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

As someone who keeps a Mac mini running in my closet, I guarantee you that I have been affected by this bug. But who remembers that it’s been 50 days since the last time your Mac server became entirely unresponsive other than pings? Unless I’m traveling, I just shrug, reboot the Mac, and go on with my life. Not great.

Update: I’ve heard from some people who report very long uptimes on Mac servers running older versions of macOS. I guess the bigger question is, what OS versions does this actually impact? Tough thing to test, given that the bug appears only after 49+ days.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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Like millions of people around the world, I have a mixed marriage: I’ve long used Macs, but my wife Kat’s personal computer is a Windows PC.

That categorization isn’t entirely fair, though—because Kat also uses an iPhone and wears an Apple Watch every single day. We have an Apple TV in the living room and a HomePod mini in the kitchen. She’s certainly no stranger to the world of Apple devices. If anything, the Lenovo laptop that largely lives underneath our TV is the odd one out in the house.

When we bought her that laptop for personal use a year or so back, price was one of the primary drivers—until the MacBook Neo, the $500-ish computer range was a market in which Apple simply didn’t compete. But when the Neo arrived last month, I thought this seemed like an ideal time to see what would happen if we took advantage of Apple’s two-week return period and tried to replace her personal PC with a Mac. So, I ran down to our Apple Store one Sunday and picked up an Indigo MacBook Neo with 512GB of storage for her to put through its paces.

This wasn’t just an opportunity for her, though—it was also a chance for me to see what it was like for someone who has largely only used a Mac in passing to switch up their habits and use it full time. The result was, honestly, illuminating. In addition to jotting down some thoughts about our experiment, we’ve also recorded a podcast in which Kat and I discussed her experience, including what won her over and what areas didn’t quite work for her.

Making the jump

One thing that jumped out at me when I was first helping her set up the MacBook Neo was the acclimation process. There are plenty of things that we long-time Mac users take for granted as the way things work, but if you’re switching from another platform, they can seem not only unobvious, but downright hostile.

For example, I noticed she ran into a lot of problems with two-finger clicking. Apple’s trackpads are often considered best of breed, but they can be jarring to somebody who’s not used to them. She would frequently bring up context menus by accident, because she’s used to resting her second finger on or near the trackpad while clicking. This is one of those habits that simply takes time and muscle memory to adapt to, but it can definitely get in the way when all you’re trying to do is click a button.

Sometimes there are larger differences that just need to be re-learned. For example, Windows has long featured a very keyboard-driven interface in which you can access most of the drop-down menus without resorting to using a pointing device. While this is technically possible in macOS, it’s not quite the same: either you have to use some specific workaround like using the Command-? shortcut to access the Help menu and then search or use the arrow keys, or you have to enable macOS’s Full Keyboard Access, which is an extreme option that can really disrupt the user interface.

We also ran into some idiosyncrasies that seemed particular to this experience. For example, this version of the MacBook Neo shipped with the previous version of the iWork apps, before their inclusion in the Creator Suite. Not only did this lead to some weirdness where you opened an app and were immediately told to download a different version of that app, but there was some sort of bug upon first run that really degraded the performance: in Numbers, for example, we dealt with repeated spinning beachballs as we tried to do anything as simple as enter data into a cell. It’s the kind of experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, even if subsequent uses later in the week were fine.

It’s the ecosystem

As for the positives, they tended to fall into two categories. The first I’ll call “quality of life” advantages. The build of the MacBook did not go unnoticed, with the solidity of its aluminum chassis and a keyboard that she deemed excellent. (She remarked several times on how much she enjoyed its clicky-clacky nature.) The Neo also runs far cooler than her Lenovo laptop, despite its lack of fan, and has a vastly superior battery life.

She, did, however knock the MacBook Neo on one hardware feature—or lack thereof. And no, it wasn’t the two USB-C ports or that one is slower than the other. It’s the lack of a touchscreen. That’s a feature that even budget PC laptops have had for a long time, and Apple—arguably the king of touchscreens!—has refused to bring to its computer platform. Coming from the Windows side, I can understand how weird that is—at least for now.

But the biggest win were what I’d call the ecosystem advantages. Since Kat already uses an iPhone and an Apple Watch, having all her passwords synced and at her fingertips—literally, since I sprang for the model with the Touch ID sensor—was deemed life-changing. Likewise, the ability to use apps like Messages on her Mac and have it seamlessly integrate with her phone was a real plus. However, we did run into one small hiccup there: at first, Messages wasn’t showing names of contacts; we discovered that was because Contacts had only synced about a dozen address records. After some further poking around, it turned out that most of her contacts were stored not in iCloud, but in her Google account. Once we set that up to sync, things worked fine, but it was another hoop to jump through to get everything working properly.

Similarly, she really appreciated the integration with Apple Pay and Touch ID. That’s a workflow she’s gotten very used to on her iPhone and Apple Watch, and its ease and simplicity is familiar—and equally good—on the Mac.

Where the Mac doesn’t always Excel

However, despite her generally positive reception to the MacBook Neo—which I think surprised even her—Kat was equally adamant that one place she’d never be able to use the machine is in her work. The main reason: Excel.

Kat spends a lot of her professional life in Excel, doing work like finance or advanced modeling—tasks that I cannot even pretend to understand. Now, Microsoft does of course make a version of Excel for the Mac. However, while it shares most of the same features as its Windows counterpart, most is not all. One key feature that she relies on in her work is a slew of powerful keyboard shortcuts that simply have no Mac equivalent.

I couldn’t believe this was the case in the year 2026, but sure enough. I even uncovered a Reddit post detailing this discrepancy, which itself links to a very lengthy Microsoft support document on all the keyboard shortcuts.

While you could laboriously remap many of these options to a Mac keyboard, the question simply becomes: why? In the strange eventuality where she was forced to use a Mac for her work, it would probably be far more expedient to simply run a Windows version of Excel in an emulation environment than create bespoke equivalents. But retraining all her muscle memory and skills? That’s a non-starter.

Goodbye, MacBook Neo

After two weeks, I’m sad to say the MacBook Neo was packed back in its box and returned to the Apple Store to spend more time with its family. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the poor Windows users.

Honestly, this wasn’t a slight on the Neo itself—the simple truth is that Kat just doesn’t use her personal laptop for much. In fact, the biggest competition to the Neo was not the Lenovo, but her iPhone, which is where she does most of her everyday computing tasks. Like many of us, she’s gotten used to a life that’s phone-first and only turns to a computer when she really needs something like a keyboard.

Ultimately, were that Lenovo to break tomorrow¹, Kat deemed that she would be tempted—perhaps even likely—to replace it with a MacBook Neo. But as it stands today, that PC is still alive and kicking, and thus we don’t have the need to buy a replacement that will, itself, barely get used.

Despite the Neo’s return, I consider the experiment to be an overall success. For someone who has long been frustrated with her experience using a Mac whenever she had to sit down at my desk², Kat ended up surprisingly pleased with the Neo. Were she to end up using a Mac more, I believe she might even find herself delighted with all the other features she has yet to discover. It gives me hope that our house may still someday be united in platform harmony.

If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s just a click away. Results will be posted at the end of the month.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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You might have noticed that, after installing iOS 26.4, your iPhone is behaving differently. Some actions (like changing your password) require a one-hour wait, followed by biometric authentication. You never had to do this before. Why now? Because with iOS 26.4, Apple has decided to enable its Stolen Device Protection feature on all iPhones. This feature may not make you safer—or feel safer—but it should prevent or severely deter misuse and hijacking of your iPhone and Apple Account.

Alternatively, you may not have noticed this—several sites reported in February 2026, during the 26.4 beta testing period, that Stolen Device Protection was automatically enabled in the update. Or a dark pattern—a user-interface design that pushes you to a particular decision without removing one or more others—may have caused you to opt in. However, I’ve found no confirmation from Apple, nor do various sites that write about Apple have a definitive answer!

So this is a good time to review Stolen Device Protection, whether or not you had it enabled without your permission.

One who steals my iPhone, steals my Apple Account

Months after a report in the Wall Street Journal about multiple people being assaulted or shoulder surfed to unlock a stolen iPhone, and from there to hijack the owner’s Apple Account, Apple added Stolen Device Protection. This feature flipped the script on iPhone authentication, requiring Face ID or Touch ID to access certain features or make significant changes—a passcode no longer sufficed. It also added a cooldown period, requiring a one-hour delay in many circumstances before those biometrically authenticated actions could occur.

The scenarios are very straightforward:

• Shoulder surfing: You’re at a bar with someone, and a stranger offers to take your picture. Your hand them your iPhone, and they make some attempt and say it’s locked. They hand it back and you enter your passcode. Now they take your photo—and run off with your phone, or someone later grabs it when you’re distracted. What might have happened is that they intentionally locked the phone, and a nearby confederate is using their iPhone or another device to zoom in and record high-resolution video of you as you enter your code.
• Violence: The Wall Street Journal’s account included instances of people being drugged at bars or at people’s homes, then convinced to give out their passcode. If drugging failed, or sometimes instead of it, violence or coercion is used. As recently as February 2025, a news report from Minneapolis quoted both law enforcement and victims.

With a passcode, those with criminal intent can access all sorts of stuff stored on your phone, including bank accounts, and use Apple Pay. What’s worse is that the Wall Street Journal reports documented that with a passcode, a thief or attacker could initiate an Apple Account reset, allowing them to hijack your account, change its password, and render it inaccessible to you—perhaps forever! (Apple is being sued about recovering such stolen accounts.)

Now, it’s unclear how many people suffered this kind of crime. It might have been dozens or hundreds—maybe it was thousands? There’s no comprehensive law-enforcement data, and Apple has offered no insight. Stolen Device Protection can cause minor to major inconveniences, depending on which features you can’t use for an hour, so I assume Apple found the issue significant enough to roll it out in 2024—and to push people to enable it in 2026, if not enable it for them.

Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.

If you have Stolen Device Protection enabled or want to, let’s go over what that entails.

Manage Stolen Device Protection

On your iPhone, go to Settings: Privacy & Security: Stolen Device Protection. If it’s disabled and you want to turn it on, you will be unable to do so if you don’t meet a number of requirements:

• Two-factor authentication on Apple Account: Nearly everyone has enabled this, or Apple has upgraded them to it.
• iPhone passcode: If you don’t have a passcode, I’m not sure we should be friends anymore.
• Biometrics: Face ID must be enabled; or, with older iPhones, Touch ID.
• Significant Locations: A slightly obscure feature, you find this in Settings: Privacy & Security: Location Services: System Services: Significant Locations & Routes.¹ Apple stores this information only on your devices, and uses end-to-end encryption to sync the data among them.² You can’t view these locations—only see a few recent ones, and a total number of stored records. You can tap Clear History and confirm to remove them.
• Find My: Find My has to be enabled on your iPhone, and it can’t be turned off as long as Stolen Device Protection remains on.

Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.

When you try to carry out certain actions, that’s when the protection kicks in. There are two kinds of deterrence:³

• Biometrics required (always): If you try to use stored passwords or passkeys from the Passwords app, view the virtual card number assigned to an Apple Card or Apple Cash, or try to disable Lost Mode in Find My, among other actions, you must use Face ID or Touch ID. A password won’t suffice. If someone stole your passcode and iPhone, they don’t have your face or fingertip.⁴
• Security Delay: For other tasks, a one-hour countdown timer starts if you have Always enabled or set to Away from Familiar Locations and are in such a place. At the end of that timer, you must use Face ID or Touch ID before proceeding. This includes updating your Apple Account password or signing out of your Apple Account on the device, turning off Stolen Device Protection (a little meta, there), or adding or removing Face ID or Touch ID. This makes it much harder for a thief to perform any critical action. In case of drugging, that has sometimes included still being in proximity of the person—why not add light kidnapping to assault?—but that appears to be rare.

I suspect that with Stolen Device Protection, a thief flings the iPhone away as soon as possible, except in even rarer circumstances than the above.

If you’re not typically in environments in which you might be at risk of the specific kind of theft or violence discussed above, Stolen Device Protection can be overkill and a pain. As noted above, I do spend most of my time at my house, working from a home office, and I avoid crowded bars and other venues.

However, if you like the additional protection and are willing to deal with the timeout or location-based iffiness of Stolen Device Protection, turn it on and give it a try, if Apple hasn’t already done so for you or snookered you into it. And you can always turn it off—it just might take an hour.

For further reading

I write about all sorts of security and protection, mostly focused on people having physical proximity to your devices, in Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

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A breathtaking image, taken by a human being on the Artemis II spacecraft, of our entire planet:

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after completing the translunar injection burn.

Just to be clear, this is the night side of Earth, illuminated by the full moon. You can see greenish Aurorae on the edges of the planet at top right and bottom left. There’s a hint of the sun (which is behind the Earth in this shot) peeking around on the bottom right. If you’re having trouble orienting, look for the Sahara: it’s toward the bottom left, with the Strait of Gibraltar and the Iberian peninsula just below. There’s no up or down in space, but this photo was posted with the south pole at the top. The vast blue expanse we’re seeing is mostly the Atlantic.

A full resolution version is available. And for all you photo nerds out there, Morag Perkins points out it was taken with a Nikon D5. (There are also some iPhones on board, but they didn’t take this shot.)

Go to the linked site.

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It’s probably just as well. You would not be able to handle the sheer hair of it all. Most of it on me, some of it inexplicably on the Mac. But, for the record, it was an SE FDHD with two floppy drives and an external 30 MB hard drive. I bought it used in 1990.

And I loved it.

I was hooked. It helped that I had just started grad school and could stay up all night playing Shufflepuck Cafe, Shadowgate and Strategic Conquest when I should have been studying.

I continued to buy Apple products throughout the ‘90s — an LC, then a Quadra 610, a Performa 6400, a PowerBook 520c, two Newtons and finally a Power Mac — when everyone in my family was buying PCs. (Now they’re all on Macs.)

I followed Apple rumors like crazy. Apple was working on a game system! A set-top box! Taligent was going to save the company! No, it was going to buy BeOS!

By 2001, it hit me: it was the rumors that were crazy, not me. Most of these people didn’t know what they’re talking about. I could write this stuff!

Hey! I could write this stuff!

So I did. I started writing Crazy Apple Rumors Site. And guess what? Yeah, it changed my life. But it also just led to some funny stories.

The first one I remember is after publishing a story one night (I wrote most of them after coming home from work), I woke up the day to find a message in my inbox from one Phil Schiller.

Normally that would be cool! An Apple executive! Emailing little ol’ me! Wow!

But there was a problem. The piece I had published the previous night was… less than flattering. Because the Enron trials were going on at the time and Schiller had given a speech at the annual QuickTime conference (yes, there used to be a QuickTime conference) that some said paled in comparison to a Steve Jobs show, I wrote that attendees wished Schiller had just pled the Fifth as so many Enron executives were doing.

So, when I saw his name in my inbox I did not think “Wow!” — I thought “Oh, crap.”

To his credit, Phil was extremely good natured about the jab and we went on to exchange emails over the years about various pieces I wrote. Schiller became a CARS staple, launching any number of my patented bad Photoshop jobs. My last exchange with him was to express my condolences on the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.

Some of my ideas were certainly better than others. One piece joked that Apple was introducing “iPorn.” That was it. That was the joke. In my defense, I was very young.

OK, I was in my late 30s. There. Are you happy? I’m not.

To create evidence of this claim, I took a screenshot of Apple’s homepage, added a blurred out pornographic picture to it and posted it with the article. I really could have and should have been doing literally anything else.

The day after posting that gem, the phone rang. Because I had a PowerBook in for repair at the time I was thrilled to see that the caller ID read “APPLE LEG”. If only I’d known what the truncated last two letters were. Instead I naively thought “Ah! News about my repair!” It was not that at all.

When I answered the phone, the woman on the other end identified herself as being with Apple Legal.

Ah. “AL”. Those were the missing two letters. She explained she was calling to demand that I take down the screenshot of their homepage with the porn added, claiming it violated the company’s copyright on the images. Presumably the non-pornographic ones. Upon hearing this, I immediately referred her to my lawyer who informed her of the fair use doctrine and hahaha, no, I folded like a cheap suit. I hand-drew a version of the image and posted that in its place.

(It is now hilarious that one of my current beefs with the company is that it continues to offer up apps that make non-consensual porn. Who says irony is dead?)

There were many other fun stories, including the time I wrote a piece saying that, for reasons unknown, the then 43-year-old Avie Tevanian was going through puberty again; slamming doors, pouting, stomping around the Apple campus and generally making all the other executives miserable. Do I know why I wrote this? I do not. This also prompted contact from the upper echelons of Apple corporate. Tevanian emailed me the next day to point out the big mistake in my article: I got his age wrong. He was actually 42.

But the big story was the one I would not find out the rest of until watching The Talk Show Live from WWDC back in 2019 seventeen years later.

Some time around May of 2002, I got an email from Schiller asking me if I would ever consider coming to work at Apple. As someone who spent way too much time thinking about the company, it was like being asked if you want to move up to The Show. But I live in Tacoma, WA, and remote work was not on the table with Apple. My wife and I were both happy with our jobs and loved living in Tacoma (shut up). So, after sweating it for a bit, I replied that, while I was flattered, it didn’t feel like a move I was ready to take right then.

At the end I quipped something to the effect of “If my situation changes and I’m suddenly really desperate, I’ll let you know!”

What I didn’t know until Greg Joswiak told Apple’s side of this story to John Gruber is that hiring me wasn’t Schiller’s idea. Apparently they sometimes used to pass around my articles at Apple’s weekly marketing meetings and, one time, Steve Jobs read one of my pieces at a meeting. Aloud. After what I’m sure was uproarious laughter, Steve said “That guy’s a pretty good writer. Why don’t we reach out to him to see if he wants to come work at Apple?”

Schiller wasn’t just idly asking me a question about my long-term career goals. Steve Jobs was saying “Hey, dumbass, do you wanna come work here, make history and also a bazillion dollars in stock options?”

And I said…

(this is what I said)….

“Only if I get desperate!”

Well, happy 50th, Apple. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.

My son’s been curious about the progress of the flight, so this morning at breakfast, I pulled up the NASA tracker so we could see where they are, but I found the interface pretty clumsy to use on the phone.

But this is 2026, where people who are excited about something can whip up their own solution. That’s just what accessibility advocate Jakob Rosin has done with this very cool web dashboard. There’s live data from NASA of the spacecraft’s speed and position, a timeline of all the events during the mission, and even audio radar of spacecraft positions that I find weirdly soothing. Definitely worth checking out if you’re keeping up to date on Artemis’s flight, although I do wish it had a visual representation of the spacecraft’s position and route. (That you can find on the NASA interface.)

[via Allison Sheridan on Mastodon]

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last month for devices that were not capable of running iOS 26, is now available even for compatible devices. If you’ve got auto-update turned on but have not gone through the steps to do a full upgrade to iOS 26, this update can be automatically pushed and applied. This is good news, as those who have opted not to run iOS 26 will get to take advantage of several sets of security releases.

Now the bad news: This is happening because of some really bad security breaches like DarkSword and Coruna. As Apple noted in a security update:

We enabled the availability of iOS 18.7.7 for more devices on April 1, 2026, so users with Automatic Updates turned on can automatically receive important security protections from web attacks called DarkSword. The fixes associated with the DarkSword exploit first shipped in 2025.

Now, to be clear, security patches on an older operating system are not as effective as they are on an entirely new system, since a new OS like iOS 26 has all sorts of structural changes made for security reasons. As a new Apple security note says, iOS 26 “contains the strongest security protections.” If you’re very concerned about your iPhone being secure, updating to iOS 26 is going to make it more secure than updating to 18.7.7.

But this does mean that Apple’s patches, which seek to break the chain of bugs that led to serious security exploits, are available to many more people.

Bottom line: If you’re an iOS 26 holdout, and you’re not ready to update your iPhone, at the very least you should update to 18.7.7 and protect yourself from some seriously ugly malicious software.