Safari web apps and PWAs are a nice start, but they’re limited. Browser tabs are messy. And most tools for turning websites into apps still feel more like wrappers than real Mac software.

Unite Pro takes a different approach. It turns any website into a fast, isolated Mac app built specifically for macOS — with support for Window, Sidebar, and Menu Bar modes, deep visual customization, smart link forwarding, and native enhancements like dock badges, meeting alerts for Google Calendar and Outlook, AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, and more.

What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.

Six Colors readers can get 20% off Unite Pro this week with the code SIXCOLORS. Learn more and download at bzgapps.com/unite.

Liquid Glass was not beloved. I didn’t mind it so much on the Mac, and I found some iPhone and iPad improvements worthwhile, and the rest tolerable. Some people hated it. John Gruber notably decided to hold off on updating his primary Mac to Tahoe. Apple ironically highlighted a slider in its WWDC keynote that one could describe as “mostly forget about Liquid Glass,” with an option from “full-on, nobody wanted this” to “as close to zero as we can go without breaking the interface.” Good.

Stacey Ford, Apple’s Vice President of OS Program Management, called out a broad mandate in the keynote. “We scoured every part of the OS for opportunities to refine our systems from the UI to the foundations,” she said. “Nothing was off limits, no enhancement too small.” In other words, there are no sacred cows leftover from the design team that left, and maybe Ford and her group hate the same things that we do, and they’ve been given the authority to fix them.

Maybe as a consequence, Liquid Glass will improve legibility through several changes, which you’ll see even with the slider set to zero. The layers of Liquid Glass elements will now be rendered so that the diffusion of the underlying material won’t interfere as much with legibility. When content moves beneath a floating bar, the bar will now—shocking!—float on top and increase contrast to keep its contents comprehensible, too. Edges will now be darker, and icons sharper.

Gruber despised a secondary macOS change perhaps as much as Liquid Glass: the tiny icons on drop-down menus that were unhelpful, patronizing, and inconsistent across apps. Those are effectively gone now, with new guidance from Apple that is nearly contemptuous of the one-year glitch in the approach.

A lot of digital ink was also spilled about corner radii, dragging, and consistency with macOS 26. So much so that Apple’s Shubham Kedia—Director, Human Interface—said in the keynote this remarkable phrase: “…every window on macOS now has the same tighter corner radius ensuring greater consistency across all of your apps, even if they haven’t been updated.” It’s the weirdest time in the company’s history that an Apple leader had to utter those words, but there you go, and there was mostly rejoicing. The lower-right-corner drag area appears fixed, too, in my testing with the first beta.

Tahoe’s other missteps that will be drawn back to the norm include ending the weirdly inset sidebars, such as in Photos, which now extend to the edges; the mouse-over hand cursor has mostly reverted to pre-Tahoe format, with slightly different finger positions, and indications that it’s a Mickey Mouse-style glove; and even the default wallpaper has rolled backwards, with iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all having access to the same set, if that’s the kind of thing you like.

More generally, I heard grumblings and read long essays about the instability people experienced with Tahoe, and still do, even though we’re at version 26.5. Often, the “tweak” year involves thousands of under-the-hood fixes. Apple was more frank about making things better this year than it has been since, I want to say, the year after Yosemite.² It would be like Microsoft making fun of blue screens of death.

Apple’s Ford said, “We made things faster, smoother, even easier to use, and we took care of a bunch of things you’ve been asking about.” She later described speed improvements in iOS and iPadOS app launch times, a fix for a long-running Wi-Fi/cellular poor handoff issue, a complete overhaul of Spotlight, and much more. She noted, “We’ve all had that moment where you search for something you know is there, but it just won’t show up. So on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, we’ve rebuilt the foundation of search that powers Spotlight, Photos, and Mail.” That is a heck of an admission of the truth we experience day to day—almost un-Apple-like.

There’s more I won’t enumerate in detail, such as the “OS improvements” section that appears on Apple’s sites for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, in which Apple confesses to imperfections and proclaims it has solved them. Because all iPhones, most iPads,³ a few Apple Watches,⁴ and all M-series Macs (but no Intel Macs) that could run version 26 can run 27, no harm, no foul, right? Just took a year.

These rollbacks and improvements may finally push people like Gruber to, er, cross the Golden Gate in a way that they could never bring themselves to plunge into the imperfect, quirky, and irritating waters of Tahoe. Because of how Apple pushes users to upgrade, I expect that iPhone and iPad users may find more relief, as they’re running the current release!

For further reading (and writing)

My summer’s work will include a lot of reading to write updates for around 10 Take Control Books titles. I’ll also be working to keep a new micro-site, currently called Apple Specs, up to date, where you can look up operating system and hardware features to figure out which devices and releases support them. I welcome feedback via a link on each page of the site.

I mean, the way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say ‘Listen, that’s not what I’m here for, right? I’m here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world.’ But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri’s not up for that. Siri’s 100 percent not into that.

This jibes with what I heard from my conversations with Apple this week, namely that Siri is designed to act as your helpful personal assistant. It’s further borne out by the poking around that folks like Federico Viticci have done in what they can find of Siri’s prompts.

This isn’t to say that Siri doesn’t still occasionally dip into the kind of AI speak that we’ve grown accustomed to from chatbots; I’ve definitely seen it. But I’ve also noticed, anecdotally, that Siri is quick to acknowledge mistakes and, crucially, ask for more followup information rather than doubling down. If nothing else, that feels like a key difference that I want to see from my AI interactions.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

I look at the content creators who are possibly experiencing their first WWDC, and realize: how am I still here, and still taking notes on an iPad, while these younger folks are shooting videos that millions of people will watch? I’m in between changes again, but I don’t mind it. The challenge still feeds me. I’m more comfortable now, but – miraculously – I don’t feel cynical or jaded. Some people are into that sort of attitude; I’ve always preferred to put in the work to be critical and enthusiastic about the things I like. In a world of complaints, optimism is a skill.

This was, um, 30 years of me covering WWDC. If Federico is now a veteran, please do not tell me the word for what I am. But I really enjoyed his reflections and the ongoing (yes, even for me) challenge of adapting to change, seeing things with fresh eyes, and appreciating the people who are experiencing these events for the first time.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The last two years at WWDC, Apple has felt like it’s been in a hurry. In 2024, in a hurry to catch the AI wave before it entirely passed them by. (They didn’t catch that wave—they wiped out, lost their surfboard, and may have been partially gnawed on by a shark.) Then last year it felt like it was trying to cover up its embarrassment about AI failures by rushing out a new design scheme that felt ill conceived, especially when it came to the Mac.

This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC 27, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick—but not to hurry.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

I’m home after two and a half days down in the South Bay for WWDC. This year I tried to take notes at the keynote and in briefings using a traditional reporter’s notebook and a pen, which means that I’m literally emptying my notebook when I give you these first scattered impressions of what I saw.

The AI stuff

What struck me most about Apple’s AI announcements is how little the company’s stance on AI has changed since its fateful WWDC 2024 announcements. It’s still classic Apple: AI is not the end but a means to an end, with the goal of building “helpful products for people.”

So this release is not about Apple questioning its priors. Instead, it’s about getting back on track, back in the game. The goal here isn’t for Apple to blow away the competition, but to be relevant and helpful and create a foundation on which to build.

Also, having a version of Siri that actually works would be a pretty big win.

Apple’s huge advantage here is that it’s the platform owner, so it can build tools that search through all the data on your personal devices without requiring that you expose that private data to some company’s systems. It’s using that revamped Spotlight to search through your own data, then handing snippets off to Private Cloud Compute for processing. I think it’s all very promising.

In terms of where it’ll go next, look to the Passwords feature that agentically changes your passwords for you in the background. Look at the tools that let you vibe code Safari extensions and create Shortcuts. I do not doubt that Apple would love to do more of this sort of stuff, which is much closer to the present-day of AI enthusiasm, but it really does need to walk before it can run.

More broadly, I’d like to see Apple ship these features this fall and then maybe introduce some new AI features early next year. The pace of AI is so much faster than Apple’s annual software cycle can accommodate. It needs to get used to phasing in new AI features across the entire cycle, so it can make quick adjustments as new trends in AI functionality emerge.

I want to note that this year Apple has redefined what Private Cloud Compute, a concept it introduced in 2024, means. Before, it meant Apple servers running on Apple hardware in Apple data centers. Now it means something a bit broader, since it can also include Apple-controlled servers running on non-Apple hardware in Google data centers. Apple took great pains this week to explain that Apple controls those servers and they’re built to the same privacy specifications as the other servers in the PCC cloud—in other words, they’re not generic Google servers that could compromise your private data—but it’s also a sign that Apple needed more cloud AI power than it was capable of providing on its own. Hence the redefinition.

And one final AI note: The segmentation of AI models has commenced. Apple now has two different on-device AI models, one of which has much higher hardware requirements. Right now, this higher-powered model is primarily used for improved dictation and speech synthesis, but undoubtedly over time, it’ll be used for other things. I do wonder if, in the long run, older Apple devices will just have to turn more to Private Cloud Compute to perform beefier tasks, or if they’ll be entirely barred from new features? But we’ve already seen that being a device “capable of running Apple Intelligence” is no longer sufficient for some features.

On the server side, there are also multiple models. More basic jobs are handed to a smaller model running on Apple’s servers. Heavier tasks are instead handed to the bigger models running on Apple-controlled servers in Google’s data centers. This is all transparent to the user, which is as it should be, but it’s interesting to watch Apple’s AI back-end increase in complexity.

Snow Leopard revisited

The moment the keynote used the phrases “sweating the details” and “attention to detail,” it was clear that beyond AI and Siri features, this year is about small fixes and improvements. In more private settings, Apple folks specifically referenced Snow Leopard and iOS 12, two updates that saw Apple take a pause from huge feature roll-outs and prioritize speed and bug fixes a bit more.

But to be clear, referencing Snow Leopard does not mean “no new features.” Like Apple’s 27 releases, Snow Leopard was full of dozens, if not hundreds, of new features—they were just scattered small improvements throughout the system. Updates like this are a challenge to communicate because there are no big features to grab on to.

This is the conundrum of operating-system releases. People say they want bug fixes and small quality-of-life improvements, but a roll-out without tentpole features feels kind of bland. In any case, Apple’s all-out mission to finally fix Siri and get AI integrated in their products the way it said that it would two years ago has allowed the rest of the people developing software at the company to check a bunch of items off their longstanding to-do lists, and I’m here for it.

At the top of my “why did it take them this long?” list of improvements is the change, mentioned in the keynote, that will allow iPhones to better handle that moment when they leave an area with Wi-Fi and have to switch to cellular. I always think of this as the “driveway problem,” but whatever you call it, too often I’m sitting in my driveway looking up directions in Apple Maps only to have all my searches fail because I’m apparently too far from my home Wi-Fi, but my iPhone hasn’t given up hope that it’ll come back soon.

My understanding is that in iOS 27, the iPhone will rely not just on measurements of signal strength (which is the primary method of choosing the wireless network today), but will also use throughput, latency, and signs of network congestion as signifiers. And it’s designed to do so quickly, so you don’t spend as much time frustrated because your iPhone feels it hasn’t sufficiently mourned the loss of its Wi-Fi signal.

Apple fixes stuff it needs to use

A lot of frustrating bugs sit, untouched, for years. Apple has its priorities, and shiny new features get the love while rickety old stuff never rises to the level of being important enough to fix.

Until, that is, Apple needs to have that feature work right in order to serve one of its priorities for the latest OS release. At that point, you’ll find that old, broken features suddenly get the attention and fixes they’ve needed for years. That’s why some of the seemingly random bug fixes and improvements scattered across the 27 releases aren’t actually random! They’re side effects of Apple’s larger feature pushes.

For example, imagine that you’re building a new Siri AI system that needs to lean on searching through a user’s local files in order to apply an important level of personal context. Perhaps when you’re building that system, you realize that you can’t actually rely on Spotlight to supply all of that context because it’s not nearly as stable or efficient as you need it to be.

If such a thing were to happen, well, perhaps Apple would find the time to rebuild all of Spotlight search to make it work faster and more reliably. Perhaps searching in Mail would float more relevant results up to the top. Perhaps Messages search would become less frustrating. And perhaps users who need to search for things will benefit, even if they’re not heavy users of Siri AI itself.

What I’m saying is, Spotlight’s going to be better in the 27 releases.

Long-suffering Shortcuts users will notice similar things happening there. It’s been incredibly frustrating to develop Shortcuts due to the lack of support for a proper If-Else statement, a cornerstone of programming. Scheduling Shortcuts has also been a pain, because you’ve got to tie a shortcut to a separate Automation step.

Well, guess what? Apple is introducing a cool new feature that lets you build Shortcuts entirely out of text prompts, using an AI model. It works pretty well, at least for basic tasks, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it this summer. But I have zero doubt that the people building that feature looked at Shortcuts and said, essentially, “What do you mean it doesn’t have If-Else or integrated scheduling? We need those things!” And so they’re now going to be there, for all Shortcuts users to take advantage of.

visionOS: Not dead

People are quick to bury the Vision Pro, which is and has always been a speculative and impractical device that’s more about the future than the present. It’ll be years before Apple is able to construct anything like the Vision Pro at a price and with a feature set that could possibly make it a mainstream product. In the meantime, it’s an experiment and exploration, and I’m okay with it. For all that to be true, though, visionOS needs to keep advancing. And it looks like it is.

This year, Apple’s adding the ability to convert panoramas into spatial scenes, which is just a wild idea. I’m dubious that my Sligachan panorama from the Isle of Skye is going to replace Bora Bora or Joshua Tree, but I love that Apple is still tinkering—and panoramas and spatial scenes are some of the best features in the Vision Pro. (That’s also a good sign, because it suggests Apple is learning what works well on visionOS and is leaning into those features.)

Also, if you believe the stories, Apple exec Mike Rockwell—who is the guy who was charged with shipping the Vision Pro—had originally planned for visionOS to be much more driven by Siri, only to be repeatedly let down by the Siri team. In visionOS 27, Siri AI seems to be pervasive. It feels like Rockwell, who is now in charge of Siri, is having his revenge—and fulfilling one of his dreams for how visionOS should work.

Of course, visionOS is also a playground for future features of other Apple devices. As Dan has pointed out, some of the visual-intelligence features of visionOS 27 sure feel like they might be applicable to other future wearable devices that Apple might be working on. Again, visionOS being a platform for experimentation is a good thing.

Photos improves, but it’s complicated

As someone who writes a book about the Photos app, I’m extremely invested in the changes Apple makes to that app from year to year. This year, it’s addressing one of its biggest limitations and adding a load of AI features that I’m ambivalent about.

First, the good news: Changes to Shared Albums! This feature has been compromised since it was launched, since it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images from your library. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

As for the three AI-powered features in Photos, they’re a mixed bag. I have high hopes for a much improved Clean Up, which was already okay but could be a lot better. The new version appears to be much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context imagery. This is where generative AI is really required, because if the fill-in algorithm isn’t smart, the results will look fake. So far as I know, Clean Up occurs on your device, using on-device models.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. It’s also going to be great for straightening images, since Extend can fill in the slivers of unknown image that are exposed when you rotate, which otherwise require that your image be cropped as you rotate.

However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. Judicious use would be my recommendation.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

The problem is that these results feel pretty generative, through and through. I saw some samples of people’s faces that, after being Spatially Reframed, didn’t really look like their faces anymore. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything that’s visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result is an image that, at least based on my initial reactions, felt surprisingly artificial. I’ve got to use this feature a lot more over the summer, but my initial reaction is skepticism.

Apple’s annual software updates have implications throughout time. They reach back to older devices, some years making them more performant and usable or, alternatively, removing support for them altogether; they deal, obviously, with the products people are using and buying right now; and, perhaps most interestingly, they hint at what we might see from the company down the road.

This year’s updates, in what we’ll call the 27 model year, do all of this. Though, when combined with the pervading reports of significant new types of devices from Apple, it provides some of the most tantalizing hints about what’s to come.

Know when to fold them

Given that the annual updates see their release around the time that Apple puts out a new iPhone, people are always spelunking for interesting tidbits in the code to see if they can find anything that informs those next generation of devices.

It’s a poorly kept secret that Apple is working on its first foldable device. Look in the right places, you can see cases, purported leaked photos of its exterior, and even 3D-printed dummy units.

For all of that, it’s the details of the implementation that are still unknown for now, but iOS 27 gives us a few clues about how this might impact developers.

For example, there are a couple of features on Apple’s big wall of text that seem to point to the foldable phone being nigh: “iPhone app resizing in iPadOS” and “App resizing in iPhone Mirroring”, as well as a bit in the keynote where Craig Federighi demos the latest device simulator for developers allowing them to test said resizing.

iPhone apps have, of course, long been available in both landscape and portrait modes, obviously, and various sizes to support the different size displays that iPhones have had over the years. But allowing users to resize them is certainly a new feature, one that feels plucked from the recent iPad multitasking updates.

While this doesn’t definitively tell us how iPhone apps will behave on a larger, unfolded iPhone display, it certainly makes it clear that iPhone apps are going to have to deal with a new multi-size future.

Reach out and touch your Mac

Second only in speculation to the folding iPhone might be the reported MacBook Pro that will be Apple’s first Mac with a touchscreen.

Apple’s been more than happy to make the iPad more Mac-like, first with support for keyboard and pointing devices, more recently with Mac-like multitasking. This year, the iPad gets an option to keep the menu bar visible all the time—and it’s now pinned to the left. Look familiar?

Turnabout is, of course, only fair play. Not unlike with foldable phones, touchscreen laptops have been sold by Apple’s competitors for years. But Apple seemed intent on keeping the iPad and the Mac in separate lanes.

Until, it seems, now. A preponderance of drawing related features are specifically making their way to the Mac, including both in Notes and in Freeform. Those features have existed on Apple’s touch-first platforms for some time, but this is their first jump to the Mac. While nominally this will work with your trackpad or even using an iPad as input, it’s not hard to imagine a future where you might be able to draw right on your Mac’s screen.

Messages now has a Drawing app on all platforms.

Likewise, a new drawing app in Messages across all of Apple’s platforms, including the Mac, and some other touch-related improvements, such as the Mac’s Sidecar feature, which now has a full-fledged touch interface, instead of just being limited to certain two finger gestures. And Apple also called out the addition of “pull down to refresh” on apps like Mail, Calendar, Safari, and more. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s a perfectly fine feature on a multitouch trackpad, but as an interface convention, we all know where it comes from.

Apple’s willingness to adopt Mac interface conventions on the iPad’s touchscreen—including the iconic stoplight controls—shows that such an idea isn’t nearly as farfetched as some might have thought. And it certainly feels like the touch future of the Mac is just around the corner.

A vision of the future

Not every future Apple device is imminent, though. While a folding iPhone and touchscreen Mac might be in people’s hands before the end of the year, Apple’s got plenty of ideas for farther off devices up its sleeves. Or, I guess, on your face.

During its preview of visionOS 27, Apple showed off the implementation of its Visual Intelligence feature on the Apple Vision Pro, saying that you could get information by an object just by looking at it.

Which is cool, but the Vision Pro is a device that stays in the confines of my house—and even there, generally in my office. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of objects in my office that I really need to know more about.

But take a similar device—say, a smaller, lighter one—into the wilds of the outdoors and there are any number of things that you might want to learn more about, from plants and animals to cars or clothing.

Reports suggest Apple is working on wearable devices, both in the form of glasses and AirPods, with cameras that can tell you about the world around you. Don’t be surprised, if and when they arrive, if they have a Visual Intelligence implementation that draws upon what they’ve done here with visionOS.

Future proof

With Apple notoriously tightlipped about its future plans and product roadmap, you might wonder why exactly Apple continues to roll out features that seem to provide evidence of just such a future.

At the base level, of course, is that if there’s a cool feature that’s ready to go at the time of an update, then there’s no reason not to put it out. (And said speculation also builds buzz, which doesn’t particularly hurt them.)

But moreover, in the same way that Apple builds in APIs and features for developers to prepare their apps for future releases, putting these features in early helps lay groundwork. In part to be able to best show off those new devices when they arrive—”And if you want to draw in Notes, just use your finger on the screen!”—and in part to let users themselves prepare for all the cool things they might want to do in the future—whether on the devices they have right now, or the ones they might someday get.

It’s not a total surprise that watchOS 27 isn’t a huge release, but there are still some very welcome features. The first is Siri AI, which, thankfully, is heavily integrated into the Apple Watch. I had wondered how much the Apple Watch would support this new LLM-backed assistant, but it seems that many of its key abilities available on iOS are also accessible on watchOS. That’s great to see.

However, the downside for me is that my beloved blue Series 7 Apple Watch will not be supported by this update, which requires at least a Series 9. Here’s hoping Apple adds some more color options in this year’s models.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Siri’s long-awaited overhaul made its public debut today during Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote, as Apple outlined its vision for a more capable version of its virtual assistant that’s powered by a new generation of Apple Intelligence.

From now on, Apple’s foundation models are being blended with Google Gemini to create the new heart of Apple Intelligence. The result, Apple executives say, will be AI features that are aware of your context, including what’s on your screen, with a personal assistant in the form of the rebranded Siri AI that’s more responsive to your needs.

Developers will get the first crack at seeing what’s new with Siri and Apple Intelligence, as Apple releases developer betas of this year’s software updates — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27 — starting today. Public betas will follow in July, with the full releases arriving in the fall as they usually do.

Of course, not every iPhone and iPad owner is going to have access to Siri AI right away. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, announced during the keynote that the updated digital assistant won’t ship to EU countries with the rest of iPadOS 27 and iOS 27 in the fall, as EU regulators want other virtual assistants to have the same access to users’ private data that Siri gets. That’s a hard no for Apple, which insists that user data remain private. There’s no timeline on when Siri AI might hit the EU.

But that’s for Apple and the regulators to hash out. Here’s an overview of what Apple announced during the WWDC keynote and what it means for your iPhones, iPads, Macs and more.

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

Apple says it rebuilt the architecture for its AI features using those new foundation models, with Apple Intelligence able to understand speech as well as text and images. It can draw on the personal context stored on your device, recognize what’s on your screen and pull from external information available on the web. As before, Apple Intelligence operates on your devices as well as servers via Private Cloud Compute, and all your AI interactions are kept private, even from Apple.

One note about on-device actions, though: only recent hardware will be powerful enough to run what Apple describes as its most advanced on-device model. That means the iPhones released last fall, any M4-powered iPad or M3-powered Mac with at least 12GB of unified memory and the M5-based Apple Vision Pro.

Siri is accessible from anywhere on your device, and you can summon the assistant with the usual “Hey Siri” vocal command. iPhone users will be able to activate Siri with the side button on the phone or with a swipe down from the Dynamic Island; another swipe can expand Siri’s answer to get a more detailed response. iPad and Mac users can interact with Siri AI from the Spotlight tool as well as systemwide context menus.

Siri AI will be available on the Apple Watch, too, letting users start a conversation with an assistant or continue one started on another Apple device via a new Smart Stack suggestion. In addition, the changes coming to Siri and Apple Intelligence will extend to CarPlay and AirPods.

A new Siri app will debut on Apple devices this fall, giving you a place to access past conversations with Siri; you can also start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your Mac.

Some of the examples Apple showed off during its WWDC keynote featured Apple executive Mike Rockwell asking Siri about an upcoming concert, with the assistant pulling the dates from the web. Follow-up questions let Rockwell ask Siri about the ticketing process, set a reminder to buy tickets at the appropriate time and play music from the artist. All of this was done in a conversational style, without the hassle of having to repeat the artist’s name.

Other demos of Siri AI showed how the assistant can now help you plan things, pulling a schedule of World Cup matches, formulating a menu of possible meals for a watch party centered around a specific match that also included recipes shared via Messages, and generating and sending out an invitation to the party. It’s worth noting that at each step, Siri has you confirm actions, and you can leap in and edit things should Siri get them wrong.

Siri AI also features improvements to the expressiveness of its voice — imagine the assistant emphasizing certain words or striking a more excited tone to reflect the message it’s reading to you. You have the ability to adjust that expressiveness as well as the pace of Siri’s voice.

Siri AI will be limited to English initially, but Apple plans to add support for other languages in short order.

Siri features in apps

There’s more to Siri AI than just a new app, though, as many features are being integrated and enhanced in other apps. Visual Intelligence is integrated directly into the Camera app, for example, with a Siri mode to show the assistant exactly what you’re seeing. Point your iPhone’s camera at a plate of food, and you can pull up nutritional information or capture an image of a bill to split it with friends, all while paying your share via Apple Pay. Those Visual Intelligence tools will be available on the Mac and iPad as well as the iPhone.

Writing tools are getting a boost with this Apple Intelligence revamp, as you can ask Siri to draft documents for you. Apple suggests that this is just a starting point for a draft that you would then elaborate on, and as a writer who balks at the idea that any AI feature can handle writing on my behalf, I should certainly hope so. I’m far more intrigued by a promised feature in which you can ask Siri to give you feedback on writing.

Additional writing tools coming to anywhere you can type include automatic proofreading — hope it proves more reliable than autocorrect — and the ability to recognize who you’re sending messages and texts to and adapt the tone to correspond to the recipient.

Photos gets a number of AI-powered image-editing tools, such as an enhanced Clean Up feature that promises better fill-ins when you remove distracting objects or people. An extend tool expands the background on shots, while a spatial reframing feature lets you change the perspective of the photo after you’ve taken it.

Safari now taps into Apple Intelligence to organize all those open tabs by topic, while a Notify Me feature uses your natural-language instructions to monitor changes in web pages — say an item going on sale — and alert you when it happens. Passwords can change passwords on your behalf, while Shortcuts taps into the vibe coding fad by letting you describe a shortcut to auto-generate it.

Apps like Messages, Calendar, Mail and Phone better understand context to offer up more useful one-tap suggestions. For instance, if you’re in a Message conversation where someone asks you for a specific photo, the Siri assistant should be smart enough to generate a suggestion that finds and sends the photo on your behalf.

You can also expect an update to Image Playground that will add support for more styles as well as new ways to modify and tweak anything created by Apple’s image generation tool. A welcome change will be the ability to create images in more formats, such as landscape. And the app figures to be better integrated with contact posters and wallpapers for your iPhone. Note that image generation will be among the Apple Intelligence features that come with a daily limit, as those capabilities are being offloaded to servers; you will be able to bolster your access through iCloud Plus subscription plans.

Platform improvements

Apple Intelligence dominated the WWDC keynote, but it’s not the only change Apple has planned for its software. Apple is promising a number of system improvements across its various operating systems. “Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re taking the features you’re already relying on and making them better,” Federighi said.

That includes system optimizations that speed up things like app launches, content loading and AirDrop transfers. Older iPhones can count on a new CPU scheduler to make sure tasks run more efficiently; as a result, iOS 27 will run on the same devices that support iOS 26.

The most anticipated changes, though, are likely to be promised enhancements for Liquid Glass, the new interface Apple rolled out across its platforms last year. Not everyone was a fan of the new look for the various OSes, and Apple took some of that feedback to heart. Liquid Glass changes promise more readable menus thanks to better diffusion for complex content, and there will now be a slider in Settings to adjust the look between fully clear and fully tinted.

Apple is also promising more uniform toolbars, with color returning to the icons in sidebars so that it’s easier to see which menu item is active. Icons are getting new layers that should make them look sharper and more defined.

Refined parental controls

Capturing the zeitgeist of society’s growing unease about how much access kids have to technology, Apple spent a chunk of the WWDC keynote reviewing trust and safety issues with its software, including new child safety tools formulated with feedback from experts.

To that end, Apple is expanding upon the Ask to Buy feature that lets parents approve App Store downloads with a new Ask to Browse tool. That lets parents view a website a child is trying to access and determine if it’s age-appropriate. A similar feature lets parents approve who their kids can connect with in Messages and other communication apps. The Communication Safety feature that already detects and blurs nudity in Messages and FaceTime will do the same when it detects gore or violent images.

Apple highlighted Time Allowances that manage when kids can access certain apps and for how long. Screen Time is getting a redesign to better highlight how kids are using their devices and what apps they’re accessing the most.

More to come

Part of the fun of WWDC keynotes is seeing what new features weren’t highlighted during Apple’s presentation. More of those details should come out in the coming days as people get their hands on the developer betas and have more of a chance to go over Apple’s supporting documents.

Both Jason Snell and Dan Moren are on the ground in Cupertino getting up-close looks at Apple’s planned software updates and Apple Intelligence changes. Expect more reports from them today and throughout WWDC, as we make sense of what Apple has in store for our devices the rest of this year.

During its discussion of platform improvements, Apple zoomed out on a small-text screen of many of the changes coming in its platforms this year—and there are a lot of them. Good news, now you can read at your own convenience—still in very small text.

I’ve been skimming through these items to pull out some of personal highlights. As I’ve said before, these quality of life improvements are among my favorites because I generally want to see the quality of my life improved. Who doesn’t?

At a glance, here are some particular favorites:

Else if support in Shortcuts – I’ve been requesting this for quite some time, and I’m glad to finally see it here. It seems likely that a lot of the improvements to Shortcuts are driven by the new “Describe a Shortcut” feature, which highlighted shortcomings in the app.

More consistent window positioning persistence across external displays — I’m a single display user, but I’ve heard this complaint for years from my friends and colleagues who use multiple monitors; here’s hoping it delivers for them.

Faster HomeKit accessory pairing — Honestly, it would be pretty hard for it to get slower, but this is definitely a place where a speed improvement is welcome.

Store data in Shortcut — Exactly what the mechanism for this is unclear, but having previously relied on third-party apps for this, a first-party solution is a good addition.

Improved Control Center in visionOS — I’m hopeful this allows for easier toggling between environments, especially now that you can create your own with panoramas.

Optional persistent menu bar on iPad — In case your iPad wasn’t Mac-like enough.

Expanded touch support in Sidecar — There’s always been a limit to using the standard touch interface in Sidecar; you could use two fingers to scroll or other gestures, or use the Apple Pencil, but you couldn’t just use a single finger. Interesting to see this improvement, along with the ability to draw in Notes and Freeform in macOS, right around the time we’re expecting to see the first Mac with a touchscreen.

Faster workout start in the Workout app — There were a lot of complaints about watchOS 26’s redesign of the Workout app, in particular making it harder to start workouts, so we’ll see if this addresses that.

Copy and paste as Markdown in Notes — Notes added Markdown export a while back, but now it’ll be even easier to work with the markup language.

Redesigned Shortcuts editor — 👀 Yeah. Vague, but again, it needs improvements, so I’ll take it.

React with any emoji in Shared Albums — I have a shared album of my pictures of my kid that my family can view, and while the thumbs up emoji is fine, it hardly covers every eventuality.

Updated menu bar icons — Another set of 👀 for that one.

Consolidated notifications for multiple Tapbacks in Messages — Thank god.

Screenshot and notification automations in Shortcuts — Automations are one of my favorite aspects of Shortcuts, and adding more potential triggers means even more options for how to kick them off.

As I said, there’s a ton more there—you can click through the screenshot above to see it at full size, but it certainly appears that Apple has spent a lot of time making these little improvements throughout all of its platforms this year.

Unite Pro takes a different approach. It turns any website into a fast, isolated Mac app built specifically for macOS — with support for Window, Sidebar, and Menu Bar modes, deep visual customization, smart link forwarding, and native enhancements like dock badges, meeting alerts for Google Calendar and Outlook, AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, and more.

What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.

Six Colors readers can get 20% off Unite Pro this week with the code SIXCOLORS. Learn more and download at bzgapps.com/unite

Apple’s built-in screen sharing support for Mac-to-Mac connections has always been a help for those of us with remote setups: headless Macs acting as servers, an office and home Mac, or the laziness of having Macs in different parts of your house you want to access without standing up.¹

Under the hood, Apple relies on VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a fairly ancient standard at this point in time, and you probably get the sense of its creaking joints if you use the Screen Sharing app regularly.² But it’s possible you didn’t know that, starting in Sonoma, Apple added a “super excellent” mode to Screen Sharing as an option when you connect two Macs with M-series chips. Called High Performance, it can deliver on its name.

Let’s shift into overdrive

When you connect to another Mac using Screen Sharing, you’re given a choice of which mode to use. Let’s walk through the connection steps:

1. Either launch the Screen Sharing app and double-click the Mac’s name in a list, or, in the Finder, Control-click/right-click the Mac’s name and choose Screen Sharing. (There are still more ways to start, too.)
2. From the Select Screen Sharing Type options, you can select Standard, which is VNC-based, or High Performance, which adds Apple’s secret sauce on top.
3. Click Continue.
4. Enter your credentials.
5. The screen appears, and you may need to enter your macOS account password on the remote Mac to unlock it.

In that pathway, if you choose High Performance, you’re presented with different options. You can also click the info (i) button to the right of an existing connection in the Connections window in Screen Sharing, and choose High Performance from the Screen Sharing Type pop-up menu to save that option for the next connection.

With a Standard connection, you get a pixel-for-pixel remote view of the other Mac’s display or displays. It’s just like you’re sitting in front of it. In fact, if you use the same account as the currently logged-in user, the remote Mac shows what you’re doing to anyone who looks at it. (You can log in as another user, and a session starts in the background that doesn’t appear on the remote display screen.)

High Performance takes a different approach. You can opt to create one or two virtual displays on the remote Mac, each with independent resolution, high-dynamic-range (HDR) support, and other features. It’s like being a remote user of the computer rather than sharing. (This mode doesn’t change the remote display resolution or other settings.)

With a High Performance connection between Apple silicon Macs, you gain these advantages:

• You can choose one or two virtual displays, regardless of the number of displays connected to the shared computer.
• The Dynamic Resolution option lets you resize a virtual display to the native resolution of your local screen, up to 4K (3840×2160 pixels) or, with HiDPI, up to 1920×1080. You can click the Dynamic button on the Screen Sharing toolbar or choose View: Dynamic Resolution during a live session.
• Stereo audio passes over the connection, as does improved video. The connection supports HDR (for richer low-light and shadow tones), 4:4:4 chroma subsampling (uncompressed color data for improved fidelity), and high frame rates of 30 or 60 frames per second (for more stable video streaming, such as when watching a video or using video-editing software).

The downside of High Performance is that it imposes severe requirements for it to work well. You need 75 Mbps per 4K display and low network latency, which requires fast Wi-Fi with a gigabit-or-faster mesh or wired backbone if there are multiple network routers or base stations. However, that requirement also means that when you’re using High Performance, it feels very much like sitting in front of the other display rather than viewing it remotely.

If you want the depth of HDR Video, you have to enable it on the remote Mac via System Settings: Displays. The option for HDR Video appears in a Preset pop-up menu, but, of course, only if the display supports the right HDR signal. HDR can be enabled or disabled from the View menu and Screen Sharing toolbar, if it’s available.

Because the remote display is blacked out when using High Performance (even when connecting as the currently logged-in user), this can be seen as a privacy advantage if you have concerns about anyone else viewing the remote Mac’s screen. However, High Performance mode’s utility really lies in treating Screen Sharing like a high-speed display tunnel instead of a jerky remote view.

For further reading

If you’re looking for more detailed information about High Performance mode or any aspect of Mac-based file and screen sharing, you might consult my book, Take Control of Apple Screen and File Sharing.

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

I’m an avid combiner of RSS and a user of read-it-later services. And I read widely — tech, politics, Texas news, accessibility, and movies. I also consume as many words as possible as audio, rather than text on a screen. That’s an accessibility story I’ll get to in a bit. But even in our little Six Colors family, where RSS is mighty popular, it still means very different things to different people.

The first step, it seems to me, is to know what kind of reading routine you want. Are you, like Jason, a fan of newsletters or newspapers, who wants a concentrated once-a-day digest? Or do you want to monitor feeds all day, allowing the river of news to wash over you as it arrives? Or maybe you’re like me — a scanner of feeds multiple times a day, who takes read-it-later at its word, putting most items aside for focused digesting in bunches?

Embracing my inner squirrel

So I gather and store the things I want to read. I like the two-pass approach: survey what’s available, mark the best, and read what I’ve curated when I have time. That can also include links folks send to me, or a look at Bluesky or Mastodon. These sources both do something RSS can’t quite replicate — they’re serendipitous, surfacing things my list of subscriptions doesn’t know I’m interested in.

Choosing a story I especially like from a long list — ideally with a single keystroke on the Mac, or a swipe on iOS — gives me a tiny dopamine hit, something like shopping does for some people. Oooh, a new Wired story on how AI will kill us all, or a review of an anticipated Broadway play from The New Yorker. Swipe!

Just me?

When I open Feedbin each morning, my Texas news folder often bulges with hundreds of articles. In the Tech category, I might need to process a dozen stories about electric vehicles, twice that many about Apple stuff, and whatever TechMeme has for me that day. I scroll the headlines and press 3 on my Mac keyboard to send an article to Instapaper — the best read-it-later service available directly in Feedbin, now that Pocket’s gone. From there, Instapaper syncs to an iOS text-to-speech app, which will turn my cullings into an audio playlist.

My approach works extremely well with my tool of choice: Feedbin on the Mac as collector of RSS feeds and reader. I use the Feedbin Web site, though there is a Mac app with a very simlar interface. It’s been a challenge to replicate the experience on iOS, because so many RSS readers force me to swipe or tap twice (or more) to get an article into Instapaper – more to go directly to a speech app, which I’d rather do.

I’ve recently started using ReadKit on my phone and iPad, because it’s fast, offers a good internal browser, is accessible to VoiceOver and allows me to theme my screen just the way I want. Instapaper is a swipe and a tap away, which is one more tap than I had to make when I used Reeder, but I prefer the ReadKit’s look, so I’ve adjusted to the extra step.

Instapaper operates as middleware, syncing to speech app like Voice Dream or Speech Central in turn. What I get on the other end is a playlist of spoken articles that will read to me continuously. Links from friends or from social media, I can pop directly into a speech app via the iOS share sheet.

This triage/gather/read-later method isn’t specific to my speech-based consumption. If you have squirrelish tendencies, various apps will take your saved articles and give you a pretty interface from which to read them using your eyeballs. If not for speech, I might just read everything in ReadKit, but I’d have to start the things I wanted to save for later, which isn’t as appealing to me as syncing, then automating the deletion of things I’ve read.

No to the newsletter (mostly)

My friction point is newsletters. Like Jason, I’ve subscribed to a number through Feedbin and a dedicated email address. But my nut-gathering method runs into an obstacle when I’m forced to view a newsletter’s full body in Feedbin, or save the whole thing to Voice Dream. To read the way I want, I’d have to scan the newsletter in a browser window, and make my article choices there — adding steps I’d rather not.

RSS is so much simpler, and I use it whenever I possibly can. But as Jason points out, some content providers are ditching the standard to force readers into newsletters or apps. It’s made that ReadKit browsing experience more important to me, so I tend to read newsletter most often on my phone.

Audio for accessibility

I’m visually impaired, and text-to-speech isn’t a nice-to-have for me — it’s how I get through my reading list each day. I’ve appreciated sites that have added audio versions of their stories. If I happen to be alone, have earbuds in, and have time to read right away, I’ll press Play on a news site post. But that number of “ifs” makes it hard to integrate site-provided audio into my routine — which is exactly why having a dedicated pipeline from RSS to a speech app matters so much.

The happy squirrel

What I keep coming back to is this: the squirrel method works for me because it separates the act of finding from the act of reading. Those are two different cognitive modes, and collapsing them creates pressure that makes reading feel like a chore, or a distraction from taking in the amount of material I want to each day. It’s also what I’m used to. It’s aparently difficult to teach an old squirrel new tricks.

The app I want to highlight this time around is one I rely on constantly: Audio Hijack.

If you’ve ever wanted to record audio from a specific app on your Mac, Audio Hijack is the tool that makes it happen. Its session editor offers a visual canvas: drop in your source(s), apply optional effects, then add a way to record and listen to that audio. The app helpfully connects everything automatically, so the audio flows just the way you want.

Audio Hijack has a fully functional free trial, so you can try it out before committing. Download it today)!

And as a Six Colors reader, you can save 20% on Audio Hijack – and anything else from Rogue Amoeba’s lineup – through the end of June. Use coupon code SIXCOLORS2606 in their online store.

Parish sending me a link to the site led me to do some final tweaking on a project I’ve had brewing for a while: the much less fancy Apple Specs Database. I built this site to help me figure out which hardware appears on given Apple devices, and which features are present in operating systems across Apple’s platforms. It lets me answer questions like, “What’s the oldest iPhone that supports MagSafe?” This is almost the inverse of the long-running MacTracker, which is organized around devices.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Next week is WWDC, which has always represented Apple’s connection to its community of third-party developers, and in recent years has also served as the official start of Apple’s annual operating-system cycle.

Recently, I’ve been thinking of the D in WWDC a lot more. Developers aren’t all programmers, but many of them are. The programmers have always created the code that runs the apps that run on our devices. And yet, this year, things have changed an awful lot.

These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.

Of course, it’s happening because of AI.

Not just AI for the emails I get, though to be clear, I am being inundated with emails that purport to be from humans but are very much the product of an AI agent trying to add a personal touch to media pitches. (It’s a shame, because I used to really be impressed when an actual human emailed me about their product. Those people are entirely invisible now, lost in the wash of the AI pitches. I couldn’t tell the difference if I tried, so good are the imitations.)

But it’s also clear that a decent percentage of these new apps is being generated, in whole or in part, by an AI code assistant. Mac users—some of them developers, some of them people who have never written software in their lives—are building apps that fulfill their imaginations.

We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture investment and big payouts.

Focus on the vision

Federico Viticci of MacStories recently released a command-line app that uses all features of Reminders. He previously released Shortcuts Playground, which lets you generate shortcuts with AI coding assistants. My pal Lex Friedman just released Gnome, a vibe-coded GIF menu bar utility. On the Six Colors Podcast last week, Dan Moren mentioned that he’s been using AI to build himself a simple ePub ebook reader that fulfills his very specific needs as a writer.

And, yes, a couple of weeks ago, I made a Mac app of my own, using Claude Code. I can’t say that I wrote it, because I didn’t write a line of Swift code. It would be more accurate to say that I envisioned it, or produced it, or product-managed it. I knew what I wanted, described it in detail to an AI assistant, iterated a whole lot, and ultimately got something that basically does everything I imagined it would do.¹

It was an astounding experience. I have been using Mac apps for nearly 40 years, but I have never come close to writing one. AppleScript scripts and Automator actions are as close as I’ve ever come. But this week, I sat down at my desk with just an idea, and a couple of hours later, I had a completely functional (if ugly and incomplete) app that did exactly what I wanted it to do.

The process of building the app reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: coding is a specific skill, but it’s only one part of a much larger process. Great developers aren’t necessarily great coders, though they can be. Apps must be envisioned, their specifications defined. The act of trying to describe an app to an AI coding engine is a clarifying one. The more you describe the app, the harder your brain has to work, because it’s always more complicated than you think it’s going to be. The decisions you make determine what the app comes to be. It’s authorship of a sort, but defined in a way that takes the writing of code out of the equation, which is weird, since the act of coding has usually been an inextricable part of the process of making software.

I guess it still is, but sometimes a human isn’t writing that code.

I have no illusions that the code AI code engines generate is flawless and beautiful, though it may yet improve. If I hired a developer to write my app for me, they might very well create cleaner code than Claude did. But I’d never hire someone to build such a minor app, and no human programmer could generate it in a few hours for the $30 cost of a Claude Pro subscription.

Whatever you call it, whether it’s being a producer or product manager or something else that isn’t a programmer, creating good software in the AI era still requires the power of a human brain: being creative, solving problems, and making decisions. Some people will be better at it than others. It’s a skill, and a bit of an art. I’m excited that modern coding tools have given people with vision and desire the ability to make software.

The next step for developers

Which brings me to a final point: Apple’s development tools, most notably Xcode, are nightmarish. My developer friends are used to them, but as someone who has never really used Xcode before, I was shocked at just how deeply unintuitive it is. As in, Claude would tell me to click on things, and I would have to reply, “I have no idea what that is or where it’s supposed to be.” And I’ve been a Mac user for a long time! I’ve gotten very good at intuiting where stuff is in a Mac interface.

Which is why one of the things Apple should be doing, as quickly as possible, is finding ways to make it easier for people to develop apps on its platforms. The Xcode learning curve is just too high. Either there needs to be a novice mode for Xcode, or Swift Playground needs to be given a boost, or a new tool needs to be built for the task.

While AI tools have made it more possible to build apps on Apple’s platforms, the developer tools themselves are still a formidable barrier. As the definition of “developer” changes, so, too, must the definition of developer tools.

The future product managers of some great Mac and iPhone apps thank you in advance.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Microsoft has actually renewed the suite’s certificate, but the fix can only be delivered through a software update. That means users of Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 are in the clear – they’ll receive the update, so neither will be affected. However, Microsoft stopped offering support for Office 2019 on October 10, 2023, and the suite has received no updates since. As such, it won’t be updated to version 16.83, which is the release that includes the renewed certificate….

Some critics have argued that Microsoft’s deadline is effectively self-imposed because the company renewed the certificate but chose not to provide the update to Office 2019 users. For example, JimmyTech, the IT consultancy that spotted the change, has argued that using the expiry to retire older software rather than quietly renewing it “amounts to a choice.”

Microsoft’s messaging on the subject hasn’t done it any favors, either. Its end-of-support page for Office 2019 for Mac, originally posted in October 2023, once told owners to “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function.” A revision now dated May 15, 2026 has dropped that line, replacing it with a note that their data “can be accessed in a supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.”

Old software becomes incompatible. It’s a fact of life. But to build it so that it just suddenly stops working one day, and to take no steps to ameliorate that situation, is pretty disgusting. Shame on Microsoft.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Have you ever really looked at your Photos, man? There’s much depth there—just keep looking. I’m not stoned; I’m just thinking about Apple’s two ways of demonstrating depth in Photos to simulate adding a sense of layers or dimensionality to images you took with one or more cameras on your iPhone.

Starting way back in iOS 16, Apple started analyzing images for your Lock Screen to offer a cool in-front/behind split against the clock. In iOS 26, Apple went further, with Spatial Scene photos. I’ve heard from readers and seen online that both ways of spatializing photos leave people confused: Which photos does iOS choose? How does the analysis work? And, importantly for some, how do I disable these effects on a per-photo or overall basis?

Depth Effect

Starting way back in iOS 16 and available on an iPhone XR or XS or later, Depth Effect provides a sense of layering in a photo when used on your Lock Screen when you are pulling images from your Photos library. To access it:

1. Touch and hold your Lock Screen.
2. Tap Customize.
3. Tap the More … button.
4. If Depth Effect is not checked, select it; if it’s grayed out, see below. Your photos in the current display will be analyzed, which may take a moment; during that time, you will see a progress circle fill clockwise.
5. Tap Done.

If you want to see how Depth Effect interacts with your images, a handy way is to choose On Tap from the More menu in step 3. When you tap, you can cycle through the current selection of images to see how they appear.

In doing so, you might notice that the Depth Effect doesn’t appear for every image. In fact, if you tap the more button and Depth Effect is grayed out, then the current image didn’t pass the depth analysis test.¹ You can still enable the feature, but you have to tap to find another candidate—most qualify for depthifying!

The analysis in step 4 identifies objects and animals (including people) and makes educated silhouette guesses to separate foreground and background images. The clock element may resize to better display foreground elements. The foreground element may also be set to the background if it would obscure too much of the clock display.

Starting in iOS 26, you can adjust the clock’s depth by dragging it to make it taller on the screen. Depth Effect takes advantage of this by resizing the clock as needed.

In controlling Depth Effect, you might have noticed an oddball icon on your Lock Screen: a hexagon, with one tip at zero degrees, with a moon rising over some mountains. That is Spatial Scene, up next.

Spatial Scene

I have mixed feelings about Spatial Scene, new in iOS 26, because it partly invents reality and sometimes makes me a little queasy. Fortunately, I don’t have the motion sickness some iOS 7 users experienced with the long-ago introduction of parallax on wallpapers. But there’s another dale between the uncanny valley and the cliffs of heebie-jeebies that Spatial Scene fits into.

Spatial Scenes were designed for Apple’s Vision Pro, and the feature relies on machine learning to pick apart the depth in a 2D image. When you move your phone around, iOS creates a parallax effect that makes your brain think it’s looking into a 3D scene: the foreground elements remain steady, while background elements move. Spatializing doesn’t require photos captured with a newer camera, nor do you need Apple Intelligence. Any iPhone starting with the iPhone 12 series can generate them.²

You can also view images in the Photos app with the spatialization applied. Make sure Settings: Apps: Photos: Spatial Photos and Videos is enabled. This label is awfully confusing because the name of the iPhone feature is Spatial Scene, while the Vision Pro 3D feature is “spatial photo” as well as “spatial video,” both lowercase. Those kinds of media can only be viewed on a Vision Pro in 3D (they look 2D on an iPhone) and can be captured with an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, any model of iPhone 16 or iPhone 17, or Vision Pro.

Now, when you view a qualifying photo, a Spatial Scene hexagon button appears. Tap it, and you see a kind of scanner motion over the image as it’s analyzed. This resembles other scanning simulations in Photos, such as when it identifies plants, people, and buildings. A Spatial Scene version of the image appears, which you can view at simulated angles while moving your photo around. Tap the X to close the view. The analysis is not currently retained, so it’s regenerated each time you use the feature.

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

One of the disadvantages of adulthood is self-awareness, however. A Close Personal Friend whose encouragement and opinions I value messaged me in response to the morning blog post, and echoed (not for the first time) a thought that I’d been having all morning (also not for the first time): I really should just push the button, already. It’ll be fine…

In the meantime, enjoy the stuff I’ve been writing when I thought nobody was looking and it didn’t matter how frequently I posted. This is the end of a mighty long journey and if it were any more epic, Annie Lennox would be singing over the end credits and making everybody cry.

Andy is one of a kind and it’s a great read. Also, he’s posting annotated versions of the links he collects that form the basis for most of what we talk about on MacBreak Weekly every week, and that’s a pretty great Apple-related clipping service on its own.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

She meets in person with Richard McClintock, a publications director with a background in Latin, who first identified the text’s distorted origin in 1994. She also interviews and emails people who worked at Aldus and Letraset, buys a sheet of dry-transfer type on eBay, and pulls together a great story about graphic design, the classics, and history.

I found it riveting and hilarious, and exactly the kind of Rabbit Hole (her channel name) that I fall down with printing and type history myself.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The app we want to highlight this time around is one Jason and Dan and most of their colleagues rely on regularly: Audio Hijack.

If you’ve ever wanted to record audio from a specific app on your Mac, Audio Hijack is the tool that makes it happen. Its session editor offers a visual canvas: drop in your source(s), apply optional effects, then add a way to record and listen to that audio. The app helpfully connects everything automatically, so the audio flows just the way you want.

Audio Hijack has a fully functional free trial, so you can try it out before committing. Download it today)!

And as a Six Colors reader, you can save 20% on Audio Hijack – and anything else from Rogue Amoeba’s lineup – through the end of June. Use coupon code SIXCOLORS2606 in our online store.

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce that Myke Hurley and I are launching a Kickstarter for a new podcast, Designed in California.

Myke and I have been discussing Apple in depth every week for more than a decade on the Upgrade podcast. For Apple’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, I researched many different accounts of that era and wrote a 90-minute special episode of Upgrade. The reception to that episode was phenomenal—and we loved doing it. So we want to fund an entire year of a new podcast that will tell more stories in that vein.

We’re using Kickstarter for this project because researching and writing these scripts is quite labor-intensive, and I was hesitant to make that time commitment in the hope we would eventually build up enough of an audience to justify the large workload. We’ve set a goal that would allow us to generate thirty 30-to-45-minute episodes over the course of a year, with our first stretch goal to raise that number to a full fifty episodes in a year. (Update: Stretch goal met! Fifty episodes it is! We’re on to new stretch goals that add more content to the cast for backers.)

Kickstarter backers will help make the podcast happen. And backers at the Founding Producer tier or higher will get access to a special backers-only podcast feed for the show’s first year. This includes:

• Ad-free episode
• All episodes on a topic will drop at once in the backer feed so that you can hear the whole story; in the public feed, those episodes will release weekly
• Access to the Relay podcast network membership plan, which includes access to a Discord community and an exclusive Relay members-only podcast
• Bonus content that will be created if we hit stretch goals

We’ve already planned more than enough topics to get through year one. It’s all subject to change, but right now these include:

• The earliest days of Apple, including the release of the Apple II, the fraying of the Jobs/Wozniak friendship, and the calamitous reign of Apple’s first CEO
• How Steve Jobs ended up being ejected from the company he founded and his time in the wilderness, including the founding of NeXT
• Apple’s Mac OS crisis of the late 1990s, which ultimately led to Apple’s buying NeXT, creating Mac OS X, and bringing back Steve Jobs
• A history of Apple’s TV commercials, good and bad
• The origins of the iPod and iTunes, and how they changed how we listen to music forever
• The secret project that ultimately led to the creation of the iPhone
• The story behind why Apple is obsessed with controlling its own destiny, what’s now commonly called the “Tim Cook doctrine”, but is firmly from the era of Steve Jobs
• The long and complicated relationship between Apple and its arch-frenemy, Microsoft

During June, we’ll also be releasing several preview episodes of Designed in California as Upgrade special installments, so you can get an even clearer sense of what this podcast will be like.

One of our inspirations for this project is The Rest Is History, one of our favorite podcasts and one that has proven that an enthusiasm for history and storytelling can make for a magical experience. We want to bring this sensibility and excitement to the incredible variety of stories connected to Apple, the people who have worked to bring Apple products to life, and all the aspects of our lives that have been touched by the technology that has emerged from a few square miles near the south end of San Francisco Bay.

I realized when writing about Apple’s 50th that I’ve covered the company for roughly two-thirds of its existence. I’m looking forward to digging deep into research on topics that were before my time, and getting the chance to bring my own personal experience to bear on events I witnessed personally. And I’m hoping to tap the knowledge of many of my friends and colleagues as the project rolls along.

This will be unlike your other tech podcasts. Myke and I have built a story list that can feed several years of the show, so we know we won’t run out of material. We’d love for you to take the journey with us.

Please check out the Kickstarter at designed.fm and consider helping us make it happen.

A new set of iPhone 18 Pro dummy units is giving us our best look yet at the all-new colors Apple has planned for this year. The dummy units corroborate that the iPhone 18 Pro will be available in dark cherry, black, silver, and light blue.

This color information has been floating out there for a while. I point to this item in particular because I think these photos are the best illustration I’ve seen yet about why Apple would think they’re appealing. The Dark Cherry is really appealing, and Light Blue is a proper, nice blue.

Perhaps Apple’s aggressively monochrome era is over?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

“Star City,” Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” spin-off, has just premiered. I’ve seen the first five episodes and really like it. It’s accessible even if you haven’t seen “For All Mankind” or if you’ve stopped watching that show.

“Star City” is set in the same world as “For All Mankind,” but it’s told from the perspective of the Soviet Union during the height of the space race in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just after the USSR has landed the first people on the moon. Rhys Ifans is great as the enigmatic Chief Designer who runs the space program, and Anna Maxwell Martin is menacing as Lyudmilla, the head of Star City’s security. (“For All Mankind” fans will notice much younger versions of a few familiar characters from the Soviet side, too.)

The whole show is about space, sure, but it’s also a cold war spy thriller set in a locked-down secret city in the heart of the Soviet Union. There are space heroics, bugged apartments, mysterious contacts, forbidden books, and even smuggled rock and roll records.

Dan Moren and I are covering each episode over at The Incomparable as a part of our NASA Vending Machine podcast. The first two episodes of “Star City” are available now, as are our podcasts covering those first two episodes.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Every year at WWDC, Apple kicks off a new cycle of operating system updates that will change the faces of the devices we use every day for the next year. On June 8, we’ll get our first glimpse at what the “27” operating systems will bring, which will lead to their arrival in the fall and numerous major updates all the way through next May, when the cycle will begin again.

I’ve been attending Apple’s WWDC since sometime in the 90s, which is… a long time. But this year’s event promises to be one of the most interesting ones yet, mostly because Apple really stepped in it in 2024, promising a bunch of features it didn’t deliver. Last year was a bit of an apology tour, but it didn’t directly address what had been promised the previous year.

Which means that Apple has really piled two years of promises on the agenda of WWDC 2026. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Here’s what I’ll be watching for at this year’s event, especially when it comes to its AI do-over.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

I keep finding this old dog can learn new tricks—or, if not quite new, ones that were hiding in plain sight. The other night, using Messages on my iPhone to send a good-night text to my spouse and older child, off on a brief getaway to the coast, I noticed that orange highlighting had invaded my message!

I text a couple of friends: “Have you seen this before?” One had not; the other remembered it vaguely, but had no idea why it had occurred. Some googling later, I discovered that Apple had added the feature recently…on the geologic scale. This feature, which I’ll explain in greater depth, first appeared in iOS 10, released in fall 2016.

Well.

Here’s how it works:

1. Type any part of your message.
2. Tap the emoji icon at the lower-left corner of the keyboard on an iPhone or iPad.
3. If any text within the message matches emoji descriptions, a wash of orange glowing illumination passes over the text, leaving orange highlighting behind where you can tap.
4. Tap any orange text, and options for emojis appear.
5. Tap an emoji to have it replace the orange-highlighted text.

Slap me with a fish, and call me Terry, I had no idea. The “feature” isn’t available on the Mac, yet it can’t be disabled on your iPhone or iPad!

There are several other ways to insert emoji into conversations, if you’re so inclined. I used to be quite resistant, but I find that I use a dozen or more with some regularity. (Most emoji are rarely used.)

Use the emoji icon. The most obvious solution is often the best. Tap or click the emoji icon, then choose an emoji. That icon appears in the lower-left corner of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch keyboard, switching the keyboard layout, and at the right edge of the message field in Messages on the Mac. Apple organizes these into tabs of what I’ve always felt are slightly arbitrary categories, but which conform to the Unicode Consortium’s ordering. The clock icon is what you tap or click to view your most recently used emoji. Tap or click in the search field to enter search terms or to shudder create a Genmoji.¹

Dictate. You can dictate emoji by name on all platforms, and it is kind of fun to say “pizza emoji” or “getting a haircut emoji” and have it pop into place. On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, tap the microphone icon in the message field to start dictation. On a Mac, invoke dictation when your text focus is in the message field. (Check that Mac dictation is enabled in System Settings: Keyboard: Dictation.)

Character Viewer (Mac). The Mac has a nifty Character Viewer that can be enabled in the same Keyboard system setting: enable “Show Input menu in menu bar” to get a wee rounded-corner icon that has a more button above a hamburger button (three horizontal lines) next to a Command icon (⌘). From that menu, choose Show Emoji & Symbols. The Emoji link in the left navigation bar reveals the usual subjects, and you can search here, too (with no Genmoji horrors).

You can also use keys or keyboard shortcuts:

• Mac: Press the Globe/fn key or type Command-Control-Space also brings up the viewer: it’s the same as Emoji & Symbols on a Mac.
• iPad or iPhone: On an iPhone or iPad with a physical keyboard attached, press Control-Space. You can also use the Mac key/keystroke when you use an iPad with a linked keyboard and mouse (System Settings: Display, select iPad). Whatever the method, an emoji-only pop-over picker appears.

Extra tip: Click the viewer icon in the upper-right corner to convert the viewer into an iPhone/iPad-like pop-over picker on your Mac! Dismiss the picker, then invoke it again, and click the viewer icon in its lower-right corner to turn it back into a floating palette.

Text Replacements. If there are frequent emoji you want to insert with the least effort on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, use the Keyboard: Text Replacements view to map short text strings to an emoji. A convention for emoji shortcuts is to put a colon on either side to make it straightforward to invoke. You might use :shrug: to have 🤷 inserted. (There’s a similar Settings: General: Keyboard: Text Replacement in iOS and iPadOS, but at least in version 26, I was scolded by the operating system that “The shortcut cannot contain any Emoji”!)

Tapbacks. Tapbacks are another way you can insert emoji into a message. In Messages, press and hold on a message you’ve received on an iPhone or iPad, or Control-click/right-click or long-click on a message on a Mac, and you see the Tapback options. Several will appear; tap or click the emoji icon to then choose from the picker.

Third-party replacements. I use Launchbar to type a few characters of an emoji set that’s part of a built-in shortcut list in Index: Show Index: Emoji. You can configure macros/shortcuts apps, like TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro, to swap out emoji for things you type. If you are a serious keyboard emoji warrior, Rocket is a great way to invoke emoji without any clicking.

Contrary to the above, do you hate having emoji replace emoticons in Messages or elsewhere as you type on a Mac?² Apple used to have an option in the Keyboard preferences/settings that let you disable substitution. Starting in Tahoe (I believe), you can now toggle this in any app that supports it in Edit: Substitutions: Emoji Replacement.

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

Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.

As you might expect, there is a lot of complexity behind this simplicity. Also, Viticci expects his approach to be eclipsed by Apple’s announcements at WWDC. This doesn’t make this any less of an accomplishment, and it’s especially exciting to consider that we are entering an era where building user automations now requires nothing more complex than a text-entry field.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I’ve been thinking a lot about soccer this week. My team won the Premier League for the first time since I became a fan, and they’ll play in the Champions League final later this month.

What better time to encounter Apple’s latest immersive film for Vision Pro? Spain’s Real Madrid is one of European soccer’s most decorated clubs, and it’s the subject of “Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness,” out Friday. According to Apple, the 20-minute-long documentary was filmed with more than 30 Blackmagic immersive cameras to capture the fan and player of experience of Real Madrid’s Champions League match with Juventus back in October.

Apple’s immersive productions are really benefiting from the larger selection of immersive cameras, now that Blackmagic is apparently cranking out its URSA Cine camera in volume. The doc has shots from a wirecam above the pitch, various angles around the pitch, and separate cameras observing fans in a bar, a 94-year-old fan at home, and even a taxi driver watching on his phone from inside his car.

I admit that I’m still hungry for real sporting events in immersive, not short edited highlight packages interspersed with training ground footage overlaid with inspirational music and sound bites about how it’s all one for all, all for one, supporting the legacy of the team, and all the usual stuff. “Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness” has all of that.

But the soccer looks great. I really, really loved watching the shots from the “suspended above the pitch” view, which gave me a perspective (literally and figuratively) on strategy that I’ve never had before. And the near-the-goal shots really show off the incredible athleticism and technique of soccer players that does not come across on most TV broadcasts, even if they’re in 4K.

Alas, Real Madrid was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the Champions League this year, depriving it of its 16th title. I guess someone else will have to hoist that trophy in Budapest on May 30.

The latest version of Bare Bones Software’s venerable text editor, BBEdit, arrived on Thursday. Version 16, the first full-version update in more than two years, offers an array of new features including dramatic performance improvements, much greater Shortcuts support via App Intents, and even support for vi keybindings.

As you might expect for an app that’s several decades old, BBEdit benefits from occasional checks by its lead developer, Bare Bones founder and CEO Rich Siegel, to see if older areas of the code are performing as well as one might expect. In this cycle, he’s looked for areas to improve performance and found several, most impressively an improvement of an order of magnitude or greater when it comes to remote file transfers via SFTP.

With Apple heading toward an automation universe where many features of apps are broken out into App Intents, BBEdit 16 offers a load of new actions accessible straight from Shortcuts, including access to some of its best text utility functions, like Delete/Extract Lines Containing and Process Duplicate Lines.

Searches in projects will now find text in images, thanks to support for Apple’s VisionKit. There’s a new index in the side of Notebooks. The app now supports separate settings to deploy projects to both test and production environments. Emoji support is seriously improved, which is great news if you’ve ever pasted an emoji into BBEdit and stared into the Zero Width Joiner abyss as your emoji was blown into its component parts.

Other new features include support for the W3C’s online HTML checker, speed improvements for AI worksheets, and with some big changes to syntax coloring. Bare Bones counts more than 100 new feature additions, cataloged by its usual detailed release notes.

Perhaps most importantly, the app—which is probably the single most important one on my Mac—offers a great many of its features for free, and has for years. In my opinion, every Mac user should have a copy of BBEdit handy.

The release of 16.0 also resets the clock on the free trial mode that lets you use all of its features. The paid version of the app is $60, and users of older versions can update for $30 (version 15) or $40 (earlier). It’s also available on the Mac App Store for a $5/month or $50/year subscription.

Instead of attending this week’s Google I/O keynote — an event I’ve been covering for the past decade — I found myself in a physical therapist’s office getting work done on an arm I broke last year. While Sundar Pichai was outlining the latest developments in AI and how they’ll affect each and every one of Google’s products, a polite-yet-determined physical therapist was busy yanking my arm into all sorts of positions, with the hope of stretching it back into its regular shape.

I think I got the better end of the deal.

OK, that’s somewhat unfair to Google, which had plenty to announce at its annual developer conference, with a lot of it impacting software and services you likely use. To be sure, there was plenty for developers and coders to sink their teeth into — only at Google I/O are you going to get applause breaks when a speaker mentions the number of tokens Google is processing or the speed of tensor processing units. But Google made announcements of interest to civilians like you and me as well.

Don’t believe me? Well, if you’ve ever used Google’s search tool, the company has some big changes in store. And with 13 Google products having at least a billion users — and some like Gmail and YouTube pass the 3 billion user mark — there’s a good chance you’re a member of Google’s customer base, whether you want to admit it or not. Changes are coming there, too.

But will they be positive changes? That’s harder to discern at this point, though Google is certainly enthusiastic. “Let’s make something that matters,” a hype video kicking off the nearly 2-hour keynote intoned. Given the ambivalence that some of us feel toward the inclusion of AI in just about everything and the current direction of travel for the tech industry, the jury is still deliberating over whether Google succeeded in that goal.

For anyone who doesn’t live and breathe Google pronouncements, here’s a quick rundown of the Google I/O developments you should file away for later reference.

A new approach to search

If you’ve been on the web long enough, you likely think of Google Search results as a ranked list of clickable links that ideally point you toward whatever it is that you’re looking for. Don’t get too comfortable with that idea, though, as Google is changing the look of its search tool, and I’m not just talking about the updated search box which dynamically expands to fit larger queries and taps directly into Google’s latest AI tools.

In other words, the AI Mode currently available in Google Search sounds like it’s going to be more of the default view, with queries producing a detailed summary of what the search engine found, along with prompts to pose follow-up questions that drill down into the results. In theory, that makes search a more conversational process that better delves into the nuance of what you’re specifically looking for. In the coming months, agentic coding is going to adapt the look of search results to reflect their content, and Pro and Ultra subscribers will be able to put agents to work searching for things like vacation rentals and newly released sneakers.

But before all that, the problem remains that AI Mode searches can produce some laughable results. I ran an AI Mode search for myself just now and learned that I’m the managing editor at Tom’s Guide — surely, that’s going to surprise the people there who laid me off back in January. (Sorry, boys — Google says I’m back on the payroll!) On the bright side, Google, I do appreciate being described as a “prominent personal technology journalist” — now those are the kind of hallucinations I can get behind. A follow-up query for my social media profiles included my Twitter handle, which I deactivated and deleted more than a year ago; not to worry, though, as the link takes you to an entirely different dude named Philip Michael.

You can understand, then, why the news that Google is going to offer more of this makes me a little nervous. Summaries are nice, but they’re not very helpful time savers if I have to fact-check each piece of information. And with Google searches driving even less traffic to some sites, how long before publishers start moving more things behind a paywall, resulting in even more incomplete results?

We’re not going to find out the answer to that question until we have a chance to use Google’s revamped search tool, which is in the process of rolling out. Get ready for a summer of learning how to search all over again.

More conversations in more products

Gemini found its way into Google Maps back in March, when Google added an Ask Maps feature that let you perform more complex searches. (Think “I’ve got a meeting in half-an-hour and I need to eat; where’s a quick place to get a bite to eat that’s a short walk from here?“) A whole host of other Google Apps — we’re talking YouTube, Gmail and Google Docs — are now following suit, with AI-powered features on their own.

The new conversational search capability makes sense for YouTube, where you’ll be able to make more specific requests for the types of videos you’re looking for. Presumably, this feature will be especially handy if you’re looking for how-to videos for handling a very specific task.

I’m less convinced about Gmail Live, a voice-powered feature where you’ll be able to ask Gemini for specific information — drop-off details for school field trips, flight departure info, the details about a party you’ve been invited, too — and your assistant will find what you’re looking for and read it back to you. We’ll see how that works in practice, but anything that improves on Gmail’s frustrating search capabilities will be a welcome addition. (AI Inbox in Gmail is getting new capabilities, too, at least if you subscribe to Google AI Plus or Pro. Here, the updates promise to generate contextual drafts for emails that require a prompt reply as well as surface Docs, Sheets and Slides links that require your review.)

A new Docs Live feature, though, represents everything I hate about AI. Google bills this as a way to help you get started with writing projects — you just brainstorm ideas and Docs Live turns them into a draft for you to review and refine. A Docs Live demo video posted by Google has a software engineer putting the AI agent to work formulating talking points for a Career Day presentation, going so far as to task Docs Live with producing some funny analogies on his behalf.

Google is taking pains to frame this tool as a way for getting started on writing projects, but you and I both know that less scrupulous users are going to offload writing entirely on to Docs Live. You could argue that none of this is Google’s problem, as it’s just handing people a tool, and it’s up to them to use the tool responsibly. But that’s sort of like handing out booze and heavy machinery and expecting everyone to mind their Ps and Qs. Sometimes, you have to be more careful with the kind of work you’re enabling.

New creative tools

Google touted a few generative media tools — some new, some updates to existing features — and the most relevant one to our purposes is Google Pics, an image creation tool coming to the Google Workspace this summer. With Pics, you will be able to edit photos, create posters and flyers and whip up illustrations to share on social media, using text commands.

Pics tools that Google showed off during its I/O keynote include moving selected images around, resizing them, and getting unwanted distractions out of photos. You’re also able to integrate text into images, even changing around the text that’s already in a photo.

A lot of those image-editing tools will sound familiar to anyone who’s used similar features to play around with photos on a Pixel phone, and those have been pretty polished in my experience. A watermarking tool will let people know that the image has been manipulated to head off any funny stuff like deep fakes.

Gemini Spark and Gemini Omni

Two other Google I/O AI announcements deserve some attention. Gemini Spark is an AI agent coming to the Gemini app for business customers, though you imagine it will eventually roll out elsewhere. Spark integrates with Google’s products as well as some other third-party tools to handle tasks on your behalf, such as generate emails, pulling details from reports and monitoring changing information online.

Google built Spark so that it’s working 24/7 — it’s a cloud-based assistant — which means that it’s still monitoring things even when you’ve shut down your laptop or put your phone to sleep. I’d have to see it in action beyond an on-stage demo to get a sense for how it performs though Google stresses that Spark will seek your permission before it acts on anything.

Gemini Omni is the last bit of big software news to come out of Google I/O. According to Google, the ultimate goal with Omni is to be able to create anything from any input, which certainly sounds ambitious. At the moment, Omni’s focus appears to be on video, with Google promising that you’ll be able to generate a video from any text, image or audio. The first iteration of Gemini Omni — Gemini Omni Flash — is part of the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube shorts.

The Omni demos shown off by Google took videos shot by people, using voice inputs to change things like the video’s style, environment and even viewing angles. In the hands of a creative pro, it could be quite a powerful part of an already advanced skill set; used by less skilled practitioners, it could increase the amount of AI slop we see out in the wild. But then, that warning could apply to a lot of the AI capabilities Google is adding over the next few months.

Google’s glasses (but not Google Glass)

Finally, we saw some hints of hardware at this year’s Google I/O. Specifically, Google showed off some new smart glasses built on its Android XR platform, with the likes of Gentle Monster and Warby Parker supply the designs. The glasses will come in audio-only versions, where a Gemini assistant talks in your ear to you (and only you), while a display version of the glasses will put info right in front of you.

During its keynote, Google touted the hands-free nature of the experience, with the on-board assistant able to give you directions, help you send texts and emails and identify whatever it is you’re looking at — all without having to take your phone out of your pocket. But you will need to be carrying a phone to pair with your glasses — Google says they’ll work with iPhones as well as Android devices — which makes me wonder what the point is.

Sure, we could all spend more time not staring at phone screens. But is that worth the extra money you’ll have to spend on glasses for an accessory to a phone that already costs hundreds of dollars on its own? (For what it’s worth, there’s no pricing information on these Google glasses yet, as they’re not arriving until later this fall.)

If you remember, the Apple Watch debuted with the same premise — it’s really just an extension of your phone. And while that selling point may have brought in a few early adopters, the Apple Watch itself didn’t take off as a product in its own right until the health and fitness tracking features really came to the fore. I think mixed reality glasses — whether it’s these Google-backed models or the pair that Apple is allegedly developing — are going to have to carve out their own space beyond just “smartphone stuff but the smartphone stays in your pocket.”

Maybe something to focus on for I/O next year.

Microsoft believes that the future of authentication is passwordless, secure, and user-friendly.

SMS-based authentication is now a leading source of fraud, and by moving to passwordless accounts, passkeys, and verified email, we’re helping you stay ahead of evolving threats while making account access simpler and more seamless.

Good. Hopefully this is a trend that more and more companies get onboard with, along with passkey adoption.

I’ve long appreciated Apple’s long-time feature to autofill (and auto-delete) codes via SMS has been a great stop-gap, but we should stop relying on SMS for these things altogether.

Apple itself largely does not use SMS as an authentication method, though I believe it’s still available as a fallback for your Apple account (there’s a trusted phone number listed that can be used to recover your account if needed.) By and large, though, the company has just sent codes to your various devices, though it also allows for the use of hardware security keys for iCloud. And, of course, the company has been at the forefront of passkey implementation.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Contrary to popular opinion, Jobs did not get fired from Apple—he got parked in a useless role until he quit out of frustration, as Cain recounts. Jobs was motivated to start NeXT Computer for two reasons: He saw a potential market for a high-end workstation in education and industry, and he knew that this was a market Apple wasn’t especially interested in, so he could avoid expensive and distracting lawsuits with the company he was being pushed out of. (That didn’t work.)

As depicted in the book, the same cycle seems to repeat again and again. Out of the gate, Jobs decides what his new company will focus on by cannily identifying a potential market—the demand for “3M” machines, workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and a processor capable of handling a million instructions per second. Scientists and researchers, Cain recounts, said they would buy them in large numbers—assuming they cost no more than about $10,000 each.

Then the second cycle happens: Jobs ends up getting focused on all sorts of little details that matter to him, but don’t necessarily serve the original product goal, from the design of the factory that would build the workstations to the expensive physical design of the workstations themselves, made unlike any other computer in existence.

The end result was pretty much what you’d expect: The computer that NeXT ended up building didn’t satisfy the requirements of those original higher-ed buyers who were the target market. Jobs had followed his bliss, and his good taste, in interesting directions. NeXT made an interesting product. But the product failed at being a successful product, just as NeXT kept failing at business.

And it just keeps happening, as the book details. Early investor and Jobs believer H. Ross Perot (yes, the former independent presidential candidate!) had ties in the government that would’ve allowed NeXT to sell computers to America’s intelligence agencies, primarily for spy-satellite image analysis. Jobs refused the lifeline, saying he didn’t want to do business with the government.

A deal with IBM had the potential for NeXT’s operating system to take the ecological niche of Microsoft Windows before it had been firmly established on the world’s PCs. Jobs decided he was uncomfortable working with IBM.

Time and again in “Steve Jobs in Exile,” you see Jobs act like his company’s own worst enemy. He makes decisions for perfectly understandable personal reasons, but they go against the entire premise of the company he had established. (How does a guy with a fundamentally anti-establishment worldview end up building a company designed for elite institutions, industry, and the government?) The situation at NeXT becomes increasingly untenable, and to Jobs’s credit, he does seem to have learned that his mistakes are what led the company to the cliff.

When Jobs discovered that a small piece of the overall NeXT software picture, WebObjects, had a potential market in revolutionizing early web commerce, he recognized it, and the company benefited. But you get the sense that Jobs was not comfortable changing the world of selling things on the Internet, when he really still wanted to change the world.

In the end, NeXT’s investment in a forward-looking Unix-based operating system underpinned by the Mach microkernel made it an acquisition target for Apple, which was desperately looking for a replacement for the classic Mac OS. The rest is history, though Cain points out just how dramatic and fraught the merger of the NeXT staff with Apple’s late-90s engineers really was.

If you think Jobs’s years at NeXT were some sort of graduate education in which he grew older and wiser so he could emerge, fully formed, as Apple CEO, you’ve got it wrong. As Cain expertly points out, the NeXT era was one in which Jobs was humbled again and again, until he started to realize that his instincts were not infallible, his distortion field did not reflect reality, and that he had to modify his behavior to have any hope of success. (In fact, Jobs’s greatest success during the period came with Pixar—where he had a much more hands-off relationship with the company’s executives.)

The Jobs who sold his company to Apple was not tanned, rested, and ready for action. He was beaten, battered, bruised, and humbled. But he had learned enough lessons that he was able to give Apple a better version of himself, the second time around.

[Steve Jobs In Exile (Portfolio), available at Amazon, Bookshop, and everywhere else.]

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple Sports got its World Cup update on Tuesday:

Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone that gives fans access to real-time scores, stats, and more — is now available to download on the App Store in more than 170 countries and regions around the world, including more than 90 newly added markets. Designed for speed and simplicity, the app delivers a personalized experience, putting fans’ favorite teams and leagues front and center with a simple, intuitive interface designed by Apple.

In addition to being available in 90 more regions, there are a bunch of nice soccer features, including a starting line-up, all geared toward this summer’s World Cup, which is less than a month away.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Joe’s covering a lot in this course, but you can distill it down to a few principles: how to ensure your private information remains under your control, what you can do (if you want) to migrate from Big Tech products and services to alternatives, and how to minimize or eliminate privacy risks. The course includes a discussion forum, downloadable PDFs, and optional homework and quizzes, which can be a useful way to ensure your understanding of material. I trust Joe’s insights and his teaching approach, not only because (disclosure) I’m the Executive Editor of Take Control Books, but because I’ve seen over that time how patient he is at explaining the frustrating things tech companies (including Apple) do to us, instead of for us.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

VoiceOver and Magnifier will gain AI-powered features that can provide enhanced image description, using the device camera. VoiceOver’s Image Explorer will use Apple Intelligence to give more detailed descriptions of what’s in photographs, scanned documents and labels, for example.

With updates to live recognition, VoiceOver users can press the iPhone action button to quickly ask a question about what’s in the camera viewfinder and get a detailed response. Users can also ask follow-up questions in their own words to get more visual information. These question features resemble what’s available to users of the Be My Eyes app’s Be My AI feature, but it’s unclear whether Apple’s offerings will go further.

Magnifier for iOS and Mac will include the same Apple Intelligence-powered options, which can be used with speech or high-contrast onscreen text. Magnifier users will also be able to speak to the app, to get more specific information about their surroundings, or to ask follow-up questions.

Voice Control is set to get an Apple Intelligence boost, giving users the ability to describe an element onscreen they want to act on, instead of using a numbered grid, or remembering an item’s label. The natural language support should also allow Voice Control users to navigate apps or elements that aren’t labeled for the feature.

Accessibility Reader, which renders onscreen text in ways that are visually more accessible, including larger fonts, high-contrast backgrounds, and clutter-free layouts, will provide AI-generated summaries on demand, and can translate text into the user’s chosen language.

AI-generated captions will be available alongside standard SDH and closed captions, and also in places where no captions are provided otherwise. They’ll be available on macOS, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro, and they can be styled to meet the viewer’s taste or needs.

Power wheelchair users looking for a reason to try Vision Pro might find one in this year’s accessibility announcements, especially if they use an alternative drive controls to steer the chair. Those who can’t use a standard joystick to navigate often employ sip-n-puff switches, head arrays or other devices. With this year’s updates, Vision Pro users will be able to use eye-tracking to control compatible alternative drive systems. At launch, Vision Pro will be compatible with TOLT and LUCI systems.

Other updates coming this year include motion cues for VisionOS, improved Apple device handoff for Made for iPhone hearing aids, larger text support in the tvOS interface and more.

Today’s preview marked the fifth straight year Apple has used GAAD week to preview accessibility features coming to its platforms in the fall. GAAD celebrates its fifteenth year.

Go to the podcast page.

If you’ve enabled FileVault before macOS 26 Tahoe and used the option to escrow your key in iCloud, as of 26.4, you’ll be forced to migrate to a new, better, more secure method. Jason Snell just noted this update in his post about refreshed security. I wrote last September about how Tahoe shifted to storing the last-ditch account Recovery Key in Passwords starting with macOS 26.

In that column, I explained, “Your previous choices are preserved. If you wrote the key down or used iCloud escrow, this remains in place.” This is no longer the case! That article remains accurate and provides all the background and insight you need on using FileVault and the role of the Recovery Key.

However, when faced with the upgrade, you may appreciate a few tips and some advice.

You may not need FileVault

FileVault is not necessary for everyone. Apple encourages it, but enabling FileVault increases the odds that you might be locked out of your Mac forever should something go wrong. What is that something? If I could predict that, I wouldn’t be any richer, but you’d all be happier, as would Apple.

The something arises from FileVault’s two-part boot process, which uses a thin layer that requires a Mac account password to unlock your drive. There’s an “opportunity,” shall we say, for that data to corrupt for whatever reason. The Recovery Key bypasses the password requirement, uses a long code stored securely to let you in, and then resets your password.

You might also somehow forget your login password! Unlikely, but I have had times in the past when I used only a memorized password, and my fingers kept the muscle knowledge, and my brain apparently did not. I lost the thread of it, and couldn’t remember what to enter anymore! I have taken measures to prevent this since, but it isn’t impossible.

Fail to have a password or access to your Recovery Key, and you’re locked out forever. Apple can’t recover this data.

If you don’t use FileVault, you don’t need to worry about that at all. Consider your risk profile—are you concerned that someone other than you (or an authorized person) might have physical access to your Mac, and be able to bypass macOS’s login to read the drive directly? That is a big lift for anything but motivated cryptocurrency thieves or a government. If so, FileVault is a valuable add-on, a good complement to Lockdown Mode: FileVault hardens your Mac against local attempts to get into its contents; Lockdown Mode resists many common remote methods of malicious intrusion and phishing.

If not, you can rely on built-in encryption and the physical security of someone having to get to your machine to try to crack it.

But if you like or need the protection of FileVault, perhaps because you travel with a laptop or work in a sensitive industry or carry sensitive data, read on.

Practical upgrading insight

The previous column covers all the basics and the, er, advanceds, but as you migrate, consider these items:

• Found in passwords: Recovery Key is now stored in Passwords. Search for “recovery key” or the model name listed in Settings: General: About in the Name field. (Changing the name doesn’t update the Passwords entry.) If you don’t see an entry in Passwords, try resetting FileVault (see below).

• Persistently available: The key is persistently available in the Mac interface, too, either by using Touch ID or entering your password in Settings: Privacy & Security: FileVault and clicking Show.

• Backup your backup: Because you can no longer store your key in iCloud, it is critical that you have some means of using Passwords on a 26 or later operating system version to regain access to your Mac account if your login fails. You may want to store the key in another password management system, like 1Password, if that would increase your odds of gaining access to it. If you can’t use your password to log in and you can’t access your Recovery Key, you will be locked out of that data forever.

• Older devices can’t see the key: Any of your iCloud-linked devices not yet running iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS 26 will be unable to view the Recovery Key in Passwords (or equivalent in Safari in older versions of macOS).

Resetting FileVault

In my case, I’d upgraded to the new method back in 26.0, writing about it here and upgrading my book Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices. When I went to check just now—with 26.5 installed—the FileVault view said I had FileVault enabled. However, the Show button was grayed out, and Passwords didn’t show an entry for this computer.

I fixed it in this way:

1. Disable FileVault.
2. Click Turn Off Encryption. (You may be prompted to enter your password.)
3. Enable FileVault. (You may be prompted again, but probably not.)

The entry now appears in Passwords.

Note also that Apple continues to show outdated text in this section: “FileVault secures your data by encrypting the contents of your Mac and locking your screen with a password.” All M-series Macs and all Intel Macs with a T2 Security Chip encrypt the contents of the startup drive by default. FileVault layers startup protection on top of that. So Apple may require this mandatory security change, but it fails to explain it correctly.

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

With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad and tracker blocker for your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.

And with the new App Ad Blocking feature in v5.0, it extends the powerful Safari, YouTube and Apple TV ad blocking protection to all apps including:

• News apps
• Social media
• Games
• Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox

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.

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.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Do you want to block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad,Mac or Apple TV — not just in Safari?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.

The new App Ad Blocking feature in Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 builds upon our powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking, extending protection to:

• News apps
• Social media
• Games
• Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox

All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.

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.

Read on Six Colors.

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.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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]

Use code SixColors2026 for 15% off.

Go to the podcast page.

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.