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Formerly indie developer Jason Weingardt, on Threads:

Some personal news: I’ve joined the team at Major League Baseball, and the Mosaic app has come with me. The last 3+ months have, without question, been the wildest of my life. I’m beyond thankful to MLB for the chance to help shape how fans experience baseball, and even more thankful to the community of fans around the world who tried Mosaic, filed bug reports and feature requests, and helped shape it along the way.

We believe Mosaic can be a valuable tool to help learn more about what fans want…. I will keep working on Mosaic as part of my job…. Most importantly: Mosaic is sticking around. Features may come and go, but my ask is that you continue to write in with your feedback about what you like, don’t like, and what you’d want to see in a baseball app. I’m excited for what’s next, and I hope you are too.

Mosaic is a baseball app that’s been in TestFlight for a few months. (Scroll back through Weingardt’s Threads history for details.) From the moment I saw it, I was dazzled—it’s a great iOS baseball app that uses all of Apple’s platform technologies to lay out live game data and show off other MLB features in ways that MLB’s own app just doesn’t. And it even integrated with MLB TV, so if you’re a subscriber to MLB’s premium video service, you can watch games via Mosaic, including in the most mind-blowing multiview I’ve seen.

I don’t want to lean too much into the current state of the official MLB app, but it used to be so cutting-edge and great that when I was at Macworld, we gave it a zillion awards and ended up just inducting it into our “app hall of fame.” But over the years, that app has become generic and unfocused and one-size-fits-all. It is no longer a joy to use.

So Jason Weingardt wrote Mosaic, by himself, and it’s a properly great iOS app (that also runs on iPad and Mac and, as of today, Apple TV). I ran into Weingardt at WWDC and he was so happy that people had already fallen in love with his own personal semi-secret passion project.

We all pretty much expected Mosaic to be crushed by MLB once it figured out what was going on. No matter that it was using public APIs and honoring MLB’s own premium content subscriptions, it just felt like the kind of thing that was too good to be true.

Instead, to their immense credit, MLB hired Weingardt, and Mosaic is now apparently a part of MLB’s digital strategy. I almost can’t believe it. It’s the best possible outcome for Weingardt, MLB, and baseball fans with Apple devices.

I’m so happy to think that MLB’s apps may now be on a trajectory to go back to where they belong—in the app hall of fame.

I’m a huge fan of displaying ambient information in my computer interfaces, which on my Mac tends to involve putting data about weather, solar power and the like in my menu bar, so it’s available at a glance. My tool of choice for this is SwiftBar, itself a follow-on to BitBar (which has been rebooted as xbar). On my iPad, I’ve been using custom widgets generated with Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app to do the job.

Now here’s a new contender that generates widgets on both Mac and iOS: Brett Terpstra’s $20 TerminalWidget, which lets you send data to a widget from a command-line script, Shortcut, AppleScript, or a URL scheme.

Widgets are more complicated than little items that live in the menu bar. That’s why Scriptable uses little JavaScript scripts to build them. TerminalWidget has a basic set of terminology that lets you target specific widgets and provides some pre-filled functionality that lets you generate some design elements without much hassle. It’ll also just… take text you give it and display it if you want.

If you’re working via Shortcuts, you can update TerminalWidget using a bunch of different template types: Chart, Image, Progress, Table, or Text. Just as with the command line, each Shortcuts action contains a bunch of variables, so you can customize colors and fonts, add a caption and title, or other things that help fill out TerminalWidget’s templates. It’s by design a lot less flexible than something like Scriptable, where the sky’s the limit—but it’s also a lot more approachable, since you’re basically filling in the blanks with whatever data you want to provide.

I wasn’t really able to replicate my beloved Scriptable weather widget in TerminalWidget—not flexible enough—but TerminalWidget also supports straight-up image use, which allowed me to generate the contents of my Scriptable widget via script, output it as an image, and then tell TerminalWidget to load that image. So if you wanted to offload widget duties to your Mac or a remote server, you could do that and just display the image in TerminalWidget.

In a way, TerminalWidget turns its limitation (lack of flexibility) into a strength, because the learning curve is so gentle, especially if you use Shortcuts, which literally shows you every single possible variable you could possibly use, so you can tinker and figure out what you want to display. Dr. Drang is using it for planetary positions, because that tickles his fancy. If there’s something you’d like to put on a glanceable widget across iPad, iPhone, and Mac, TerminalWidget will let you do it. That’s a beautiful thing. Now I need to figure out what widgets to add to my own devices…

But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.

And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.

Lesskeys

Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.

Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.

Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.

PeekNote

If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.

Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.

Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.

If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.

Carrot Weather

If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.

Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.

The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.

SmartTracker

With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.

Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.

SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.

TuckBar

Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.

That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.

Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.

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We trust Apple with a lot of our data. In general, that hasn’t seemed like a bad idea; in particular, compared to its competitors, Apple seems to ensure that it can inspect or interact with very little of our data. The company has built its platform and its reputation on being an elegant, frictionless, hands-off conduit. While we can make many complaints about Liquid Glass, its increased focus on invasive (and poor) advertising, its software quality, and much else, Apple has kept its corporate nose cleaner than anybody else. Its transparency and documentation are, oddly, worse than its actions and clear intent.

I was thinking about this when I received an email from an anonymized iCloud Hide My Email account, asking for more detail about how Apple managed the transition from the old method of presenting or escrowing (in iCloud) your macOS FileVault Recovery Key to the new method, in which the key is stored in Passwords. This transition, which I’ve documented in a few places, was a step forward in privacy and security.

But not transparency! I’ll explain, but you can’t find an explanation on Apple’s site about the transition. The support documentation remains out of sync with Tahoe. That leaves it to yours truly to explicate.

Don’t trust and verify

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a newsletter with a round-up of how fitness wearables, like rings, watches, and bands, preserve your privacy from government intrusion, as well as whether they protect you from unwanted security invasions by using end-to-end encryption (E2EE). (The former often requires the latter: governments typically can’t break through E2EE.)

I want to quote two full paragraphs to make this point:

In the end, we found that only four of these companies (Apple, Google, Whoop, and Oura) promise to notify users of law enforcement requests in publicly available documentation. And just two of those companies, Apple and Google (which also owns Fitbit), currently publish transparency reports on how often they hand users’ data to the government.

Support for end-to-end encryption—a method that ensures your personal data is only accessible by you, and not the company who makes the device and manages the cloud storage—is more rare than transparency reports among wearable device makers. The Apple Watch is the only popular fitness wearable that supports end-to-end encryption.¹

Apple wasn’t an early player with E2EE. Really, it was seen as the kind of thing only true security geeks cared about, even while people like EFF and other digital privacy advocacy groups and individuals warned us that our data was only lightly protected. Over time, as the criminal, exploitative, and political monitoring and extraction of our secrets became clear, Apple kept stepping up.

The Secure Enclave is a keystone of those moves, as the tamper-resistant silicon subsystem allows devices to keep locally generated security keys entirely private. Most of these keys never leave the Secure Enclave! Rather, it’s the encryption hub.²

iCloud initially had a fairly cursory level of protection, with the then-Apple ID account password serving as the only real bar. Two-step verification in March 2013 provided better account protection, but didn’t cover iCloud backups, which could be retrieved without that second step. A rash of celebrity account leaks in late summer 2014 led Apple to extend two-step to iCloud data within a couple of weeks. The next year, it upgraded security to the more rigorous two-factor authentication, which later became mandatory.

As part of its response to the iCloud data hijacks, Apple began to beef up iCloud. It began rolling out E2EE for all the device-based services it could, leaving synced data still relatively lightly protected. (iCloud data is always encrypted with Apple’s at-rest keys, which only it ostensibly has access to, and in transit with HTTPS. However, a security breach at Apple or someone able to hijack one end of an in-progress HTTPS sync allows access to that unencrypted data.)

Then, suddenly, months after shipping major updates to its operating systems, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection in December 2022. Enabling this feature put the E2EE aegis over nearly all synced or stored data at iCloud; mail, contacts, and calendar entries remain an exception because of their interoperability with third-party apps and services. You can view Apple’s document that explains what level of protection applies to data, with and without ADP enabled.

With that in mind, let’s talk about the Recovery Key transition.

Recovery Key is not recovered? I think not

The particular reader question driving this was their concern about the FileVault Recovery Key that was in place when the Tahoe-driven transition occurred. Was the old key destroyed and a new one created and stashed in Passwords? Or was the old one just moved over? If the latter, isn’t that a security hole, if a tiny one?

My initial reply wasn’t entirely glib, but I said, having not documented the upgrade, I believed Apple explained the process when it occurred. But I couldn’t find any screen captures of how that occurred. Apple’s documentation remains in the past—it doesn’t mention the Passwords method at all. The Passwords User Guide perversely mentions the Recovery Key, but not how to interact with turning it off or on.

People who had FileVault disabled (whether they never turned it on, or turned it off at some point) did receive an alert during the upgrade:

Your Mac is Ready for FileVault: FileVault keeps your Mac safe by encrypting your data and protecting it with the password you use to log in. If you forget your password, you can use your Recovery Key to reset it.

Clicking Not Now bypassed the process; Turn On opted the user into the new Passwords-based storage for the Recovery Key.

I’ve explained in previous columns how FileVault provides an extra layer of protection. FileVault requires a Recovery Key, so you have recourse if your password stops working, you forget it, or corruption happens in the boot data. This shouldn’t happen, but it can. The Recovery Key and your password (transformed by a cryptographic formula—or hash—after you enter it) are both “key encryption keys,” delightfully named KEKs. Neither directly encrypts your data. Each instead unwraps the key that the Secure Enclave uses to unlock your drive for use in macOS.³ (You can find out a lot more about this topic in my Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices, a revised version of which, including “27” betas, will be out shortly as a free update.)

Apple never knows your macOS passwords, and it shouldn’t know your Recovery Key. That was the flaw with iCloud escrow: your Recovery Key could be retrieved by someone with your Apple Account information who had access to your Mac.

With that said, how did Apple manage the transition from the old system to the new one that uses Passwords? Into this lacuna of details, jump I with inferential logic about what Apple must have done.

With a “show me once” Recovery Key: Apple would generate this key, show it to you, then destroy it. The company (and macOS) didn’t need a record of it, because its purpose was to be used to decrypt another key: don’t have the key, can’t decrypt that other key. If you opted for that method, Apple had to destroy the existing KEK to replace it with a new one derived from the newly created Recovery Key.

With an iCloud escrow key: The same scenario applies from a different angle. Apple can’t retrieve your escrowed key unless you use your Apple Account. That isn’t a per se security weakness, but Apple doesn’t need that escrowed key, and it doesn’t want to decrypt it at iCloud to send it to you. I would warrant that the company once again destroys the KEK, creates a new one, and that’s what’s stored in Passwords. Anything else leaves a potential gap in my explanation of why Apple made this change in the first place.

Now, you say, if macOS generated the key and it stored it in Passwords, doesn’t it “know” the key? Not exactly. The key is ostensibly generated in memory, added to Passwords, and destroyed. To have accessed the key, an attacker would need to be monitoring your screen or grab particular memory locations at an exact moment. If someone has undetected remote observation of your Mac display, the game is already over.

Passwords uses end-to-end encryption with device-based secrets. You can enter a device password or use biometrics to unlock Passwords (or chained biometrics with an Apple Watch linked to your Mac). That’s as secure as we can get to protect any password. If someone wanted to access your Recovery Key through Passwords, they need access to one of your devices; cracking your Apple Account and its second-factor or passkey authentication wouldn’t help—and that’s a big stretch to begin with. Nor does just having your macOS account name and password without the ability to have physical or remote screen access to your device.

I believe Apple handled this transition awkwardly. The company could have provided more clarity about the requirement to change how a FileVault Recovery Key was stored, and explain exactly what measures it took to ensure security across that transition. And it could update its support pages!

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

This is turning out to be the year of immersive sports.

In January, Apple worked with Spectrum and the L.A. Lakers to debut a series of immersive NBA games. And beginning August 28, it’ll be airing a live immersive Major League Baseball game every Friday night for the rest of the Friday Night Baseball season.

Unlike the NBA games, which were limited to cable subscribers, these games are part of Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball package and will be available to all Apple TV subscribers with a Vision Pro. (In Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S., anyway.)

As with the NBA games, this will be an immersive-specific telecast with its own announcers (Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, Michelle Margaux), replays, and graphics. Apple says that during commercial breaks, viewers will “stay immersed in the in-stadium experience from all angles.”

As always, the details will be fascinating to see. While I thought that the immersive NBA games were pretty good, some viewers complained that there were too many changes in camera angle that broke immersion. Baseball is a very different sport, in terms of pace and in the size of the field, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple chooses to approach its coverage.

The four immersive games on the schedule are: Red Sox at Yankees (August 28), Angels at Pirates (September 4), Padres at Giants (September 11), and Giants at Dodgers (September 18).

But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.

Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.

Vox Dictum

I record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.

Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.

I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.

As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.

Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.

Bonfiyah

Like Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.

Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.

Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.

Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.

Letterboxx

Letterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.

With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.

You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.

Echo Photo Album

I don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.

You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.

You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.

Chess Peace

All work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.

The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.

The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.

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A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool, which is supposed to hide a user’s IP address, in many cases doesn’t actually work. Instead, the issues mean a malicious attacker can set up a website to learn a Private Relay user’s real IP address, or that many websites have also already collected this information incidentally. The issues also impact OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network, the researchers who discovered the issues say.

Fascinatingly, this flaw seems to be due to the implementation of passkeys: the authentication happens out of band, in a separate connection, and therefore never runs through Private Relay.

The security researchers who uncovered the issue have put up a site that lets you check if you’re affected; I wasn’t able to test it this morning, as the Wi-Fi network I’m using as of this writing doesn’t support Private Relay at all. (Joke’s on me, I guess!) They’ve also reported the vulnerability to Apple, who did not provide a timeline for fixing it, but allowed them to disclose the issue nonetheless.

Cox points out that along with the Hide My Email bug, this is the second time that a vulnerability has affected Apple’s paid privacy features, since both are part of the iCloud+ subscription. Though Apple did finally patch the Hide My Email flaw late last month, a second flaw is not a great look for a company that prides itself on privacy and security.

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“Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV, which was no sure thing after the series more or less wrapped up in May of 2023. But it’s back for a fourth season, in which—after an episode-long visit to Ted’s home of Kansas City—the football-turned-soccer coach returns to Richmond, where—as teased at the end of season 3—a new women’s team is launching and just might need a coach.

I’ve seen the first half of the season, and I’m happy to report that though the teams have changed, this is still “Ted Lasso” through and through. Thematically the first three seasons were about Ted’s journey in running away from a dissolving marriage. With season four, a whole new set of themes begin to emerge.

Yes, love ’em or hate ’em Ted’s homespun aphorisms still abound. The relationship between owner Rebecca and marketing genius Keely continues to be as strong as ever. Higgins is still doing his Higgins stuff. Mae is still tending bar. Those three fans in the pub are as random as ever. But in coaching a barely-formed women’s team that is in desperate need of players and fans, “Ted Lasso” returns to its roots as an underdog story, which helps make the whole thing feel more like the show’s first season. (There’s even a press conference scene that is disastrous for entirely different reasons from the original.)

It’s great to have series co-creator Brendan Hunt back as Coach Beard, but the addition of Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) as Alice Chilton introduces a new dynamic. Chilton is the only coach who can go into the locker room without permission, she thinks she deserves the managerial job, and she’s got some serious anger control problems. Reynolds adds a lot of grit to the proceedings, preventing it from becoming too much of a sickeningly sweet reunion love-fest.

The character least served from the season, at least so far as I’ve seen, is breakout character Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). He’s there and has some moments, but since he’s the manager of the men’s team, he’s often relegated being a gruff, bearded question mark attached to questions about his relationship status with Keeley. I appreciate the ironic turnabout of the men’s manager being an afterthought who’s only relevant in terms of his romantic storylines, but I do wonder if Roy is too strong of a character to be served in such limited doses.

Anyway, the best review I can give to season four of “Ted Lasso” is that each episode made me laugh out loud, a lot. Not only was it nice to see these familiar characters again, but the show did the most important job any comedy has—it’s funny. Welcome back, coach.

Soulver 4’s release comes at an interesting time, when many people have turned to chatbots and Google’s search dialog—and soon will turn to Siri AI—to answer questions that are better written out or spoken than described as just numbers or operators.

This significant update succeeds in bringing a sort of authoritative basis to stuff you need to calculate or convert. Behind the scenes, there’s no inference or autocompletion—it’s numbers, baby, all the way down. However, the developers aren’t unaware of the AI glow-up. They’ve addressed it in an interesting way, making it easy for agents to ask questions of Soulver!

How many bushels in a peck as I travel a furlong faster than a parsec?

Soulver has filled a gap for me in my calculating needs since I dug into the subject in 2015. While I love PCalc and use it for regular and advanced calculator needs, Soulver is where I go when I need to mix things up.¹

PCalc and Soulver offer overlapping Venn diagrams of what’s possible in number space, but they are distinctly different beasts at heart. Where PCalc mostly calculates within a calculator-style interface, Soulver mostly offers a way to make sense of numbers, units, percentages, time, intervals, and much more. I think of it as a “take stuff in various units or other formulations and then produce an output in a way I want” tool.

I sometimes go days without using Soulver, and then find myself typing in an array of calculations. For instance, as a tiny print book publisher (it’s just me), I am often dealing with the weight of paper, the weight of books, the cost of shipping, and other variables. The number of sheets I have in some of my Numbers documents is alarming, but I often need conversion that sounds like a story problem: “The printer in Canada is giving me paper weight in gsm (grams per square meter). I know the book’s area per page (typically in inches). I need to calculate the weight of 1,000 copies in pounds.” I can type the query faster than I describe it. For instance, I need to estimate the weight of a new book based on the weight and page count of one I am holding:

(6 inches x 9 inches) / (5.875 inches × 8.25 inches) × (352 / 204) × 302g in lbs

Version 4 continues to offer all of what I consider its basics. You type out numbers and units with operators between them. You can set variables, add comments, and drag results into subsequent lines as part of further calculations. You can force-convert units, as above, telling it to use a metric unit instead of imperial, or to use a different unit scale. Say you want inches instead of feet, or kilograms instead of pounds.

Because it’s a notepad, your work is persistent. You can use Soulver to create the equivalent of tabs within sheets, collected into a “sheetbook.” This is somewhat like the Notes app, and it lets you organize calculations into projects and sub-projects. I have a monolithic sheet I use for essentially everything. Soulver can store files locally or sync via iCloud.

Where version 4 starts to diverge from previous releases is in what feels like a baroque set of options that aren’t stapled on, but most require a bit more effort to get the nuance and make them work for you.

How much did Minions & Monsters make in 1940 dollars?

It took me a few weeks to write this review, quite honestly, because every time I looked at the upgrade page, my eyes glazed over as I thought about how to best present this. I mean, the release notes page is broken into ten sections. The answer—which didn’t require Soulver 4—is that I need to cherry-pick more than usual for an app to give you the flavor.

Here are a few new elements that will keep me away from search engines and other resources more than any other:

Inflation calculation. As a historian, and as somebody who just wants to use his numeracy to interpret the world, I find myself jumping for an inflation calculator all the time.² You need an online source, as it has to have a table of the historical values to provide the correct cumulative percentage between two years or dates. Because of the relatively high inflation in developed nations since the start of the pandemic, I find myself trying to understand why I’m staring at a jar of peanut butter and can’t comprehend what it costs now. (Soulver currently does annual inflation calculations, but will add monthly data in a future update.)

It’s a date: Date math is the hardest math, in my experience. Soulver previously let you perform the magic of subtracting one date from another or adding days to a date to figure out the right month, day, and year. In the update, you can do more tricks, like figuring out work hours (set by default, and you can change) in periods of time or differences, calculating relative to cultural and religious holidays, finding the number of daylight hours in a particular place, and (as should be obvious so far) much more. As a person of the Jewish faith, I honestly never know when Hanukkah starts, and Soulver doesn’t appear to know either. (Soulver says Hanukkah is coming in a future update.) However, it does include Christmas and Ramadan; there’s no list of this category, but you can look in Soulver: Settings: Dates & Times and click Public holidays to see that list, set by your region.

How far away? I don’t know about you, but I regularly want to know the distance between two places, sometimes nearby, sometimes far away. Soulver 4 lets you ask, distance between [place name] and [place name], and get the proper curvature-adjusted distance. (I have a proviso about this that you can read at the end.)

How long to upload? I’ve used Soulver for bandwidth and file-transfer time calculations since I first installed it. With the latest release, you don’t have to punch in nearly as many units or conversions to get an answer to a question like time to upload 1TB at 900Mbps. (Answer: 2.47 hours.)

Elements you’ll find added or improved that I haven’t found a particular use for yet but seem significant include:

• Better formatting: You can highlight expression lines with one of eight preset colors, as well as add divider lines. This makes data in sheets easier to parse. In addition to the previously available export function, Soulver 4 lets you email sheets to yourself with full HTML formatting.

• Trip planning: I’ll be honest that this feature looks powerful, but requires breaking out of the Soulver mold, as it uses a multi-line approach by defining the top and bottom of the trip range as a “time point” via the contextual menu. However, because of how it calculates time intervals and provides warnings if the duration you’ve set doesn’t fit, you can use it for short itineraries (getting to the airport on time) or planning a long trip.

• Tags workflow: Coders are amazing people, and you can see that in the simplicity and complexity of this tagging feature. When you tag a line with a hashtag and a tag name, the associated value can be summed, and operations can be performed on it. For instance, you can tag everyone’s individual orders on a dinner bill, add in tax and tip, and then have it divvied out. But that’s just one example. A spreadsheet could be easier, but it can also be overkill.

• A command-line interface: If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like a GUI, a command-line approach to Soulver might fit you, but the developers created it mostly to allow a simple way for you to have various other things, whether scripts, editor plug-ins, or coding agents, use Soulver as a kind of engine of numerical accuracy.

Weather goest thou?

Soulver is a $59 one-time purchase and gives you access to Mac, iPhone, and iPad versions. (There’s a 60-day free trial to test it out.) While that might seem high, I think given inflation—wink, wink—that’s comparable to the $30–$40 we might pay for a single-platform great utility in 2010! The iPhone version can be purchased on its own for $15. Soulver 3 owners pay $29 to upgrade to version 4. You can also get Soulver 4 via the $15 a month Setapp subscription, and have full access to it and over 330 other apps.

But you might run into one not-quite-hidden subscription option if you make certain weather or stock queries. With the App Store version of Soulver, $26 a year gives you access to what the app labels Live Weather (a number of current metrics), Live & Historical Stocks (a deep trove of data and real-time), and Inline Knowledge Assistant (which lets you use Wolfram|Alpha). It’s included at no extra cost for Setapp subscribers.

I ran afoul of an aspect of this in testing, as Soulver (as of 4.0.2) included about the top 700 most populous cities and leaned on Wolfram for more, but didn’t prompt me as to why it couldn’t identify a city I mentioned. Developer Zac Cohan said the next minor update will add dynamic place-name lookups as part of the base price to reduce confusion and better fit the user base.

This subscription is not at all necessary to use Soulver 4, and Zac says the vast majority of Soulver users don’t need it. However, the cost to provide the data and services is too high to include for all users, hence the subscription to defray those costs.

Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.

The post itself includes numerous transcripts of message conversations¹ and emails that supposedly bolster OpenAI’s case that it studiously avoided using Apple information.

This is, as The Verge’s Jess Wetherbed notes, a pure public opinion play. Because if they have evidence, the only correct answer is “we’ll see you in court.”

What kept running through my head while reading this was the old legal chestnut: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The reckoning is coming. Apple has done it before, and it’s doing it again. After macOS 27 Golden Gate, you will no longer be able to run legacy Intel apps using Rosetta 2. After the 26.4 update in March, when running any affected app in macOS 26 Tahoe, you see a notification banner when you launch affected software or a background component launches that uses Intel code:

Support Ending for Intel-based Apps. This version of “[App Name Here]” will not open in a future release of macOS. Learn how to update to an Apple silicon version. [Learn More pop-up menu]

There is one carveout noted for “certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks,” so far unnamed.

With information in hand, you can plan how to deal with Intel-only apps that have been abandoned, or the developers have seemingly no interest in updating. Printer makers are, so far, the worst.

A history of looking backward

Apple has done this before—many times, in fact. I’ve argued in the past that one of Apple’s key strengths, and a key to the continuity of the Mac’s operating system, is how well it’s managed transitions across chip architectures, frameworks, and operating system changes.¹

Look at what Apple has managed:

• Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC (silent emulator)
• Mac OS 9.1 (or later) to Mac OS X (Classic)
• PowerPC to Intel (Rosetta, original flavor)
• 32-bit to 64-bit code (warnings)
• Intel to Apple silicon M-series chips (Rosetta 2)

At each of those milestones, Apple offered either advance warnings about a future lack of compatibility, an emulator tool, or both. Does anyone have fond memories of running QuarkXPress using Classic in Mac OS X in its early days? When it crashed, which was often, it only took down the Classic “app” and didn’t require a Mac restart.

To be fair, Apple could have continued to let older software run for as long as it was willing to devote time to maintaining emulators or compatibility layers. We could be using apps written for Motorola 68030s on our M5 Macs right now! However, it makes increasingly less sense to support the past after a reasonable transition, particularly one that stretches years and sees the company discontinuing compatible hardware.

Apple released the last Intel-based model in August 2020, introduced its first M-series computer in November 2020, and halted sales of computers with Intel inside in 2023.

As part of this shift, you receive the Intel software warning, not just the first time you launch an affected app or an Intel-based component or even Terminal-accessed binary runs, but the next time you do it after a restart. Yes, it is trying to bug you to get a newer version of your software. Golden Gate also pulls an interesting trick: When you upgrade, it removes the Rosetta emulator. You’re prompted to install it the first time you need Intel code. I guess this is an extra spur to remind you.

Because Intel-only apps will continue to work under Rosetta until you install macOS 28 Dumbarton, these reminders will continue for at least another 16 months or so.² Once you upgrade to macOS 28, those apps and components will simply stop working.

Sunsets can be beautiful

Apple includes a helpful tool in Golden Gate in System Settings: General: About. Click Details next to Intel-based Apps, and a dialog box appears that lists everything installed that requires Rosetta. As a nice touch, Apple shows you apps launched in the last year, along with when, so you know the most critical to upgrade or swap out.

You can also examine any app in the Finder, choose Get Info from the File menu, and note the warning next to Kind. Apple allows apps to be compiled as universal binaries that include both Intel and Apple silicon code, and offers an Open using Rosetta checkbox that was useful in the early days of the swapover when some M-series versions of an app were missing features or were buggy compared to the Intel version. You sometimes checked that box to use the more stable Intel variety, and then surely forgot about it. (For instance, Adobe updated its primary apps faster than third parties did their plug-ins. To use some Photoshop plug-ins, you had to force Photoshop to run in emulation.)

Hover over the item, and you can click Visit Website if Apple has a link to one, or click the More … button and choose Show App in Finder or Move to Trash. Not every app or component has a Move to Trash item, and I’m not sure why. I also suggest installing AppCleaner, a free app that will root out all files associated with an app when it’s deleted. (Turn on SmartDelete to monitor the Trash, or you can drag apps onto it.) This ensures you’re not leaving cruft behind when you get rid of the app proper.

This is all fine for rooting out installed apps, but Apple may not catch every system component, command-line utility, or other software that lives in crevices and emerges in particular conditions. For that, you should take a look at:

• Go64: The free app from St. Clair Software, the makers of our favorite app, Default Folder X, provides details in a list form.
• Rosetta Check ($7): Turn to Rosetta Check for even more information about each unsupported app, which may be useful if you have a lot of software to work through updating.
• HoudahSpot: If you use HoudahSpot, you can construct a search.

A few companies that have Intel-only apps or components have explained their migration path, with PaperCut being an excellent example. Others without any financial incentive—such as hardware makers, who sometimes barely care about compatibility for software required to support their products—may wait until after the 2027 transition to wake up and make changes. This has happened many times before!

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

I’ve been covering Apple financial results and earnings calls for a very long time, dating back to my time at Macworld when Steve Jobs would occasionally parachute into earnings calls presided over by, among other people, Tim Cook! This week’s earnings call was Cook’s 90th and final installment, and that’s probably the most notable thing about it.

Even the fact that it was a record third quarter isn’t that notable. It’s more notable when Apple doesn’t set a quarterly record, especially given economic changes and inflation.

Still, as always, the results and the earnings call provided a few things I thought were worth pointing out. And so, powered by my second cup of tea while I’m on a summer trip to visit family (that was a late-night flight!), here are some thoughts about financial things.

It’s not a chip shortage, it’s demand

Apple is having supply-constraint problems. Maybe you’ve noticed the lack of new Mac minis and Mac studios? The Mac is the hardest-hit product line when it comes to supply, but Cook said the iPhone has also been affected, and anticipates constraints on the iPad as well.

This isn’t the whole story, of course, but it is part of it—and a part that Apple wants to crow about. Apple is limited in how many Macs, iPhones, and iPads it can sell because they are all powered by systems-on-chips that are coming off of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor’s most advanced production nodes. Here’s how Cook put it:

The root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do. And we had high expectations, so it wasn’t that our expectations were low, but as you can see from iPhone’s growth being 22% and Mac’s growth at 29%… these are extraordinary numbers and the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal. So we’ve been pulling supply ahead, and at some point there’s a limit to that. And so we’ve got a quarter that we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side, essentially.

This isn’t a partner or supplier issue. This issue is an incredibly strong… iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation.

You can’t argue with the strong iPhone and Mac sales figures, and Apple specifically called out the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo, which Cook said “has been especially popular” and suggested that the company is still struggling to make them fast enough.

It’s admirable (and sensible) that Cook isn’t pointing fingers at anyone but customers who want Apple products, but the key phrase in his statement is “the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal.” This is an acknowledgement that while in the past, Apple might have been able to boost chip production from its partners, today the chip industry is maxed out thanks to the wild building of chips for AI applications.

Still, I do take Cook at his word: Even in a normal world, there’s only so much TSMC could do to rapidly respond to a dramatic increase in chip orders from Apple. I’m sure Apple is kicking itself for not anticipating stronger demand, especially given how tight the whole industry has gotten. And Cook’s suggestion that Apple is going to be “scrambling on the supply side” because the impact will “increase significantly” (and Cook really emphasized that word!) suggests that this may get worse before it gets better.

Oh yeah, and this isn’t just about cutting-edge SOCs. It goes for memory too. According to Cook, the price Apple pays for memory just keeps going up, and the offsetting Apple has been able to do by using existing inventory is going to be less effective as supplies run out.

As an aside, Cook also alluded to reports that Apple has tried to get the U.S. government to authorize purchase of RAM from some forbidden Chinese chipmakers, which has aroused political ire. “Obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side.”

How does Apple increase prices?

One of the analysts on the earnings call asked a question about Apple’s recent price increases, which was a great opportunity for Cook to explain Apple’s pricing philosophy.

It started out pretty normal, with Cook pointing out the price increases were done “reluctantly” and only because it’s “a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing.” But then it got more philosophical:

In terms of our philosophy on dollars or percentages, we look at units, revenue, and margin, and then come to a business judgment as to how to handle that. And so it’s not a mathematical formula that gets us to a specific result or just looking at one dimension of that. We look at all three dimensions and think about it over the long term instead of a 90-day clock. Hopefully that helps.

Yep, that helps, Tim. Three-dimensional pricing. Imagine pricing as a cube, and you’ll finally see the Matrix.

Soft Services stories

Services revenue, while up year-over-year, was (shockingly?) not up sequentially for the first time in more than three years. Apple laid most of the blame at various foreign-exchange rate “headwinds,” but CFO Kevan Parekh also tried to blame the softness on a few other factors:

• Theatrical gross from “F1: The Movie” last year
• “Headwinds in mobile gaming”
• Changes to the App Store business model worldwide, mostly driven by regulation
• The U.S. court order allowing developers to link out of Apple’s payment model without penalty

It felt like a real stretch, and more of an opportunity to complain about the App Store being regulated and litigated. But I will admit that a softening in mobile gaming, which obviously drives a lot of App Store revenue, is an interesting data point. And it’s more interesting that Apple felt it was worth sharing.

But, Parekh went on to say, “Despite this, the App Store did set a June quarter revenue record.” So… maybe not the reason for the softness after all?

Apple is an EGOT

Did you know that Steven Spielberg just won a Grammy award, which made him an EGOT? Winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony is a pretty rare accomplishment that any individual should be proud of.

But did you know that large corporations are also keeping score? It’s true.

“It was wonderful to see Apple TV earn the industry’s top honors, adding Tony Awards this year to its Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar wins,” Cook said Thursday. “We reached that milestone faster than any streamer in history.”

I wonder which marketing person at Apple had the job of figuring out how quickly every other streamer became an EGOT. Also, thanks to cancelled series “Schmigadoon” for the Tony. Maybe do everyone a solid and bring it back?

This was Tim

Through the earnings call, financial analysts showed their softer side by thanking Cook for all his years of service and revenue generation. Cook made a point of thanking them all individually before answering their questions, which I thought was a nice, and human, touch. He also made a final farewell statement designed to warm Wall Street hearts:

Thank you to all of you, from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era. He is truly one of a kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company.

Oh! The new guy! I didn’t even mention it, but John Ternus was on the call the entire time, and didn’t say a peep. At least, not until Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America decided to devote one of his two questions to him. He threw him a softball about how the competitive landscape is changing overall.

Ternus did not pick up the ball.

“Well, thank you for asking,” Ternus said, rousing from his call-long slumber. “I guess I would just reiterate what Tim said, there is so much opportunity for us with everything that’s happening in this space, and we’re just really focused on our plans and very excited about it.”

Deferring to the big guy and not letting Wamsi Mohan bait you into stealing Cook’s moment. That’s future CEO thinking right there, pal.

For the 90th and final time, Apple CEO Tim Cook hopped on a conference call with financial-industry analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe take one final victory lap. CFO Kevan Parekh and incoming CEO John Ternus were there, too.

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

Tim Cook’s introduction

Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is pleased to report $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year ago and a June quarter record. We were able to achieve this despite supply constraints and sequential foreign exchange headwinds.

We continue to see enormous customer enthusiasm for our most popular lineup ever, with iPhone revenue growing 22% from a year ago to reach a June quarter record. We saw so much excitement around the best Mac lineup we’ve ever had, growing a strong 29% to achieve a June quarter revenue record. Services also set a June quarter record with $30.7 billion in revenue.

We achieved June quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. We were pleased to see strength across the board with June quarter records in the U.S., Latin America, Western Europe, India, China mainland, Japan, and Southeast Asia. We also achieved June quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets and saw double-digit growth in most emerging markets.

This year’s WWDC was a wonderful showcase of our latest innovations. We were tremendously excited to unveil the all-new Siri AI, a completely reimagined version of Siri that is profoundly capable, deeply personal, and integrated seamlessly across our platforms. And we’ve been absolutely thrilled by the response who’ve been using Siri AI in the developer and public betas. The reviews from early users have been phenomenal, and it’s been so wonderful to hear from people who are excited about the capabilities we’ve built. And it underscores our philosophy that building AI that is private and based on personal context can change how users find information and get things done with our products in a way that truly enriches their lives. We really couldn’t be more excited about it, and we are feeling incredibly enthusiastic about the impact it’s going to have.

At WWDC we also announced new tools to help parents keep kids safe online and we were pleased by the overwhelmingly positive reaction. New child safety features like Ask to Browse and Time Allowances will help parents encourage kids to develop healthy digital habits. These new tools integrate guidance from leading clinical and child development research, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. Our goal is to make it easier for parents to manage what their children see, who they interact with, and how and when they can use their devices. We’re looking forward to bringing these new capabilities to users this fall, in addition to amazing new updates across our operating systems.

Now let me turn to the results for the quarter, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue for the June quarter was $54.3 billion, up 22% from a year ago. We achieved June quarter records in every geographic segment, and set a June quarter record for upgraders. According to IDC, we gained share globally during the quarter. As I’ve said before, this is the most powerful and most popular iPhone lineup we’ve ever had. More people are relying on iPhone every day for AI, powered by the outstanding performance of A19 and A19 Pro. Across the lineup, iPhone continues to deliver the performance, battery life, durability, and camera capabilities that people count on every day. Whether it’s the extraordinary camera system of iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the remarkably thin design of iPhone Air, the balanced performance and durability of iPhone 17, or the exceptional value of iPhone 17E, there’s an iPhone for every customer.

Mac delivered its best June quarter yet, with $10.4 billion in revenue, growing an impressive 29% from a year ago despite significant supply constraints. This revenue growth was driven by the incredible strength of our latest lineup, with MacBook Pro and the all-new MacBook Neo. According to IDC, we gained share globally. We also set a June quarter revenue record in developed markets and an all-time record in emerging markets with particular strength in Greater China, where we had an all-time revenue record. In addition, we achieved all-time records for upgraders and customers new to Mac.

With the power of Apple Silicon, the Mac lineup delivers outstanding power-efficient performance, massive memory bandwidth, and next-level AI capabilities. Mac continues to be the ultimate AI powerhouse, excelling at high throughput, on-device inference, and creation across a broad range of AI workloads. And we’re seeing customers increasingly put those capabilities to work, from using Mac Mini as a powerful platform for agentic AI to deploying clusters of Mac Studio systems to run frontier-class models locally.

Across the lineup, customers continue to embrace the Mac family. MacBook Neo has been especially popular, with its distinct design and excellent value resonating with customers around the world, and we’re continuing to work hard to meet demand. MacBook Air, the world’s most popular laptop, continues to deliver the portability and performance customers love with M5. And MacBook Pro, powered by M5 Pro and M5 Max, remains a go-to choice for professionals tackling the most demanding AI, development, and creative workflows.

In iPad, revenue was $6.2 billion for the June quarter. iPad continues to be the ultimate go-anywhere, do-anything device for students, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds, thanks to its incredible power, portability, and versatility. The addition of M4 to iPad Air has made it even more capable, delivering a significant performance boost for everything from personal productivity and immersive learning to advanced creative workflows. Together with a remarkable performance of iPad Pro, the amazing value and versatility of iPad, and the ultra-portable iPad Mini, we’re offering customers our strongest iPad lineup ever.

Revenue for Wearables, Home, and Accessories was $7.9 billion, up 6% from a year ago. We grew in every geographic segment and achieved a June quarter record for upgraders for Apple Watch. Our Apple Watch lineup brings together the most comprehensive set of health and fitness features we’ve ever had. We’re delivering useful features backed by research to enable users to better understand their health and wellbeing. It’s gratifying to receive almost daily reminders of the meaningful impact Apple’s health innovations are having for users all over the world—changing, even saving lives.

Meanwhile, we continue raising the bar across our AirPods lineup, whether it’s the immersive listening experience of AirPods Pro 3, or the premium listening experience and exceptional active noise cancellation of AirPods Max 2. And with live translation powered by Apple Intelligence, people are crossing language barriers and connecting like never before.

As I mentioned earlier, we’re excited about the work we’re doing on the next generation of Apple Intelligence, including Siri AI and the AI features we’re developing across our platforms. These experiences are intuitive and useful, while also deeply integrated in a way that’s personal and private, with the latest models running on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. We began laying the groundwork for users to have the best possible experience with AI when we introduced the Neural Engine in 2017. Ever since then, we’ve innovated and invested deliberately in silicon, systems, and scalable unified memory architecture designed with AI at their core.

What sets Apple apart is the unique combination of massive unified memory bandwidth, industry-leading power-efficient performance, and deep on-device intelligence, all built around the customer experience from the ground up. The result is that Apple has created the world’s best hardware to experience AI, whether using Apple Intelligence, including Siri AI, or third-party offerings. That’s why developers and researchers are increasingly using Apple devices to build ever-more advanced tools and models.

Turning to services, revenue was $30.7 billion, a June quarter revenue record and up 12% from a year ago, despite significant sequential foreign exchange headwinds. We also set an all-time revenue record in developed markets and a June quarter record in emerging markets. Apple TV continues to leave audiences spellbound with new releases like Widow’s Bay and Cape Fear alongside returning favorites like Silo and Sugar. And next week, we’re excited that Ted Lasso is back for its fourth season.

It was wonderful to see Apple TV earn the industry’s top honors, adding Tony Awards this year to its Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar wins. We reached that milestone faster than any streamer in history. We’re also looking forward to this year’s Emmy Awards, where Apple has landed a record 89 nominations, leading all networks in both the major drama and comedy series categories with three outstanding drama series nominations and three outstanding comedy series nominations. Widows Bay also stands out as the year’s most nominated new program, earning 19 Emmy nominations. In the six and a half years since launch, Apple TV has earned more than 850 wins and nearly 3,800 nominations.

In time for the World Cup, we expanded Apple Sports to include more than 170 countries and regions worldwide and made it easier than ever for fans to follow every moment of the tournament from the opening game to the final whistle. At the same time, we’re halfway through an unforgettable year of F1, and Apple TV subscribers have been tuning in all season to follow their favorite drivers and teams.

In retail, we were pleased to announce Apple Upgrade this week for customers in the U.S. Apple Upgrade is a new hardware leasing program launched in partnership with Klarna and makes it even easier for customers to get their hands on Apple’s latest products with a plan that’s right for them.

In all of our work, we’re thoughtful and intentional in how we show up for our users and across our communities. That means innovating to protect user privacy with the next of Apple Intelligence or helping parents keep kids safe, as I mentioned earlier. In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we unveiled new features to help users get more out of the products they use every day. New intelligent capabilities are coming to VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader to make them more useful and intuitive. We’re also using on-device speech recognition to generate subtitles for video content without captions. And Apple Vision Pro is adding a feature for power wheelchair users to control drive systems using just their eyes. All of these features were born out of Apple’s longstanding commitment to ensuring that the benefits of technology are shared with everyone.

As we continue to develop new capabilities for users around the world, we’re also doing our part to invest in innovation close to home. Last year, we made a $600 billion commitment to the U.S. over four years, and now, as we said before, we plan to reinvest the tariff refunds we’ve received into the U.S.

We’re pleased with the progress we’ve already made advancing the American supply chain. Earlier this month, Apple announced a new agreement with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting-edge wireless connectivity technologies. The new, multi-year agreement with Broadcom, which is part of Apple’s American Manufacturing Program, is expected to exceed $30 billion. This marks our largest-ever American Manufacturing Program commitment. It’s also an important step forward in our work to build an end-to-end silicon supply chain here in the U.S.

We’re excited for the upcoming opening of the Apple Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. The center is located in a facility where we currently assemble advanced AI servers. Later this year, we’ll make Mac mini there, too. The center will teach students, supplier employees, and business of all sizes, the same innovative processes we use to make our products. The goal is to empower American manufacturers to take their work to the next level and strengthen the entire advanced manufacturing ecosystem.

We have an exciting fall ahead and an incredible future beyond. Our road map is phenomenal, and we are so excited about the way Siri AI will enrich our users lives. Throughout all of it, we will remain guided by our North Star: building the best products and services to enable people to do magical things. It’s a special privilege to be part of people’s lives in lasting and meaningful ways, helping them to create, connect, and experience the world around them. I couldn’t be more excited to watch our phenomenal story of innovation continue to unfold, and I’ve never been more confident that the best is yet to come. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevan.

Kevan Parekh’s opening remarks

Thanks, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Here’s a quick rundown of our key financial metrics. Our revenue of $109.4 billion was up 16% year over year, a June quarter revenue record. We saw strong performance around the world with double-digit growth in every geographic segment despite supply constraints. Products revenue was $78.7 billion, up 18% year over year, driven by double-digit growth on iPhone and Mac, both of which set new June quarter records.

Our installed base of over two and a half billion active devices has reached another all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments. Services revenue was $30.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year. We set revenue records in every Services category, including all-time records in cloud services and payment services. Company gross margin was 50.1%, up 80 basis points sequentially. This included a benefit from tariff refunds, which had a favorable impact of approximately two percentage points. When you remove this favorable impact, we would have been at the midpoint of the guidance provided last quarter.

Products gross margin was 40.1%, up 140 basis points sequentially. This also included a benefit from the tariff refunds I just mentioned, which had a favorable impact of over 2.5 percentage points. Services gross margin was 75.6%, down 110 basis points sequentially, driven by a different mix. Operating expenses came in at $19.1 billion, up 23% year-over-year, driven by investments in R&D. Net income was $29.8 billion. Diluted earnings per share was $2.02, up 29% year-over-year, and included 11 cents of favorable impact from tariff refunds. Operating cash flow was very strong at $34.4 billion. All three of these metrics set June quarter records, even when excluding the tariff refund benefit.

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

iPhone revenue was $54.3 billion, up 22% year-over-year, driven by the iPhone 17 family. We grew double digits in the vast majority of markets we track and reached June quarter revenue records across both developed and emerging markets. The iPhone active installed base grew to an all-time high and set a June quarter record for upgraders. According to a recent survey from Worldpanel, iPhone was a top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, the U.K., France, Australia, and Japan. We were thrilled with the response to the iPhone 17 family. Customer satisfaction in the U.S. was recently measured at 99% by 451 Research.

Mac revenue was $10.4 billion, up 29% year-over-year, a new June quarter record, driven by the strength of MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro. We grew in both developed and emerging markets, with strong double-digit growth in markets like Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. The customer reception to MacBook Neo has been incredible. We continue to attract new customers to the product around the world. As Tim mentioned, Mac had its best quarter ever for customers new to the Mac and for upgraders worldwide, including in the U.S., China mainland, and India. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction for Mac was recently measured at 95%.

iPad revenue was $6.2 billion, down 6% year-over-year, driven by the continued difficult compare against the launch of the A16 powered iPad in the prior year. At the same time, the iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, and over half of the customers who purchased an iPad were new to the product. And 451 Research recently measured customer satisfaction at 98% in the U.S.

Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $7.9 billion, up 6% year-over-year, driven by strength in wearables and accessories, and we saw growth in both developed and emerging markets. The wearables installed base reached a new all-time high. We set a June quarter record for upgraders on Apple Watch, and over half the customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction on Apple Watch was reported at 95%.

Our Services revenue reached a June quarter record of $30.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year, despite significant sequential FX headwinds. For the total services business, we saw a double-digit growth in the vast majority of markets we track. We set records in every category, with June quarter records in advertising, App Store, AppleCare, music, and video, as well as all-time records in cloud services and payment services. We are optimistic about the long-term future of our services business. With our large installed base of over two and a half billion active devices, we have an incredibly strong foundation for growth opportunities. Our services continue to attract more customers, and we have now surpassed $1.5 billion in paid subscriptions. Both transacting and paid accounts reached new all-time highs in the quarter, with double-digit growth for both in emerging markets. And we continue to improve and expand our services offerings, from powerful updates to Creator Studio to exciting new features we’re bringing to services later this year, like splitting bills with Apple Cash using Visual Intelligence.

Turning now to enterprise and education, organizations are using the Apple platform to drive AI innovation and empower the next generation of students. Starting with Enterprise, Morgan Stanley has deployed over 20,000 iPhone 17 devices globally as part of a shift from employee-owned to corporate-owned devices for liability and security. More companies are choosing Mac for on-device AI advantages, including lower costs, better performance, and enhanced privacy and security. At Disney, creative teams are increasingly turning to Mac for on-device AI workflows that reduce overall cloud token costs and keep their IP secure. And Credit Agricole, France’s leading retail bank, is using on-device AI and MacBook Pro to streamline regulatory workflows, reducing manual processing time by over 80%. Our newest addition to the Mac lineup, MacBook Neo, is reaching new enterprise users in many environments, from bank branches to retail storefronts.

In education, MacBook Neo continued to accelerate adoption of Apple products, with many districts leveraging Apple financial services to deploy at scale. Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, is transitioning 25,000 students from Windows devices to MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. And in Oklahoma, Midwest City-Dell City School District purchased over 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students. In fact, in the last quarter, about half of the MacBook Neo large purchases by U.S. education institutions displaced Windows and Chromebook devices.

Let’s turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $147 billion in cash and marketable securities and $84 billion in total debt. During the quarter, we returned $33 billion to shareholders. This included $4 billion in dividends and equivalents and $25.8 billion in share repurchases.

As we move ahead into the September quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to. Importantly, the color we’re providing assumes that global tariff rates, policies, and their application remain in effect as of this call, and the global macroeconomic outlook does not worsen from today.

We also expect our September quarter total company revenue to be impacted by two main factors. First, we expect foreign exchange to be a sequential headwind of about 2.5 percentage points to the year-over-year total company growth rate from the June quarter to the September quarter. Second, we expect the impact from supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially. The projected supply constraints in the September quarter affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad. As a result, we expect our September quarter total company revenue to grow between 9% and 11% year-over-year.

On iPhone, we expect to continue to see high levels of demand; however, we do expect iPhone revenue to be impacted by these foreign exchange headwinds and supply constraints. Therefore, we expect the September quarter reported growth rate for iPhone to be mid-teens year-over-year. For Services, we expect September quarter year-over-year reported growth rate to be largely similar to what we reported in the June quarter after removing the negative sequential impact of about two and a half percentage points from foreign exchange that we just described.

We expect gross margin to be between 47 percent and 48 percent. This includes an expected benefit of approximately one percentage point related to tariff refunds. We expect operating expenses to be between $19.1 billion and $19.4 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $350 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16.5 percent.

Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.27 per share of common stock payable on August 13, 2026, to shareholders of record as of August 10, 2026.

Before we take questions, let me turn it back over to Tim.

A farewell from Tim

Thanks Kevan. Before we get into questions, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you. Thank you to all of you, from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era. He is truly one of a kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company.

As I’ve said, I couldn’t be more confident in his leadership, in our executive team, and in the extraordinary people at Apple who are determined to enrich the lives of our users all over the world. We have a bright future ahead, and I truly have never been more optimistic. So thank you all, and now Kevan and I will be happy to take your questions.

Analyst Q&A

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Tim, best of luck. It’s been a pleasure working with you over the years. Maybe to start with, if I think about the 9 to 11% sort of growth that’s guided for September, it’s about a 500 basis points or so deceleration versus what we’re seeing really in June quarter, even through this year, I would say. Can you just talk about how much of this decel is really supply constraint versus other factors like FX? And if you could just flesh out what these supply constraints are, broadening beyond these advanced SOCs you talked about last quarter as well.

Kevan Parekh: Amit, this is Kevan. How are you doing? Why don’t I start with just kind of describing the sequential change, and then I’ll let Tim jump in for kind of a bit more color around the supply constraints. So I think as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we expect the September quarter total revenue to grow by 9% to 11% year-over-year, and then we expect that to be impacted by two main factors. So first, when we look at going from the June quarter to September quarter, we expect foreign exchange to be a sequential headwind of around 2.5 percentage points to the year-over-year company growth rate. And then the second impact is that the impact from supply constraints, we expect that to increase significantly when we go sequentially from June to September, and that projected supply constraint in the September quarter will affect the iPhone, Mac, and the iPad. And really, when you combine those two factors, we get pretty close to the June overall total company growth rate.

Tim Cook: Yeah, Amit, it’s Tim. First of all, thank you for your comments. During the June quarter, we did experience supply constraints primarily on the Mac and to a lesser extent on iPhone and iPad. These were driven by very high levels of demand, and as we’ve said before, we are seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, and were primarily driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on. If you look forward then into the current quarter, the September quarter, we continue to expect high levels of demand. However, with less flexibility in supply chain, we expect the impact from the supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially. The projected supply constraints in the September quarter, as Kevan said, affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad. And so, we’re seeing some very significant constraints currently, with limited flexibility in the supply chain to remedy it.

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Got it. That’s really helpful. Thanks a lot for that. And then, Tim, I just have a memory question for you. Apple has historically, I think, done a really excellent job about delivering capability and utility to customers without really making them pay disproportionately more. The stagnant memory inflation seems to challenge that equation for you folks right now and there are reports that suggest that you’re seeking greater sourcing flexibility for memory. Can you just talk about, is this sourcing options really about ensuring that you have supply and it’s a way to mitigate memory inflation, or is more to preserve the value proposition for your customers. Just any light you could shed on this would be helpful. Thank you.

Tim Cook: Yeah, let me back up and talk about memory in general, ’cause I know this is a subject on many of your minds. As I’d said on the last call, we paid more for memory in the March quarter than the December quarter. And then, as I alluded to last quarter, we expected to pay significantly more in the June quarter than the March quarter, and that is what happened. It was partially offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. For September, we expect to pay even higher memory costs. And we’re able to offset partly by a few factors, and let me walk through kind of what they are.

The first is, as you would expect, we have a benefit from some carry-in inventory in the September quarter. However, we believe this will see decreasing benefit from this over time, beyond the September quarter. The second is, we’re expecting lower costs on certain non-memory components that are in our BOM, and then if you look beyond September, we see the market pricing for memory continuing to increase, which could drive an increasing impact on our business, and we’re continuing to evaluate this.

In terms of the sources of supply, you know, primarily the DRAM market has three suppliers, and obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side. It’s unclear on the pricing side, but it could help on the supply side, and so, we’re evaluating all options.

Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Good afternoon. First, Tim, congratulations on the extraordinary run and [inaudible] on these earnings calls. In terms of my questions, I have two as well. First, on the Apple Upgrade program, could you talk a little bit about the expected adoption rates across your 2.5 billion device installed base in success? Do you see it shortening the replacement cycle for iPhone, or also having an equal impact to Mac and iPad, which may have not have benefited from device subsidies in the U.S. like iPhone has historically.

Tim Cook: Michael, first of all, thank you for your comments. I really appreciate that. If you look at the upgrade program, what it’s all about is making it easier for for customers to get their hands on our latest products with a leasing plan that’s right for them. And of course, as you know, the residual values on Apple products are generally much higher than the residual value on several of our competition, and so it’s a way to get into a product on a fairly affordable basis, particularly for those customers who want to upgrade on some kind of schedule, and so we’re very excited about it. It is offered in our retail stores, and so it’s not widely offered in all channels, and so we’ll see what the customer uptake is, but the early feedback on it is quite positive.

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, Michael, I just mentioned that it’s only available in the U.S. right now as well.

Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you. That’s very helpful, and then my second question, just on iOS 27 and Apple Intelligence. Went into public beta earlier this month. Could you talk about learnings from the public beta? Will the new Siri AI be a demand driver for iPhones this holiday? How does the Apple Intelligence usage to date in the open beta inform how you’re thinking about compute costs and the ability to recover some of those costs through iCloud Plus.

Tim Cook: Yeah, thank you for that. First of all, we are off the charts excited about Siri AI. We had a great reception from WWDC. We released the developer beta immediately after the keynote. The developer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The feedback from reviewers and so forth have been overwhelmingly positive. We released it to the public for a public beta a few weeks ago and the continued feedback is really, really great. I think it’s a very big idea have AI that’s private, that’s based on your personal context, and that’s integrated across the operating system, and so we couldn’t be happier with how things are going. In terms of what it means for compute cost, it’s obviously early going for us, and so I don’t want to say that we have a complete plan for that. We do believe there will be people that want to use it a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people can buy up the stack on iCloud Plus, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is. But we could not be more excited about where the product is.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for the question, and obviously, Tim, known you a long time, I’ll really miss you. I wanted to ask about the supply constraints again, and I think people are just trying to make sense of it a little bit this way, is that the Street had you at 12% growth for the quarter of September, and so you could argue that to get to the 10% you guided, that’s just the FX, and then in the first quarter, which is December, the Street has been decelerating quite a bit, to like 8% to 9%. So I think what we’re struggling with after hours here is how much these supply constraints really hit you in December and impact that because, you know, the Street did a pretty good job of taking that number into the higher single digits. You know, is there any guidance you can give us there as you see it, Tim? And we’d really appreciate it. Thanks.

Tim Cook: Let me talk about the constraints a little more and then Kevan can weigh in on the guidance for revenue. As I had mentioned before, the primary issue is advanced nodes that we run our SOCs on. That’s the primary supply constraint now, and the root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do. And we had high expectations, so it wasn’t that our expectations were low, but as you can see from iPhone’s growth being 22% and Mac’s growth at 29%, and the iPhone is 22% year to date as well, that these are extraordinary numbers and the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal. So we’ve been pulling supply ahead, and at some point there’s a limit to that. And so we’ve got a quarter that we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side, essentially. And Kevan, you want to add on the revenue guidance?

Kevan Parekh: Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Tim. Ben, let me jump in here. The dynamics Tim mentioned combined with the foreign exchange impact I mentioned earlier sequentially is really what’s built into the 9 to 11 percent guidance we’re giving for the September total company revenue year on year growth rate. Beyond September, we’re not providing any color. At this point I think you mentioned December, so we’re not providing any kind of color or guidance beyond the September quarter.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Ok. And then, if I could just ask, and you guys know what’s in the press all the time. But there’s this little company that is also building a fab in Arizona that you guys have been speculated you guys could work with that could potentially alleviate some, at least your silicon constraints. Is there any possibility that you guys broaden out your silicon providers in a reasonable time frame to alleviate these so we feel better about supply?

Tim Cook: Yeah, let me stress again, this isn’t a partner or supplier issue. This issue is an incredibly strong… it’s a great issue in some ways. It’s an incredibly strong iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation. In Arizona, we do source over 100 million components this year out of Arizona. And so, it is part of our $600 billion commitment to the U.S., and we could not be more pleased with how that fab has ramped and is producing for us.

Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Thanks so much for taking my questions, guys, and Tim, just echo what everyone is saying, it’s been a pleasure working with you. Hope to still talk to you in the future. I want to maybe focus on pricing here, Tim, and kind of unprecedented for you to take pricing in the ways that you have. I guess two related questions… Is it your intention to pursue some of these multi-year LTAs with your suppliers just to ensure access to supply at pre-agreed prices? And when you approach product pricing in this environment, is it your intention to protect product gross profit dollars? Is it your intention to protect product gross margins? We’d just love the kind of thought process behind the pricing.

Tim Cook: Yeah, on the pricing front, we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. And we did it because we’re in, what I would characterize as a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices, and so that was the rationale for it. In terms of our philosophy on dollars or percentages, we look at units, revenue, and margin, and then come to a business judgment as to how to handle that. And so it’s not a mathematical formula that gets us to a specific result or just looking at one dimension of that. We look at all three dimensions and think about it over the long term instead of a 90-day clock. Hopefully that helps.

Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, yeah, no, that does help. Thank you, Tim. And then just maybe a quick follow-up. I guess, Tim or Kevan. 12% services growth was just a bit below your guidance. I imagine FX maybe played a role there. I think the fiscal 4Q guidance assumes another deceleration. I think the math would imply below 10% year-over-year as reported. So can you maybe just help us understand the kind of function factors underlying that deceleration? And if that’s App Store, which I think some third-party data sources would suggest, is that a function of AI maybe reprioritizing time away from parts of the App Store? I just want to make sure we understand the moving pieces on services, please. Thank you so much.

Kevan Parekh: Hey, Eric. This is Kevan. I’ll take that one. So, let’s walk from kind of the 16 percent in our fiscal second quarter to kind of the 12% that we just talked about in the June quarter that you referenced, and we look at that, relative to the March quarter, foreign exchange was the main driver for the change in the year-on-year growth rate sequentially, and also a couple other factors to keep in mind. One is we had the theatrical release of F1, which is one of the highest grossing sports films in history, and this year we didn’t have a theatrical release. So that had a favorable impact on both the June quarter and also the September quarter in the year ago. We also had some factors that impacted the performance of the App Store. We did see some headwinds in mobile gaming, and then keep in mind, we also made some changes to the App Store business model in certain countries, and in the U.S., we do continue to operate under a court ruling impacting the link-out transactions. But we’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear our appeal. Despite this, the App Store did set a June quarter revenue record. So if we take a step back, there are several positive trends in the services business, and during the June quarter, we saw strong double-digit growth in categories like cloud services, video, payment services, and advertising, and we set revenue records in every category, with June quarter records in advertising, the App Store, AppleCare, Music, and Video, where Apple TV viewership reached an all-time high in the quarter. And then we also set all-time records in cloud services and payment services, where Apple Pay saw a record level of users in both developed and emerging markets. And services also had a June quarter record in emerging markets. And as we outlined in the prepared remarks, you know, our services continue to attract more customers, and we now have surpassed one and a half billion in paid subscriptions, and our transacting and paid accounts hit an all-time high, with double-digit growth in both those two and emerging markets.

So I think when I step back, if I look at, you know, kind of how we landed versus our expectations that we had outlined in the March quarter, for the June quarter, I would say that we roughly met our expectations, but we did see a bit more softness on mobile gaming in the App Store. As we go into the September quarter, what I would say is we expect foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind, and in fact this is a theme that’s impacting the services business moreso than the total company. We expect foreign exchange to drive about a 5 percentage point headwind to the year-on-year growth rate from the March to September quarter. So if we look at the sequential change from the June quarter, the 12% services we reported, to what we’re guiding for the September quarter, we are going to see another 2.5 point sequential headwind.

Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Thanks for taking the questions and also best wishes, Tim. I guess I want to… maybe it tethers with the memory pricing dynamic, but as you look at the demand that you’re seeing right now, I’m curious of how you assess whether or not you’ve seen any pull forward of demand either from the consumer or even the enterprise and education markets, and whether or not you’re factoring that into your views as we look forward at all.

Tim Cook: You’re talking about on iPhone, I assume, in general. We’ve been running at this 22% growth rate for the last while, for this cycle has been a 22% increase year to date, and so it’s not obvious in the data that what you’re asking is true. Obviously, we’ve now had to increase prices on iPad and Mac, and the price elasticity there, it’s just too early to come to a definitive conclusion of what happens there. Because it takes a little while for the channels to adjust since there’s channel inventory and it takes a while for the consumer to respond, and so we’ll understand that more in the weeks ahead.

Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Very helpful, and then as a quick follow-up, maybe more longer-term thematically, as AI proliferates towards the edge and more consumers utilize AI, I’m curious, Tim, if you see AI opening up additional opportunities. I can appreciate that you’re not going to give us specifics, but do you see other kind of addressable markets evolving from AI over time?

Tim Cook: Yes. I think there are enormous opportunities for Apple moving forward in AI. And I’m so excited about Siri AI and kind of where it is and where it’s going, and I’m excited about the feedback that we’re getting there, and of course, the ability to run some percentage of requests on device is also very strategic and sort of a competitive weapon, if you will. So I could not be more excited about the opportunities there.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Yes, thank you. Tim, first, congrats on your tenure as CEO. You joined back in 2011 when Apple reported $108 billion in revenue and you just delivered a quarter of $109 billion. So just an amazing journey.

Tim Cook: Thank you for that, I really appreciate it.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Yeah, sure, Tim, it’s been a pleasure. For my question, first on Siri AI, Do you expect that Siri AI would change the capital intensity of Apple, despite the fact that you have the ability to do so much differentiated workloads on device and you have this distributed compute? You do have some requests that go into the backend, both in your own first party cloud as well as third party. So is it right to think that the capital intensity of Apple will change in the future because of Siri AI?

Tim Cook: We use a hybrid model, as I know Kevan has reviewed with you earlier, and so we use some third-party cloud and we do our own data centers, and so there will be a mix. But generally speaking, as you know, we have been growing our OPEX and spending more in AI in general. Quite a bit more. And there are other locations on the P&L other than OPEX, like OCOGS, et cetera, that also have AI expenditures, and so we’ll see what Siri AI does from the cost side of it. But there’s also the ability when people use it a lot for them to move up on an iCloud plan as well, and so what the balance of that is, is a bit uncertain at the moment.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: And John, since you’re on the call, congrats on the new role. I’d love to get maybe just a high-level take from you if you think that the competitive landscape here is changing, especially as you hear about, potentially, companies like OpenAI building an AI-enabled competitive device or SpaceX AI potentially having a phone that could bypass some of the typical carrier tax. Just would love your high-level thoughts on how you see the competitive landscape evolving and Apple’s position there.

John Ternus: Well, thank you for asking. I guess I would just reiterate what Tim said, there is so much opportunity for us with everything that’s happening in this space, and we’re just really focused on our plans and very excited about it.

Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Hi, thanks for squeezing me in here and Tim, best wishes from my side as well. Maybe just for my first one, if I go back to WWDC when you announced Siri AI, you also did mention along with the rollout that probably we won’t have the initial rollout in China and Europe, so just wanted to get your thoughts on that front and any more color in terms of what hurdles you need to cross to be able to launch it in those regions.

Tim Cook: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question. Let me take them individually. If you look at the EU, we’re working closely with the Commission. Obviously, our complete desire is to launch everything everywhere at the same time. That’s always the philosophy that we have. We have not been able to do that in the European Union, but we’re working closely with them to try to get to something that would allow us to offer Siri AI there. It is offered, or will be offered for the Mac there, because the Mac is not covered by the same regulations as the iPhone and the iPad. So, net-net, we’re working with them, and hope to reach some sort of solution. If you then look at China, last week we received approval to ship sort of the original features of Apple Intelligence. Things like Clean Up and so forth, and so we’re working now through the rollout of those, and there will be more work required down the road for Siri AI, but we’re at the front end of that.

Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Follow-up, Kevan, just not to beat sort of this FX thing to death here, but if I look at the gross margin, you delivered 48% in the quarter without the tariff refund benefit. You’re guiding to like 46 and a half. Any way to walk us through the sequential driver there and how much of that is FX impacting it versus maybe like increased commodity costs that’s driving that sequential moderation because it does seem a bit more atypical than your normal sort of years.

Kevan Parekh: Yes, that’s a good question. So let me walk through kind of what’s impacting our gross margins. We look at our gross margin change from the 49.3% we had a total company level for the March quarter, and as you mentioned, the 48.1% adjusted for the tariff refund in the June quarter, that hundred and twenty basis point change, if you look at the drivers of that, more than 100% of that can be explained by the memory cost change that Tim outlined. While FX was a factor, really the main driver was really the memory cost impact, and as Tim outlined earlier when we talked a bit about the dynamics around the memory cost, is we did see some partial offsets from things like the benefit of carry-in inventory, reduction in non-memory component costs, and some favorable mix. We are seeing the same dynamics when you go from the 48.1 that we printed in the June quarter to the 46.5 midpoint you referenced of our range without the tariff refund impact. That 160 basis point change is also… more than that is explained by the change in memory costs, and we had partial offsets, again, from things like the benefit of carrying inventory, lower cost and non-memory components, and as well favorable mix. I think that FX was a pretty minimal impact when you look at that versus the memory, and so generally, the sequential change from the March quarter to the 46.5 you referenced is really driven by memory.

Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Great. Thank you both for taking my questions. And congrats again, Tim.

Tim Cook: Thank you so much for saying that, I appreciate it.

Shortly thereafter, Apple execs spent an hour on the phone with financial industry analysts, and we’ve got our usual complete transcript, including many farewells to Tim Cook.

And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs:

As usual, Six Colors will be here to report on the whole thing. Around 1:30 pm PDT, the company will release its financial reports and we’ll be on the scene with our usual load of colorful charts and some analysis. At 2pm PDT, it’s that hour-long phone call with analysts that I’ll also transcribe. Due to summer travel, we’ll be foregoing our usual post-results live stream (and there’s no Six Colors podcast this week, either), but you can tune in to the Upgrade podcast on Monday, where Dan will join me to break down all the results.

Support for MCP via AppleScript means that you can have AI agents communicate directly with MailMaven to improve spam detection, recognize important messages, collect order or financial information, or perform an infinite number of other tasks in which your incoming or outgoing email acts as the hub of knowledge. SmallCubed, the app’s developer, has created a basic MCP server for Claude as a working example. You can write AppleScript from scratch using its terse, thorough guide, or point a code chatbot at the page to write AppleScript for you. I currently have a few nightly scripts that collate book sales and archive the day’s email by digging into MailMaven’s database; I need to rewrite those to use AppleScript instead!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

For the most part, I’m going to focus on Mac apps with these columns, because that’s where the action seems to be these days. But iOS remains a vibrant platform, too, and every now and again, we’ll look at some of the interesting apps being created for iPhones and iPads. This is one of those now and agains.

Want to see your app included in a future round-up? Get in touch at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and you just might make the cut.

Kickabout

The World Cup is just a memory now, but if you’re missing the daily infusion of soccer (or football, depending on what part of the globe you’re reading this from), Kickabout brings the action back to your iOS device in a very condensed form.

Kickabout will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever gathered around a foosball table in a rec room, with a look that will bring a smile to the face of Subbuteo tabletop football aficionados. You take charge of an 8-player team, with players only free to move about certain areas of the pitch. (No length-of-the-field Maradona-esque wonder golazos for your squad.) You use your finger to drag your players around, swiping any which way to boot the ball toward the goal as you look to rack up the most goals in each 2-minute match.

Goals and shots off the post earn you points, which translates to tickets that you cash in to collect various national teams, from the U.S. all the way to newly minted world champion Spain. You can also buy gear, including stands for your virtual stadium. It’s a fun element that adds to Kickabout’s replayability as you try to assemble your own World Cup field.

Kickabout has both single-player and dual-player modes, though I found the latter to be a little cramped for my iPhone 17 screen. I imagine head-to-head matches are much more enjoyable on the iPad. Still, Kickabout offers plenty of fun even for single players, as you try to master the game’s different difficulty levels.

Kickabout is free to download, and a $3 in-app purchase gets rid of any ads.

Undolly

The Photos app has a built-in tool to weed out duplicate images, but if you find yourself taking a lot of photos, Undolly brings a whole suite of tools that promise to bring order to your iOS device’s photo library. Besides getting rid of duplicates, the mobile app also lists large videos taking up space in your library, rounds up any screenshots you may have stashed somewhere and keeps tabs on other potential space-takers like RAW, timelapse and animated images.

The value of Undolly will depend heavily on how you use your photo library. For instance, I take a lot of screenshots for articles that I don’t always remember to delete, and the app helped me track down some that were three to five years old. I also appreciate Undolly’s swipable comparisons of similar shots, so you can see for yourself whether the images differ enough to keep. Undolly’s algorithm also rates images by their framing, quality and expressiveness of subject to better help you determine the shots that deserve a place in your library.

While it’s free to download initially, you will have to subscribe to Undolly to use its features, with a free three-day trial letting you get the lay of the land. After that, a monthly subscription costs $4, while annual and lifetime payments go for $15 and $40, respectively.

VWLSS

Nearly five years after Wordle first appeared, we’re still living in a golden age for daily word puzzles. Add VWLSS and its daily serving of mobile word play to the pile, though there are some unique iPhone elements that could help this free offering earn a place in your regular rotation of gameplay.

You have eight words to guess, each tied to a specific category and with all the vowels stripped out. It’s up to you to figure out the actual word, which you can do either by typing in the answer or using a handy speech feature. I prefer talking to typing, though I’m still sore that my guess of “Bob Barker” in the game show hosts category was misheard as “Bob Parker.” Revenge will be mine tomorrow, I guess.

Annotate

Between Notes and the still-new-to-iOS Preview app, you’ve got more than a few built-in tools for marking up documents and images on your iPhone or iPad. The Annotate app looks to expand on that with 17 tools that allow you to crop, blur and add notes to your heart’s content. If you find yourself making a lot of the same annotations, the app lets you create and save templates and there are shortcuts for watermarking and auto-redacting faces and phone numbers.

You can download Annotate for free and export up to five annotated photos and documents. After that, you’ll need to make a one-time $10 payment to use the app. Annotate works well enough on my iPhone, though I suspect iPad users will get more out of using this app’s many features on their larger-screen devices.

Go to the podcast page.

I’ve been thinking about soap again.

Back in February I wrote about an Apple-related revelation I had while washing my hands on vacation:

We stayed at a nice hotel rather than the less-nice-but-cheaper VRBO condo rental we usually do. Because I’m me, I started thinking about Apple. Like Apple, the nice hotel’s brand promise is that it’s a nice hotel. If the hotel didn’t clean its rooms well, didn’t provide soap that smelled nice, didn’t maintain the in-room refrigerator, didn’t clean the swimming pool, it would probably decrease its expenses and increase its profit margin. But over time, it would lose its niceness and become a lousy, overpriced hotel.

Earlier this month, John Gruber wrote about how he hopes incoming Apple CEO John Ternus can perform a bit of a reset on Apple’s advertising strategy. In recent months Apple has announced that it’s adding ads to Apple Maps, and (as John has documented) it’s allowed incredibly low-quality, scammy ads to infest Apple News.

While Apple can spin adding ads to Apple Maps as a revolutionary new way for businesses to be discovered, it’s telling that its initial announcement was hidden inside a press release about an entirely different product, and introduced as “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps.” Those choices show that this isn’t something Apple is actually proud of—and that the people in charge of communicating and explaining Apple’s decisions to the world are at odds with those who are making the decisions about expanding revenue.

Apple also recently expanded App Store ads, creating more clutter at the top of App Store search results. It similarly pitched this as an opportunity for developers—but of course, it’s really an opportunity for developers to take a portion of the money they make from the App Store after Apple’s cut and hand it right back to Apple so that their apps don’t become invisible. What a racket.

But Apple’s approach to grinding out additional revenue doesn’t stop with advertising. The recent release of Apple Creator Studio should’ve been a highlight, because it groups a bunch of useful creative apps in one place for a reasonable price. Instead, its launch was marred by the inclusion of Apple’s free productivity apps in the bundle, requiring users to download new versions and (at least initially) display aggressive subscription promotions in the Numbers, Pages, and Keynote interface.

To this day, you’re confronted with an ad for Creator Studio every time you create a new document in those apps, and their default toolbars contain buttons that won’t work unless you subscribe to the bundle. As a result, Apple has essentially turned its free productivity suite—software that was designed to enhance the inherent value of Apple’s products—into a freemium package with upsell to a creative professional subscription bundle that’s irrelevant (and a terrible value!) for most of its existing users.

There are many more examples. Using notifications to promote subscriptions and badging the Settings app to push AppleCare plans are among the ways Apple has chosen to intervene in the user experience to drive revenue. I’m actually not opposed to the idea that Apple should communicate opportunities for its customers to get more out of their devices—but it should be careful not to cross the line into actively annoying those customers. If someone doesn’t want to see what you offer, you need to accept that and go away—not keep needling them. Apple often falls on the wrong side of that line.

Which brings me back to the hotel soap.

Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products—you pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the low-price leader. It didn’t put stickers on the first Intel Macs to get some marketing dollars from Intel. It doesn’t load up new Macs with loads of lousy bundled third-party software like so many PCs do.

Those are choices Apple has made that cost the company revenue, but they’ve got a bigger purpose. They reinforce the brand.

Opting not to add more revenue to the bottom line is a difficult choice for anyone working at a profit-driven corporation. I used to be in that position at my former employer, defending the overall product against a constant stream of advertising and biz-dev deal proposals that would add incremental revenue. Believe me, arguing to corporate executives that we should leave money on the table is a deeply uncomfortable role to take on—but it’s vital if you care about the bigger picture.

How many companies out there have made the wrong decision, time and again, and taken the easy shot of increased revenue at the expense of their product?

It makes me wonder if the people making these decisions at Apple have lost track of the Apple brand and what it stands for. I know for a fact there are people at Apple who understand these points—the sheepish marketing we sometimes see from them is quite the tell—but clearly those people are not influential enough to counter those empowered to push these initiatives forward.

Nice hotels have lots of ways of generating revenue. They charge resort fees. They charge for parking and wi-fi. The drinks are expensive. The room service is expensive. But what those hotels have learned is that there is a fundamental level of quality that you diverge from at your peril. If you don’t buy the nice soap, the good shampoo, and the soft mattresses, if you don’t clean the rooms properly, if you allow your grounds to get shabby, you are in danger of losing your status as a nice hotel, and just becoming an expensive cheap hotel—and nobody wants to stay at one of those.

This is the opportunity Apple has during this leadership reset: To remind itself of what the Apple brand represents in the market. I’m not making an innocent touchy-feely request for Apple to just be better, gosh darn it! This is serious business.

People buy Apple’s products because they are nice and work well and are not lousy in a lot of ways the cheaper competition is. Apple’s revenue-grubbing approach to the user experience in its products and services threatens to erode the Apple brand, and once lost, it can be hard to recover. No amount of incremental revenue from lousy ads and nagging upsells can counteract long-term brand damage.

Always choose the good soap. And empower the people who will push back against those who want to tell you how much money can be saved by giving the customer cheap, lousy soap instead.

Go to the podcast page.

Several years ago, Apple began hiding disk partitions and volumes on the startup drive. The first was a secret volume with a tiny operating system on it that would let you boot from it, after which you could restore from a Time Machine backup, run First Aid in Disk Utility, or reinstall Mac OS X or macOS. Over the years, Apple has multiplied those hidden locations and added more sophistication to what they offer.

These boot volumes are:

• recoveryOS: The current name and form of the special volume described above, which boots into the Recovery Assistant “app.” You can run Disk Utility (and First Aid), reinstall macOS, launch Safari to access Apple Support pages, modify startup security settings (rarely required these days), and access Terminal. With Terminal, you can reset your macOS password. If your Mac can’t start up properly, it will try to launch the Recovery process within recoveryOS, which performs automatic repairs that Apple doesn’t document. If successful, you can then restart into macOS.

• Fallback recoveryOS: If recoveryOS is damaged—and that can happen—you can press the power button twice, quickly, and then keep holding it the second time. This fallback recovery volume can’t change startup security, but it can help you diagnose what’s going on. This is the duct-tape belt that helps if your pants come unbuttoned (macOS won’t boot) and your suspenders break (regular recoveryOS fails).

• Repair Assistant: From a powered-down state, press the power button until you hear the startup chime, then press and hold Command-D. (On an Intel Mac, hold the D key at startup.) The Diagnostics app can run hardware tests that might help narrow down a problem before you bring in Apple Support, or they may ask you to boot into that mode and share the results of the tests they have you run. Repair Assistant can fail, too, if its volume is damaged. You may then have to perform a special “revive or restore” operation, which requires another Mac. Or you may need a full reinstall using a bootable macOS installer.

• macOS: macOS is a sort of hidden boot volume for the last several releases. You don’t boot from the system; instead, a read-only snapshot of the system is mounted, and then booted from. This is part of Apple making system resources immutable through cryptography and at startup.

Besides using recoveryOS for the above tasks, you might also need to use it to unlock your Mac after locking it in Find My and to reset your password using a FileVault Recovery Key. Here’s how.

Unlock your Mac

While it’s not a common scenario, it could happen to you: you accidentally leave your Mac somewhere, or it’s stolen. Thinking quickly, you launch Find My on another of your devices or go to iCloud.com/find and log in. You then tap or click a few buttons to lock your Mac. If the Mac is connected to the Internet, it restarts and locks immediately. (Despite promising to display the message you entered when you locked it, macOS does not do so.) If it’s not connected, it restarts the next time it has Internet access.

The account used to lock the Mac is the only one that can unlock it, and you must be in front of the Mac to perform that operation. Apple limits each Mac to having Find My enabled from a single account. Here are the steps:

1. When you see the macOS Recovery title, click the account profile below it. Enter the account’s password and click Continue.
2. If you entered it correctly, “Authentication succeeded” appears. Click Restart.
3. The Mac restarts and shows Activate Mac after it boots up. This time, all the active macOS accounts are shown. Click one, and then enter its password. Click Next.
4. You now can choose to either use your Apple Account or a macOS password to continue. If you opt for the Apple Account, enter the full address or phone number as shown. Then enter the account’s password. Otherwise, you can click to enter the Mac password, which Apple says is the last one used to unlock the Mac in a regular session before it was locked. If you’re the only user on the Mac, that’s easy to figure out. (In testing with Golden Gate public beta 2, I wasn’t able to get the Mac password option to work, and I’ve had it fail in Tahoe, too.) Sometimes neither works. Choose Restart from the Apple menu in that case and try again.
5. On a successful entry, the Mac restarts yet again after a one-minute countdown. Enter your password when prompted to start up into a regular session.
6. Apple Pay will have been disabled, and your iCloud sync will probably be paused as well. When prompted after the macOS session starts, enter your Apple Account password (or passwords if you have multiple accounts linked to your macOS account).

If you try this too often, as I did while testing, or for other security reasons only Apple knows, your Apple Account may be locked. At step 6, I was told I had to reset my Apple Account password from one of my other devices; all four linked to the account were shown. I made that change. In the Golden Gate second public beta, clicking Unlock Account did nothing before or after changing. I was able to click Cancel, complete step 4 again with the new Apple Account password, and proceed to step 5 and restart.¹

Years ago, when you locked your Mac, you had to set a passcode to unlock it. While that isn’t supported on M-series Macs or Intel Macs with the T2 Security Chip, the email Apple sends still shows an image of a screen where you would enter that code and says you can only unlock your Mac with that non-existent passcode.

Unlock via FileVault

If you try to log into your Mac and can’t recall the password or it isn’t accepted, you can use your FileVault Recovery Key to unlock the volume and reset your password. The Recovery Key is a long code that’s a last-ditch way to unlock your startup volume. It’s also a back-door way to help with a post-Find My lock operation if your password won’t work or you’ve forgotten it.

[I’ve described how to set up FileVault and how to deal with the Recovery Key in “FileVault on macOS Tahoe uses iCloud Keychain to store its Recovery Key” and “FileVault keys can’t be escrowed in iCloud anymore.”]

Here’s how to use your Recovery Key to unlock FileVault:

1. At the login prompt, click the ? icon to the right of Enter Password to bring up the Reset Password link. (This also appears if you enter your password incorrectly a few times.) Click Reset Password.
2. Your Mac restarts into Recovery Assistant using its Reset Password pathway. Enter your Recovery Key (see articles above). Click Next.
3. If you entered your Recovery Key correctly, you are prompted to enter a new password for the account you rebooted from, and confirm it. Do so.
4. When you restart, you can now enter the new password.

If you forgot or can’t enter a correct password for unlocking your Mac in step 1 in the previous section, you can click “Forgot all passwords?” This will launch the FileVault-based password reset, let you reset the password for that account, then proceed with unlocking.

For further reading

To learn a lot more about Find My locking and unlocking, consult my book Take Control of Find My and AirTags, which covers the whole ecosystem. For a lot of insight into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS security, including FileVault, check out Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.

Revisions of those two titles for the 27 series of operating systems are coming out soon. You can purchase either today and receive a free update to the new version when it’s out.

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

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Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: Ford CEO Jim Farley has been bullish on CarPlay and the UEV project was previously headed up by Doug Field¹, who spent several years at Apple both on the Mac hardware team and, more significantly, leading up the abandoned car effort.

This integration is interesting, though, because of the lukewarm reception of CarPlay Ultra in the automotive industry. The new “MapKit for Automotive SDK”, which as far as I can tell is being announced in this press release, seems more like the Android Automotive approach of building in support at a low level, though here it’s predominantly focused on navigation rather than providing the full stack for the car. Here’s how Apple describes it:

This integration is made possible by Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, which allows automakers to embed and customize Apple Maps. The SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles, and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences.

I also appreciated this little tidbit nestled at the very end of the press release:

In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford’s UEV Platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car.

Translation: Eat it, GM.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The market for small e-readers has been booming lately. Earlier this year, Jason took a look at the Xteink X4, a pint-sized reading device that was about as light and small as they come. But those maniacs at Xteink weren’t done yet: they followed it up with the $79 X3, which is unbelievably even lighter and smaller.

I wouldn’t blame you for wondering if there’s such a thing as too small and light—at 3.84 inches by 2.51 inches (and just 0.2 inches thick) the X3 is still larger than, say, a credit card, but not by much. The screen itself measures just 3.7 inches, more than half an inch smaller than the X4’s 4.3 inch, but its 259 ppi resolution still makes it plenty easy to read on.¹ At that size it’s little imposition to take it with you wherever you go. Easy to lose? Maybe. Easy to love? Yes.

For one thing, this small size unlocks at least one capability that the X4 couldn’t fully deliver upon—the ability to stick to the back of your phone. Like the X4, the X3 has a MagSafe-compatible magnet in its rear case and it fits just about perfectly on the back of my iPhone 17 Pro, nestled below the camera plateau.

However, the magnet is not particularly strong, and it lacks the secondary stabilizing magnet that you see on official MagSafe accessories, meaning it wobbles around a bit. I wouldn’t call it a super secure connection, but it’s pretty good if you’re just slipping it in and out of a pocket. Just be aware that it probably will come loose.

Like the X4 before it, the X3 features a pair of rocker switches on the front for a total of four possible buttons. But they’ve opted to skip the X4’s side mounted rocker switch in favor of a single buttons on each side. There’s also an on/off switch at the top (plus a recessed button used for resetting the device). And with all of that, they somehow managed to continue to fit a microSD slot in the top. The bottom left corner also has a little set of holes for a lanyard or wrist strap.

The one casualty of the smaller X3, however, is the port. The X4 was big enough to accommodate a USB-C connector, but the X3’s thin profile makes that impossible. Instead, there’s a pogo-pin USB cable that connects to four magnetic contacts on the reader. Is this a step back? Strictly speaking, yes. Using a proprietary connector is a bummer in the year 2026, especially because it means having to keep track of a single-use cable. That said, once you get the X3 up and running, the only real need for the connector is charging, and the battery on this thing lasts a very long time. (I’ve yet to run it down in several weeks of usage.) Just remember to make a note of where you stow that cable for the point months down the road when you do need to charge it and find yourself wondering whatever happened to it.

As with the X4, the X3 lacks any sort of screen lighting, meaning that it’s strictly a “read in bright light” device. But don’t worry, because Xteink has already unveiled a new X4 Pro with the company’s first lit screen.²

All in all, I found the X3 very comfortable to read on, whether attached to my iPhone or not. The side buttons work great as page-turners, and the screen is high-contrast and sharp enough to make text render very clearly. All in all, it’s a great reading experience—if you take into account one major caveat.

Soft where?

The elephant in the room for the Xteink X3 is the software. Xteink ships the X3 with its own built-in firmware which, by all accounts, has improved since the first version. But I can’t really tell you, because upon opening the box and powering up the device, the first thing I did was install Crosspoint, the open-source community-built firmware that has turned this device from a curiosity into a real contender.³

Unlike a lot of other firmware replacements, Crosspoint is super easy to install; you can do it right from a web browser. While it’s not fully free of technological hurdles, I’d say that most people comfortable using an e-reader or updating their iPhones will be able to handle the process with few problems. And the benefits are manifold.

Crosspoint goes beyond simply turning this into a functional device and into one that is actually fun to use. It’s got a straightforward, easy to navigate interface that makes it simple to do everything from reading to loading books (accomplished via a web-based interface). For those who like to tweak their reading setup, there are plenty of configuration options, everything from screen orientation to hyphenation and, yes, custom fonts loaded via the SD card.

Even the onscreen keyboard that you need to use for various configuration tasks is pretty solid for what’s available—on par with navigating via an onscreen keyboard with a game controller, in my opinion. I wouldn’t want to have to type in my Wi-Fi password every time—and you don’t, because it saves it for you—but one time was fine.

There are also a bunch of other features that might appeal to those who want to take reading to the next level. For example, support for Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) standard means that if you want to host your book library on your own server, you can point your reader at that and download any of the books you already own directly to your device. There’s also support for KOreader sync to help keep your place between supported devices.⁴

Crosspoint has been so successful, in fact, that the team at Xteink has smartened up and started collaborating. (This after a brief moment when it looked like the company might try to firmware lock its devices.) Now, not only do the “developer editions” sold directly by the company continue to allow you to install the custom firmware, the company has been working with the Crosspoint team to make sure new devices, like the X4 Pro, will already be supported when they arrive. While Xteink hasn’t quite adopted Crosspoint as the default OS, it’s not far off.

The world is not enough

Given how positive I’ve been above, you might be all too tempted to run out and snap up an Xteink X3 for yourself. I don’t blame you! At $79 (and often discounted for less than that), it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.

If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap⁵ and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.

Both of these companies benefit from lock-in in the form of Digital Rights Management. DRM is, of course, largely pushed by publishers, who insist upon cryptographic schemes to lock down the books they sell in order to nominally protect against piracy. Never mind the fact that books are still easily and widely pirated, the DRM is relatively simple to crack⁶, and many of those books have been vacuumed up by the boatload by an even more insidious thief in the form of AI training data.

I come at this, of course, from the perspective of both reader and writer. As a writer, I certainly want to be compensated for all the hard work I put in to create my books, but I also want people to read and enjoy them. That’s why you’ll find no stauncher defender of libraries.

Personally, I find the industry’s insistence on DRM misplaced, just as I did with the music industry two decades ago. The lack of these security features does not automatically turn people at large into thieves and it’s insulting to think that it would. In fact, the sci-fi publisher Tor, one of the biggest names in the business and a subsidiary of Big Five publisher Macmillan, has put out its titles without DRM for almost fifteen years and I haven’t seen any significant indication that it’s harmed their business. Many of my books are also available directly from my publisher without DRM, and I don’t think that’s put a dent in my bottom line either.

I would love to be able to easily load any book I’ve ever purchased onto my Xteink devices—or, for that matter, any e-reader or e-reading app of my choice. There are, of course, extensive repositories of DRM-free public domain books available. Amazon, to its credit, does now allow you to download DRM-free copies of any book that you’ve purchased.⁷ I argued a few years back that this is an opportunity for Apple to distinguish its stagnant ebook marketplace from the competition. But for first-run books, your options are currently more limited (and sometimes harder to suss out).

I’d also love to somehow see support for Libby, the popular library ebook borrowing app, on Xteink devices, though I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But in my opinion, the bottom line is that more ways to read makes more readers of books, which in turn makes more customers of books.

But I digress.

The conclusion

The other week I was riding the train with my kid, our usual weekend pastime. As he was enjoying looking out the window, I was reading a book on the X3, magneted to the back of my iPhone 17 Pro. As we neared a stop, a woman nearby caught sight of it and marveled over it. “Is that a tiny e-reader?”

I extolled its virtues for a moment before they got off at their stop. But it told me one important thing: there’s a hunger for these types of devices. Because people who self-select as readers in this day and age are, above all, passionate. You have to make a choice to be sitting and reading a book when you could be watching TikTok or Instagram or listening to music or a podcast, all of which are constantly at your fingertips.

That’s where the X3 (and the X4) deliver. A Kindle or Kobo isn’t exactly bulky, but they’re not pocketable either. Being able to take your e-reader with you just as we stuffed mass market paperbacks in our back pockets in days gone by is freeing and fun. Now if the world might just shift a little bit more to meet us, maybe we could free ourselves a little further.

Go to the podcast page.

I’ve been in the iPhone Upgrade Program since Apple debuted it more than a decade ago. There have been plenty of ups and downs over that time—especially in the early years, when Apple was still figuring out how the whole program worked, but more recently it’s been pretty smooth.

And, I have to say, effective: I’ve had a new iPhone every year, without fail, and I’ve ended up paying only about half of what I would pay for a new phone outright.¹

I do, however, have some concerns about the details Gurman does report. For one, the involvement of Klarna. They’re best known for their buy-now-pay-later service—a realm Apple was prepared to play in but ended up quickly abandoning. At the time I wondered if part of that about-face was Apple “perhaps not wanting to be in a business that can feel a bit troublesome.” But the company still subsequently partnered with other companies that offer that feature, like Affirm and, yes, Klarna.

Unlike the iPhone Upgrade program, this new offering will also reportedly not include AppleCare, meaning that you’ll have to shell out to protect the device you are leasing from Apple. There’s more than a whiff of “services revenue” around that, AppleCare now being somewhat more expensive than it was. No doubt some will choose not to go through the hassle and additional cost of purchasing it, which means a subset of those people will invariably damage their phones and incur additional payments to Apple. AppleCare as part of the iPhone Upgrade Program was fundamentally a good deal because it insured devices that Apple was probably getting back, whether for eventual refurbishment or just for parts.

But the iPhone Upgrade Program often felt like an afterthought to Apple—for example, despite Apple officially telling me devices on it were eligible for the company’s restructured AppleCare One program, I heard from several users that this was effectively not the case.

Additionally, this part of Gurman’s story made me hesitate:

The Apple Upgrade service will work like a subscription and users can pay off the device early during their term, upgrade early to a new model or keep it at the end of the leasing period. In certain cases, those transactions will incur an additional fee. Like a car lease, it can also be returned at the end of the term. [emphasis added]

So “certain cases” and “an additional fee” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. How many cases? What kind of fee? 9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy points out that if this really is structured like a car lease, that could mean some serious charges.

The iPhone Upgrade Program was, by comparison, straightforward. The cost of buying your phone was divvied up into 24 payments; after 12, you can upgrade. Loans were backed by Citizens Bank, but there were no interest charges or other fees. Hence it probably wasn’t a big money-maker. I don’t know what Apple’s deal with Klarna will be, but I’m skeptical that it’s going to be as consumer-friendly.

Finally, the other questionable part circling this is this report from 9to5Mac’s Marcus Mendes that code in iOS 27 suggests Apple will be able to restrict features of devices that fall behind on their payments:

The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks.

If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in “Restricted Mode,” which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available.

Forget paying for heated seats, imagine if your car just decided not to offer CarPlay or, I don’t know, climate controls if you fell behind on your lease payments. This just feels, for lack of a better term, gross. Certainly predatory on lower income consumers who are most likely to take advantage of such a payment structure to buy an expensive phone.

As I said, details are still not concrete, so it’s always possible that this won’t be the exact situation. But if it is, I can say with some confidence that my days in Apple’s upgrade programs are at an end, and I certainly would be loath to recommend them to anybody.

The season finale of Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey’s excellent Origin Story podcast is about the Luddites, and why the name doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It’s really about people reacting negatively to new technology that threatens their jobs, and therefore their livelihood. This might be extremely relevant to some modern technology topics, come to think of it.

(Available on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Overcast / YouTube and everywhere else.)

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

I dispense what might be called valuable insight to my friends, as well as in this public forum. My friends know the danger: they might become the topic of a column, which is true for my buddy Jeff, who left a bag containing his passport behind at a hotel. Fortunately, he had an AirTag in his bag. That was, however, just the beginning of the journey. (Jeff gave me permission to share his story.)¹

To avoid suspense, I’ll tell you that Jeff doesn’t have his bag back, but will soon.

Grate news

Jeff was out of town on business for a few days—he’s one of those nearly extinct creatures called a “full-time technology reporter“—and was carrying his passport to Texas not because it’s another country (it hasn’t seceded yet), but because he lacks a Real ID-upgraded driver’s license. He had a small bag with a few items, including the passport and an AirTag, that he didn’t need to carry, so he used the hotel safe. There have been many articles written about how unsafe hotel safes are, but it feels as if you’re in a decent hotel, it’s still another bar for someone to get through to steal your stuff.

Leaving in a bit of a rush, Jeff didn’t retrieve the bag from the safe. When he realized it wasn’t with him, thousands of miles later, he was peeved. Shouldn’t the “left behind” feature in Find My have alerted him? Find My showed the bag’s location, however. For some reason, it appeared as if it were in the hotel parking lot. I catastrophized with him, assuming it was stolen. He called the hotel, which said it wasn’t in lost and found.

A staff member went out, looked in the parking lot, and said the rough location was a grate—perhaps the bag had been stolen and someone had found the AirTag and dropped it through the slats? Which would imply that a hotel employee or a thief had managed to get into Jeff’s room after he left, open the safe, leave the hotel, and rummage through the bag in the parking lot before absconding.

That wasn’t the case (or valise). The hotel called back the next day. The previous staffer didn’t know, for some reason, that valuable left-behind items were tagged and placed in a safe in the basement, presumably below or near the parking lot. His bag, containing his passport and other items, would be sent back to him.

Jeff’s experience reveals several aspects of the Find My tracking system that you can take advantage of in advance or use if you’ve lost something or left it behind.

Don’t leave me!

Every device and item you have can be set to alert you when you “leave it behind.” I believe this setting is enabled by default, though Apple’s documentation isn’t clear on this point. All of my devices and items have it enabled, and Jeff found it was turned on for all his gear. Here’s how to check:

1. In a native Find My app, select the device (like a Mac) or an item (an AirTag or other Find My network item) in the list of such things.
2. On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, the action sheet appears. On a Mac, click the info (i) icon next to the item’s name on the map. In the upcoming version 27 operating system releases on all platforms, tap or click the More (…) button that appears when you select the device from the list.
3. Tap or click Notify When Left Behind, which should already show On. (In the 27 releases, tap or click When Left Behind.)
4. If disabled, turn it on.

Here’s a crucial detail: examine the “Notify me, except at” list. You can manually add to this set of locations (tap or click New Location). However, it primarily grows when you’re notified by an item or device being left behind, and then you tap or click in the notification to ignore it at that location. You are presented with the option to just exclude that item or device from that location or all of your equipment.

It’s very easy to approve that exclude-all button. (Jeff did not; his list didn’t include the hotel.) This can be convenient when you’re at a hotel, a friend’s house, or another location for a few days or frequently, and sometimes leave Find My-tracked stuff there. But once you ignore the location, you won’t get notified in the future. You can modify the list by hand, too.

Jeff may instead have been tripped up by the safe acting as a Faraday cage—a metal mesh or box that shields electromagnetic signals from passing through. The AirTag and other Find My items use Bluetooth to broadcast a rotating identifier at regular intervals.² If the safe blocked that signal, Jeff’s iPhone lost contact with the AirTag the moment the bag went in—a few days before he left. With no fresh separation between the phone and the item at departure time, the alert may have lacked the necessary trigger. Jeff was on the verge of sharing the location with the hotel when they found it.

Apple says this takes longer than the few days Jeff was on his trip: “You can see its last known location for up to seven days in the Find My app.” After seven days, the device or item’s location will appear as “No location found” or “Offline.” Jeff could see the item’s location, which made the lack of notification seem like a bug.

Now for the grate part (not great part): once Jeff’s bag was removed from the safe in his former room, it would have been carried through the hotel and detected by every iPhone, iPad, or Mac nearby. When it reached the hotel’s lost-and-found safe, the rough location would likely still be relatively close before it entered that particular Faraday cage. At which point, when Jeff looked at Find My, he saw it at (or under) the parking lot.

Sack attack

The hotel works with a service that handles the return. Jeff paid both a whopping and reasonable $60 to have it sent two-day air back to him. Fair enough! Unfair enough, days after he paid, the bag is still at the hotel (as I write this). Jeff will, of course, follow its progress via Find My.

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

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And that’s what I’m hoping to do with these app spotlights for Six Colors. We’ll profile some interesting new apps for the Mac (and maybe the odd iOS offering every now and again), and explain why you might want to give it a download.

Do you have an app you’d like to bring to my attention? Simply drop me a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and we’ll take it from there.

With that housekeeping out of the way, here’s what I’ve been downloading lately.

Park Shelf

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for most of us, our Mac screens are an unholy mess. Open windows clutter up the view, adding another layer of complication to multitasking. An app called ParkShelf from Digital X Design looks to bring some order to the chaos with a handy place for storing open windows instead of placing them in the dock or relying on your Mac’s App Switcher to jump between windows.

Instead, ParkShelf features a floating bar you can position anywhere on your screen (though there is an option to pin it to a specific area if you prefer). That way you need to call up a particular window, it’s just a matter of heading over to where you’ve stashed it in ParkShelf and summoning what you need. The rest of the time, you’ve got a clean, uncluttered workspace so that you can focus on the task at hand.

I’ve been trying out the free version of ParkShelf, where you can store up to three different windows at any one time. For unlimited storage, you’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Pro version. In addition to the unlimited storage, the Pro version also gives you the ability to customize a hot key that sends an open window into ParkShelf’s waiting arms. (In the free version, option-P serves as the default hot key.)

For my purposes, ParkShelf works best when I’m focusing on a specific project. If I’m on a writing assignment, I can use the app to stash a window of notes, a browser page I’m using to research the topic, and data sheets in PDF form while I type away in my text editor. When I need anyone of those windows, I can turn to ParkShelf to look something up, but otherwise, those windows are out of sight and out of mind.

I’d like it better if I could store multiple web pages or notes, but ParkShelf seems to treat each app as its own window. For instance, even when I have web pages open in Safari for multiple windows instead of tabs, ParkShelf stores the whole kit and caboodle. Still, the free version of Park Shelf is certainly worth trying out if you’re looking for a way to better manage all the open windows on your screen.

Other apps

• ScrollPods lets you control scrolling on a Mac by tilting your head. The free utility works with 3rd-gen AirPods as well as any AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and Beats Fit Pro models. Install the app, turn on a switch, and a tilt of your head lets you scroll through emails, web pages and other windows. Mastering just the right tilt takes a little bit of practice, but this is a pretty clever accessibility tool that takes advantage of an accessory you probably already have on hand.

• Sleepr is a $5 app that serves as a sleep timer that lives in your Mac’s menu bar and lets you time shutdowns after 15-, 30-, 60- and 120-minute intervals; you can also have your Mac go to sleep at a very specific time. The 3.0 release adds Liquid Glass support, recurring bedtimes that automatically start themselves, a floating alert that can even appear over full-screen apps, and a live menu bar countdown.

• Senqu Image Converter is a $5 image utility that lets you convert among JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and PDF files. The recent 1.2 update added the ability to drop images onto a preset in the full window for instant conversions, while dropping a file now immediately starts the conversion process using current settings.

To me, the sobering part is when Hill, unable to track down the source of her own biography, talks to an “author” of hundreds of AI books:

Mr. Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.
“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”

[stares directly into camera]

Lest you think this exclusively an Amazon problem, this comes just a few weeks after Joanna Stern’s story of AI-generated knockoffs of her book on Apple Books.

You know, it’s hard enough making any sort of living as a writer, but crowding the field with AI slop? It’s not even as if people are buying them and reviewing them favorably. They’re just old socks stuffed down the drain, clogging up the sink with putrid water.¹ What are we even doing here, people?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Analyst Dan Rayburn, on (sigh) LinkedIn:

Going forward, Apple TV hardware is now essentially dead. Last month, Apple raised the price of its Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi (64GB) from $129 to $199, while the Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi + Ethernet (128GB) now costs $249, up from $169. That’s a major increase for hardware that hasn’t changed since its 2022 debut…. I don’t envision anyone in the market spending $200 on a streaming device.

Leaving aside Rayburn’s bizarre complaints in his post about Apple TV audio format support (which reflects nothing I’ve seen and sounds more like a user grinding a personal axe), this is a classic example of something we don’t see around these parts much anymore: The market share argument.

Apple’s strategies used to be attacked by the market share argument all the time. The premise is this: If you don’t have market share, nothing else matters. You could be making a profit. You could be serving a nice niche audience that is happy with your product. You could, in fact, be servicing your own lucrative ecosystem rather than focusing on competing with companies that are happy to race to the bottom.

Or as Rayburn puts it:

Of course, Apple has never competed on price and has shocked many by refusing to compete in the living room. Apple prioritizes the premium experience of its tvOS platform over low-margin hardware without home-screen ads and promoted content. 

So the Apple TV is dead because of the (admittedly ridiculous) recent price hikes… but also, Apple has always “refuse[d] to compete in the living room” and made the heinous decision of prioritizing a “premium experience” over cheap boxes stuffed with ads and paid marketing. Apple TV was always mostly dead, because Apple has never deigned to make a $20 streaming stick infested with ads, but this price hike is the final stake in the heart?

Okay.

I have always been frustrated with the price of Apple’s TV box. And it’s ridiculous now—those are prices that should only be applied to brand-new models with great functionality, not to stale years-old hardware. But Apple’s competition in this market is selling $20 sticks at Walmart. They’re monetizing through TV licensing deals and aggressive user tracking, including logging everything you watch so that it can be used to profile you.

As for Apple not being competitive, the Apple TV used to start at $129, and the Roku Ultra is $100, so in the premium segment where Apple plays, they weren’t that far off. Now they’re twice as expensive, which is rough.

In his post, Rayburn concedes that “A small minority of users might purchase the hardware to stay in the Apple ecosystem, but that won’t increase Apple’s market share.” His point is that market share matters for TV streaming boxes because streamers won’t ultimately bother to support the platform at all if nobody’s using it.

I think that’s poor analysis, because I’m positive Apple TV owners are more engaged with their devices and probably have extremely favorable demographics compared to the users of a $20 streaming stick. Also, those streamers will be building iOS apps anyway, at which point it feels like tvOS apps just aren’t far enough removed. In fact, some streamers like building apps for tvOS because they can show off advanced features (like on-device multiview) that cheap boxes just can’t handle.

I came across Rayburn’s post via this post from Janko Roettgers, which is all about installing custom home screens to Android TV boxes. Why would you do that? Roettgers writes:

Monet is just one of a number of home screen replacements (or launchers, as they’re called among Android enthusiasts) that takes cues from Apple TV to bring a new sense of minimalism to Google’s streaming platform. Most of these launchers do away with the endless rows of content recommendations, the big hero images that try to get you hooked on the latest TV shows, and the increasing amount of ads and sponsored content.

“Honestly, the stock Google TV launcher [keeps] getting worse,” [Monet developer Nico] Klein says. “It’s clunky and full of ads. It actively gets in the way of what users are trying to do. You have to fight your way through a jungle of menus just to get where you actually want to go, it’s just not intuitive.”

Sounds fun. When I tried out a bunch of non-Apple streaming boxes last year, I pretty much found the same. The whole space is infested with this kind of garbage and clutter.

Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI.

The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement, but this is the beta period, and improvements may be forthcoming.

Still, the promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new possibilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.

As of today, iOS 27 is available to any and all who want to try it as a public beta. Some features are buggy, others aren’t yet finished, and every once in a while something may go haywire. But it’s all in the name of getting everything working for the final release in the fall.

Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?

The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the app on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written Siri off as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down from the middle of the top edge of the screen, a gesture that’s now available not just on the home screen but in any app. It’s got a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also ended up with a few orphan blank “New conversations” which I deleted, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the month-plus that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.

After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.

Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that includes.

The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie still in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games¹, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message.

Of course, some of this is easily ascribable to this being beta software. But some of it also the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.

All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of AI, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding, but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. Especially because it’s already there, built into your phone.

One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available on that continent either.

All roads lead to Siri

While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.

There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.

Liquid Glass half full

To call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.

It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.

Performance, no anxiety

Tempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.

All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.

The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.

AirDrop transfers were also notably rapid, though I say was because in recent beta builds my iPhone has stopped sending files via that method, though it still receives them. (That’s betas, folks!)

Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement.

I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones, but the public beta experience will certainly bear out the truth of that claim.

Photo fit and finish

If there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.

The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.

There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.

Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.

For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).

There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.

And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful.

There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.

Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.

Other features

Apple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.

Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.

Passwords has an agentic AI feature that will scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Even on that subset though, my experience was uneven, with just 5 of 18 updated. It’s a very cool idea, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses, but right now it’s hit or miss.

If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. Unfortunately, my experience with this was a little disappointing, with it not correctly assigning the event to the right day and ignoring my attempt to provide timezone information; nor did modifying the event with natural language after the fact seem to work. I hope that gets ironed out before the end of the beta period.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. In my testing, this isn’t fully rolled out everywhere yet: Boston’s satellite maps were actually two-dimensional compared to iOS 26’s, but if I flew down to New York, I could see far more detail on a building like One World Trade Center.

FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!

Apple’s improved Shortcuts with a bunch of new actions and streamlined automations by including them as part of the shortcut itself. There’s also an impressive new AI “describe your shortcut” mode. It works pretty well for simpler shortcuts, but can start to get a little off the rails the more complex you get. Unfortunately, Shortcuts has been among the buggiest features during the beta period; I’ve had a lot of them stop working, and run into some perplexing issues.

Safari likewise has a few new features, including being notified when a page content changes (as frequently as on the hour, if you’re watching for price changes, for example), as well as a “describe your extension” feature not unlike the Shortcuts functionality. I haven’t had as much of a chance to put this through its paces, but it’s a fascinating addition and will be interesting to see if lots of people who never would have tried their hand at this kind of thing will end up making extensions.

You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.

Conclusion

Despite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.

But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.

As for the shortcomings, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a beta period. Proceed with caution. Sometimes things just don’t work, and you may have to live with it until the next build comes along. But sometimes things also improve build-to-build, and that’s the fun of being at the cutting edge. For the next couple months you get your chance to live in the future.

Let’s just get this out of the way: I liked macOS 26 Tahoe. I liked it because it marked the first time in years where Apple seemed to embrace the fact that Mac users deserve productivity improvements, not just syncing up with whatever (often useful, yes) new features were being introduced to iOS.

I didn’t like the interface changes, especially the way the redesign handled toolbars and sidebars. It actually felt like macOS dodged a bullet by being treated as an afterthought, because pouring more Liquid Glass atop macOS would have made the situation even worse. But over the last summer, I got used to the interface offenses and instead focused on all the improvements.

Turns out that at least some of my friends and colleagues decided that Tahoe’s interface offenses were too great to bear, and despite all those tasty new productivity boosts, they would sit this one out and hope that Apple came to its senses with macOS 27.

Good news for them: While they’ve spent a year without Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight, their upgrade to macOS 27 Golden Gate will net them last year’s features as well as a host of other improvements, all wrapped in an interface that is an unequivocal improvement over what Tahoe wrought.

To those folks, welcome back to the current OS version. To those of us who spent a year floating on the glassy surface of Tahoe, welcome to Golden Gate. Available today as a Public Beta and arriving on every Apple silicon-based Mac this fall, it’s an update I’m not going to have to spend a year apologizing for liking.

Design takes a step forward

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.

Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.

In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.

Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.

To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is probably fine, though I’ve currently got the slider right in the center. We’ll see how that goes.

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

Siri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.

In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.

The result is… still a work in progress, at least so far. Siri AI is a beta feature inside a beta operating system. Betas within betas. First off, it’s a struggle to remember that Siri is actually useful and I should take advantage of it. Years of training myself never to consider Siri have to be untrained, and that’s going to take some time.

Thus far, I’ve found Siri AI’s responses to general-knowledge queries to be very good. But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. This is where things start to fall apart, though this is not surprising—it’s an early beta, and many third-party apps will need to update to better integrate with this system. I don’t use Apple’s default calendar or email apps, which puts me at a disadvantage. It frequently failed to answer fairly basic questions about files on my system—”where’s that PDF that contains my company’s tax ID number?”—that I’d hope that a smart assistant with access to my entire Mac should be able to find.

There’s also the question of Siri/Spotlight choosing the right context. When you type Command-Space, Spotlight comes to the fore—and that’s good, because if you want to use it as an app launcher, you want instant responsiveness. When I typed a question that’s more appropriate for Siri, however, I found I needed to wait a few seconds for “Ask Siri” to appear so I could ask my query.

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. The contextual menu used to open with all of its contents down and to the right of the pointer (unless you were too far to the right or bottom of the screen); now it starts shifted down a little bit, as if the old context menu was being drawn and then an Ask Siri item was being overlaid right at the top of the menu, sticking up over it. It’s darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. It’s disconcerting every time I right-click on something.

The most useful actions tend to be placed at the top, and I’m not convinced that even a fully functional Ask Siri would always be the most useful command in a context. This feels more like a weird add-on to existing context menus, and all to promote the new Siri features. Apple, if a feature is good, users will use it. Distorting the geography of context menus on the Mac to promote them feels aggressive and almost desperate.

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.

The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.

It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.

Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.

After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut. As I wrote in June:

This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it…

But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical. And perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

Describe a Shortcut is limited, but it really works quite well. I hope it continues to grow and improve, because it lowers the bar for user automation across Apple’s platforms in a delightful way.

For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.

There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has unfortunately distorted the Shortcuts interface in some unfortunate ways. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Which is fine, except it’s an enormous amount of screen space devoted to something that may be entirely irrelevant. Somehow, Shortcuts won’t let you hide this pane.

New horizons for Photos

During WWDC week, I wrote about the changes to Photos this year, but just to reprise:

Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

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

As for the three AI-powered features in Photos, they’re a mixed bag. I have high hopes for a much improved Clean Up, which was already okay but could be a lot better. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context imagery, though of course it’s not perfect.

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

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

However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.

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

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

Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos.

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them. Keeping in mind that we’re entering the long cruise to the fall release of the final version, here are some other highlights so far:

• Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there¹—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) nearly five years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• Safari’s now got an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, but I noticed that this approach is also being applied to the Start Page, where recently viewed pages also now appear clustered by topic.

• The Passwords app gets an injection of agentic AI through a new feature that offers to change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you, navigating various websites and generating new, high-security passwords automatically. It’s a clever idea, but the most unfinished of any feature in the beta. It managed to change three of the 39 passwords it attempted. If you were trying to break into my Ikea account, well, you’re going to need to order more Kallax shelves on someone else’s dime now.

• Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!

A note about stability

This summer, the vibe has been that Apple’s 27 releases are very stable for betas, which is not surprising since improved stability and reliability have been key Apple goals. And I would agree, I’ve been running the developer beta on my main Mac since the week after WWDC, and it’s been mostly fine.

But don’t be fooled: These are betas, and they will do weird stuff. I have to occasionally reboot my Mac to get things working normally. Shortcuts just stop working, and then start working again, willy-nilly. Third-party apps frequently quit unexpectedly, or refuse to quit at all and hang out in my Dock forever! And as I mentioned above, my menu bar manager is busted, though the developers are working on it.

If you’re willing to put up with the quirks in exchange for a glimpse at the future of the Mac, jump in. If you refused Tahoe entirely, you are in for an extra treat. And if you’d rather just wait… relax. Fall will be here before you know it.

Go to the podcast page.

I had a simple task that involved Apple Home. If you use Apple Home, you know what happened next. Tears, frustration, the arrival of batteries, paperclips pushed into hard-to-reach holes, many online searches, and—if you are lucky, as I was—success.

Siri, am I lazy?

My goal was straightforward: can I know if the garage door is open without going to look? Early in the pandemic, we occasionally forgot to close it. While there was a locked door between the garage and the house, it still felt like we were playing with fire, as someone could steal a bike or other lesser goodies from the garage.¹ The garage is on our basement floor (ground level on one half of the house), and the last thing I enjoy doing at night is walking downstairs before bed to check the door.²

I purchased an Eve Door & Window Contact Sensor to have this capability reported by Apple Home, joining a growing set of HomeKit devices, including our front-door deadbolt. Because of our old-style single-piece swing-up garage door, I had a heck of a time finding the right place and right adhesive to stick the sensor where it was close enough for the two components to register.

I spent enough time on the vagaries of physics and materials that I was probably more frustrated than I needed to be when I tried to make a workflow with the danged thing. An Automation wouldn’t work because I wanted an alert, not for the sensor to trigger other Home devices. A Shortcut should have worked, but after many hours of trying over weeks, I was unable to get anything reliable to happen. The Automation was quite simple: at 9 p.m., check the state of the sensor, and send me a message if the sensor shows Open rather than Closed. I left it in place and walked away for literally years.

After recently installing a back-driveway camera, I was determined to get this sensor online.³ First, I replaced the battery, which had died during my period of disinterest. The Eve sensor uses a weird, tiny battery: a 3.6V 1/2 AA (ER14250). After that arrived, using some better adhesive—thin-film 3M 468MP—I positioned the sensor pieces in a better location and more securely.

Now it should work! Except that after adding it, I saw Characteristic in red text on a pink background in Shortcuts. Some online research led me to reset the sensor by inserting a paperclip into a hole I hadn’t noticed. After re-pairing the sensor, I was in business! Or was I?! The sensor wasn’t responding, despite recent status updates.

Threading the sensor through the house needle

This led me to the next culprit: the garage is too far away (one floor and the other end of the house) from my Apple TV, which acts as a Matter controller, while the Eve sensor relies on Thread as its communication protocol. What’s a Matter controller?⁴ And what’s Thread?

Matter is an overarching standard, painstakingly developed even as low-power sensing devices and other equipment proliferated in silos. Matter enables Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings devices to communicate across a network, regardless of the network transport medium (Ethernet, Thread, or Wi-Fi). This prevents you from needing ecosystem-specific hubs and lets manufacturers build to a common standard.

Thread fits into this mix as a low-power, wireless networking standard for sensors, allowing them to communicate their status without rapidly draining their batteries, as would happen with Wi-Fi.⁵ Apple initially supported Thread with a proprietary standard, HomeKit-over-Thread, and later added direct Matter support. The Eve sensor was just old enough that it was running on the older standard, but the Eve app allowed me to apply a firmware upgrade. I could then migrate the sensor to Matter, which seems to be more reliable.

Apple made things a little confusing here, too. The 1st-generation Apple TV 4K supports Matter, but lacks a Thread radio, so it can’t work with Thread-based devices. The 2nd generation added that radio, so you can do Matter over Thread. But then, with the 3rd generation, Apple bifurcated Thread hardware support: the 64 GB Wi-Fi only model lacks a Thread radio; you have to spend the now-whopping $249 for a 128 GB Wi-Fi + Ethernet version if you want to use Thread.

Failing an Apple TV 4K with Thread, you can use a Thread border router (TBR), which sometimes comes with sensor kits. This plugs into your network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet and bridges to the Thread network, allowing the Apple TV’s Matter controller to work with the Home app on your devices for automations, notifications, and so forth.

It’s that easy, folks. Sigh.

I do own a 3rd-generation Apple TV 4K with Wi-Fi + Ethernet, because I am a fancy man and a big spender, but I really wanted the reliability of plugging it into my Ethernet network. Yet, I couldn’t get the Eve sensor’s Thread radio to reach across my house to talk to the Apple TV. I bought a TBR, thinking it would solve the problem.

By the time the TBR was delivered, however, the garage door sensor magically connected via Thread to the Apple TV and has been rock solid. The TBR that arrived, on the other hand, I was unable to pair and get working, so back it goes for a refund.

Now my nightly Shortcut works! The only fly in that ointment is that the sensor status reports as Closed or Open in iOS and iPadOS, but as 0 (closed) or 1 (open) in the macOS Home app, in both macOS 26 and the beta of 27. I can live with running the Shortcut from my phone.

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

Back in May, OpenAI was rattling its saber about thinking about talking to lawyers about possibly considering a lawsuit against Apple for not treating it right when it came to ChatGPT integration.

What a misdirection! Instead, Apple has sued OpenAI—and it’s alleging that the hardware program it’s been building with Jony Ive and company is being fueled by the theft of trade secrets.

Here’s the statement Apple supplied to various news outlets on Friday:

At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.

There’s a lot more in the court filing. As summarized by Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac:

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that [former Apple designer Tang] Tan used insider knowledge of Apple’s confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for “show and tell” sessions.

Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began “screenshotting and downloading files relating to a highly confidential Apple project” hours before interviewing with Tan, who then “solicited more information about that same Apple project” once the interview started. This became an “established pattern,” Apple says.

The list of bad behavior by former Apple employees goes on, including distributing internal Apple documents to new hires, evading security procedures, downloading confidential files from Apple after they had departed, coaching new hires about what confidential documents to study before leaving Apple, and lying to Apple partners to get them to disclose confidential information.

It’s… a lot to process. All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open! I’m fascinated to see where this story goes.

Go to the linked site.

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If you’ve ever wondered why your data transfers to external drives aren’t going as fast as you’d like, or a certain peripheral just isn’t working, you could probably use WhatCable, a helpful little app from developer Darryl Morley.

WhatCable looks at your Mac’s USB ports and anything plugged into them, and lets you know about speeds and power supply for your currently connected USB and Thunderbolt cables, as well as what their maximums are. While there are other places on your Mac that you can find this information, such as System Information, WhatCable presents it all in a well organized, easy to read manner. It even details all the devices connected to your USB hubs.

For example, after looking at it, I realized that my backup drive was only connected via a USB2 cable. Fine in general for overnight backups, but when it reminded to me when I was troubleshooting some backup issues that maybe I should switch to a high speed cable that supports USB-3.¹

You can choose to run WhatCable in your menu bar, or as a standalone app; there’s also a “Show technical details” option that gives you even more information that could be helpful for troubleshooting. There are options for font size, translucency, and menu bar icon, in case you’re so inclined.

For its base functionality, WhatCable is free and available either via Morley’s site, or via homebrew. For a £9.99 one-time purchase, you can unlock WhatCable Pro, which works on up to two Macs, lets you assign names to cables so you can remember which one it is when you plug it in later, provides more in-depth diagnostics, offers live power metering to see how much juice is being delivered right now, and even more.

[via Michael Tsai]

Surely there must be a way to set up an iPhone as the perfect dumb phone for children—one with access to only the apps you deem appropriate, no internet browser, but with all-important tracking and navigation abilities—without having to pay another company to make it work? Well, there is. It’s been hiding in the iOS Accessibility menu the whole time. And, inexplicably, it’s a feature Apple barely talks about.

It’s called Assistive Access. Introduced with iOS 17, Apple designed it for those with cognitive disabilities. If you’ve never encountered or stumbled across it, it’s a distinctive iOS experience: fewer options, more focused features, easier to navigate. The aesthetic is ideal for kids: large, friendly tiles for the apps replace the smaller icons of the “normal” Apple interface.

It’s kind of beautiful. And absolutely the sort of thing you might want to give to a younger kid.

[Via Andy Ihnatko, who also detailed his own use of accessibility features to make streamlined workflow automations.]

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My beloved sister-in-law-in-law (my wife’s brother’s spouse) texted me with an important problem. Her mother had managed to delete the App Store from her Home Screen. How to restore it? While this is a common problem, I realized that the process is completely unintuitive.

For her mother’s particular situation, the answer felt like a cheat code for a video game: unlock, swipe left (once or more), search, touch and hold, drag. Done.

It’s worth a full review of how modern Home Screen management even works in iOS (and iPadOS), with the App Library view off some people’s radar entirely. Apple has, fortunately, not changed this process so far in the iOS 27/iPadOS 27 betas.

Delete or hide an app

I don’t use the term baroque lightly. However, Apple’s flowchart for choices you can make when deleting an app and what happens next has added some curlicues and ornamentation that can confuse the best of us.

It works like this:

First, touch and hold an app. That’s the easy part.

Now we fork into various swirls and pathways. Choose either Remove App or Require Face ID.

Remove App: You can pick from two options (or tap Cancel):

• Remove from Home Screen: The app’s icon disappears from your Home Screen page. However, it remains in the App Library, which I’ll describe below. More importantly, any data stored on your device remains accessible to the app. It’s like hiding, but not hiding!

• Delete App: Deleting an app removes the app from your device and its data stored on the device. This shouldn’t affect iCloud-synced data if you use the app on other platforms or other identical devices.

Require Face ID: Enabling Require Face ID hides content within the app from Spotlight results. You can add Hide to Require Face ID and also hide the app itself from Spotlight searches. Here are the two Face ID variations:

• Require Face ID: You can’t launch the app without using Face ID, separate from any authentication that may occur within an app for access to its data. You also can’t use data from the app in other apps without Face ID.

• Hide and Require Face ID: One step further, the app icon isn’t actually hidden! It remains in “obscured” fashion on the Home Screen, and appears in Hidden Apps in App Library. A hidden app that produces notifications, handles calls, or sends critical alerts has those suppressed as well. (Despite the statement that “This app will be obscured on your Home Screen,” it was simply removed for me.)

So, let me get this straight. If you remove the app from the Home Screen or Require Face ID, you can still search for it in Spotlight. If you delete it, it’s gone (though Spotlight may show it as a tap-to-download option from the App Store in results). If you Hide and Require Face ID, you can’t search for it or its contents, but you can find it in a Hidden folder in App Library. Got it, got it.

Despite the above, I have to throw in a big HOWEVER.¹ If the app is one of a few made by Apple and preinstalled, you can only remove it from the Home Screen. For instance, touch and hold Settings, Camera, Safari, and a few others, and then choose Remove App: only Remove from Home Screen appears; you can’t delete it, and you can’t use Hide and Require Face ID. Other Apple apps, like Stocks or Weather, may be freely tossed. Perfectly consistent and clear.

Since you now have perfect knowledge of all of these states and interactions, let’s look next at App Library, your Home Screen away from Home Screen.

Apple refused to call it Junk Drawer

I have used a succession of apps that I call, with affection, my “junk-drawer” apps. If you don’t have a drawer in your kitchen that is full of miscellaneous crap that you nonetheless occasionally or regularly need, but which has no place in any other drawer or organizational system, congratulations: you’ve just outed yourself as an extraterrestrial and Earth’s First Contact Committee is on its way.

For example, I throw in every piece of text, PDF, photo of receipt, file, and other detritus that I need to keep handy and email or a folder isn’t accessible enough. Then I can search within the app—convenient since everything is now OCR’d by default, so I can find any word or phrase across all media in the app.²

App Library is the equivalent of this, but just for apps. Do you find Spotlight too effusive in its results? Want to have an organizational scheme for apps you don’t have to set up or maintain? Swipe left until you get to the App Library page. You can scroll through pseudo-folders, from which you can tap to launch apps with full-size icons or tap groups of tiny icons to open the pseudo-folder categorizing those apps. You can also use the search field at the top to search only for apps, as opposed to using Spotlight. At the very bottom of the library is where you find Hidden, the not-exactly hidden set of Hide and Require Face ID apps.

To reverse previous choices from an app, App Library, or via Spotlight if the app is searchable:

• Find the app, touch and hold it, then drag it leftwards onto another Home Page page.
• For a Require Face ID app that’s not hidden, touch and hold it, validate with Face ID, then choose Don’t Require Face ID.
• For a hidden app, tap the Hidden folder, validate with Face ID, then touch and hold the app, and choose Don’t Require Face ID. This removes it from the Hidden folder.

If you deleted an app, you can search for its name in Spotlight, and you may see it in a list with a cloud download icon; you can tap that to restore it, but not its data, which you might be able to recall via logging into an account or it syncing with iCloud. You can also tap Search App Store in Spotlight. Or, launch App Store, search for the app’s name, and tap the cloud download button.

You can’t go Home Screen again

Reader Peter wrote in with a related question I can answer briefly: “No.” I’m sad about that, though. His question? He has a weirdly undeletable app—he can delete it, but it always reappears immediately and persists across migrations and devices. He wondered whether, after he triggered Settings: General: Transfer or Reset Phone: Reset: Reset Home Screen Layout, he could restore his painstakingly set-up Home Screen layouts.

If you have a suggestion, write me, or post in the Six Colors Discord, available to members. Discord is also where you can send a question for the column directly by using /glenn.

My Apple TV has started yelling at me. Or at the very least, the Disney+ app on the Apple TV is now clamoring for my attention.

It used to be that when I fired up Disney Plus on my Apple TV, I could browse for something to watch in relative peace. But at some point, an update must have come along that caused the app to break its previously inviolable vow of silence. Because now, when I hover over the thumbnail for a particular movie or show, a preview starts to autoplay.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the latest Avatar picture or something from Pixar or even a Hulu original that now lives in Disney’s app — one moment of hesitation, and a preview plays until I move on to the next thumbnail and the cycle begins anew. New season of The Bear? Preview. An Indiana Jones picture? Preview. X-Men ’97? A particularly angering preview that doesn’t even feature Gambit, for crying out loud.

Disney’s Apple TV app is not alone in blasting previews whether I want them or not. In the land of streaming services, you are dealing with an attention economy, and the purveyors of streaming apps have decided the only way to command that attention is to shout as loud as possible. Hence, nearly every app from every streaming service of note turns on auto-playing previews by default, no matter how you feel about them.

And make no mistake — I feel that auto-playing just about anything is an assault on my senses. When I am trying to decide what to watch, I want to pause on a thumbnail and maybe glance at the information a bit without having to hastily scroll away once audio and video playback begin. Maybe I want to have a conversation with a family member about whether this is a program we both might enjoy without having to shout over some Na’Vi chittering at me about some sort of trouble brewing on Pandora.

The good news is that Apple TV apps have a setting for turning off autoplay previews so that you can go back to browsing through a streaming catalog in blessed silence. But there’s bad news, too — each app seemingly puts that setting in a completely different place, and it’s up to you to hunt down where that might be.

Should Apple impose some order on tvOS apps and require some degree of standardization when it comes to autoplay settings? Or should it go one step further and tell developers not to turn on that feature by default so as to spare the eardrums of paying customers? It’s not for me to say, even though the answer is emphatically yes to both questions.

But I fear my wisdom will fall upon deaf ears — and not just because they’ve already been deafened by all those autoplaying previews. So instead, I can do the next best thing, which is share the hard-won knowledge I have on how to turn off autoplay features in all the big streaming apps that might be living on your Apple TV.

Please don’t thank me. The silence is reward enough.

Apple TV

Apple’s TV app will start to preview content from the Apple TV streaming service if you let it. That’s certainly Apple’s right, but maybe I don’t want to hear about Your Friends and Neighbors each time I launch Apple’s app.

To make Apple TV shut up about the new season of Ted Lasso, go to the Settings app and select Accessibility, followed by Motion. Toggling off Auto-Play Video previews should, in Apple’s words, control whether you allow “video content to auto-play in apps like TV.” In my experience, though, the only app this setting seems to control is TV itself. For third-party apps, you’ll need to dive into settings on your own.

Tubi, HBO Max, but not really Paramount+

Tubi has among the easiest autoplay settings to disable, which is good because it also has the most annoying autoplay behavior. Tubi not only starts to play a preview if you momentarily pause while browsing through its vast library, but if you let that preview reach its conclusion, the movie or show will immediately start playing. For heaven’s sake, Tubi, your entire raison d’etre is to let me comb through the back alleys of your content to let me find something obscure to watch — stop ruining this for me!

Anyhow, with Tubi, all you have to do is head to the app’s settings where you select Video. There, you can disable autoplay to your heart’s content. See? Simple.

The story is similar for HBO Max and Paramount+—sort of. On HBO Max, choose Settings and then under the Playback tab, you can turn off a whole variety of autoplay features. In Paramount+, the Settings icon is hidden at the far bottom left of the screen, but if you just keep moving down through the side menu, you will end up selecting the Settings icon and can get where you need to go. All the Autoplay settings are under the Video tab.

Unfortunately, while Paramount+ will let you turn off “autoplay video,” that setting does not stop previews from autoplaying. Instead of letting you do that, Paramount+ gives you the option of holding down the center button on any preview to enter an “immersive preview mode” where they made the whole plane out of the preview. Frankly, yet another reason to give anything with Paramount’s imprimatur on it a wide berth.

Netflix

If Tubi is the easiest app for managing autoplay annoyances, then Netflix may be the worst. That’s because you can’t do it from the app on your Apple TV.

Instead, you need to head to Netflix in your web browser of choice, where you select your profile icon, followed by Account. From there, you select Edit Settings followed by Playback Settings followed once more by Autoplay Controls. There’s a box called Autoplay Preview While Browsing on All Devices — uncheck that and make sure to save your preference. Autoplay should be just a filthy memory the next time you access Netflix on your Apple TV.

Peacock and Disney Plus

I’m lumping these two services together because they put their autoplay controls in the exact same place. That’s not to say that the setting is easy to find, though, as both Peacock and Disney do a bang-up job hiding the control where you would least expect to find it.

In either app, go to the screen with your account profiles and click on the edit icon for the one you want to adjust. On Peacock, under Autoplay Preferences, you’ll see a toggle for Autoplay Trailers. For Disney, the Playback and Language Settings section has Background Video and Background Audio toggles; turning off the former takes care of both, while adjusting just the latter means that video previews will play silently.

Does the fact that this setting lives in the user profiles for both Peacock and Disney Plus mean that you’ll have adjust playback controls for each profile in your account? Indeed, it does!

Amazon Prime Video

Near as I can tell, Amazon Prime Video is the rare streaming app that doesn’t autoplay previews as you’re rummaging through its library of shows and movies. At the very least, nothing autoplays when I’m in the app, and whether that’s because of the overall Apple TV settings I’ve adjusted or something with Amazon itself, I’m satisfied with the result.

So well done, Amazon — I take back some, but only some, of the horrible things I’ve said about you.

On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.

Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.

Back in 1995 I worked on a project for MacUser magazine called the Mac Catalog, which was a FileMaker-based spec database much like EveryMac’s. I was the person who brought the Mac Catalog to the web for the first time, in fact! The Mac Catalog died along with MacUser, but it makes me happy to see that EveryMac has survived.

If that fact makes you happy, too, you can become an EveryMac supporter.

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A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.

This information originates with Tyler Murphy, who runs EasyOptOuts, a service that aims to help you remove your private information from the web. Cox says he confirmed the issue by creating a new Hide My Email address and providing it to Murphy, who returned the associated private iCloud email in about five minutes.

According to Murphy, he reported the vulnerability—the full details of which neither he nor 404 are disclosing—to Apple a year ago, and as of the end of May, the company said a security update was due “in the coming weeks”, though it still had not been patched as of the story’s publication.

While it’s hard to determine without the exact details how serious this vulnerability is, Murphy and Cox’s demo and Apple’s response do suggest that it is of concern for those relying on the feature, which is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ service.

The company recently announced that it would be shifting all new anonymous addresses for both Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple to a single subdomain, a move that some critics say would make it easier for services to block using those addresses specifically. Previously, that would have required blocking all icloud.com addresses, which would obviously be untenable.

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The key is right at the top of Apple’s document about the issue:

This update delivers security fixes that were first made available in the iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 betas.

In other words, the security fixes in 26.5.2 are based on the security fixes that were rolled into the 26.6 betas, the first of which was released publicly on May 26. That means that everyone in the security world, including bad actors, has had more than a month to analyze all of Apple’s forthcoming fixes—which still haven’t rolled out to the broad user base because 26.6 is still in beta.

With 26.5.2, Apple has decided not to wait for the entirety of 26.6 to ship to get its included security fixes out into the world. Now everyone can update to 26.5.2—and Apple recommends it—and take advantage of those security fixes immediately.

These days, reporting on security issues immediately brings up the topic of AI—on both sides. Apple says it uses frontier models to find and discover issues on its platforms, but of course, AI can also be used to analyze the changes in a beta release and deduce what bugs it’s fixing. In the AI era, the lifecycle of a beta OS release may end up being longer than Apple is willing to wait to roll out fixes.

Of course, individual bugs aren’t exploits. According to Apple, attackers need to chain multiple bugs together to create a functional exploit. Each closed bug reduces the overall attack opportunity, but Apple says none of the bugs fixed in 26.5.2 have been used in any attacks, nor was 26.5.2 released in response to any emergent security issue.

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We live in a modern, jet-set, hyper-fast world! When we want to buy something online, boom, zoom, we use our fingerprint or face to approve the transaction, so we can grab the next Segway outta here! We don’t have time to enter a credit card! And can we trust a webpage form? Pfeh!

All right, calm down, 1950s inner voice, it’s not that bad. Most of our transactions involving a payment card or other sensitive data can be safely handled over a secure web connection. Apple Pay in Safari is the highest standard, of course, because the payment process involves encrypted elements, and your card number isn’t disclosed to the merchant. The Wallet app in iOS and the Wallet features in iPadOS and macOS further let us automate the entry of numbers and identifiers on pages we trust.

That’s all for automated commerce. What about other scenarios where you need to provide information to someone, often a friend or a local business, in order to transfer money or conduct a transaction? How can you be sure no one else is snooping in?

Make a call

Voice is still one of the most secure means of providing data. The landline wired and cellular wireless networks may be fertile ground for government agencies, but if you need to read a credit-card number or provide a PIN, a call is often the safest way to do so. By voice, you can always have the other person verify details that you believe only they know, or you can verify details to them for the same.

Because we live in a cyberpunk dystopian future, I do have to add a proviso. AI-generated voices have been convincing for a couple of years now—long enough that you shouldn’t trust an incoming call from someone you think you know, and certainly not from a bank, credit-card company, or other financial institution. I mean, I wrote “How To Avoid AI Voice Impersonation and Similar Scams” in January 2024! I assume the state-of-the-art scam is even better.

(The biggest takeaway is analog, too. Set a family password that you demand from a family member who calls asking for money or to do some weird phone or computer set of instructions.¹)

Unless recorded, voice calls also lack persistence, making them impossible to recover later. A real-time Bob needs to be either between Alice and Carol or doing an AI impression of Alice or Carol.

Use secure messaging

I could make the argument that using secure messaging carries even less risk than a voice call if you’ve had an ongoing messaging conversation with someone, so you know it’s really them. Are unsecured text messages being intercepted willy-nilly?² No, but there is also something about sending plain text all over the cellular networks that gives me the willies, nillies aside.

Secure messaging systems include:

• iMessage: While iMessage has seen exploits, they’re government-grade ones. Its secure end-to-end infrastructure is creaky, but unbroken. There’s an extra detail I’ll mention below.
• RCS with encryption: Between Apple Messages on iOS 26.5 or later and an Android device with RCS encryption support, you have a similar level of end-to-end protection. Make sure you see RCS encryption in the text field, or it’s just plain text. You can also use RCS encryption between two capable Android devices—as if!
• Signal: The Signal app and ecosystem have the best end-to-end encryption, as it implements some of the most modern approaches to protecting older messages and current conversations available so far.

The extra note on iMessage is complicated. Briefly, if you use Messages in iCloud, an encryption key to retrieve those messages is included in an iCloud-based iPhone or iPad backup. With access to your Apple Account, someone could potentially retrieve your stored messages. However, if you enable iCloud’s Advanced Data Protection, the backup is encrypted and requires endpoint decryption using one of your devices, protecting the Messages in iCloud encryption key. This should be a worry only if someone manages to obtain your Apple Account, can activate a second factor, and the information you passed via Messages is so sensitive that someone would hunt to uncover it.

Avoid using SMS or MMS text messages (unencrypted plain text), unencrypted RCS (in-transit/at-rest encryption), or other messaging systems where you’re not sure how they handle data protection. WhatsApp can be used if you either have backups disabled or have enabled end-to-end encrypted backups.

Don’t use most collaborative tools

I know that I spend a lot of time in shared documents, whether Google Docs, Notes, Pages, or more esoteric apps or web apps. Most lack the highest level of protection. Shared Pages and Numbers files on iCloud Drive, as well as Google Docs, are encrypted in transit and at rest, and granting shared access is relatively easy (very easy in Google Docs). For iCloud Drive documents, this is true even with Advanced Data Protection enabled.

I’d be dubious about pasting my driver’s license or credit-card information into any of them that are shared with someone else. Ditto, don’t take a picture of your payment card or driver’s license and share it via a Shared Album in Photos, as it has the same issue.

There are two notable (heh) exceptions: if you and the other party or parties to a shared Notes entry or an iCloud Shared Photo Library all have Advanced Data Protection enabled, end-to-end encryption is used.

Consider the risk

As with all decisions around privacy, consider how at risk you and your data are, including voice as data. In most cases, ensuring a baseline level of encryption can be enough. Even when the app or server can “see” your unscrambled information, the transport between your device and the server and another person’s device is encrypted. Someone would have to break into the server to sniff data. If stored on the server, the baseline state would be encrypted at rest; however, the server operator would manage those encryption keys.

For peace of mind, if not strictly necessary, I’d encourage you to consider using end-to-end encryption when you can. It’s so easily available. For someone to crack your connection, they would need to obtain one of your devices and be able to unlock it. Otherwise, the path between you and someone else is effectively impregnable.

For further reading

I cover message security extensively in my book Take Control of FaceTime and Messages, which I recently updated to include the beta release of RCS encryption for Apple-to-Android communication.

For more on Wallet, I wrote an entire book on that seemingly simple app and set of features, Take Control of Apple Wallet. The book arose from the frustrations of finding where things in Wallet (and outside Wallet but related to it) lived.

On the security side of things, Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices includes detailed advice on the ins and outs of physical security: how to ensure someone with access to your hardware can’t reach your data.

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

There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint. Make pixel art. Clean up document scans. Design a flyer. Create App Store screenshots. Crop and resize photos. Do some basic photo retouching. Remove a background.

Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s. Yes, it’s retro—but it’s also practical, since hard-edged 1x pixel graphics are high contrast and communicate precision.

Mojave Paint is available in the Mac App Store as a free download. That’s the limited version, but it’s only $9.99 to fully unlock all the features.

The Verge obtained exclusive details from a person familiar with the restructuring who requested anonymity as they were part of the layoffs. They shared an audio recording of a meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, informed the staff that their positions had been eliminated, effective immediately, as “a part of a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A LinkedIn post from a now-former employee corroborates the layoffs.

As an owner and daily user of three Level locks, this news is certainly worrying. An Assa Abloy spokesperson told The Verge that the company will “continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware” but given that the majority of the engineering team seems to also be out, there are certainly questions around it.

On the upside, all of Level’s products now support Matter, which means that at least basic functionality ought to continue working for some time to come. But this is still potentially a disappointing move for a unique product.

Go to the linked site.

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Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.

It’s clear that some people within Apple recognize that the transition to Liquid Glass introduced mistakes. They also appear to have the authority to fix those mistakes. Refinements to Apple’s own icons in Golden Gate are a welcome course correction, as is the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider. It’s time to correct the mistake of banning icon shapes as well.

Kafasis makes the important point that uniform shapes make it more difficult for users, especially those with vision issues including color deficiency, to differentiate between icons. He also references an argument from TidBITS’s Adam Engst that the uniformity sabotages Apple’s own clear and tinted icon formats.

Apple, let the Mac app icons be free.

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Perhaps lost a bit amid the Apple price hikes of Thursday was this surprising bit of news from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman regarding the future of Apple silicon Macs:

[Apple] plans to debut a base M6 processor as early as this year for entry-level Macs, according to people with knowledge of the matter. But in a first, the company will skip higher-end versions of that chip, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.

Apple instead aims to introduce its next Pro and Max chips with more advanced computing and graphics power in 2027 as part of a new M7 generation, according to the people.

According to Gurman, Apple has decided to shift gears in order to fast-track the tech in the M7 chips, which is better suited to “meet growing demand for on-device AI capabilities and more graphics-intensive software.” In other words, Apple looked at its chip roadmap and felt it didn’t want to wait for M7 and didn’t want to bother shipping M6 Pro and Max.

As weird as this seems, I’m actually encouraged by Apple’s willingness to change its chip and product plans in order to better serve the technical needs of its customers. If Apple has a chance to push its advantage when it comes to on-device AI processing, it should do so, even if it means ripping up plans and calling an audible.

Of course, this decision has knock-on effects. For example, Gurman’s been reporting for ages about Apple’s forthcoming MacBook Pro models with OLED touchscreens—but the chips they were meant to ship with, the M6 Pro and M6 Max, have just been cancelled! So… now what?

On Friday, Gurman let the other shoe drop, reporting that Apple will release those systems with M5 chips “between late this year and early next year”, with M7 to follow:

Apple is already conducting advanced testing of the follow-up models with M7 Pro and M7 Max chips, according to the people. Those laptop models are planned for as early as the end of 2027. Apple is also planning a Mac Studio refresh with M7 Max and M7 Ultra chips in 2028.

Releasing new models with familiar chips is probably not ideal, but if the alternative is delaying the OLED MacBook Pro until late 2027, I can see why Apple would choose to go ahead and roll out a new and improved MacBook Pro powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The laptop is apparently just about ready, so there’s no sense waiting. The weirdness of it launching with an old chip is just collateral damage from Apple’s larger decision to be more aggressive when it comes to its high-end chip plans.

What’s interesting is the manner in which they did so. Today’s prices apply across several product lines, most prominently the Mac and iPad, but also the Apple TV and HomePod. The increases vary, but they affect both low-end devices—the MacBook Neo, whose starting price jumps $100 to $699¹—and the high-end—the Vision Pro which, yes, it seems, can get more expensive, now starting at $3699.

If there’s a winner here, it’s probably the full-size HomePod, which rose just $50–back to the same price it was when Apple released the first-generation of the product eight years ago. Losers include the highest-end Macs, with maxed-out MacBook Pros jumping $1800 and a top-of-the-line Mac Studio increasing by a whopping $4200. But that’s not shocking, as those are all fully loaded with RAM and storage.

I also have to wonder if they purposefully did this price increase during Amazon’s Prime Day sales, knowing that would at least give customers a chance to snag devices at discounts before these changes ripple all the way down the supply chain.

Not every product line was hit today, though: unchanged for the moment are the prices for Apple’s most prominent device, the iPhone, as well as the Apple Watch. Those are due for a refresh in September—it seems likely at higher prices or, as Jason speculated last week, dropping the low-end configurations, but at this point, who knows? We’ll find out in just a few months, when the most expensive iPhone ever arrives, and is probably even pricier than we’re thinking now.

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Since the very beginning, it’s been clear that computers provide incredible power to those who know how to use them to get work done. The challenge has always been how small the group of “those who know how to use them” has been.

The Apple II included support for BASIC, a simplified programming language that was intended to let new computer users write programs. “In my opinion, the real thing [the Apple II] is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer,” a young Steve Jobs told the New Yorker in 1977. The first computer programs I wrote were in BASIC.

There was also the Logo language, which helped introduce beginners to programming concepts through the manipulation of a virtual robot called a “turtle.” In the ’80s, HyperCard tried to broaden the programming community through its use of HyperTalk, another language designed to speak to beginners.

The (still!) current examples of this on the Mac are AppleScript, which used a format based on English-language sentence structure; and Automator and Shortcuts, two automation tools designed to create flow-chart-based programs.

The goal is always the same: To give regular people the ability to harness the power of computers. And we’ve never, ever been closer to the goal than we are today.

No, I’m not talking about vibe coding apps, mostly because that requires a level of focus and detail that most “regular people” are not going to want to provide. Show a civilian Xcode and watch how their eyes instantly glaze over.

I’m talking about Shortcuts—specifically, Apple’s Describe a Shortcut feature in the forthcoming macOS 27, iOS 27, and iPadOS 27.

This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

Yes, there are lots of limitations. Describe a Shortcut doesn’t work with third-party apps, only Apple’s own stuff (at least, for now). It can sometimes get confused, especially with complex queries. And it has an interesting tendency to kick things to the Use Model action—why am I not surprised that an AI model likes to build Shortcuts that themselves use AI models?

But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical. And perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

I was also impressed with the fact that Shortcuts created with this method are… just Shortcuts. With one click, you’re looking at the actual Shortcut blocks that the feature has assembled for you. You can edit them as you see fit. They’re not special in any way, other than that they were built with an actual English-language sentence, not a line of code that resembles one superficially.

I’m sure that future developments will make it even easier for us to tell our devices what to do. But this particular advance feels especially big to me, like we’ve crossed some invisible line of demarcation. We are entering the era where the computers program themselves—and, for the most part, are able to understand what we’re asking them to do.

Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates—Bill Gates, of all people!—to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.

The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had been folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.

1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.

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The movement takes the place of a scherzo and is mainly constructed [of] the welcome datacompordinary major scale with the four lower notes shifted a semitone upward.

In the photo of the book passage, (presumably) Hazeley’s finger is pointing at the phrase “welcome datacompordinary major scale.” He wrote, “Absolutely stumped. Have never seen this term, can find no definition anywhere, and can’t parse it.”

Fortunately, Jacob Haller saw the post and pointed out that he wrote about it back in 2004:

Some Mac third party keyboards used to (or maybe still do for all I know) have a little feature where if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type ‘welcome datacomp’. Here’s a nice little rant by someone who got caught by this.

That linked post is from 1994. In it, Chris Tate describes being baffled by a third-party ADB (the predecessor to USB) keyboard:

This past weekend, while trying to get some text-editing work done, I had to leave the computer alone for a while. Upon returning, I found to my horror that the text “welcome datacomp” had been inserted into the text I was editing. I was certain that I hadn’t typed it, and my wife verified that she hadn’t, either. A quick survey showed that the “clipboard” (the repository for information being manipulated via cut/paste operations) wasn’t the source of the offending text.

That story includes a cameo from John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app, who had apparently been contacted by numerous people assuming it was a virus:

Yes, we have heard of this. It’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.

My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details. Someone finding it in a printed book in 2026 just shows you how the weird tech quirks of the past can just keep echoing long after they’ve gone.

Go to the linked site.

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