Go to the podcast page.

In the meantime, I’ve recently turned to Secretive, an open-source tool by Max Goedjen and others that allows you to store your SSH keys inside your Mac’s Secure Enclave. Doing so means that your keys can’t be exported and are protected by the same level of security as your system’s most sensitive data. In addition to ECDSA-256 keys, running Secretive on macOS Tahoe and later lets you create post-quantum keys using the MLDSA-65 and MLDSA-87 algorithms. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry about it—you’re fine.

Using Secretive still requires some technical know-how. You’re going to have to edit some configuration files and, if you’re using the keys to log in to remote servers, install them yourself. There are instructions for much of this both in the app and online. Other apps can work with Secretive too, assuming the developers have built in support: right now, it’s mainly targeted at developer tools like git and GitHub, as well as secure file transfer clients like Transmit and Cyberduck.

The one major downside of this system is that since the private keys are stored in the Secure Enclave, they cannot be backed up or transferred elsewhere. That’s more secure, but it’s more inconvenient as well; if your Mac gets hosed, or you migrate to a new device, you’ll have to recreate your keys all over again. It also means that if you maintain SSH keys on multiple Macs, you have to set up Secretive on all of them. That’s another reason that I’d like to see Apple find a way to abstract this process further via the Passwords app, if it can figure out a safe and secure way to do so—not to mention, potentially making it available on iOS as well. Like passkeys, ssh keys offer more security and less reliance on passwords.

Secretive’s not for everybody, but there are certainly a subset of users who will be very interested in the security it offers. But until such a time as Apple makes this process part and parcel of its operating system, I’ll be relying on Secretive to help me manage it.

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.

Nick Heer has a detailed analysis of this announcement, though, as he points out, it’s impossible to make any conclusive judgments as we don’t yet know exactly what these “additional controls” will look like. But the reactions from some developers whose apps rely on this permission were wary, at best.

Security and convenience are a tough line to walk, there’s no question. The competing models of macOS and iOS take very different approaches to the idea of, oh, let’s call it “messing around and finding out.” Even giving an app access to every single permission on iOS—unwise as it might be—can’t touch certain parts of the system; that’s not true on the Mac. But, on the flip side, it unlocks a world of possibilities for apps on your Mac that simply aren’t possible on the iPhone.

Specifically, as Apple calls out here, AI agents. The AI agents that you can use on your phone can get access to information that you granularly share with them, but there are limits. An AI agent with Full Disk Access to your Mac is capable of much more. If I can draw an imperfect analogy, it’s akin to giving the agent power of attorney to act autonomously on your behalf, without your full knowledge. At least until after the fact.

But there are plenty of legit uses for Full Disk Access. Just looking at my MacBook Air this morning, I’ve given that permission to three apps¹: Terminal, BBEdit, and SuperDuper. All apps that I trust with that level of power because of their long history and because in order to do what they do best (or at all), they need that access.² (Interestingly, on my Mac mini, that list also includes SpamSieve, KnockKnock, and Shortcuts—though not BBEdit, for whatever reason.)

As Nick explains, this move was likely a response to Jason Aten’s recent story in Inc. about Meta’s Muse having access to his Messages, despite supposedly not permitting it.³ But it’s also a recognition that this is going to become more and more of an issue as AI agents become more commonplace, and no doubt ask for Full Disk Access, because these kinds of apps want as much power and information as you will give them, and it’s far more efficient for them if they can just ask for disk access than enumerating all the individual data stores. Especially, in an era where we’re besieged by permission dialogs.

I don’t think Apple has done the best job with its permissions user experience—it surely could be improved. But I also have to admit that my own behavior has changed over time as Apple has instituted more and more granular controls. Perhaps it was simply the callowness of youth, but I was once far more willing to grant permissions to apps I installed⁴—these days, I find myself scrutinizing them more and more: Why do you need Bluetooth access, app? What devices on my local network are you really accessing? My default is to not allow things, unless I have a very clear understanding of why the app is requesting them—and, in the cases where I am overly cautious and impeded an app’s functionality, going and turning on a permission I disabled.

But I also realize that I’m hardly the average user. I think there is a good argument for protecting Full Disk Access further, but there’s also only so much you can do to protect a user from themselves. Ultimately, this is a cat-and-mouse game, and while I don’t want my data purloined or misused, I also don’t want my computer locked down to the point that I can’t use it for all the things I want to do.

Please drop in if you can.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Amazon on Thursday announced new Kindles, including a new base model, Paperwhite, and Colorsoft. All three models come in multiple varieties (plastic and aluminum) and in a variety of new colors.

The cheapest model is $170 ($150 with ads), and the priciest new model is the $319 Colorsoft Signature Edition. (I admit that I find it somewhat shocking that even a basic e-reader costs $170 these days, but here we are.)

More notable, I think, is that Amazon is embracing page-turn buttons again—but with a very Amazon twist. After systematically removing page-turn buttons from its Kindles over the years, it’s brought them back—on a $80 case. Following in the steps of competitor Kobo, Amazon has also added a page-turn remote control for people who prefer to read while their device is not in their hands. (I know multiple people who place their e-readers in a stand and rely on page-turn clickers.)

I gotta say that I don’t love that Amazon has decided that to use page-turn buttons, you need to pay $80 and keep your Kindle in a case. But at least they’re finally offering an option. (For the record, Kobo’s Libra Colour is priced similarly to the Paperwhite Signature Edition and has buttons right on it, no case required. It’s the e-reader I use the most these days.)

Still, I must begrudgingly admit that Amazon has provided some much-needed page-turn options for people who don’t want to endlessly tap or swipe on a touchscreen. And over the last few years, Amazon has addressed many of the limitations of the Kindle software platform, making it much more competitive with Kobo. Given the outsized place Kindle has in the e-reader world, it’s good to see that someone at Amazon still cares about Kindle.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Disabling an AirTag speaker is a way for an unwanted party to more easily track someone without their knowledge and consent. Apple designed the AirTag to alert people when an unknown tracker was moving with them (via software), or when a tracker moved or was bumped (via a sound) after remaining in a location for a period of time. The latter case is critical, as Find My items have been found in purses, luggage, vehicles, and other things that move, left there either provably or putatively by a party attempting to track someone otherwise unaware they’re under remote observation.

You can find sites selling AirTags with the speaker disabled all over the Internet, as well as instructions to do so, and some even state outright that the action helps with unwanted tracking. ElevationLab’s AirTag Silencer is certainly the only mainstream device that performs this task with the exacting design one has come to expect from the company since the introduction of their 2012 iPhone dock—now with the proviso of “unfortunately.”

I’ll take ElevationLab at their word that they intend this for use with, as the product description states, “Anything you wouldn’t want the speaker tipping off a thief. (We originally designed this for our own bikes that have been stolen).” This also guided their 5-year and 10-year AirTag cases, which can be secreted in a hard-to-remove location deep within something expensive.

It is true that the “moving with you” and audio alerts make an AirTag and similar items less ideal for recovering stolen items than for finding lost ones, tracking luggage in transit—or being alerted that you left something behind.

Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was blunter than I. “Honestly, this is just another example of the mindset that things are more important than people,” she said via email. “There is a reason why the AirTag makes that noise, and it is because you cannot make a tracker that does not alert a thief without also making a person a tool for stalking. I think these people have, in fact, considered the implications and decided that they don’t care.”

I posed the question of potential misuse to Casey Hopkins, ElevationLab’s CEO. He replied via email, “We make products we want for ourselves. And we’ve had expensive bikes and other gear stolen and then recovered using AirTags. We have also silenced our own AirTags on those items using DIY methods available online and on YouTube. If someone is determined enough, they could already silence it themselves, but the person would still get phone notifications. With roughly 200 million AirTags in use, extreme edge cases will make news, but the overwhelming number of people just want to track their own gear.”

I see his point, but I don’t accept it, as the viewpoint is either naive or uninformed about the scale of abusive tracking. Yes, AirTags are used mostly for good purposes—my family must own 20 Find My items at this point—but there’s a difference between what a product might be used for and making a tool that expedites bad behavior, disabling both a component and a strategy created by Apple. Making it easy to remove the speaker also makes it simpler to engage in consent-free tracking—there are no two ways around it.

Silent tracking

Apple’s Find My items and Google’s Find Hub trackers securely relay a signal from trackers through nearby iPhones, iPads, and Macs (Apple) and Android devices (Google), letting us keep tabs on our stuff and then potentially find it when it’s lost or stolen. The AirTag is a sword with two edges: one allows desired finding by yourself or others you share an item’s location with; the other, privacy-invading stalking, is often employed by those attempting to control someone, as part of ongoing domestic violence or stalking an acquaintance or stranger.

This isn’t speculative. You can find hundreds of newspaper articles and television reports about specific cases, and many write-ups of the broader problem. In New South Wales, Australia, a local commission on crime was able to compel retailers to provide information about who purchased tracking devices in 2023. Their analysis revealed one in four of the purchasers—about 750 of 3,000 people—”had a history of domestic violence, while a further 126 were apprehended violence order defendants at the time the items were purchased.” A lawsuit filed a few days ago in Oregon is the latest example.

The speaker is a primary component of the company’s anti-tracking strategy, so much so that the second-generation AirTag, released this year and replacing the original, emits a 50% louder sound. While that aids in finding stuff you’ve misplaced, it definitely increases the likelihood that a victim of stalking will hear an alert sound. Apple and Google, not notable collaborators, worked together in 2023 to release an anti-stalking proposal, which both companies have adopted, including audio alerts.

Apple originally had an AirTag (and third-party devices certified as Find My items) emit a sound when it was moved after three days in the same location. Advocates for victims of domestic violence and groups concerned with privacy urged a shorter time period. Apple updated the alert, just a few months after the product’s 2021 release, to trigger at a shorter and random interval. Since mid-2021, an AirTag or any Find My item chirps when moved between 8 and 24 hours after its paired device was last within Bluetooth range; the randomness makes it harder for a tracking party to predict when it might make a sound.

If you have an iPhone, iPad, or Android device and an Apple or Google tracker moves with you for a short period of time, your device will alert you and provide a map of where you’ve been tracked so far. This also lets you play a sound on the tracker device—something that’s not possible if the speaker has been removed.

Not being a lawyer, I can’t argue whether or not ElevationLab’s product comes with liability. However, using an AirTag, Find My item, or Google Find Hub tracker to acquire the location of someone without their permission may be a crime or risk a lawsuit, depending on the jurisdiction.

There are different ways to disable an AirTag or other tracker you discover, typically by rotating the back case and removing its battery. EFF’s Galperin has more direct advice: “I think that encouraging people to hit their AirTags with a hammer is a fine idea. They may need to hit it several times.”

A misfired pin

I’ve been purchasing products from ElevationLab since their 2012 ElevationDock. The company has always had an eye for elegance coupled with problem-solving.

This is what makes the company’s AirTag Silencer an absolutely baffling misfire, something that you would have thought would have called out as enabling behavior by some customers that no company would want to be associated with.

ElevationLab can’t prevent speaker-removing hardware from being sold or instructions from being disseminated. But the company should not be producing a case-hardened steel piece of precision goods that may look like a pin, but is a razor-sharp double-edged sword. Pull this product from sale.

In “Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius,” Mr. Johnson details the remarkable story of how, in 1999, Jobs recruited him from Target to join Apple as head of retail and launch perhaps the biggest long shot of Jobs’s entire tenure as chief executive. At a time when computer stores were a moribund category and Apple’s brand was near its lowest ebb, the two men concocted a daring strategy: find some way to connect with the millions of consumers who had no interest in or understanding of Apple’s products.

Continue reading on Apple News ↦

Continue reading on The Wall Street Journal ↦

Go to the podcast page.

Well, this week, Apple updated iWork again, including new functions for Numbers, and glory be—this time it did provide a full list of all the new functions available in the release notes. Can I hope that I played a part in this change? I’ll take it.

Of those new functions, it’s the additions of XOR (exclusive or) and DAYS (returning a number of days between two dates) that I’ll likely find the most helpful, though there are a bunch of statistical functions in there as well. I’d still love to see a MEDIANIF, alas. Maybe someday!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Torn between Be and NeXT, Gil Amelio tries to analyze it all scientifically, including final demos from both teams. But was the end result a foregone conclusion?

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

After my massive article on migrating your passwords, passkeys, and other secrets from third-party password managers to Apple’s Passwords, Wallet, Safari, and general ecosystem—potentially with help from another app—reader Scott asked whether I was directing people into weaker security. He wrote:

If someone manages to steal my device and its passcode, they have access to the contents of my phone, including all of the information stored in Apple Passwords. This is not the case if I use a third-party password manager and have set a separate password for access, as the thief will not have access to my other passwords…I’m surprised this liability is not discussed and considered more frequently.

This is a great follow-up question, and one that I didn’t address within the scope of the migration article, which was already long. Let me pick apart how to answer that by looking at risks and mitigations.

The risks of cracking our eggs at once

I understand the fear of losing everything, whether it is a set of material objects or digital secrets. One of the most heartrending stories I ever heard was from a photographer who lost all his work in an apartment fire shortly after moving to New York City to start his career. He rebuilt. That’s harder to do digitally, where if our privacy is “burned,” we might see bank accounts drained and potentially have to get our Social Security number or other identity number replaced.

But we should consider alongside that how likely it is for the scenario Scott describes: “…someone manages to steal my device and its passcode, they have access to the contents of my phone…” A sequence of actions has to take place for that to be true:

• Someone has to steal your device.
• Someone has to have obtained your passcode or have forced you to reveal it when or after they steal the device.
• That person has to then have the time to put the stolen booty to use, like performing money transfers or cryptocurrency actions, before you erase your device remotely.

It’s most likely an iPhone would be the thing stolen, because we have those with us all the time, and thieves have been known to shoulder surf or record video from a distance to capture you entering your passcode. iPads and Macs can, of course, be taken from us as well, but it’s just much less likely when we’re out and about. A stolen Mac has additional protections if it’s powered down, and we often set longer passwords for a Mac, where an iPhone or iPad might still have a four-digit code.

If you are a privacy advocate, protester, journalist, opposition politician, or promoter of freedom and peace, you are at greater risk, and thus using Passwords as an in-band solution—one in which compromising a device unlock pathway could compromise our secrets—already makes no sense. (I’ve seen some people recommend Bitwarden, not because of a necessarily superior security model, but because it’s open-source and has an expansive free personal tier that includes end-to-end encryption for synchronization among your devices.)

So this worry for the rest of us is a kind of prospective and speculative anxiety: that, in the wrong circumstances, all our passwords and other secrets would be exposed. While this happens regularly, the number of instances in which a passcode is obtained and malice occurs before we can stop it is fairly low. Most iPhones are stolen to wipe them for resale, which Apple has rendered difficult with the long-ago introduction of Activation Lock. Rather than knowing your passcode, criminals are more likely to try to threaten you or use phishing to obtain the passcode after they have the device.

Fortunately, Apple came up with a solution after the Wall Street Journal in 2023 exposed how a dangerous sequence of events, which could start with drugging or violence, would allow thieves to reset an Apple Account and take over someone’s digital accounts and life.

We don’t yet have face-stealing technology

Apple’s Stolen Device Protection is a feature that may be one that has irritated you enough that you haven’t cared to understand how it may also keep your secrets safe. Go to Settings: Privacy & Security: Stolen Device Protection, and it’s likely enabled. Based on reports, I believe Apple enabled this by default in iOS 26.4. It’s available only for iPhones.

When enabled, it restricts a number of activities and requires Touch ID or Face ID for many authentication steps—passwords can’t be used instead. For the purposes of protecting your secrets, Stolen Device Protection has two key attributes:

• It locks many actions for an hour, such as changing your Apple Account password. Even then, you have to use biometrics to start the countdown and before taking the action. Knowledge of a passcode isn’t helpful. If you have Away from Familiar Locations selected, this occurs only when the device isn’t in a place you routinely spend a lot of time, typically home and work.¹

• You cannot view passwords or fill them into form fields from Apple’s Passwords system without using Touch ID or Face ID with Always enabled, so a thief having your passcode is out of luck. (If you have Away from Familiar Locations selected, a ne’er-do-well would have to be in one of those locations to use a passcode.)

This leaves one rotten scenario, in which you are kept under duress for at least an hour and are forced to use biometrics, then perform other actions. But how likely is that for most people? I don’t want to dismiss the distress of those who have been through that, but the likelihood of most people experiencing it is vanishingly small.

Leaving Stolen Device Protection enabled does mean that you may have to wait an hour in some scenarios to manage aspects of your Apple Account, make changes to Face ID or Touch ID, change your device passcode, and a few other actions. But this minor inconvenience might assuage the kinds of concerns that Scott wrote in about, and make you more comfortable that your big basket of secret eggs won’t scramble.

For further reading

I just updated my book Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices to incorporate changes Apple has made in the last year, including in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. In the book, I dig into risks and likelihoods further. The book takes the tack that Apple, having secured a lot of our data, now has implemented many protections against physical access to our hardware, including theft, and explains how to enable, configure, and manage a wide set of features.

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

Everyone loves the MacBook Neo. Apple’s fresh-squeezed laptop was a not-too-surprising hit with computer buyers, and presumably sales have continued to be good despite a $100 mid-stream price increase elevating its original $599 price tag to a still-good-but-not-astounding $699.

The Neo proved that Apple’s iPhone-class processor, the A18 Pro, was powerful enough to drive a Mac and the Mac’s wide-open software platform. With performance roughly in between an M1 and M2 processor, the Neo is completely capable of even somewhat difficult tasks like audio and video editing. Obviously, RAM and processor limitations prevent it from tackling the toughest jobs, but that’s why Apple makes numerous other, more expensive Macs.

A friend’s kid is moving into her college dorm—the same one both of my kids lived in!—as I write this. I have no idea what computer she’s bringing to school, but it certainly could be a MacBook Neo, and I’d wager a bunch of her classmates will have them, too.

So, hooray for the Neo, but what’s next? With the arrival of the iPhone 18 Pro and the A20 processor, the question is, will Apple release a Neo based on last year’s A19 Pro processor, or jump to the A20? I fear that the answer is the less-exciting A19 Pro, but what if it’s the A20 Pro? (And if it’s not the A20 Pro in 2027, it’ll be the A20 Pro in 2028, you could almost bank on it.)

So what’s in store for the MacBook Neo in the future? Let’s go to the charts:

In short, the A19 Pro would be an incremental update to the Neo, keeping it roughly in the ballpark of M1 CPU performance and M2 or M3 GPU performance. The A20 Pro, on the other hand, would elevate the Neo to M2-level CPU and M4-level GPU performance.

Also, in terms of differentiating the product line, next year the MacBook Air will presumably get the M6 chip just unveiled for the Mac mini. But regardless, both the M5 and M6 chips are still well ahead of the A20 Pro in everything that really matters for Mac performance.

I’m sure Apple could get away with releasing a MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro chip, and given the pressures on its margins caused by the RAM crisis, that’s probably what it will do. (It would presumably bring the Neo up to 12GB of RAM, which would be a nice boost—while raising the price, of course.)

But now that we’ve seen it in action in an iPhone, the prospect of the A20 Pro in a MacBook Neo is even more tantalizing. The question is how long we’ll need to wait to see it.

Safari web apps are great when they fit the job. But sometimes you need Chromium: a Chrome extension, a separate browser profile, or simply a website that works better in Chrome. Coherence X6 turns any website into its own standalone Mac app, powered by the Chromium browser of your choice.

Instead of living in another browser tab, each site opens in its own standard Mac window, with its own Dock icon, profile, accounts, extensions, and settings. Apps stay isolated from one another, so you can keep work and personal accounts separate, create distraction-free versions of the sites you use every day, or build dedicated apps around specific workflows.

Coherence also gives those apps capabilities you don’t normally get from a website shortcut. You can control which links stay inside an app and which open elsewhere, create apps that always open in Incognito, use different Chromium browsers for different apps, and customize how each app behaves.

Six Colors readers can save 20% on Coherence X6 this week with code SIXCOLORS. Learn more, create your first app free, or purchase Coherence at bzgapps.com/coherence.

I’ve been using the Apple Watch Series 12 for a week now, but this isn’t a review. The first wave of reviews that dropped at embargo time were all from people who had used the device for about the same amount of time, and it seems a bit silly to just repeat those observations—and a week after all of those stories were published. In addition, the most tantalizing features of the new Apple Watch—Live Rewind and Siri Recap—won’t be available until “late 2026.”¹

So instead of sprinting to a quick judgment, I’ve decided to take the long path and live with the Series 12. I migrated from my own Series 10 watch, transferred my cellular plan over, and have committed to wearing it most of the time, including when I sleep. (While I tried out Apple’s sleep features the last time I reviewed an Apple Watch, I decided I didn’t really get enough benefit out of it to keep it going—but since Apple really wants me to wear the watch when I sleep, I will do so, at least for now. That way I can at least try the Vitals app, which runs in daytime mode now.)

Since I’m coming from a Series 10, I’m unfortunately not able to be impressed by how thin the Series 12 is—since the Series 10 was really the watch that got noticeably thinner. (If you’re thinking of upgrading from an older watch than Series 10, though, you’ll love it.) I’m curious to see how the watch face holds up compared to the older model, since the aluminum Series 12 has picked up Ceramic Shield 2 protection.

All summer I complained about just how sluggish the new Siri AI functionality felt in watchOS 27 on my Series 10. Obviously the watch isn’t really capable of full-on Apple Intelligence, but it’s able to phone home to its paired iPhone and relay queries made from that device, and the result is that I can stand in my kitchen and ask what temperature is right for the immersion cooker to cook tonight’s chicken, and get an answer—something that would have required me to go search on my phone before. The results aren’t iPhone fast, but they’re generally fast enough, and have the improved information density that Siri AI offers.

It does feel like Apple tightened up Siri AI responsiveness right at the end of the OS beta cycle, which is especially important when it comes to basic functions that shouldn’t require a laborious trip to an iPhone or cloud servers. Now, when I start a timer, it picks the command up pretty fast. All summer I was frustrated by the seeming inability of my watch or my iPhone to add items to Reminders lists via Siri, but that problem seems to have finally abated, which is important, since that kind of quick data capture is one of my primary Apple Watch use cases. No amount of Siri AI goodness will be worth it if you can’t properly set a timer or add a reminder from your wrist.

While I can’t rewind 15 seconds of recent conversation or check the notes on a meeting that was being monitored by my watch, I was able to use another of Apple’s “Audio Intelligence” features, which is near-instant song identification via Shazam. I suspect this is all about timing. Since this Apple Watch is apparently always buffering audio, when I’m curious about the identity of a song, it’s got the ability to use its buffer and extend the window it needs for analysis. For Shazam, this can often be the difference between success and failure—often, the most recognizable part of a song is what prompts me to want to look it up, and by the time I bring up Shazam, the moment has passed and the song is ending or the conversation in the café has picked up and I end up unsatisfied.

I was watching “Ted Lasso” the other night, and as the music at the very end of the episode began to play, I realized I was curious about the artist. With a very quick flip of the Digital Crown, I exposed the Shazam widget, which had already identified the song and was displaying it for me. There’s a plus icon there that you can use to add that song to your log for later reference.

It’s not going to change my life, but it’s a great little feature. My only real complaint about it is that if Apple’s going to let you use Siri Recap to monitor your life, I’d kind of like the option of turning on a Shazam log for an extended period of time. A few months ago, my wife and I were in a café in Portland, Oregon early on a Sunday morning, and the playlist perfectly fit the mood. I would have loved to have been able to just tell my watch to log all the songs it could identify until we left the café, or for some duration of time.

It’s a start. There’s much more to be done—by me, in terms of using it, and by Apple, in terms of shipping all the features it has promised for this hardware but was unable to deliver by launch.

In 2011, Mike said, “Steve Jobs was on one of his famous walks after having had a dinner with someone,” and he said to his walking companions from Apple, Mike was later told: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just right now on my iPhone send [the dinner companion] a thank you card?”

Apple decided to build an iPhone app just for creating and mailing cards. And the project moved fast, because it was a Steve-initiated one. As it turns out, the app was built and launched during the final year of Steve’s life.

Of course, no story of cards and Apple is complete without a link to the eulogy for Apple’s earlier card service, iCards, created in part by our own contributor, Phil Michaels, back in 2008 (starts at 2:30). (My god, they just keep trying to make cards happen, don’t they.)

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Qualcomm Incorporated today announced the renewal of its global patent license agreement with Apple, effective April 1, 2027.

“We are pleased to extend the Apple license agreement,” said John Han, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL).

That’s it. That’s the whole statement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple has made no announcement.

Apple first struck a deal back in 2019, which not only ended ongoing litigation between the two, but also launched the patent licensing deal and a “multiyear chipset supply agreement.” Apple’s last re-up of its Qualcomm deal in 2023 extended that deal through 2026.

Despite developing its own cellular chips, Apple is still using some Qualcomm modems in its products. Though this year only the new iPhone 18 Pro Max uses Qualcomm modems, and then only in the U.S. And unlike the 17 Pro and iPhone Air, last year’s iPhone 17 used a Qualcomm modem. Some of this could be due to supply—Apple needs a lot of modems and perhaps can’t yet make enough for every single phone, iPad, and Apple Watch it produces.¹

Some of it could also be due to the specifics of the licensing agreement and dropping of the ongoing court case. But it is interesting that the Qualcomm announcement specified only the patent license—not a renewal of the original’s chipset supply agreement. Apple would surely want to use its C-series chips as much as possible—they seem to offer better performance and power efficiency, and with the C2 even add support for mmWave, one of the few features the previous version were lacking.

I certainly suspect we’ll continue to see fewer and fewer Qualcomm modems in Apple’s devices—they didn’t buy an entire modem division for nothing—but untangling a longstanding relationship like this can take a long time, given manufacturing timelines.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

We are flying through September, and our St. Jude campaign is rocking and rolling. As of this writing, we are knocking on the door of $450,000 raised this month!

St. Jude cares for some of the world’s sickest children regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Its patients receive the customized care they need to treat childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, no matter what barriers they face. Donations from normal folks like you and me make that possible.

If you haven’t donated or signed up to host your own fundraiser, today is a great day to change that!

Important note: we will be hosting the 8th annual Podcastathon telethon on Friday, October 2, from noon to midnight Eastern. I’ll be there for the fourth straight year, along with Stephen, Myke Hurley, Kathy Campbell, Casey Liss, and Brad Dowdy. It will be guaranteed to be a fun watch. Please save the date and drop in if you can.

And here’s a teaser: In addition to all the amazing live content, challenges, and nonsense, you may just be lucky enough to catch three Six Colors writers with syndicated television trivia game histories play an answer-and-question game against one another for the very first time.

Go to the linked site.

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Oh and we throw in a game, too. All work, no play and all that.

So let’s work our way down the list of possible additions to your Mac or iPhone. And if you have something you’d like to see featured in this space, let us know about it via email at apps@sixcolors.com.

Mainspring

Your Mac is more powerful than you know, with a lot of controls hidden well out of view (at least if you don’t want to dig around in the Terminal). Mainspring imagines a world where you can control some of those features via toggles in a utility panel.

Want to speed things up by removing the delay before your auto-hidden Dock pops up or making the hide and show animation go faster? Turn those features on. You can also tweak the built-in screenshot tools to remove drop shadows or save your files as JPGs instead of PNGs. Or you can explore dozens of other optimizations covering various aspects of your Mac, tailored to whether you’re using a laptop or desktop.

Best of all, undoing those changes is as simple as sliding the toggle off. Mainspring really lets you tweak and fine-tune your Mac without running the risk of damaging something important in the process.

What I really appreciate about Mainspring is the setup feature that proposes different scenarios for getting started. I selected the Writer settings, which gave me access to the different screenshot tools that I could turn on and turn off. The app really makes it easier for amateurs like me to use.

You’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $29 for an unlocked copy of Mainspring, but the app comes with a free trial that lets you use it for one day so you can see if Mainspring’s various settings are just the tweaks your Mac needs.

Docktor

Sometimes, when I’m jumping between different apps for the same project, I forget what I’ve got open where. Did I start writing that document in BBEdit or in Google Docs in Safari? The free Docktor utility resolves any lingering doubts by adding live previews of each open app’s window when you hover over its icon in the Dock.

You will have to turn on some permissions to let Docktor do its thing, such as allowing screen recording to capture live thumbnails using ScreenCaptureKit. Optional permissions allow Docktor to know your location and look at your calendar to populate relevant widgets that can be added to either side of your Dock.

That’s another bonus feature for Docktor apart from the live thumbnail previews, though by default, the widgets appeared a little faint on my display. I took care of that by going into Docktor’s settings and fiddling with the Liquid Glass to make things easier on my eyes. That may be a step too far for some users, but the app is free to download and use so you can give it a try to see if it delivers what you’re looking for in a productivity-boosting utility.

Pop Out Timer

Apple devices have their own built-in Clock apps, though the one that comes with the Mac is a bit pedestrian for my tastes. Pop Out Timer offers a different spin on things, with a floating window that you can place just about anywhere on your screen.

That can come in handy when using the stopwatch mode if you want to keep an eye on your time while running through a presentation. As for me, I’ve used Pop Out Timer’s stopwatch as an impromptu time tracker for logging how much time I’m spending on projects where I bill by the hour. The app also features timer, clock and pomodoro modes.

Customization features in Pop Out Timer’s settings let you adjust the aspect ratio of the floating timer as well as the background and text colors. The app, which also runs on iPhones and iPads, is free to try, with timers restricted to 5 minutes. If you like what you see, unlock the premium version, either with a subscription (49 cents/month or $4/year) or a one-time $12 purchase.

TrillMark

When you’re heads down on a project, those notification pings your Mac sends out can fade into the background — which really defeats the purpose of notifications if you ask me. The $8 TrillMark lets you assign different sounds to notifications coming from different apps, so that an alert coming in from Slack will make a different noise compared to a News notification.

To differentiate notifications even further, TrillMark lets you set colors for individual apps, so that you’re sure to see the alerts that are critical to you and to know which apps they’re coming from at a glance.

TrillMark requires some tweaking. For instance, when I’m shuffling through songs in the Music app, I have a notification appear on screen with the song title and artist, but I don’t necessarily want a noise from TrillMark pinging over the music. Fortunately, if you go into the settings, you can ensure that such notifications appear silently.

Echo

Let’s wrap up this week’s look at apps with an iOS puzzle game that lets you clear your mind while passing a few spare moments.

Echo requires you to navigate your way through a maze with just a limited number of moves, but fortunately, there’s an Echo button where your past moves reappear to help you unlock doors and overcome obstacles. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but all becomes clear the moment you start playing.

Different game modes — a campaign mode along with endless play and daily puzzles — add to Echo’s replayability, while soothing music creates a very calming experience.

Best of all, Echo is a free download with no ads marring the experience, though there is a button where you can send a tip the developer’s way.

Go to the podcast page.

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Just up the road from Apple in Redwood City, Steve Jobs’s NeXT is fading and flailing, but has a modern operating system just like the one Apple desperately needs to buy to replace Mac OS. An unlikely person makes an unlikely phone call to save the day.

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You ever have one of those moments when you start to copy a large file in the Finder and groan when the Progress Window tells you it’s going to take forever? I used to have them all the time, and it didn’t make sense until I figured out that macOS was gaslighting me about my network connection.

The other day, Friend of the site Todd Vaziri wrote on Mastodon:

Two M4 Mac minis, both running Tahoe on the same local network, gigabit ethernet, using standard File Sharing. I can’t reliably play a Blu-ray rip from one computer to another without it stuttering… a measly 2.82 Mbit/sec file. What am I doing wrong here?

I replied, as did many other people, to tell Todd that he could probably solve his problem by disconnecting both Macs from his in-house Wi-Fi network. He tried that, and all of a sudden, his file transfers were running at fast Ethernet speeds.

You’d think that your Mac would detect the fastest network connection available and prioritize that, but it doesn’t. There is, however, a very helpful setting you can use to prioritize your settings. You can find it in the Settings app, under Network. Scroll to the very bottom of that pane and click on the inscrutable downward-facing caret next to the inscrutable ellipsis symbol (yep, System Settings is still terrible four years later), and choose Set Service Order.

In the resultant window, you can drag all of your Mac’s possible network connections up and down to create a priority list. Items at the top are your Mac’s preferred network connections; ones at the bottom will only be used if there are no other active connections. If you put Wi-Fi at the very bottom, your Mac should only use it when no other active connections are available.

Except: It doesn’t work reliably, and hasn’t for years. Because I’ve been exactly where my friend Todd was the other day, baffled as to why my two Macs on fast Ethernet connections were chugging through an impossibly slow file transfer. The answer was solved the moment I manually disconnected from my Wi-Fi router.

So what is a Mac user to do? The obvious answer would seem to be to turn off your Wi-Fi, but that’s not advisable: Macs use Wi-Fi for all sorts of features beyond getting on the Internet. If you turn off Wi-Fi, you’ll lose access to Continuity features, including the ability to AirDrop.

Instead, the right way to approach this is to leave your Wi-Fi on, but not connected to any routers. As a convenience, any Wi-Fi network you connect to is set to “auto-join,” so when you see it again later, your Mac will reconnect. That’s great, but if you’re being bitten by this issue, that convenience becomes a frustration. Instead, open Settings, choose Wi-Fi, and click the ellipsis button at the far right side of your Known Networks list. You’ll be given a small menu of options, including the (presumably checked) Auto-Join. Uncheck this setting by choosing it, and now your Mac won’t automatically glom onto your local Wi-Fi network. Do this for any networks that your Mac might connect to when you’re trying to be on your at-home or in-office Ethernet.

There is a downside to this approach. When I unplug my laptop from its docking station and open it up somewhere in my house, I have to manually connect to my Wi-Fi network. And when I’m back at my desk, I need to manually disconnect. (These can both be handled by clicking on the Wi-Fi symbol next to the network’s name, right from the Wi-Fi menu in Control Center.) Gray means it’s not connected, white with an accent color means it’s connected.

Yes, it’s a little bit of a hassle. So you need to ask yourself: How much am I affected by my Mac inadvertently using my Wi-Fi connection when it’s also connected to a wired network? The answer may be “not at all,” in which case you should probably keep using Wi-Fi using the Auto-Join regimen that Apple uses as its default.

But if you’re like me, and have seen slow file transfers and unstable videoconference connections resolved by dropping off of Wi-Fi and back to Ethernet, you may find that manually connecting and disconnecting from Wi-Fi is a small price to pay for networking stability.

[Apple folks take note: I have re-filed this bug, “Network traffic often sent to wrong interface based on network priority,” as FB24893093 after originally filing it as FB16275329, which was closed in 2025 because it was theoretically fixed in a late Sequoia build. Either it’s back, or it never left.]

Go to the podcast page.

Safari web apps are great when they fit the job. But sometimes you need Chromium: a Chrome extension, a separate browser profile, or simply a website that works better in Chrome.

Coherence X6 turns any website into its own standalone Mac app, powered by the Chromium browser of your choice.

Instead of living in another browser tab, each site opens in its own standard Mac window, with its own Dock icon, profile, accounts, extensions, and settings. Apps stay isolated from one another, so you can keep work and personal accounts separate, create distraction-free versions of the sites you use every day, or build dedicated apps around specific workflows.

Coherence also gives those apps capabilities you don’t normally get from a website shortcut. You can control which links stay inside an app and which open elsewhere, create apps that always open in Incognito, use different Chromium browsers for different apps, and customize how each app behaves.

X6 makes all of this much more powerful. Coherence apps now behave properly throughout macOS, including normal drag-to-Dock behavior and correct app identities in Stage Manager. You can also clone an existing browser environment into a new app, bringing over your logins, bookmarks, settings, and the extensions you choose.

The result is the power and compatibility of a full Chromium browser, packaged into focused, isolated apps that feel at home on your Mac.

Six Colors readers can save 20% on Coherence X6 this week with code SIXCOLORS. Learn more, create your first app free, or purchase Coherence at bzgapps.com/coherence.

iPhone 18 Pro Max uses an innovative battery-firmware solution that limits battery capacity to below 20 Wh from the time it’s manufactured through its transport from the factory. When you activate your iPhone, the limit is removed and the battery’s full charging capacity is available.

However, should you need to ship your iPhone after you’ve been using it, you can trigger this feature, dubbed, “Prepare to Ship”, in Settings. And just so you’re not surprised, Apple warns that “While your iPhone battery discharges, it might become warmer than usual. This is expected.” I feel like iPhone batteries already get pretty warm, how warm are we talking here? Hand-warmer on a ski slope warm? Cook a pancake warm?

Still, Apple does stress that the battery is perfectly safe for other uses, including air travel, and that this is purely a shipping requirement. I sure would have loved to be a fly on the wall for the discussion that ended up with this feature. It’s some serious in-the-box thinking.¹

[via The Verge]

Go to the linked site.

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2024’s M4 Mac mini was a revelation. It packed Apple silicon power into a shockingly compact space, breathing new life into Apple’s all-time utility Mac and (eventually) making it into a go-to device for home AI and even back-end podcast transcription.

Two years later, the Mac mini gets its first update since it became such a popular purchase. It’s a bit surprising: while the high-end model has updated to the familiar M5 Pro chip found in the MacBook Pro, the lower-end model has skipped right over the M5 and become the first Mac to be released using the next-generation 2-nanometer M6 chip.

It has also, unfortunately, seen a price increase. The Mac mini famously debuted in 2005 at $499 ($855 in today’s dollars), and the M4 model was introduced at $599 in 2024 dollars. Unfortunately, after a midstream price increase and the release of this new version, the starting price has been boosted to $899, a 50% increase over that relatively recent base price.

I get it. Memory and processors are skyrocketing in price due to the AI gold rush, on top of inflation. But the fact remains that at $599, the Mac mini was about as close to an impulse buy as a Mac desktop could get. At $899, it’s crossed an invisible threshold. I can understand it, but I don’t have to like it.

Previously, on Mac mini…

On the outside, this Mac mini is identical to the previous model. It’s still a 5-inch square that’s only two inches high and weighs only 1.5 pounds, a shock of a size if you’re used to the Mac mini’s pre-2024 silhouette. It’s got two USB-C ports on the front and three Thunderbolt ports on the back. (It’s Thunderbolt 4 if you’ve got the M6 model, Thunderbolt 5 for the M5 Pro.)

We’ll get to the chip momentarily, but Apple has made internal upgrades on some other Mac mini parts. Wi-Fi and Ethernet were left untouched in the 2024 Mac mini update, but not this year—the M6/M5 Pro models support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Both models also come standard with 2.5Gb Ethernet, with 10Gb Ethernet as a configure-to-order option.

And now, the star of the show

The Mac mini vaulted right over the base M5 processor entirely, preventing me from making more references to that classic “Star Trek” episode where a computer tries to take Captain Kirk’s job because some A.I. genius has conned people in positions of authority into thinking that’s a good idea. (Thank goodness I have no more need to reference such outdated, irrelevant themes.)

As a result, the release of this Mac mini also marks the debut of the M6, an entirely new generation of Apple silicon that will undoubtedly populate numerous Macs and iPads over the next year. That makes it worth peeking into the details of how the M6 is structured and how it performs, even if you’re not currently in the market for a new tiny Mac.

Since the beginning, Apple’s M-series processors have included two different sets of CPU cores designed with different characteristics. The performance cores were designed to run at high speed and rip through tasks, albeit at the cost of greater power usage. (Apple would tell you that even its performance cores are also optimized to use power intelligently whenever possible, of course.) The company’s efficiency cores, on the other hand, were designed to perform lower priority low-level tasks—and computers have a lot of those!—while excelling at energy savings.

While power efficiency isn’t as important for a Mac plugged into an outlet, it’s vitally important to laptops, which make up the bulk of Apple’s Mac sales. And of course, power efficiency can also reduce thermal issues that require venting, and reduce the amount of electricity you’re paying for.

Last year, though, Apple introduced a new core type, the “super core,” with the M5. What differentiates a super core from a performance core? It comes down to the different ways computer programs do work. Software splits up tasks into individual components, or threads, and passes those to the system to send to the processor. Some software is very good at breaking up work into tiny individual components, which is good, because those tasks can be distributed across many CPU cores, where work can proceed in parallel. But some tasks aren’t broken up so readily—whether it’s because the software hasn’t been optimized, or because the task itself really is just a single big chunk that must be processed at once.

According to Apple, super cores are focused on chewing through those single-threaded tasks at maximum performance. This differentiates them from performance cores, which Apple says are tuned to perform better at complex, multi-threaded jobs. Meanwhile, those efficiency cores are percolating quietly in the background, taking care of lesser tasks that don’t require the muscle that the other two core types deliver.

In the M6, for the first time, Apple has decided to apply all three different core types to a single design: It’s got six efficiency cores, four performance cores, and two super cores. Something for every kind of task, ideally, leading to the most optimal mix of power and efficiency.

In addition, the M6 has 12 GPU cores, which pick up the neural accelerators Apple added in the M5 generation (and therefore never before seen in the Mac mini), to assist in AI jobs that run on the chip’s graphics hardware. There’s also a new dual 16-core Neural Engine, so Apple’s doubling its own home-made neural processors, all in the goal of making the M6 more impressive as a processor for AI jobs.

With these changes, the M6 ran 11% faster than the M5 in single-core CPU performance, according to my tests. That’s slightly below average for an M-series generational update, though of course if you’re specifically upgrading from any previous Mac mini, you’ll see much greater performance boosts.

In multi-core testing, the M6 performed 23% faster than the M5 generation, very slightly above average for an Apple silicon generation change.

And when it comes to GPU scores, they’re up 24% from the M5 generation—again, a very slightly above average per-generation improvement. Of course, this improvement is largely built on the back of Apple’s choice to include 12 GPU cores in the M6, up from 10 in the M5. If you divide the scores per GPU core, it suggests that Apple (quite understandably) took this generation off from massively improving its GPU core design, given the major steps forward it took in the previous two generations.

This is now part of the Apple silicon playbook. If you see Apple add GPU cores in a processor generation, it’s most likely doing so because the actual GPU cores aren’t particularly improved, so to make the chip faster, it piles in more. Increasing the GPU count by 20 percent will generally improve your GPU performance by… 20 percent. The strategy allows Apple to crow about improved GPU performance even in a year where its attention is turned elsewhere.

What’s harder to tease out in any sort of benchmark test is how the chip will perform day to day, with a varied workload. Maxing out one CPU core or all the CPU cores provides a clean answer; Apple’s three-core-type design likely works more subtly in practice. My guess is that the mix of CPU core types will result in a better balance of power and efficiency, which is essentially Apple’s holy grail when it comes to processor design. Apple wants its chips to be able to rip through a task when you need it to, but run effortlessly (and in a low-power state) the rest of the time. That’s much more difficult to measure, however.

The Apple silicon Mac era has now lasted so long that we can begin to see patterns and judge how individual generations fit into the story. The M6 processor appears to be an average improvement, so close to dead-on average that it feels like it was made specifically to meet an internal metric for improved CPU and GPU performance.

These results are colored, at least a bit, by Bloomberg’s report that Apple has decided not to ship high-end M6 processors at all, and jump directly to a new M7 generation that is better suited to “meet growing demand for on-device AI capabilities and more graphics-intensive software.” There’s nothing wrong with the M6 at all, but if Apple’s next generation chip design includes some major AI and graphics performance leaps, I can see why the company might want to prioritize that release rather than rolling out an entire chip line-up based on an adequate but uninspiring creep forward in performance.

Small is beautiful

Back to the Mac mini. Since Dan Moren reviewed the last two releases of this product, I haven’t gotten a chance to spend much time with it, or to write about it in detail.

Let me be clear: I love it.

I’ve been using Mac minis since the very beginning. I’ve had a Mac mini in my home as a server for most of its existence as a product.

In the late 2010s the Mac mini was in the wilderness. It wasn’t updated for more than three years.

But thanks to Apple silicon, it has gotten a new lease on life—and a new design. The fact that the Mac mini became a hot product in the last year just warms my heart. It’s always been Apple’s most versatile Mac, capable of performing whatever Mac jobs you want to throw at it. The smaller size just makes it that much more delightful. It’s a shame about the price, but you could say that about most tech prices these days.

Still, what a computer! Even the performance of the base M6 model is more than enough for most computing tasks that regular people will ever need. If you invested in an external display a few years ago, most likely that display is still going strong—and attaching a new Mac mini to it will just refresh everything. If you want a Mac to live in a closet and serve files and web pages and run AI agents or whatever, it’ll be great for that too.

The Mac mini has come into its own at last, and I’m glad for that. Perhaps in the next few years, prices will settle down and Apple will allow it to cross back over into territory where it’s more of an impulse buy, a “why wouldn’t you upgrade?” sort of proposition. Right now, make no mistake, it’s still a great option if there’s a tiny space for it in your life—but you’ll need to actually do the work to calculate the value it will provide you before making that decision.

As of this month, Rogue Amoeba has been building independent Mac software development for 24 years. It’s celebrating that anniversary with Six Colors readers, who can save 24% on SoundSource, or anything else they make. Just use discount code SIXCOLORS24 in their store, through the end of September.

SoundSource is a remarkable app, giving you powerful control of your Mac’s audio, right in your menu bar. Why Apple hasn’t made sound more of a priority on macOS is anyone’s guess, but Rogue Amoeba has filled the gap spectacularly. SoundSource offers per-app volume and effects, as well as output re-routing. I like to put up YouTube TV on my MacBook Pro’s built-in display while I’m doing work on my Studio Display. I use SoundSource to route the audio from YouTube TV to the laptop speakers, so the audio is “coming from the right place” and doesn’t get in the way of the audio coming from the main display.

SoundSource 6 also has new AirPlay support! Sadly, macOS lets you set a single AirPlay device as your default output. SoundSource doesn’t care—it’ll stream audio from any app on your Mac to AirPlay devices around your home. And yes, it also lets you group output devices, so you can put one app’s audio on AirPlay speakers in multiple rooms—while all the other audio stays on your Mac.

There’s a fully functional free trial available from Rogue Amoeba’s website. And yes, they’re all already updated for compatibility with MacOS 27 Golden Gate.

Don’t forget: use discount code SIXCOLORS24 on their store this month to save with a long-time indie developer.

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

Over at OpenAI, ChatGPT head Nick Turley wrote in an internal message that publishers would face an “existential threat” from commercial products trained on news content that can be used to substitute news providers. One Microsoft document even described a “doom loop,” news orgs said, “that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.”

Truly damning stuff. Anthropic’s settlement with authors—of which, full disclosure, I am one—allowed the company to sidestep the admission of wrongdoing, but it remains pretty clear that all the people at these companies knew exactly what they were doing. This is emblematic of the worst of the tech industry, the move-fast-and-break-things ethos that doesn’t stop to consider what you lose when you break things—or, if you prefer your lessons in easily digestible pop culture references, I got two for you.

Go to the linked site.

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The new AI Siri came out this week as part of OS 27 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and it’s a life changer. A phone changer. It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting….

The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling.

I used the beta-test version all summer, growing more and more excited. Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.

David’s absolutely right—Siri AI really works. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite good. The trick is, as he puts it, “remembering you have Siri” (and that it’s useful now). I have so thoroughly trained myself not to use Siri that I struggle to remember to use it when I’m not explicitly trying to test it.

In any event, Pogue provides 125(!) examples of Siri prompts he issued, and details the results—including some surprising successes and a few failures. (The failures clearly point to where Apple needs to put its attention as it improves this feature, especially when it comes to connecting to more apps, including Health.)

Go to the linked site.

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According to Apple, its coverage of Friday’s Giants-Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium will include 14 different iPhone 18 Pros “embedded throughout Dodger Stadium,” including in the pitch clock, backstop, foul pole, and both bullpens. The idea is to provide unusual vantage points that haven’t been seen in baseball broadcasts before.

In addition, Friday’s game marks the fourth immersive broadcast of the season, providing a you-are-there perspective for Vision Pro users.

This is the last Friday Night Baseball game of this year.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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Apple desperately needs a replacement for Mac OS, but negotiations with Jean-Louis Gassée’s Be are at the breaking point. But does CEO Gil Amelio have any other options?

Go to the podcast page.

This week’s look at interesting apps features four such multiplatform wonders that let you do everything from type with your voice, post on a social network or jot down random thoughts on at least two different Apple devices. And our lone macOS-only app should prove pretty useful in its own right.

If you’ve come across an app that you find useful no matter what device it works on, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com.

Voice Keyboard Pro

My high school typing teacher would frown upon hearing this, but typing sometimes feels like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And since I’m the type of person who tends to speak aloud the words as I type them, why am I even bothering with the middleman of a keyboard and not just letting my voice handle all the work?

Voice Keyboard Pro lets me do just that, allowing me to press and hold a key on my MacBook Air keyboard — the Control key, by default, to be exact — and dictate into any app that allows for text entry. I’ve used Voice Keyboard Pro to enter text into BBEdit, the built-in Notes app, and the Gmail web page in Safari, all without any fuss.

Transcription is fairly accurate — Voice Keyboard Pro knew enough to properly capitalize “BBEdit,” for example. But it’s not flawless, as my efforts to dictate a message to Jason Snell kept turning his first name into “JSON.” I imagine that’s something the app would learn to correct over time.

Voice Keyboard Pro isn’t just about dictation, as the app offers a Meeting mode that not only records what’s said in one-on-ones, standup sessions and sprint planning, but also offers a nice summary of what you talk about afterwards.

You can try out Voice Keyboard Pro for free on a limited basis with five transcriptions per day. A $4.99/month Pro subscription unlocks the app and adds custom vocabulary and offline modes.

Play

I cannot tell you how many times this scenario plays out: I will be scrolling through my YouTube feed when I see a video and think “My wife will probably enjoy watching this, I’ll have to remember it for later.” Of course, I will not because my brain is too crowded to remember random YouTube videos upon command.

The simply-named app Play now does the remembering for me. Copy a YouTube link into Play, and it’s kept in a watchlist complete with metadata — you can even watch YouTube videos directly in the app. In addition to YouTube, Play also supports Vimeo, TikTok and Instagram Reels; I’ve also posted Bluesky links with embedded video into Play, though I have to click through to the website to play back the video.

Play has a tagging feature that helps you organize videos. For instance, I can tag videos containing recipes with a Cooking tag for easy reference later on. Other bookmarking and customization features let you organize and annotate your video playlists as much or as little as you like.

You get to try out Play for seven days to get a feel for the app. After that, a $2.99/month subscription unlocks all the features. Though I’ve used Play primarily on my Mac, the app also works on iPhones, iPads, Apple TV and Vision Pro headsets.

Skyscraper

After the social network formerly known as Twitter followed its owner straight into the sewer, I’ve found that I’ve transitioned to Bluesky rather nicely. What I have yet to do is find a satisfying Bluesky client app, though Skyscraper looks like it might change that now that the version 1.6 update has delivered a native macOS version.

Skyscraper lets you scroll through your timeline, remembering where you left off across all your devices. (The app also comes in iOS/iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS versions.) It’s easy enough to switch between my curated feed and the different Discover and Popular with Friends feeds through a drop-down menu. I also find the stats included in the Notifications view showing how many people have replied, reposted or favorited my Bluesky posts to be a nice balm for my ego (or a devastating blow, based on the vagaries of my popularity).

The free download delivers enough features to get by, though some users will want to pay up for a $2.99/month Pro account that adds support for multiple accounts, notification customization and other niceties.

Einfall

My deep dive into the world of apps has revealed that there are a lot of options out there if you want something that helps you quickly jot down your thoughts. Einfall takes things a step further, not just by providing a quick way to jot down ideas as they occur to you, but to take action on them as well.

Once you’ve created an entry in Einfall — it could be anything from a list of to-dos to an idea for a story — you can then use the app to route it elsewhere, whether that’s creating a reminder or calendar entry, or even using AI tools to expand on your thought. Because Einfall works across multiple devices — there are macOS and iOS versions — you can store ideas that occur to you just about anywhere. I especially like the fact that there’s a lock screen widget for the iOS version so that you don’t even have to unlock your phone to get an idea down.

I don’t think the app is for everyone, as the actions interface is taking me some getting used to, but people who will find Einfall useful will likely realize that right away. At any rate, you can download the app for free and jot down ideas in it to your heart’s content. You can try 15 actions before you need to unlock Einfall for good with a one-time $29.99 payment.

Eyes Forward

If you have never longed for an app that turns your Mac into a teleprompter, then you can stop reading this column early today. But for podcasters who have to read tricky ad copy while on camera, actors who record their own auditions or anyone else who needs to stay on script without breaking eye contact, a teleprompter app becomes a very handy tool. And Eyes Forward — a $1.99 one-time download — offers an easy-to-use solution.

You enter in a duration or words per minute into Eyes Forward to set the scrolling speed for your text. You can also move the floating Eyes Forward window to just below your Mac’s camera, with developer Robert Hirsch recommending that you narrow the window to help make your eye contact seem more natural.

From there, it’s a matter of formatting the script — you can bold words, for example, if you want to remember to emphasize what you’re saying — saving it, and loading it into the virtual teleprompter. The ability to toggle between light and dark modes as you prefer adds an extra level of polish to an app that delivers exactly what it promises.

If you have HomeKit-compatible security cameras, you may have heard that Apple was going to ship an Apple Intelligence upgrade with the version 27 operating system releases. Apple Home would now provide an analysis in words of what was happening in a clip, making it easier to search for things that had occurred, instead of “animal” or a person’s name.

But it’ll cost you. Maybe more than you expected. Apple had said it would require an iCloud+ subscription, its name for what used to be simply extra storage. Starting at $0.99 a month (in the United States) for 50 GB of extra storage—barely enough for any purpose—options range all the way to $59.99 a month for 12 TB of storage. With an Apple One plan, you can increase that to 14 TB.

Over time, Apple added additional features: iCloud Private Relay, Hide My Email, a custom email domain name, Apple Invites, and HomeKit Secure Video. A 50 GB tier supported one camera, 200 GB ($2.99 a month) supported up to five, and the 2 TB ($9.99 a month) and higher tiers supported unlimited cameras.

In a support note updated September 9, Apple dropped the price bomb. Because video summaries require higher usage of Apple Intelligence, your iCloud+ subscription has to be at an even higher level than the basic secure video offering:

• 1 camera in the 2 TB tier
• 2 cameras in the 6 TB tier ($29.99 a month)
• 5 cameras in the 12 TB tier ($59.99 a month)

You also need an Apple TV 4K or 2nd-generation HomePod. Make sure they’re upgraded before you try to work with the new feature. To enable it, go to the Home app in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, or macOS 27 Golden Gate. Tap or click the settings icon, then choose the new Apple Intelligence menu. Enable Summarize Videos. You can select as many cameras as your iCloud+ tier supports. Once you flip the switch for that many, the rest are grayed out.

There’s definitely a pricing mismatch here. I don’t think there’s a case for video summaries for 2 to 5 cameras costing $30 to $60 a month if you don’t need the storage. I’ve stayed comfortably at the 2 TB tier for many years—now paid via an Apple One bundle—for personal and family storage, and for the number of cameras we have.

However, I also accept that video processing is computationally intense. Apple can’t throw open the doors. But having advertised a feature as something it feels is useful, this service price tag seems too high. Apple rarely lowers service prices; I can’t think of a time it did. But it also can’t underprice the server capacity required to manage this task. The company may have painted itself into a corner.

Go to the podcast page.

Strategery was always one of our very favorite games in the early days of iOS. And by “we,” I mean large portions of the staff at Macworld, including both myself and Lex Friedman. Lex reviewed the app for Macworld, and we even gave it an award. It was a Hall of Fame iPhone game.

Strategery—named for Will Ferrell’s made-up word during his impression of George W. Bush—was a take on the classic strategy board game Risk. Risk is a clunky game to play, with an awful lot of little plastic pieces and dice rolling. Strategery did away with that, resolving battles with a single tap while replacing the map-inspired board with a series of procedurally generated game terrains. It was really great.

Now the bad news: The classic Strategery game, which hasn’t been updated for nearly a decade, doesn’t work on iOS 27, which (if you hadn’t noticed) came out today. I hate it when beloved software dies. And so does Lex, which is why he sprang into action and began building a game that could be a suitable Strategery replacement. (It was very good! I have played it a bunch over the last few weeks, via TestFlight.)

But then something delightful happened, as Lex recounts:

I loved Strategery. I didn’t feel good about knocking it off. So I reached out to the developers…. I had several delightful video conversations with Sumul and Courtland. And I lucked out: I found two of the nicest developers you could ever hope to meet. They still felt a ton of love for Strategery, they loved how many people still felt warmly about the game — but they didn’t have time to devote to keeping it updated. We worked out a deal for me to take it on.

The result is that Lex’s game inspired by Strategery has become Strategery! Existing Strategery users will just get it as a free update. And new players can buy it for $5.

Lex has added a few new features to Strategery, and with the consultation of the original developers, he’s restored some features he hadn’t even realized that he had missed.

What a happy ending. Strategery would always have a place in App Valhalla, but it’s even better if it remains alive and well. Thanks, Lex.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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—software is a living thing, and those of us who have been using it throughout the beta period this summer can attest to the fact that Apple is constantly at work trying to refine its experiences.

The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities 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.

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 apps 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 off Siri 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 on the home screen. That last interface is available systemwide, in any app, by swiping down from the center of the top of the screen. The search interface has 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 tend to end up with a few orphan blank “New conversation” and “New photo” entries, 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 months that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, early on 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 certainly 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 entails.

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 from an image 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.

And because of Apple’s integration, your Siri AI experience works right via your AirPods. As I was walking down a hill near my house, I found myself wondering how far away the downtown skyscraper I could see was. Without even pulling out my phone, I asked Siri via my AirPods. After a moment, it gave me back an answer, but I realized it had plotted directions, so I replied “How about as the crow flies?” and it not only understood me, but gave me back a reasonable-sounding answer. And even better, it was completely correct.

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. I took a screenshot and asked it to add a bunch of listed panels that I was speaking on to my calendar, and it added only one of them, at the wrong time and in the wrong timezone.² Sometimes it mishears things, as the time I was using my AirPods to tell my wife I was walking past Dunkin’, and it asked me if I meant Duncan.

It’s at times unsettling to realize this is 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, in my experience, 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 to save a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of this new enhanced Siri, 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—though Siri AI will whip up a Python script for you if you ask it—but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. And, more to the point, for questions about your life, contacts, and data? As newly minted CEO John Ternus pointed out as this year’s iPhone event, to get the same results from one of those competing AI chatbots, you’d need to hand it access to all your data. Is that really a better alternative?

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 or later and the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available there.

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.

It’s also worth noting that Apple has also ramped up Siri’s vocal stylings, if you’re on an iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro or later and use the English voices with either the American or British accents. You can now tweak both the pace and the “Expressivity” of the voices with sliders, choosing the ones that sound best to you.

I’ve stuck with my standby British Voice 4 at the default “middle” pace, but I dialed the expressivity way up. Does that make me a sicko? Maybe! The good news is it’s my Siri, not your Siri, so I can do whatever I want. As can you. In general, I don’t find the new voices to be groundshakingly better, but there are improvements, and I hope the company quickly rolls out this option for other languages and accents.

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.³

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, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.

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. (That’s also one place that I find Siri AI particularly handy, since it can often find emails that I struggle to locate.)

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.

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. The default Auto mode chooses the best option for you based on what edits you’re making.

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.

Just browsing

Having had a big year in iOS 26, Safari’s updates are somewhat more modest this year. It has not escaped the application of AI-powered features, with a new automatic tab organization scheme that can group your tabs based on similar themes. The good news is, this is a feature you can turn on or off, though you might have to poke around to find it. When viewing all your tabs, tap the Filter button in the top left. That’ll give you a list of topics it thinks it detects; tap any of those to just see the relevant tabs. Below that in the filter menu, you’ll see an Organize Tabs sub-menu that lets you turn on the automatic grouping.

I found it somewhat helpful, but also kind of random in its groupings. For example it described one set of nine tabs as “Crossword Puzzles,” despite the fact that only one of them was actually a crossword puzzle (all nine, however, were from the New York Times or affiliated sites). Occasionally, I have seen groups rearranged or renamed as you add or remove tabs, which is odd. But I do appreciate that you can quickly close all the tabs in a single group or move them all to a different Safari Tab Group⁴; you can also just drag any tab into or out of one of the automatic groups if you don’t agree with Safari’s decisions. You cannot, however, change the name of an automatic tab organization group.

A new Notify Me feature allows you to set an alert on a page for when content changes. This is a really handy feature, and I like the way Apple implemented it: when you set up an alert, it asks you what it’s looking for. So, for example, if you want to know when tickets go on sale for an event, or an item is back in stock, you just type that in. Then you can choose how often it checks, from hourly to monthly, including on what day or days of the week and what time. That’s it; you’ll get an alert when the thing happens. The only downside is that hourly being the option that checks the most frequently, it might not be fast enough to catch certain high-demand items. I appreciate, though, that whenever you visit the page for which you’ve set an alert, it shows it in a little banner at the top, along with an Edit button. You can also see a full list of the items you’ve got notifications for in Settings: Safari: Notify Me, along with the ability to edit them and, handy, information on the last time it checked.

Finally, there’s a big new Describe an Extension feature in Safari that allows you, as the name suggests, to create an extension just by typing a few lines. It’s a powerful application for bespoke needs—that website that never quite displays the way you want it to, or that feature that nobody’s ever implemented. I appreciate that if you describe functionality offered by an existing extension in the App Store, Safari will suggest that to you to check out—always nice to give a nod to third-party developers. I honestly struggled to find a need for an extension, but that may be just because I’ve already developed most of my own workarounds over the years; but I’m glad this feature exists and that Apple is recognizing that users want to take their customization to an additional level.

What’s the matter, never taken a Shortcut before?

It’s been a little while since Shortcuts got some time in the limelight, but iOS 27 brings a few much appreciated improvements to the automation system, along with one big new feature.

Let’s start with the big news: Describe a Shortcut. Like Safari’s extension feature, this simplifies the process of making shortcuts by allowing you to describe in plain language what you want it to do—Shortcuts then goes and builds it. I’ve been impressed what it can manage for simple workflows, which it can build more or less on its own. I particularly like that the system will ask you questions if it needs clarification, and that it can refine the shortcut with further prompting.

For more complicated Shortcuts, or ones that involve actions from third-party apps, the describe system doesn’t really work, but it can still provide a good jumping-off point. I wanted to see how much of one of my more complex automations it could duplicate, and the resulting basic functionality was much more straightforward in some ways that what I’d designed⁵, so I ended up rebuilding my automation around what Shortcuts had generated.

Despite its limitations, some of which I imagine will be eliminated in future updates, I think this is a great tool that hopefully broadens the appeal of making shortcuts—which, in turn, will hopefully mean more time and attention spent on improving Shortcuts.

Speaking of which, there are a number of smaller improvements too. I already mentioned the existence of an Otherwise If option, which is huge for those of us with complex shortcuts; the editor itself is also speedier and more usable. And automations are now directly integrated into the shortcuts themselves, rather than just being isolated in a separate part of the app. That makes those shortcuts easier to understand and troubleshoot.

Apple’s also added the ability to store persistent data, which even syncs across iCloud, a huge boon to those who want to make more complicated shortcuts without relying on third-party tools. And, in another much appreciated move, there’s a streamlined approach to privacy and permissions, which are now all viewable in a single place within the shortcuts info panel. This should help avoid the pesky repeated prompts for access that could make shortcuts fail.

While there are still issues left to address in Shortcuts, I’m very pleased by the improvements in iOS 27, and even more heartened by the fact that they happened. Shortcuts feels like it’s been lying fallow for some time, and I’m glad to see that Apple has remembered it’s a vital and useful part of its operating systems.

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.

I really love the new button above the keyboard that appears when you’ve copied something to your clipboard, showing you a preview and letting you tap to paste it, though it’s taken me some time to circumvent my deeply ingrained muscle memory of holding to bring up the context menu to paste. (It’s also vastly more useful than the overly aggressive “Write with Siri” prompt that appears when above an empty entry field. I’m not that desperate when I’m writing a text message, guys.)

While Apple announced new Pro photo features for the Camera app on the recently introduced iPhone 18 Pro, the rest of us do still get a nice feature update: you can now edit the controls you want to appear at the top of the app. By default, you get Flash, Live Photo, and Shared Library, but if you tap the controls button to the right of the shutter, you’ll see an Edit button appear at the top of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll be able to remove items from the top menu, or add any of the others for quick access. It’s a nice way to streamline the app or to make sure the features you want available are always there.

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.

During the beta period, Passwords offered an agentic AI feature that would scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Apple’s removed that feature for the 27.0 release, saying it will return later. That’s good because, in my experience, it needed a little more time in the oven. Only a handful of the ones it found could be successfully updated. That said, it’s a very cool utility, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses.

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 thoroughly 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. I would appreciate if it were a little smarter about some things, such as picking up timezone from a specified location. If you see the event I’m scheduling is in San Francisco and I’m in Boston, maybe at least prompt for which timezone I’d like to use. But I get it: timezones are hard.

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. Buildings do admittedly look less warped when you get in close, with sharper detail. For some reason, though, the new maps in Boston appear much, much darker than the iOS 26 counterparts; I didn’t see the same results in New York City, for example. Not sure what’s going on there.

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

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

Every year, I come to the end of the review and have a moment of introspection. Who precisely is such a review for in this day and age? People don’t really need to know if an update is worth installing. Apple’s own stats say 86 percent of iPhones introduced in the last four years are on iOS 26, and 79 percent overall. (And that was for a very divisive year.) For better or worse, the vast majority of people just hit update.

So I think the role of the reviewer has evolved. Consider this less of a review of whether you should get iOS 27, and more as an overview of what to look for, what to try—what works well, what could still use some tweaking. In an update like iOS 27, which has a lot going on, that’s more important to ever. Even I’ve missed features here and there, or found ones that I just haven’t had the time or opportunity to try.

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.

Last year’s macOS release, macOS 26 Tahoe, was a mixed bag. While it added a bunch of solid new productivity features, it also included a half-baked visual update that muddied the entire interface. While I chose to view the glass as half full and accepted the interface imperfections, I understand that a lot of people just gave Tahoe a pass rather than inflict a visual regression on themselves.

No matter how full you think the (liquid) glass was, I have good news: macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, and it’s good. Not only has Apple addressed most of the visual problems with last year’s release, but if you skipped Tahoe, you’re also going to be dazzled by Tahoe features like Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight.

For everyone who spent a year grinding in Tahoe, Golden Gate doesn’t just improve the look of the entire system, but offers a host of other improvements. This is an update nobody will have to apologize 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.

The iconic macOS “stoplight” window controls have even gotten a bit of a glow-up, with some Liquid Glass shading added to the three circles in the top left of windows. I think they’re cute. Not only are they more harmonious with the other Liquid Glass design elements in macOS (and all of Apple’s current operating systems), but they also hearken back to the classic Aqua design language that was introduced along with Mac OS X back in the day. I don’t know if I want to lick these stoplight icons, but they do look a little candy-like, and I’m here for it.

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 fine—I think in the end I will adjust it just to the opaque side of center.

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.

Apple is labeling this feature as a beta within macOS 27.0, though I’m of the opinion that if you ship a feature in your “final” OS version, it’s fair to judge it. Fortunately for Apple, Siri AI actually works quite well. In terms of general-knowledge queries, it’s very good—good enough that if you previously relied on Google Gemini or ChatGPT for basic questions, you probably can just use Siri and be happy.

But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. And here, the results are encouraging—but a bit of a work in progress. Siri AI takes advantage of an updated Spotlight index to search files on your Mac, including data in apps such as Mail and Calendar. I found that asking targeted questions can generate good responses, but you need to be aware of the system’s limitations. Some third-party apps aren’t tied into the Spotlight index, and if there isn’t local searchable data (for example, if you use Gmail and aren’t using Apple Mail) you just can’t search that data at all. I ended up setting up Apple’s Calendar and Mail apps on my Mac, even though I use Fantastical and Mimestream for those purposes, just so I could be sure Spotlight and Siri could search through my calendar items and mail.

Still, there are some magic moments to be had. I asked Siri what episodes I should be watching next for the “Magnum, p.i.” podcast I do with friends—yes, I have my finger on the pulse of today’s culture—and it managed to make an intelligent search of my Messages archive and pull out the relevant message that I sent to the group listing what our next episodes were. That felt like magic. It doesn’t happen like that every time—there’s a lot of “here are a bunch of PDFs that might work, good luck”—but it’s all quite promising.

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. It’s at the top of every single context menu (regardless of applicability) and 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. I don’t mind the impulse, but it feels like Apple is trying too hard to push Ask Siri into places it doesn’t belong.

And I don’t want to soft-pedal the Spotlight improvements, even though they were obviously made to benefit Siri AI. Spotlight is also better in Golden Gate, all around. Suggestions are better, and if you use Apple Mail you will find the search function there much improved. Sometimes upgrades made to benefit AI can benefit regular humans, too!

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.

It is, in some ways, a longstanding dream of the computer industry finally realized. You can literally describe what you want your device to do—”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.

Describe a Shortcut is limited—Shortcuts of great complexity are beyond its ken, as are ones that use actions from third-party apps—but when it works, it’s magical.

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.

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 changed the Shortcuts interface a bit. 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. Fortunately, it’s easy to resize or hide that pane and go back to the more standard Shortcuts look.

New horizons for Photos

There are a bunch of big changes in Photos this year, but the three biggest ones are driven by AI. And they’re a bit of a mixed bag.

Clean Up, which removes unwanted items from the background of photos, has been improved a lot. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context backgrounds.

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. 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.

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.

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 if you are the sort of person who wants to assign star ratings to things.

Safari gets organized

Across the 27 OS releases, Safari now sports 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, so I basically haven’t used this feature. I’m glad it’s there for those who are desperately in need of an injection of tab organization, though.

There’s also a new Notify Me feature that will send you a message if a webpage you’re watching changes. You can specify what kinds of changes you’re looking for using natural language, and it’ll check every hour, day, week, or month. Personally I don’t think I would ever use this feature for anything—nothing has occurred to me in the months I’ve been using the Golden Gate betas!—but if you’re someone who has a seldom-updated site you’re monitoring, maybe something involving a local government or school, I could see it being useful.

What I have found useful, however, is Safari’s exciting new Describe Extension feature. This is essentially “vibe coding” of Safari extensions. The process is fairly simple, kicked off by clicking on the utility icon to the far left of the URL bar and choosing Describe Extension. It works exactly that way: You type out what you want the extension to do, and it’ll build it for you—but first, it’ll also search the App Store to see if there are available Safari extensions that already solve the problem.

If you’re thinking that you don’t know what you’d use this feature for, I get it. But over the summer, I ran into two instances where I was frustrated by what a website was doing, and ended up using Describe Extension to solve my problem. It was extremely satisfying.

I use StrawPoll.com to schedule podcast recording, but the site has two separate scheduling features: Create Poll and Schedule Meeting. Both of them are, of course, tools to create a poll that schedules a meeting. I never remember which one to click on. So I had Safari build me an extension for that website that hides Create Poll from the site’s navigation bar, and redirects all attempts to load the Create Poll page to the Schedule Meeting page instead. It works!

There’s also the Relay podcast networks title-voting page, which offers an archive so I can look back on title suggestions for other shows—but that link appears nowhere in the site’s interface, so I’m always trying to look it up or guess what it is. I had Safari add a link to the page’s nav bar so I never need to look it up again.

When you update to Golden Gate, keep an eye out. There are lots of opportunities for simple customizations to websites you use, once you realize you have the power to describe an extension.

This section is running in the background

In Golden Gate, the Dock now continues to display apps that haven’t quite quit, but are continuing to run in the background, with a note attached to their contextual menu that they are “running in the background” and an option to stop that background processing.

I understand why this might be useful in some circumstances. You might want to know that the app you “quit” is still hanging around. In practice, though, this is entirely contrary to how the Dock is supposed to operate.

The Dock is not a notification board for Apple’s privacy and security systems to warn us about apps doing weird things. It’s a launcher and monitor of apps that are providing a user interface. It’s never been a place to display background apps, and it shouldn’t start being one now.

On top of that, I just can’t figure out why some apps appear in the Dock in this state and some don’t. I understand an app like Photoshop, that sometimes keeps running for a little while after you quit it, being flagged in the Dock until it’s properly quit. (Which it already did, for the record.) I don’t understand fully quitting an app like Shortcuts and having it just sit in the Dock as if it were still running. Is the app misbehaving? Is this a bug? I’m baffled about this choice all the way around.

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.

• 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 there—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared five years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• 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!

• In June, Apple introduced a feature that injected some agentic AI into the Passwords app, so that the app could automatically change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you. When I tried it, it had about a 8% success rate—not great! Apple has pulled this feature from the first version of Golden Gate, hopefully to make it much better, and will re-introduce it later this year.

• Notes has gotten way more Markdown savvy. You could already import Markdown text format into Notes, but now you can go the other way, copying or pasting the contents of styled notes text as Markdown. As someone who writes everywhere in Markdown, this is a great feature.

Sail through the Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is one of California’s crown jewels, where San Francisco and Marin stand apart and allow the Pacific Ocean to mingle with the San Francisco Bay and the vast river deltas of the Central Valley. And for 89 years it’s been spanned by one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

It’s a lot to live up to. And while macOS 27 can’t possibly do that, it does manage to be a very good update that rectifies macOS 26 Tahoe’s greatest sins, unifies a more useful Siri with Spotlight, and hints at some subtle ways Apple can use on-device models to make using your computer more productive.

Tahoe users will find the entire Mac experience more attractive and cohesive. Those who stuck with macOS 15 Sequoia¹ will pick up those improvements as well as Tahoe’s raft of productivity boosts.

I live about six miles north of the Golden Gate. It’s nice here. And for the next year, It’ll be nice to have the company of a macOS version. Fortunately, it’s shaping up to be a good neighbor that’s focused on beautifying the neighborhood.

Rogue Amoeba, leading the way in Mac audio software.

Rogue Amoeba marks their 24th year of independent Mac software development this month. They’re celebrating with Six Colors readers, who can save 24% on SoundSource, or anything else they make. Just use discount code SIXCOLORS24 in their store, through the end of September.

SoundSource has become one of their most popular apps, covering a wealth of things MacOS doesn’t do on its own. SoundSource gives you powerful control of your Mac’s audio right in your menu bar, with per-app volume and effects, as well as output re-routing. Send Safari to your desk speakers, and Music to your headphones, at the same time. And those real-time effects can be applied to any app’s audio, or all audio together.

The new AirPlay support in SoundSource 6 is a standout, too: while MacOS can set a single AirPlay device as your default output, SoundSource can stream audio from any app on your Mac to AirPlay devices around your home. Combine that with its ability to group output devices to put one app’s audio on AirPlay speakers in multiple rooms, while everything else stays on your Mac.

There’s a fully functional free trial available from Rogue Amoeba’s website. It’s also worth noting that all of Rogue Amoeba’s app are already updated for compatibility with MacOS 27 (Golden Gate).

Many thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors. Don’t forget: use discount code SIXCOLORS24 on their store this month to save with a long-time indie developer.

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The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. For example, in the discussion of Live Rewind, we learn that

Audio from the microphone flows into the audio buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip.

You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word.

Notably Apple chose not to use a very common synonym for “flowing” that would be instantly understandable to most, because no doubt it did not like the implications of that word. So I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.¹

Also worth noting that the Siri Recap feature, unlike Live Rewind, does not even bother to alert people around you that recording—sorry, flowing—is happening, using similar linguistic hopscotch. From Apple’s own privacy document:

There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.

The implication obviously being only raw audio could even be considered a privacy violation. That’s an interesting way of framing it, even though I’m pretty sure there are people who would be upset to know that their conversations are being summarized even if audio is not being retained.

Glenn has already done a thorough and even-handed rundown of this feature, but I think Dr. Drang’s point about the lengths to which Apple has to contort itself to make it seem like this feature is on the up-and-up is, in and of itself, telling.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

At my gym, all the signs are handwritten and friendly. In one section, a sign asks members not to drop their weights because there are downstairs neighbors.¹ In the bathrooms, reminders to flush and wash hands. But throughout the gym, signs say—more directly—no live streaming. Other signs ask people to exercise consideration when recording their routines for themselves or their coaches to ensure nobody else is in their sight lines. Privacy in the gym is paramount to ensure everyone is not self-conscious and is comfortable.

I was thinking of my gym when I heard about Live Rewind and Siri Recap in the just-announced Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. These are two of the four flagship Audio Intelligence features launching in beta later this year. Both of these tools record audio continuously. Live Rewind lets you double-press the Digital Crown to receive a transcription of the last 15 seconds of conversation. Siri Recap takes notes on what it hears throughout the day and provides Apple Intelligence-generated summaries.

Both features have, understandably, freaked people out, made them angry, or caused them to shrug in resignation. Surely Apple is exaggerating the privacy protections it explains on the same page it describes the features! And if Apple is all in on recording us all the time without our consent or knowledge whenever one of its devices is nearby, the privacy game is over, isn’t it!? Everything becomes fodder for the machine; private conversations are immutable; the future is surveillance!

I’m not one for extremes, and I’ve studied Apple’s privacy and security provisions and mistakes for nearly 30 years. But I have concerns about these features from social, political, safety, and legal standpoints. Let me tackle the privacy and security first.

Hush, now

When Apple announced Private Cloud Compute in 2024, it was interesting, but it felt academic because it didn’t then release a Siri worth worrying about. In 2026, the PCC expansion with Siri AI is much more important, as Siri may send huge amounts of our personal information to the cloud to provide better answers derived from our data.²

After studying Apple’s details on PCC, I felt reassured. This is partly because one of Apple’s five pillars of PCC integrity is transparency. This is unlike many previous claims by Apple that it would be transparent. Here, they’ve stated exactly what will be available to researchers, and one researcher already found a flaw and was awarded the highest Apple bounty—$150,000. The other pillars include end-to-end encryption, barring access by Apple or other parties through cryptographic design, and no way for an external (or internal!) party to determine which PCC server is processing an individual’s data.

Apple’s promises with Audio Intelligence are somewhat different, though I find them a valid approach to minimizing invasions of one’s privacy and an attempt to reduce violations of other people’s personal sphere. Here are the fundamentals for Live Rewind and Siri Recap:

• The features are opt-in and can be entirely disabled (with a big asterisk, which I discuss in the next section). Live Rewind has to be triggered before it can access a 15-second recording window. Siri Recap must be enabled. This contrasts with Apple Intelligence in the version 27 releases, where, unlike earlier iterations, you cannot disable Apple Intelligence.³

• Audio isn’t recorded, nor is it stored, nor is a transcript made. As it is captured, the audio is not accessible to you, watchOS or iOS, apps, or Apple. Apple achieves this by using the S11 Secure Exclave chip in the new Apple Watch models to process audio; after processing, it immediately discards it, except with Siri Recap, as described below.⁴

• All of the audio processing happens on your Apple Watch and iPhone. The two communicate through end-to-end encryption between Secure Exclave chips.⁵ That prevents leakage. If you engage Siri, however, some portion of the Live Rewind text could be sent to PCC under the same security protections. (Apple says “will.”)

• Siri Recap uses PCC. The process is complicated, exposing as little information as possible within the already secured PCC environment.

• iCloud syncing is end-to-end encrypted. You don’t need to enable Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

• Siri Recap deletes summaries after seven days; Live Rewind’s 15-second text snippets are deleted within 30 seconds after the Apple Watch display dims. You can save Siri Recaps or export them. With Live Rewind, they are retained within the Siri app if you choose to save them or ask Siri about the text.

From a design standpoint, these measures all feel well thought out to prevent all of the egregious use cases one might imagine: Unwanted recordings! Apple analyzing our conversations to sell us stuff (or sell to third parties)! Leakage that would allow friends or strangers to access summaries, snippets, or conversations, including via internet cloud storage!

And yet. I find the above fits into the meme of “My ‘An explanation of how the Apple Watch recording what you are saying is kept private and anonymous’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.”

The right to be unheard

When I’m out in public in the United States, courts have found that in most situations, I have little right to privacy. But then you can shave that down. If a neighbor points a camera from their house at my unfenced front lawn, visible from the street?Generally legal, with some exceptions related to harassment or intimidation. But if a camera points into my house through a window or into a fenced area of my property, most jurisdictions find that “not cool” (a legal term).

The audio side of this is very different. My state of Washington, for instance, is an “all-party consent” state; some states are “one-party consent” or have different rules. “One party” means anyone in the conversation (on a phone, in person, via videoconferencing, etc.) can consent, so they can record audio or have a device or system do it for them. In Washington and other all-party states, every person being recorded must consent, or it is illegal and actionable. (Recording across state lines or internationally becomes complicated.)

The company says it’s not “recording” or “storing” audio. But it is capturing it. Shockingly, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t provide a legal analysis. (Presumably many privacy-focused organizations are doing deep reads of state-level statutes.) But the gut check is what I’m really going for, anyway: do these two features have the feeling of being recorded without one’s permission, even if Apple is trying to mitigate both the technical reality and the sense of it?

On the technical side, it appears that you have to enable each feature in the Watch app on the paired iPhone. Live Rewind requires enabling Siri: Live Rewind: Double Click Digital Crown. You can schedule Siri Recap by time, trigger it or turn it off using a location, or enable or disable it manually, such as through Control Center.

So let’s do the vibe check.

Live Rewind appears to be buffering audio at all times in anticipation of needing to transcribe the last 15 seconds. Apple says Live Rewind is designed to alert those around you that you’re replaying audio: when you double-click the Digital Crown, a chime sounds (ignoring any of your settings) as the Apple Watch’s entire screen is taken over with an animation that includes a microphone indicator.

However, unless Live Rewind is also a literal Time Machine, this doesn’t feel right. People are being warned 15 seconds after their audio is captured. (If Apple doesn’t mean that, it needs to clarify.) Further, it assumes that people will be keyed in to someone’s smartwatch making sounds and flashing images they should be paying attention to.

There’s also no “stop recording” option: if you’re being recorded by Live Rewind, you as an unrelated party—a waiter, a friend, a stranger, someone nearby, a celebrity—have no way to say “no.”

Siri Recap ostensibly is capturing audio whenever it’s active in any of the circumstances above. It has to “buffer” (Apple’s term) in order to send the audio to the Secure Exclave chip on the paired iPhone, which transcribes the audio data and deletes it. There’s no indication to other people that it’s running at all, and no one except the user can opt out.

Apple’s mitigations here include that no speaker is attributed, though Siri Recap identifies and anonymously labels different voices.

With Siri Recap, an Apple Watch automatically discards “potentially harmful content.” Apple defines this as content that “promotes self-harm or hateful speech, and sensitive information, such as financial data, government-assigned identifiers, authentication data, and certain personal identifiers.” I’m not sure this list is a strong argument for Siri Recap.

When using a public or private space, there should be a compelling case, even with the protections enumerated. There are already many kinds of assistive technology used by people with many kinds of disabilities to let them function better in a world often hostile to people with no or low vision or hearing.

However, the assistive case isn’t what defines Live Rewind, a useful feature of convenience that has massive privacy implications despite the way data is captured and stored. And it doesn’t help with Siri Recap at all. Siri Recap is just “life recording” without the label attached, since no audio or video is retained, and only 0.01% of a day’s conversation will likely be summarized.

These features feel like they were designed in a lab and passed through to production without enough people wondering, “Will this provoke a tremendous backlash because of the gaps in privacy that are relatively obvious?”

It’s a jungle, Jim

The best way I can conclude my analysis is by quoting Apple:

Be mindful of those around you. While audio is not recorded and stored, and no speakers are attributed, consider those around you where conversations might be private or sensitive.

Given that Apple has to warn of this, it’s the surest sign the features shouldn’t be released in this form. Apple repeats the form of the warning I see regularly at my gym… but apparently it isn’t heeding it.

Note: This article was updated on Sept. 18 to better explain the Secure Exclave chip, and note that Siri Recap transmits buffered audio to the paired iPhone.

Go to the podcast page.

A description of the Pro Max? The iPhone 6? The iPhone 6 Plus?

None of the above.

Those old enough—cough, cough—to remember all the way back to 2010’s introduction of the iPad might recall this as a common dismissal of the first generation of Apple’s tablet. Which, to be fair, was kind of just a big iPhone.¹ Not that there was anything wrong with that—in fact, it was a pretty successful elevator pitch for an entirely new product category.

But if you tuned in for Apple’s announcement of the iPhone Duo this week, you may have noticed something curious: Apple only rarely made mention of its very successful tablet line. The company’s view is clear: the iPhone Duo, even when open in all of its glory, may evoke an iPad, but it is very much not an iPad.

No padding

When introducing the device, new CEO John Ternus was clear about the Duo’s heritage:

We started with the experience that we wanted for ourselves, a larger display that feels as natural and intuitive as iPad.

At the risk of sounding like I’m nitpicking, let’s delve into that second clause there. It’s a comparison—it feels like an iPad.

Later on, when industrial design chief Molly Anderson did her best Jony-Ive-esque introduction to the device, she couched it in similar terms:

The two sides connect into a continuous frame, surrounding the largest iPhone display we’ve ever designed. Inspired by the versatility of iPad…

There’s a twofer there: the interior screen is the largest iPhone display, and it’s inspired by the iPad. Again, not an iPad.

There are only two other glancing mentions of the iPad. One when Apple mentions upcoming support for the Apple Pencil—”the first time iPhone offers the great Apple Pencil experience that iPad users love”—and slightly later when it discusses the display: “Drawing on our learnings from iPad and Mac, we developed a custom nanotexture finish…”

And that’s it. Those four mentions of the iPad are all that you’ll hear in the entire event.

Apple’s product page for the Duo takes it even further: the only mention there is about picking up a Siri conversation from your iPad and continuing it on your phone. That’s it.

By comparison, that 2010 introduction of the original iPad? You’ll hear the iPhone mentioned more than 20 times, including about how the iPad runs iPhone apps. That was a lineage that Apple wanted made very clear.

Some room of one’s own

Why am I harping on this?

Because you better believe Apple thoroughly considers its word choice in all of its marketing materials, especially in its most viewed annual event.

Like a lot of Apple product marketing choices, this one is simultaneously surprising and, somehow, obvious. Apple could have described the iPhone Duo as an iPhone that opens into an iPad, leveraging the success of its tablet product line, especially compared to its Android competitors. It might even have helped assuage those concerned about the price tag: yes, it starts at $2000, but you’re getting an iPhone and an iPad in one. What a savings!

But I think Apple was also all too aware that this would be writing checks that it couldn’t cash.² Because though the iPhone clearly takes cues from the iPad, it is definitively not an iPad. It’s not an iPad that you fold up to put in your pocket. Or an iPad with a little iPhone glued to the front. It’s not running iPadOS. You won’t be installing or running iPad apps.

And, like I said, there’s an obviousness to all of that. Because the iPhone Duo’s screen, large as it is—at 7.6 inches, it’s just .7 inches smaller than the iPad mini—isn’t necessarily ideal for all the features in iPadOS, whether it’s the multitasking windowing system, Slide Over, or even just the menu bar hanging out up at the top of the screen. Having it be an iPhone that works like an iPad when you open it up makes as much—or as little—sense as an iPad that works like an iPhone when you fold it closed.

This distinction also allows it the freedom to do things that the iPad doesn’t. Like the clever ability to pin a video to the top of the screen in portrait. Or being able to fold it and put it on its side for FaceTime calls. The way it shifts user interfaces away from the crease when it’s partially closed. All of these are specific affordances for this device, which helps set it apart from Apple’s other products. Even many of the interface layouts are distinct, like the vertical dock or the minimized status bar.

In some ways the Duo is neither an iPhone nor an iPad, but a third device. But if you’re going to pick one to connect it to, well, why wouldn’t you choose your—if not the—most successful consumer product of all time?

Verging on converging

In the end, the iPhone line is starting to impinge upon the iPad—not unlike the way the iPad itself has begun to blur the lines with the Mac by adding keyboard and trackpad support, windowing, and more.

This isn’t convergence in the way that some have feared, with all of the devices getting squished into a mushy middle ground. Instead, it’s informing each device with what the company has learned from its other products and, in typical Apple fashion, making each product the best version of itself.

Consumers fear convergence, but it’s a risk for Apple too. Because in a world where an iPhone folds out to an iPad, will people really buy both devices? The answer: some may not. But how many of those people were really in the market for an iPad in the first place? Apple is betting that people love their iPhones so much that, just as with the iPhone 6 and the Pro Max lines and even the edge-to-edge displays of the iPhone X and later, that what they really want is an iPhone, but more.

In his first event video since taking over as Apple CEO, John Ternus got a cheeky introduction from his predecessor Tim Cook before boldly referencing some classic Steve Jobs moments and setting the company’s most important product on a new course.

I appreciated the video’s opening conceit, which was essentially a cinematic debate about what makes for a great opening scene, leading to Tim Cook narrating his own entrance to Apple Park—and then, in a twist, explaining that he’s not the main character of this story, it’s the other guy—namely Ternus. What a great, ego-deflating moment of support—and it stuck the landing in the way that many Apple introductory segments don’t, feeling either a bit too silly or a bit too smug.

(I also appreciated the direction of this video, which made sure that the scenes behind presenters were actually populated. Past videos made it feel like Apple Park was abandoned after some sort of apocalypse, while this one made it feel like everyone at Apple was still hard at work on making the company’s next batch of products. And it allowed for some low-key levity, like the segment set at a Hollywood backlot that featured a fake rainstorm falling on film noir characters and Apple presenters alike, a collection of Roman soldiers marching with a classical composer, and a couple of astronauts riding on the back of a golf cart.)

After professing what a privilege it was to represent Apple, Ternus quickly turned to a defense of the iPhone, and the smartphone more generally, as a cornerstone of our digital worlds. In casting the tech product at the center of our experiences as an “intelligent personal hub,” Ternus was alluding to Jobs’s declaration more than 25 years ago that the Mac was the center of a “digital hub.” In modern terms, the smartphone certainly fills that role, connecting to accessories and bringing in data from disparate sources.

Not only was it bold to tie the first pronouncement of a new Apple CEO to a famous Jobs strategy, but it was also bold to use the moment to take a direct shot at competitors who seek to replace the smartphone with unspecified new AI-infused tech products. It has always seemed obvious to me that the smartphone is just too perfectly positioned, with the right set of attributes, to survive whatever an AI-infused future might throw at it.

Ternus’s opening remarks fed into that, referencing the key features that make the iPhone such a powerfully useful product: It’s always with you, has a powerful processor, a great display, is always connected to a high-speed network, has high-quality sensors, and has a battery big enough to last all day. I have a hard time believing that even a deeply AI-heavy future won’t require all of those features, and it’s already in our pockets.

Of course, he would say that. He’s the CEO of a company that sells devices, primarily smartphones. But I think he’s also right.

Apple’s take on AI

Still, Apple is a tech company, and everything in its sphere is touched by AI now, so the company needed more than a profession that the iPhone was just great at AI, thank you. And so Ternus and his team worked to define Apple’s place in our AI-focused world—in some interesting ways.

Obviously, the presentation spent a lot of time discussing Apple Intelligence, which—after a two-year delay—is finally living up to its promise. The new Siri AI assistant is quite good, and it will provide iPhone users with a satisfying experience for casually looking up information and performing tasks, whether it’s world knowledge or personal data that lives on their devices. Apple is about to turn a real weakness into—well, if not a strength, then at least no longer an Achilles heel.

Apple also pressed its advantage when it comes to designing its own processors, which give the iPhone a strong story in terms of on-device AI. You can see how Apple has begun to prioritize AI benchmarks—the new A20 Pro processor has two Neural Engines (just as the M6 chip does), offers a bunch of next-gen GPU cores with neural accelerators, and has a 50% boost in memory bandwidth.

How much AI work is currently being done on-device on smartphones? Probably not much, but perhaps a little, and over time if app developers want to minimize their reliance on expensive (and potentially non-private) cloud services, they may gravitate toward using the features Apple provides on device. This is a bet by Apple that on-device AI becomes more prominent over time, but if you design your own chips and sell your own smartphones, it’s the right bet to make. I’ve seen the pendulum swing from processing being focused in the cloud to it happening on personal devices more than once. It would not surprise me at all if it happens again, and Apple is positioning itself to be ready if it does.

But there were some appreciably non-obvious examples of Apple’s approach to AI in the event, as well. Apple has said previously that it would support SynthID, a feature that tags AI-generated content. What it hadn’t previously revealed is that it’s built Apple Reference Image, a system that cryptographically signs the original pixel data from an iPhone camera’s sensor in a way that can verify that a photo is unedited. Accepting that most photos do get edited, Apple has built the system in a way that the signed, unedited original rides along with the version you’re processing and editing—but even if you edit the image, there’s a method to view the original and make sure that it’s properly reflecting reality.

I don’t know enough about this category to know if there are similar implementations from other groups, or if there’s an emerging standard that Apple is either inventing or avoiding, but it sure does sound like a good idea to have a way to say that a photograph was really taken from an iPhone’s image sensor and wasn’t just fabricated.

Finally, Apple’s most surprising AI announcement of the day, one that I doubt anyone had on their bingo card, is that Apple is apparently making the Apple Watch an AI wearable. The new Apple Watch models, apparently in conjunction with a fairly modern iPhone, have a feature that listens to your conversation and lets you display what someone said for the previous 15 seconds. It’s like TiVo for… reality? And then there’s Siri Recap, which listens to everything and writes high-level notes based on your conversations. It’s AI meeting notes for your life.

These features are wild, and if you haven’t noticed, they are coming at a time when people are increasingly critical of tech companies intruding into places that were previously presumed to be at least a bit private. Fortunately, Apple does have a fairly positive reputation when it comes to privacy, and the company has detailed technically how these features work—no audio files are saved, apps have no access to audio data, and the AI transcription engine runs on audio in a buffer. But since we live in a world where people are already convinced their phones listen to them and use their conversations to send them ads, I’m not convinced the nuance of a statement like “my Apple Watch is listening to our conversation, but it’s not recording” is going to go over well.

I’m curious just how much of this feature is happening on the Apple Watch and how much is happening on the connected iPhone. Is the Apple Watch just there to listen to audio, make disclaimer chimes to warn people they’re being monitored, and pass the audio on to the iPhone for processing? Is the Apple Watch performing a raw transcription of audio chunks into text and passing that on to the iPhone for assembly into more understandable blocks of text? I’m sure it’ll all come out. And then we’ll all need to judge: are either of these features useful enough to make it worth the trouble of explaining to other people that things are being captured? It’s worth considering the inverse, too: Does Apple’s admirable commitment to privacy lead to summaries that aren’t especially helpful or actionable?

A lot of questions, not a lot of answers—yet.

I’d argue that Apple can’t afford to not try features like this, however. Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it. I know a lot of people will roll their eyes at this, but this is one of those times when the phrase “only Apple can do this” might actually be true. They’re taking a swing, and I admire that. It may not be enough.

Keep in mind that there’s another invasive AI feature rumored to be attached to a future Apple product—namely, the next generation of AirPods Pro, which may come with embedded cameras. I assume Apple’s explanation of these new Apple Watch features is a preview of how camera-bearing AirPods would be explained—namely, that the image data is walled off, inaccessible, processed by AI algorithms on device and then discarded. If these Apple Watch features become wildly unpopular, it might be a hint to stow those AirPods. If people accept Apple’s assurances, maybe things will be different.

The main event

Off to the iPhone, the big reason Apple does these events. Of course, the iPhone Duo is the most interesting and different iPhone in years, if ever. I can’t wait to play with one. It’s an incredibly complex piece of hardware engineering that also generates hundreds of serious usability issues for iOS and all the apps that run on it.

At first glance, Apple seems to have gotten really creative in trying to solve those usability issues. There was a time when Apple might have introduced a product like this and just explained that while you could rest the device partially open at an angle, horizontally or vertically, those angles simply weren’t supported and you should only ever use the product open or closed. And a lot of us would’ve shrugged and said, well, okay Apple, I get that we’re asking a lot by wanting you to cover all the bases right away. Maybe next year?

Not the iPhone Duo. While I’m sure there will be some frustrating edge cases, this product announcement shows what can happen when a company is fully committed to bringing its entire organization to bear on supporting a new piece of hardware. There’s a new multitasking model, support for Apple Pencil on iOS for the first time(!), the ability for apps to run on both inside and outside screens at once, Apple’s first under-display camera, an entirely reoriented iOS dock and set of toolbars, and a whole lot more.

It’s almost overwhelming, but it’s also clearly the right way to launch a product like this. It would make no sense for Apple to spend years developing a folding iPhone… and then deciding to shrug and release a half-baked iOS update to support it. If a company boasts about how the integration of hardware and software is its secret sauce, this is the moment when it needs to back that up with action. Feels to me like it has.

As exciting as this all is, let’s not forget that folding phones are a teeny portion of the overall smartphone market. Not only is this the most expensive iPhone ever, but it’ll probably be the worst seller of the iPhone line, at least to start. And in doing so, it’ll probably be the best-selling folding phone of all time. Apple’s endorsement of this style of device will drive sales of other folding phones, too. Just don’t expect it to take over the world. If it sells as well as the iPhone Air, it would be quite a coup.

That’s because most people will want to buy the iPhone 18 Pro. While that product pales in comparison to the alien newness of the iPhone Duo, it’s also exactly the phone most people will want to buy. The new camera upgrade, which adds a moving aperture to the iPhone for the first time, should offer a serious improvement in an array of shots. I’m sad that Apple has seemingly retired Cosmic Orange this year, but that’s okay, it’s just resting—I predict a nostalgic orange iPhone comeback in a year or two.

Bottom line—the iPhone 17 Pro was a huge hit and I suspect the 18 Pro will be, too. Yes, it starts at $100 more than the past models, but what doesn’t? I’m actually relieved Apple didn’t raise the price by $150 or $200. The iPhone 18 Pro might not be the one most people talk about, but it’ll be the one most people buy. (And then in the spring, we’ll see how the iPhone 18 fares as a phone released out of the spotlight of the big fall iPhone event.)

In the long run, though, is the iPhone Duo the future of the iPhone line? It depends on what you mean by “long run.” It seems to me that the impulse of the iPhone Duo and all folding phones is based on the premise that phone users want huge displays (true) but at some point those displays just don’t fit in their pockets (a sad fact of physics and tailoring). Wouldn’t you want the biggest screen that also fits in your pocket? If so, then at some point that ideal device becomes a foldable, or rollable, or some other kind of shape that can be large when in use and small when it’s stowed away.

Now is probably not that time. (Certainly not at that price.) But its time may yet come, especially as Apple does its thing and just keeps iterating, making the iPhone Duo thinner and lighter and more full featured over time.

I can’t wait to try out the iPhone Duo. As someone who spends a lot of time using an iPad, I’m seriously intrigued if it might fit in my life as a primary device. But for most people, it will be not just too expensive, but too weird. That’s fine. Apple strikes me as a company that’s willing to be patient—while making a lot of money from people who want to be out there on the cutting edge.

For everyone else, there’s the iPhone 18 Pro. And that’s as it should be.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s events are always a deluge of information, delivered by smooth-talking presenters who are probably trying to hypnotize you with their soothing hand motions. So it can take a little bit of time after watching the presentation to come back to reality, and sift through the details.

This year’s iPhone event¹ was no exception. The company rolled out new Pro iPhones, two new Apple Watches, a new pair of AirPods, and, of course, the first folding iPhone. Having had a couple of hours to poke around and think about the slew of announcements, I’ve been mulling over the implications of Apple’s newest phone.

One of the biggest questions around the expected folding iPhone, now officially dubbed the Duo, was how much of a trade-off it would be compared to the year’s Pro model iPhones. There was a similar dynamic last year with the iPhone Air, which also offered a novel form factor, though at the cost of the iPhone 17 Pro’s additional cameras and battery life.

In the end, every Apple product—and probably every product—is a story of trade-offs. So, the thinking went, what will we give up to get the benefit of a small iPhone that unfolds into a larger iPhone?

The answer: some things, but less than I’d feared.

Saving face

Perhaps the biggest casualty is Face ID. That’s not really a surprise: it’s an expensive component that takes up valuable space inside the phone chassis, as well as on the screen. Then factor in that the iPhone Duo would probably need two Face ID cameras modules, one each for the exterior and interior screens, and we’re talking double trouble.²

I’ll certainly miss Face ID in the cold New England winter when I don’t want to take off my gloves, but hopefully the Apple Watch unlock will mitigate the frustration.

Camera shy

It also seemed a foregone conclusion that at least one of the iPhone Pro’s many cameras wouldn’t make the cut, and sure enough, the Duo lacks the 4x/8x telephoto lens. But it still features the ultrawide lens, which is the better choice, since that also enables macro features. The main 48MP camera also only has Apple’s first-generation sensor-shift optical image stabilization, compared to the second-generation tech on the 17 Pro and 18 Pro.

The Duo’s dual screens also raise questions about the front-facing cameras. While both its interior and exterior selfie cameras are capable of Center Stage and can flip between landscape and portrait at the touch of a control, neither is as good quality as the front-facing camera on the Pro models.

The 18 Pro, like the 17 line before it, boasts a hefty 18MP sensor; the iPhone Duo’s exterior camera, by comparison, is just 12MP. As for the interior screen’s camera, which is the first one that Apple has tucked under the display, the current specs say only that it records video at 1080p. The exterior front-facing camera also doesn’t support the new smart focus tracking feature the company announced for the 18 Pro (which does support it on both front and rear-facing cameras).

Unsurprisingly, the Duo also lacks several of the Pro models more, well, pro features. You won’t find support for ProRes or ProRes RAW, ACES, Apple Log 2, and Genlock. In other words, Apple’s probably not shooting its next event on a bunch of iPhone Duos because that would be a ridiculously unnecessary flex unless they’ve got a whole bunch of extras lying around. The Duo also doesn’t shoot spatial video, probably due to the horizontal rather than vertical side-by-side camera arrangement. I’m sure there are dozens of people who will be upset.

Lights, camera, no action?

The Duo’s other casualties seem to mostly have succumbed to the one-two combo of high cost and low return. For example, few will likely shed tears on the lack of the LiDAR sensor.

There may be more complaints, however about the lack of the Action Button first included with the iPhone 15 Pro. That’s a bummer for folks who enjoyed the customization of the hardware button, but again an understandable absence. However, the Duo does, to my surprise, have Apple’s Camera Control button for quickly launching the camera and taking photos.

MagSafe and sound

Some were worried, given its lack of mention in the Apple event, that the iPhone Duo eschewed MagSafe, not unlike the oddity that was the iPhone 16e. But the good news is that MagSafe is apparently considered critical enough to merit its inclusion on the Duo.

However it’s not without an asterisk. Unlike other iPhones which Apple says “Compatible with MagSafe cases, wallets, wireless chargers, and more” the Duo’s says only “Compatible with MagSafe cases, wireless chargers, and more.” Note the difference? That’s right, the iPhone Duo just stole your wallet—in more ways than one.

But this one’s just a matter of space, as an image from Apple’s accessories page clearly illustrates: Apple’s MagSafe wallet simply won’t fit on the shorter, squatter Duo. Will that stop someone somewhere from making a Duo compatible wallet? You might struggle to fit your credit cards, but I wouldn’t bet against it.

And because I really need something audio-related to justify this section header, in a blow to podcasters everywhere, the Duo does not have the much vaunted “studio-quality” four-mic array of the Pro models. I’ll pour one out.³

Size matters

I’ll leave you with this last thought, which amused me. Apple touted that, when open, the iPhone Duo is the thinnest iPhone ever at just 5.2mm, dethroning last year’s record-setting iPhone Air with its bulky 5.64mm thickness.

However, when folded, the Duo is itself a chunky 11.3mm. I found myself wondering if that was, in turn, the thickest iPhone ever. The answer? Just barely not. But you have to go all the way back to 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which—like its predecessor, the iPhone 3G—rang in at 12.3mm, in large part due to its slightly convex back.⁴

The thinnest iPhone ever and the thickest iPhone in 17 years. Something for everyone!

Go to the podcast page.

Its device, called the iPhone Duo, will start at $2,000… The entry-level version will include 256 gigabytes of storage, with Apple offering higher-capacity versions that will take the price all the way up to roughly $3,000…. There will be a magnetic hinge system and support for the Apple Pencil stylus.

The Duo will go on sale as early as October and come in white and dark blue.

iPhone Duo is a good name. Not only does it make sense — two screens! — but it references an old Apple product name, and keeps iPhone Ultra in reserve for future use.

I’ve been wondering about Apple Pencil support on the iPhone for some time now. This product does sort of make sense for it, given the larger canvas of an interior screen.

The starting price seems high in practical terms, but also actually quite aggressive given the current out-of-control state of affairs for tech gadget costs. (Obviously the better configurations will escalate rapidly in price, as is Apple’s tradition.)

Gurman also suggests this device won’t ship as quickly as the new iPhone Pro models—again, not too much of a surprise, as that’s what happened with the iPhone X. And as for the colors, well, dark blue is certainly more interesting than another Space Gray. I do wonder why the Color Czar has decided that black is out as a color, but fashion does what it wants.

Anyway, happy Christmas Eve (and Christmas morning) everyone. See you back here after all is revealed.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

You might be interested in knowing how to embrace Apple Passwords with a bear hug, leaving behind your current password manager. If you tried Apple’s Passwords app in the past and were disappointed, you should probably give it another try. The improvements Apple has made in the last couple of releases have brought it to what I consider parity with the most important useful features of well-designed third-party password managers.

Despite that, Passwords is focused on—no surprise—passwords and password-like items: website logins, passkeys, and Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTPs). Many password managers include a junk drawer of other kinds of structured material you can store that doesn’t map directly to Apple’s Passwords structure. If you’re mostly using a third-party system for password-esque stuff and use all Apple devices or Apple and a Windows PC, a migration is straightforward. Otherwise, it can be hairier and could involve rethinking how you store assorted data.

You can use iCloud Passwords with Windows (and then use Microsoft Edge, Firefox, or Google Chrome). You can also use browsers other than Safari on a Mac with an iCloud Passwords plug-in or extension. However, if you or people you currently shared information with use Android, Linux/Unix, or ChromeOS, this migration won’t work for you: those platforms aren’t supported, and there’s no web app for iCloud Passwords.

Because Joe Kissell and I have written entire books that help with different components involved in a password manager migration, I’ll include references throughout to appropriate Take Control series books. For a general grounding in passwords, for example, I recommend reading Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Your Passwords, updated earlier this year.

Map the data connections

As I noted, Passwords is best at passwords (and passkeys and TOTPs), and filling them in on webpages and in apps. If you care mostly about this, you’re in luck, as you can easily migrate data of these kinds:

• Website and app logins: Account logins move to Passwords.
• Loose passwords: Ones that have no direct connection to an app or site, like a bank card PIN, also move to Passwords.
• TOTPs: These confirmation codes can be migrated. However, there’s a technical detail with how they may be stored by third parties (or Apple) that can prevent the migration and might require using a backup code; see details below.
• Passkeys: The password “industry” finally developed and rolled out a secure copying system that Apple supports that will let you move passkeys among password managers. This requires migrating on an iPhone or iPad; you can’t move these on a Mac.

Two other categories of fill-in entries that aren’t managed in Passwords can be handled—and you may already be using—in Wallet and Safari:

• Payment cards: Payment cards need to move to Wallet & Apple Pay. You have to enter these manually as AutoFill Cards, unless you’ve already done so or added the card to Apple Pay. It’s a little complicated, as I explain.
• Identities: Apple supports filling in personal or business address information through Safari using AutoFill.

(You can see Safari’s evolution on the Mac at Safari: Settings: AutoFill: your personal contact now links to Contacts, user name and passwords to Passwords, and credit cards to Wallet & Apple Pay.)

Where you will be left hanging by Apple:

• Miscellaneous secure items and attachments: If you store Social Security numbers and other account information that is distinct from a password, but you want to have available to fill in at particular websites or by searching Passwords, you can create these as entries in Passwords. In some cases, you may want to create entries in Notes (with additional security, described later).
• Structured data: You may have bank accounts, passports, driver licenses, memberships, software licenses, or other structured information stored in a password manager. That is a trickier needle to thread, as Passwords offers no support beyond a Note field.

For both of these, you might want to migrate to… a password manager. But wait! This would be one you use solely for secure storage of these miscellaneous structured or less-classifiable items, not for field-oriented secrets and accounts you want to fill in.

There’s one more important migration issue:

• Shared vaults and items: If you use a password manager that supports secure storage areas with other people—like vaults in 1Password, Dashlane, or LastPass, for example—Passwords provides something akin, though not precisely the same: Shared Groups. Because of the above provisos, many non-password items shared via a third-party manager will need to be migrated to Notes or another secured shared item-storage-based space.

Three big things that may derail the whole migration for you:

• Tags/labels: Some people make use of metadata organizational systems, like tags. These don’t transfer to Passwords at all!
• Extra data: Much like the paper card catalogs of yore had book information plus tons of annotation, accumulated over time, you may have used password manager features to add extensive notes, additional fields, include attachments, and create richly detailed records. All that will be gone, like tears in rain. True, Passwords has a Notes field, but it lacks structure, rich text, and Markdown support. If you move to another, more focused password manager, you may be able to retain this.
• Access after you’re gone: Non-Apple password managers have recovery kits that could allow a relative or other party who has that information to gain access to stored, synced data. Apple’s Legacy Contacts system, which allows an executor or other authorized person to access your data when you’re gone, excludes iCloud Keychain: no passwords, passkeys, Wi-Fi passwords, or other data. However, Legacy Contacts must be activated; until it is, it’s possible for someone who retains access to one or more of your devices to view your passwords and other data in Passwords. (See Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Your Digital Legacy, or my Take Control of Your Apple Account.

One last bit of aggravation? Passwords does not yet support removing duplicates!

Plan your migration

As you consider migrating, I urge you to run your old manager and Passwords in parallel.¹ Particularly if you store a lot of different kinds of data in your old manager, you may want to be able to consult it and migrate some of it over time. This can be a pain if you are paying an annual fee and the renewal is coming up soon. Consult the maker’s website to see whether you retain access to your data after a subscription expires and, if that bothers you, in what form.

The place to start is pruning old entries.

First, sort by last modified date. Did I know that nearly 2,200 of my 2,600 entries haven’t been modified since 2022? Some since 2008? I did not. However, you likely don’t want to delete these wholesale, because there may be secrets you can’t recover. Online backup private keys (such as with Backblaze), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency phrases or keys, or other secrets you set once need to be retained or you lose access forever.

My strategy:

• First, export everything. These exports are unencrypted and must be performed on your Mac. The export won’t include passkeys. (See below for that pathway.) This gives you a revert point. Because there are so many export formats across systems, I refer you to the software documentation to pick the best one. Warning: That file will be unencrypted and is like plutonium. Handle with care. The best plan is to use Disk Utility to create a disk image (APFS, 256-bit AES, Sparse Bundle Image), use a password you know or that is stored in Passwords, and then export directly to that encrypted image. The reason? If you save the file elsewhere, it might be backed up to Time Machine or become accessible in a way you didn’t intend. When unmounted, the drive is as secure as your startup volume. Just don’t forget or lose the password!

• Move all the older entries into a group. You might be able to create a group, tag all entries, or, in the worst case, move to a separate vault. In 1Password, the only strategy I found was to create a new vault called Outdated Entries and move all the older entries there. Warning: When selecting, make sure you aren’t including entries from all vaults, as that might move items you share with others or that others share with you.

• Next, sort by name or title. This lets you scan through entries and identify duplicates. I found a number of items I’d already labeled “outdated,” or that were from services I couldn’t even remember. However, there were also a huge number of passwords and account logins that hadn’t been changed in more than four years—some for more than a decade! (There’s no reason to change uniquely set passwords routinely unless your current one is weak and a site is compromised. Most password managers, including Passwords, let you know about weak and reused passwords.) This process can be mighty tedious, which is why I’d recommend tackling it over time rather than all at once.

When you’re pruned, cleaned up, and otherwise reduced, you can now use the set you’re exporting; it’s time to go to the next step.

Export your secrets

Your best and first choice should be to use your iPhone or iPad; at this time, you can only perform a secure password storage transfer in iOS.² Major password managers support this transfer method, which lets you move passkeys—it’s currently the only way to migrate a passkey.³

Here’s how it appears and works in 1Password:⁴

1. Navigate to the export section of 1Password—that’s Lock (upper-left corner): Settings: Advanced: Start Export.
2. Enter your account name; the app provides a hint. Tap “Approve export.”
3. An explanation screen appears. Tap Continue.
4. Choose the destination. In this case, tap Passwords, then tap Continue.
5. Tap Continue in “Passwords,” and you’re switched to the Passwords app, where you can watch the import in progress.

While this is the best method, you can also export from most apps in CSV (comma-separated values) format, which truncates most information and likely leads to problems. Warning: You will have to re-create your passkeys. You may need to use the desktop version of the password manager to export. In Passwords for Mac, choose File: Import Passwords from File, click Choose File, select the file, and proceed. This doesn’t overwrite entries.

Now, check important accounts:

• Does the regular login work? If not, reset the password. Take this opportunity to upgrade to TOTP or a passkey if either is available.
• Does TOTP or a passkey work for logging in? If not, find a backup code or another method to generate a new TOTP or passkey.

TOTPs have a particular idiosyncrasy. They are seeded with a secret generated by a website. The site displays that code as a QR code, so you rarely need to copy it, though Password and other managers allow you to do so. When migrating an entry with a TOTP, it might appear in its URL format, which is generically like otpauth://totp/user@user.user?secret=SEQUENCE in the Notes field instead of appearing as a TOTP within Passwords. If that’s the case, you can fix it manually:

1. Copy the text after secret=.
2. Tap or click Edit.
3. Tap or click Set Up Code.
4. Paste the secret you copied into the Setup Key field.
5. Tap or click Use Setup Key.
6. Tap or click Done.

If that fails, log into the website in question and use a backup code or other means to re-enroll with TOTP.

Enter credit cards, set up AutoFill, and move to Notes

Before getting started, I strongly recommend enabling Advanced Data Protection in iCloud. ADP improves iCloud security by encrypting nearly all application data—iCloud Drive, Messages, Photos, Notes, etc.—via keys stored only on your devices, just like iCloud Keychain. Without ADP, these kinds of data are encrypted in transit and at rest using only Apple’s encryption secrets, and could be demanded via a government subpoena or someone gaining access to your Apple Account. (Note that contacts, events, and email remain encrypted at rest, not end-to-end, because of the need for compatibility with third-party software.)

Follow the steps in the link to enable. You can also still access this information via iCloud.com through a process that enables a temporary end-to-end session. (For more about ADP, see Joe Kissell’s Take Control of iCloud or my recently updated for the 27 releases, Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.)

Now, work through these categories:

• Payment cards: Use Settings: Wallet & Apple Pay on an iPhone or iPad, or System Settings: Wallet & Apple Pay on a Mac. Tap or click AutoFill cards and authentication. Now you can tap or click Add Card to provide the card details. This lets you fill in the card anywhere there’s a form field or wherever you can tap or Control-click/right-click in a field and bring up AutoFill as a menu item. AutoFill cards sync across your devices when Wallet sync is active in iCloud (Settings/System Settings: Your Name: iCloud: See All). For more on working with Wallet and payment cards, see my book Take Control of Apple Wallet. This information is secured end-to-end.

• Identity filling: A different kind of AutoFill, for identity information, is found in Settings: Apps: Safari: AutoFill or Safari: Settings: AutoFill. Enable Use Contact Info on an iPhone or iPad, or check “Using information from my contacts” on a Mac. Now you can tap the entry next to My Info on an iPhone or iPad, or click Edit to the right of the checkbox label. This lets you pick an entry—you probably already did—and populate it with all the things you’d want to fill in on a form, including multiple addresses. Safari doesn’t protect identity information with ADP. However, the type of address and other information you would use are likely the least important to protect in what would be a very unlikely break-in to an Apple Account or one of your devices.

• Fill in Notes: As I noted earlier, the structured entry style of third-party password managers doesn’t mesh well with either Passwords or Notes. Passwords has a single Notes field, which may be enough for some entries, but not the more detailed ones I describe. The Notes app is structured around entries, but it’s not well designed for hundreds or thousands, and it lacks inherent field data or structure. Judge what you’re storing in your old password manager to figure out if Notes could work. With ADP enabled, it offers strong security. For migrating structured data intact, read on!

Migrate structured data

If you’re looking to move structured entries, I suggest checking out Strongbox, but not for passwords, passkeys, TOTPs, and the like. Its developer offers a free syncing version (for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch) with everything you need except Touch ID/Face ID unlocking. That requires the Pro flavor at $24.99 per year, which includes several other features.⁵

Strongbox, unlike some managers, allows you to sync via a file under your control or through its secure syncing service, depending on your preference. This lets you keep your, er, digital strongbox under your personal control, if that matters to you. It can import from all major password manager export formats.

In testing, it preserved my 1Password structured data extremely well. This included tags. It also arranged my vaults into what it calls groups, letting me retain a sense of what I was sharing with others.

The one complication is that if you want to use one of the migration processes above to copy your items into Passwords, you have to do one of two things after performing your migration:

• In your old manager, delete all passwords, passkeys, and TOTPs. This is dangerous in my accounting, as it reduces your ability to have a parallel working solution, and you could accidentally delete secrets you need to keep.
• Import everything into Strongbox, then select all the passwords, passkeys, and TOTPs from Strongbox, and empty the trash. This gives you two copies of everything: Passwords and old password manager for secrets; Strongbox and old password manager for structured data.

When you’re ready to abandon your old password manager, maybe weeks or months from the migration, you can retain a securely stored backup copy or perhaps retain access depending on the product, while not using it actively or paying renewal fees.

Working in groups

Sharing your passwords and other secrets with other people remains Passwords’ weakest aspect, because Apple offers only Shared Groups. Each entry can be stored only in your personal Passwords storage or in Shared Groups. Otherwise, you have to duplicate an entry, which can cause such entries to drift out of sync.

In the Passwords app, select any entry, then click or tap the Group pop-up menu. You can then choose an existing group or create a new one. When you make your choice, the password, passkey, or other item is now exclusively found in the Shared Groups section, not copied! Passwords doesn’t offer a copy or duplicate feature, so you have to re-create the entry if you want to share it with two or more groups that aren’t a complete overlap of the same people.

It may be easier to understand from a family perspective. Let’s say you have items you share only with your spouse, others with your children, and some with both. You can’t create a “spouse” group and a “children” group. You need to have one for your spouse, one for your children, and one for the whole family. This is where there’s real room for improvement by Apple.

The password rhymes with orange

I know this is a whole rigmarole, but I’m actually impressed that it’s finally doable in a reasonable manner. A couple of years ago, it was not. It was possible a year ago, but I wouldn’t have recommended it. Now, if you’re careful with each step, maintain a backup, and keep your old manager running in parallel as you complete the migration, you should be able to achieve success.

This article was updated on Sept. 10th to add missing details about fixing a broken TOTP import.

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

Well, well, well… maybe not. Ian Wright of CarBuzz writes:

The Cadillac configurator is up for several 2027 models, and we spotted that the Lyriq still shows CarPlay and Android Auto being standard. The Lyriq is Cadillac’s first all-electric vehicle and a tech-forward vehicle that we think is becoming one of the best luxury EVs available. So, it piqued our interest that the GM brand was still including the things it was supposed to be phasing out, and we reached out to Cadillac for comment.

“Cadillac is continuing to evolve its infotainment strategy across the EV portfolio, based on customer feedback, while also prioritizing the native, in-vehicle experience,” a Cadillac representative told CarBuzz. And, the language is telling. The plan was to start the phasing out of phone projection with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, with CEO Mary Barra saying: “We made a decision to prioritize our EV vehicles during this timeframe, and as we go forward, we’ll continue across the portfolio.”

Wright does a good job at spotting the weasel words in the new Cadillac statement. Three years after a bold pronouncement that GM wasn’t interested in listening to its customers and giving them what they wanted, here comes an “evolve[d] infotainment strategy… based on customer feedback.”

Translation: Oh, people actually do want CarPlay, so we probably should let them have it, or they’re not going to want to buy our cars.

This isn’t how this story needed to go, but if GM wants to silently walk back its stupid pronouncement from 2023, it’s still a win for anyone in the market for a new car.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

A possible replacement for Mac OS arrives in the form of a company founded by a charismatic former Apple executive—but not the one you’re thinking of.

Go to the podcast page.

Do you want an all-in-one solution to block ads, trackers and annoyances across all your Apple devices?

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The deed is done! John Ternus is now CEO of Apple!

Memomento mori

[extreme TV infomercial announcer voice] Do you suffer from insomnia, sleeplessness, or the condition known as “Snooze Deficiency Syndrome”? Do you lie awake staring at the ceiling, unable to lull yourself to unconsciousness, despite lately really preferring it to consciousness? Well, don’t worry! Apple’s outgoing CEO has you covered!

“Read Tim Cook’s full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO”

Today is my last day as CEO of Apple.

Story checks out so far.

This is a moment I always knew would come one day…

BREAKING: FORMER APPLE CEO HAD FIRM GRASP OF THE LINEAR NATURE OF TIME.

…and yet it is still hard to believe it has arrived and I am writing these words.

[sound of 170,000 Apple employees closing an email and going back to whatever it was they were doing before]

If you’re not asleep yet, don’t worry. It goes on like that for kinda a while without saying much of anything. Again, though, if you’re not asleep by the end, don’t worry. Because Apple’s incoming CEO also has you covered.

“Read John Ternus’s full memo to Apple employees on his first day as CEO”

Hang on, I gotta get a cup of coffee before we read this because I’m already pretty groggy.

OK, here we go.

I’m honored to be stepping into this role at what is truly the greatest company in the world…

The greatest company in the world, the greatest network in the world, the greatest phone in the world…

Man, after reading these I feel like I really owe Stan Sigman an apology. Too late for that, I guess.

Ternus’s memo at least has the benefit of being less than half the length of Cook’s, sort of like taking 2 mg of melatonin and then, when it’s not quite working, taking another 1 mg to finally shove you off the cliff and into Morpheus’s welcoming embrace.

Ask your doctor if reading Apple CEO memos is right for you.

Et tu, Phil?

Tim Cook and John Ternus weren’t the only Apple executives updating LinkedIn this week. (“You have been endorsed for ‘Pablum’.”)

“Phil Schiller steps down from leading the App Store and Apple events”

So, developers, please make sure to update your email templates for where to send your angry missives about long App Store review times.

Despite the change:

…Schiller will remain an Apple Fellow and work on “unspecified initiatives.”

“Unspecified initiatives”?! Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Meanwhile, while his name may still be Luca, he no longer works on the second floor. Or whatever floor he used to work on.

“Ex-Apple CFO Luca Maestri Winding Down His Time at the Company”

After years of counting Apple’s money, Maestri is reportedly looking forward to spending more time with his family money.

With these transitions, don’t be surprised if John Ternus shows up at your door saying “I’m putting a team together! We’re looking for someone with your particular skillset. Are you in?!”

I mean, it’s probably not gonna happen, but it might.

The price may or may not be right

Big week next week as… well, you know what’s gonna happen.

Sometimes I don’t know why we go through this charade of me pretending to present these things as “news” when you probably already know them. It’s ridiculous. I mean, what is even the point of anything?!

Sorry.

Anyway, if you’re wondering how much change you have to find in your couch and the couches of everyone else in your cul-de-sac and every cul-de-sac in the nation in order to get a foldable iPhone, the Apple rumor mill has got you, fam.

“iPhone Ultra’s Very High Price and Features Revealed in New Report”

Awesome! OK! Lay it on us! Here we go! Give us those dirty deets!

TrendForce estimated that the foldable iPhone will have a starting price of $2,099 to $2,299…

Oh, c’mon! I could have done that! That’s like saying “It will be dollars, unless you’re in a country that uses a different currency.”

I’m going to go ahead and predict that it’s going to be on the high end of that for sure and possibly higher, as Samsung’s most recent foldable starts at $1,999 and this is Apple we’re talking about—and not only that but Apple in an era of unprecedentedly high prices for technology (thanks, AI!).

Thus, my couches will remain un-raided as I will not be buying this device. My child’s inheritance is secure.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s homegrown next-generating operating system fails to launch, leaving the company in dire straits and searching for a lifeline from outside the company.

Go to the podcast page.

In the mid-1990s, Apple knew the classic Mac OS was running out of time. As the company’s most important product sped toward a cliff, Apple began an increasingly desperate attempt to build a replacement.

Go to the podcast page.

A few months ago I added a “Report a Typo” feature to Six Colors. The goal was to give people a simple place to go — sixcolors.com/typo — if they found a mistake on the website. That Google form inserts the information into a Google Sheet, and a script attached to the Google Sheet kicks off a simple automation that sends me a notification in a couple different places.

This works pretty well. I’m using a very simple Google Apps script to fire off a webhook when there’s a new form submission. The webhook is running on Make.com, which we use for a bunch of simple web automations, but that’s an implementation detail. Make.com posts an item in a private Discord channel and also crafts a custom push notification to my phone using Pushover.

However, the moment I turned this feature on, I discovered the problem with asking people to report errors or typos: Some people see any open channel of communication as an open channel for any sort of communication. I immediately started getting more “this is more a comment than a question” items about articles than actual typo submissions. Commentary included personal preferences for writing style, web design, political references (real or imagined), and much more.

I’m going to make an admission: This sort of feedback is maddening. I want to be alerted about mistakes on the site so I can fix them promptly, but I am not interested in receiving push notifications regarding your opinion of the professionalism and appropriateness of my writing style.

Unfortunately, it’s an open form. There’s nothing to be done. Or is there?

This is a challenge that can’t really be solved by looking for a bunch of keywords. You need wholesale sentiment analysis of the entire submission. This is—brace yourself—actually a good use of a large language model.

I solved this problem by using a plug-in within Make.com that lets me get a reply back from a cloud LLM that uses a simple model with an API cost of pennies per use, but you could also just use Shortcuts to build a version of this automation that runs on a Mac (Tahoe or Golden Gate) using Apple’s built-in models. It works just fine in Shortcuts on my Mac, via the Use Model action. (See screenshot above.)

Here’s the prompt I’m currently using:

Your task is binary classification.

Input: a user-submitted comment about an article, claiming to report an error.

Output: one token only: ALLOW or REJECT.

Definition of ALLOW:
A concrete, objective, verifiable issue in the article. This includes:
* factual mistakes
* spelling, grammar, formatting mistakes
* broken or incorrect links
* wrong names, dates, numbers
* technical inaccuracies
* omissions of material consequences of a feature or change (e.g., failing to mention that a feature deletes stored Wi-Fi passwords)

Definition of REJECT:
Anything subjective. This includes:
* political disagreement
* tone or style complaints
* metaphor or comparison preferences
* ‘you should have covered X more’
* speculation about motives
* emotional reactions or rants
* admissions that it’s not actually a mistake

Classification rules:
1. If the comment identifies a specific factual, technical, or materially consequential issue in the article, return ALLOW.
2. If the issue would meaningfully affect reader understanding or use of a product/feature, treat it as an omission and return ALLOW.
3. If the comment is opinion, taste, politics, vibe, personal criticism, or preference, return REJECT.
4. If there is no concrete, verifiable claim about the article being wrong or incomplete, return REJECT.
5. If it’s off-topic or spam, return REJECT.
6. If it’s a short but simple phrase like “there not their” or “r/sheild/shield”, those are nerdier folks reporting typos and that’s fine, ALLOW.

Respond with exactly one of these two tokens: ALLOW or REJECT. No explanation.

Submission: [[insert report text here]]

This has worked surprisingly well. And, yes, all messages are logged in the original Google Sheet, so I can occasionally check to monitor the quality of the filtering and make sure that the system isn’t failing to pass on actual mistakes.

AI or no, we’re always looking for top macOS and iOS apps to feature here. If you’ve got something that fits that description, drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief outline of the whats, whys, and wherefores.

Now on to this week’s selection…

Sortio

The folders on my Mac are a mess, but who has the time to make sure that everything is filed away in its proper place? AI does, according to the makers of Sortio, a macOS utility that promises to do the hard work of organization on your behalf.

Sortio taps into AI to look at file names and metadata to help it figure out where to put each file. You can also opt to let the utility read the file, sending a 4KB excerpt to your AI provider of choice for even more detailed sorting. (Sortio also offers an offline mode that uses Ollama or LM Studio to keep its activity on your Mac.) You can further refine sorting by telling Sortio to organize things by file type, project, date, and whether the file is for work or personal use..

I took Sortio for a spin, having it go through the folder of articles I’ve written but haven’t bothered to organize for myself. Sortio was smart enough to take my submissions to Awful Announcing and separate them into their own folder. Not every search is that precise — a separate sorting session had Sortio tagging an offer letter from an old employer named Purch as a financial document — but there are edit buttons to correct mislabeled and misfiled material.

You can try out Sortio for free, which gives you enough of an allowance to sort through a few thousand files to get a flavor for how the app performs. After that, you’ll need to buy a license, with the $14.99/month Pro license suitable for most individual users. There are team and enterprise options as well, and paying for an annual license lowers your monthly rate.

AskPlay

AI isn’t just for organizing your folders; it can also generate a playlist for you based on specific artists, songs or moods you’re hoping to hear. At least, that’s the idea behind AskPlay, an app that lives in your menu bar and lets you type or speak plain-English instructions on the type of music you want to listen to.

You’re going to need a few things besides AskPlay and its $1.99/month subscription to make the app work. For starters, AskPlay works exclusively with Apple Music, so you’ll also need to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service. In addition, you’ll need to provide an API key from an AI provider, with AskPlay supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter.

Those requirements are likely to limit AskPlay’s appeal to some users, but having tried out the app on my Mac, I am impressed by the results. I told AskPlay I wanted to hear songs written by Stephen Sondheim, and it dutifully produced a playlist not just from cast soundtracks but also numbers by vocalists from their own albums. That said, there were a few misfires — the playlist included a song from Tick, Tick… Boom!, a Jonathan Larson musical that only refers to Sondheim, as well as a rap song that shares a title with something Sondheim wrote. Other requests like “play upbeat songs from the ’80s” proved more successful.

An AskPlay feature I appreciate was the ability to augment playlists. After generating a playlist of Merle Haggard songs, I had the app add Johnny Cash music to the queue. Then I told AskPlay to “add more songs like these,” which brought Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and more to the party.

AskPlay seems built for a very specific kind of user, but if you like thematic playlists and already subscribe to the services that make this app tick, it brings another dimension to your listening experience. In addition to working on the Mac, AskPlay is available for a range of Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro.

Pocket Screen

I don’t know about you, but my workflow often requires me to jump from one window to another to perform a task — and that can often break up my workflow. I’m thinking of when I’m writing something and need to refer to notes I’ve taken in another application or a PDF I have loaded up in Preview. Jumping between apps takes me out of the flow of writing, not to mention that accurately transcribing what’s in one app to the other can occasionally be a hit-or-miss proposition.

Pocket Screen addresses some of that dilemma by creating a floating window of one app that you can keep in view when you’re working on something else. Think of Pocket Screen as a picture-in-picture feature, but for productivity. You can capture a PDF, webpage, video, chat or other kind of information and keep it close at hand in a resizable window that you can move around your desktop. The app supports up to two simultaneous views, according to its developer.

You can freely use Pocket Screen for 10-minute sessions, but true productivity mavens will likely want to unlock the app for unlimited use. That’s a one-time payment of $9.99 to remove any restrictions.

Filtre

Filtre is a Safari extension for anyone whose browsing on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad takes you to places and topics they’d just as soon not read about.

Enter keywords into Filtre, and the extension blocks articles, posts and comments that include anything you consider verboten. For instance, I typed in variations of the Washington Nationals name into Filtre to avoid being spoiled on the result of a baseball game. When I visited ESPN in Safari on my Mac, all references to the Nationals and their in-progress game had been removed from view. (A pause button accessible from the Filtre Extension in Safari’s toolbar lets you restore any filtered-out content if you prefer.)

Filtre comes from the maker of Noir, a Dark Mode-enabling extension that Six Colors has profiled before, so we’re clearly talking about someone who knows their way around Safari extensions. You can try out Filtre free for a week before the extension’s $1.49/month subscription kicks in.

LogZero

You’ve got lots of ways to track everything from calories to moods on your iPhone. LogZero offers to do it all in one place. More significantly, though, LogZero promises to keep all that logged data for your eyes only, with data never leaving your device and everything stored within the app encrypted.

LogZero is a one-stop app for keeping tabs on food intake, meditation breaks, exercise, to-dos, and medications. You can also chart your mood and weight. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, you can toggle off the items you’re not interested in logging, and they’ll disappear from the interface.

It’s worth downloading the free iOS app to see if it fits your tracking needs, though a paid subscription gives you access to more analytics features plus personalization controls. A monthly subscription costs $5, while the annual rate is $35.

Go to the podcast page.

I thought I’d find the oldest Tim Cook photo in my Photos library (what, do you not have numerous Apple executives in your People view?) and it’s from October 2008:

This was from the post-event Q&A session, back when that was a thing!

In the video of this event you’ll see that Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO, is asked by Steve Jobs to present “the state of the Mac.” If you’re used to Cook being more of an emcee for presentations by others in a pre-baked video, you may be amused to see him working hard to present Apple’s Mac lineup to an in-person crowd of media people. (There’s also a Jony Ive live presentation!)

The big product from this event: the unibody MacBook Pro, including an all-button multitouch trackpad.

Happy trails to Tim and Phil, though it sure sounds like they’re still going to be haunting the corridors of Apple Park for years to come.

I know there’s no connection between my local area network and our house’s plumbing system, but when the faucet started running uncontrollably literally seconds after I fixed a network outage, I had to wonder: did we have a poltergeist? The jury is still out. But I can tell you that my hour of fruitless examination of router settings is to your benefit: you won’t have to do this when it happens to you.

The weakest TP-Link

As a guy known for Wi-Fi since the early 2000s, you might think my house is ablaze with wireless signals.¹ Yes, it is: we have six Wi-Fi access points and gateways in a relatively small house by modern standards (about 1,200 sq. ft. on the main floor and 800 in the finished basement). But we also have Ethernet strung through the house to connect most of them, with powerline networking adapters where that doesn’t work due to the ancient and mysterious innards of the walls. The innards’ outsides are covered with heavy, old plaster, which absorbs some of the power of the Wi-Fi signals—hence the large number of emitters.

Normally, this works fine. We have four TP-Link routers, some purchased a while back, and a Netgear Nighthawk as our primary base station, which distributes network addresses and is connected to the fiber-optic ISP router.² When something goes wrong, it’s usually an issue with a router crashing, even though its various green lights remain in a happy state.

This time, something was more deeply wrong. The TP-Link routers showed orange Internet connection lights, which in this case meant they were connected via LAN to the Netgear, but they couldn’t reach the Internet. Perversely, I seemed to be able to connect from my iPhone and my office Mac, which has both Ethernet and Wi-Fi connections active.³

TP-Link has one of the most irritating admin approaches for its routers of nearly any networked product I’ve ever used. You can connect directly, but it’s difficult to store the device’s password because it uses a potentially changing local IP address on your LAN. There’s also a centralized system where you can use an app called Tether or a TP-Link website to log in remotely to a router, even when you’re on the same LAN, rather than finding its local address. Tether also scans the local network, letting you connect even when Internet access is disrupted.

Without the routers “seeing” the Internet, I couldn’t use the website, and Tether worked erratically. I eventually was able to figure out the IP addresses of two of the four routers, connect via a web browser, and find a working password for one of them. (To reset the password, you have to factory reset the router. That’s for a future day.)

But I remained baffled. My ISP gateway was up. My Mac could reach the Internet. The Netgear router seemed to be routing my Mac’s traffic to the Internet. Some of the devices on our network were also connected to the rest of the world. Had my TP-Link routers been compromised? Was something more sophisticated going on? Nope.

It’s coming from inside your smart house

Some of you may be yelling at me from the safe distance of your phone or computer. “Glenn, Glenn, why didn’t you check DNS?” The circulatory system of the Internet may be the IP-addressed traffic that passes over the series of tubes that make up the network. But DNS is the helpful labeling system, like an editorial cartoon that uses captions like “taxes” and “fat cats” to mark characters in an illustration. DNS turns human-readable domain names into the underlying numbers required for connections.

Surely DNS was working? My iPhone, Mac, and other devices were resolving addresses, or turning them from names into numbers. Then I found a clue in Network Time Protocol (NTP), a somewhat obscure bit of plumbing that also makes things tick. When I went to Advanced: Administration: NTP Settings on the Netgear, the last time it had been able to grab the current time and date was hours earlier. That seemed problematic.

Digging more deeply, literally, I found that the dig Unix command couldn’t pull up IP addresses from the Netgear router. On a LAN in which you’re using DHCP to handle local address assignment, your router may require that you enter Internet IP addresses for one or two DNS servers, or it might retrieve them automatically from your ISP. When a device on your network requests an address, the DHCP server assigns an address and tells the device to use the router address for DNS resolution. The router relays your requests to the real DNS server.

I tried dig @10.0.0.1 apple.com (use the router to return the IP address for apple.com) via Terminal on my Mac, and it timed out. I then tried the same lookup using my ISP’s DNS servers. Same timeout. The Mac had no problem with domain lookups, however, nor did my iPhone.

Now comes the time to insert a head-slapping emoji. Some time ago, and I can’t recall how long ago, I set my Netgear router to use my ISP’s primary and secondary DNS addresses. I know many people have switched to Google, Quad9, Cloudflare, or other free, public DNS servers to improve lookup speeds, which, at one point, would have helped speed up network operations tremendously because ISPs invested so little in their DNS operations.

However, using public DNS can cause issues in particular cases. For one, it can confuse content delivery networks (CDNs), which try to guess the closest server to you topologically based on your DNS lookup request to their servers. When that works, you’re getting the shortest path and likely faster throughput. Public DNS can misdirect CDNs, resulting in severe slowdowns in data transfers for big files and with streaming. Much of that has been resolved, but not all of it. I had had some issues, so I reverted from one of the public DNS services to my ISP’s servers. (This has largely been solved now.)

So what happened? My ISP, CenturyLink, must have had a DNS failure. I couldn’t get replies from its DNS servers when I checked (directly or via my router). I found postings later from other CenturyLink customers around the same time, but no public message from the company.

Why did my Mac and iPhone keep resolving? My Mac’s Ethernet connection had a manually set DNS server that was an alternate one provided by my ISP, one that apparently continued to work. I can’t explain the iPhone situation, unless it’s possible that iOS will pull DNS over a cellular connection when it fails over Wi-Fi—I don’t know that it does that, but I don’t have another explanation.

I removed my ISP’s DNS values, replaced them with 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) and 8.8.8.8 (Google), clicked Apply, and an hour of my time suddenly was marked on my internal spreadsheet as “wasted.”

Where I went wrong

I’m always trying to learn from my mistakes, particularly because I turn mistakes into opportunities to write columns like this one to save time for you, dear reader. In this case, I was led astray by the half-working network and the fact that, seemingly, only one brand of router in one configuration was failing. I should have remembered to start with DNS—and I will in the future.

If you’ve read this long, I’m sure you’re dying to know about the faucet. I had just finished fixing the network, walked to the freezer, grabbed a fruit-only frozen treat, and was walking across the kitchen when a small stream of water came out of the faucet. I tested the taps. I put the frozen delight back into the freezer, turned off the taps while my spouse was on speaker so we could figure out which tap’s cartridge decided at that moment to give up the ghost, and ordered a replacement. This was another kind of DNS failure: do not spout!

For further reading

While this column may have given you less confidence in me than you had before you read it, I share much more information about Wi-Fi, networking, and troubleshooting in my book Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security.

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

By drawing on public application programming interfaces (APIs) from the league and other sources, Weingradt built an app in TestFlight — Apple’s home for products still in beta — and shared his new creation, Mosaic, by posting on Threads and tagging #buildinpublic to solicit early adopter feedback….

That very same day, MLB Executive Vice President Kenny Gersh received a Slack message from colleagues alerting him to Mosaic and asking if the league’s legal team should get involved. While of course not wanting just any developer to profit from baseball’s IP, Gersh appreciated that this was a controlled environment that required an MLB.tv subscription to access premium features, so he replied, “Not ideal, but it’s not a huge problem yet. Maybe we’ll hire.”

They hired. I know there’s a lot of skepticism out there about whether the big organization will just crush the Little App That Could. To me, it says a lot about MLB’s tech brain trust that they embraced Weingradt and that he’s still dropping incredibly impressive new features into the app on a regular basis.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

We talked to Snell about some of his favorite apps for streamlining his podcasting and writing workflows.

Continue reading on The Mac App Store ↦

Apple’s Friday Night Baseball made its immersive video debut on the Vision Pro Friday, with numerous live immersive cameras scattered around Yankee Stadium for the night’s game between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Apple has produced a lot of immersive video, including some sports documentaries and a set of live L.A. Lakers games, and it’s been clear that the makers of all that content have assumed that immersive video should be produced more or less like regular sports content: with lots of quick cuts, despite the fact that quick cuts in immersive video can be disorienting in a way that cuts in standard 16:9, 2-D video aren’t.

There’s no clear agreement about the ideal solution. I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person.

Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach—and it does benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.

Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.

In between innings, the broadcast stayed in the park—and this is when it would occasionally switch to a different angle, such as at the outfield fence, behind first base, in the club level behind home plate, or looking down into the dugout. There were also replays—carefully demarcated with animated graphics, to reduce confusion—of key plays from the previous inning from the immersive perspective.

In the end, it felt much more like I was sitting at Yankee Stadium watching the game. Apple’s dedicated commentators tried to point out things you couldn’t see if you were watching a standard telecast, like defensive positioning. The commentary was fine (though I wish it had been a bit less chatty), but I would also have been happy to have the option to listen to natural audio, or just the local radio broadcast.

I do wish there had been a little bit more experimentation in terms of the primary camera angle. (Disclosure: I only watched three innings before needing to leave home to catch a flight.) I would’ve been interested in seeing an inning from behind first or third base, just to get a little bit of a different angle.

Still, I think Apple’s first immersive live baseball production was successful. I saw the Yankee catcher commit interference and then get hit in the arm by a brutal backswing; I saw a wide throw from shortstop almost (but not quite) pull the first baseman off the bag. I saw Yankee manager Aaron Boone constantly spitting a stream of sunflower seeds on the warning track in front of the dugout rail. And most delightfully, every few minutes a train zipped past the stadium out in the outfield, visible in a crack between the stands and the scoreboard.

Will immersive sports amount to anything? I don’t think anyone knows, but this latest experiment suggests that the people producing Apple’s immersive sports are actually learning and experimenting. I’m encouraged, and I’ll tune in next week for sure.

We look at everything related to Siri AI, including the new Siri app and its ability to handle contextually aware conversations, the expansion of Apple Intelligence into new apps, enhancements to accessibility features, and, in particular, Visual Intelligence’s heightened prominence as a camera feature on the iPhone and iPad. We also dive into how Apple’s Private Compute Cloud works and associated privacy issues, particularly around the company’s extension of this on-device processing to Apple-managed hardware at Google Cloud.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

If you’re a Kickstarter backer who pledged at a level where you’ll get the special member feeds, check your messages for information about how to redeem that pledge and get access to the special feeds.

And if you didn’t back the Kickstarter, you can now join us via Relay and get access to entire series of the show all at once, ad free. Next week, members will receive the entirety of our series about Apple’s mid-90s Mac OS crisis that led to the company buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs, which led to the creation of Mac OS X. Those episodes will play out over the next six weeks in the main feed, but members will get all seven episodes, five hours and 15 minutes of content, all at once. (Plus the first of our monthly bonus episodes.)

There’s also a YouTube channel, and Spotify users will find that video version available within Spotify as well.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The Apple II makes its public debut at a landmark event in the history of personal computers, and Steve Jobs truly comes into his own.

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Under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, the Apple II takes form at last. It’s an integrated color computer created by Steve Wozniak, powered by a groundbreaking power supply designed by Rod Holt, and wrapped in a plastic shell designed by Jerry Manock.

Go to the podcast page.

We travel to the summer of 1976, as Apple travels to Atlantic City for a computer trade show, the Apple II begins to form, and the fellowship between the two Steves shows signs of breaking.

Go to the podcast page.