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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple TV

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

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

Tubi, HBO Max, but not really Paramount+

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

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

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

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

Netflix

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

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

Peacock and Disney Plus

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

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

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

Amazon Prime Video

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

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

On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

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

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

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

Make a call

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

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

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

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

Use secure messaging

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

Secure messaging systems include:

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

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

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

Don’t use most collaborative tools

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

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

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

Consider the risk

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

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

For further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

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

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

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

Apple, let the Mac app icons be free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

When Amazon Prime Day gets underway this Tuesday (June 23), it will be the first time in nearly a decade that I’m not involved in some tech site’s effort to go all out with coverage around the online retailer’s multiday sales event. In recent years, my home base on the West Coast has meant late-night shifts posting about deals, updating constantly shifting sales prices and otherwise pointing out discounted doodads to readers. But none of that’s happening this year, after I was unceremoniously laid off a few months ago.

Being unemployed stinks for a number of reasons. Missing out on Amazon Prime Day coverage isn’t one of them.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good deal, and certainly helping your readers save some money on something they’re looking for falls well within the remit of a consumer technology writer. But few of the offers you’ll see on Amazon Prime Day qualify as good deals. And whatever bargains that are to be found are generally lost in the firehose of inconsequential price cuts on second-rate merch. Amazon Prime Day has become the living embodiment of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, to the point where if Oscar Wilde were alive, he’d be pointing at his computer monitor like he was in the Leonardo DiCaprio meme.

And yet, you wouldn’t know this by perusing the majority of tech websites this week, which will spend the next few days turning themselves into an extended, unpaid advertisement for Amazon’s sales event. As I write this sentence a few days ahead of Prime Day’s actual kickoff, some sites are already touting the deals you can snap up right now. And I guarantee you that once Prime Day wraps up on June 26, you will see stories about the Prime Day deals you can still get. Why, it’s almost as if Prime Day is a made-up construct and prices on goods routinely fluctuate!

Look, I don’t begrudge websites getting in on this Prime Day racket, particularly any websites that might want to employ me at any point in the future. The fact of the matter is, websites gotta make money somehow, and if one of those ways turns out to be affiliate revenue—i.e. the percentage of money a site can collect when you click through a link to an online retailer—more power to them. But the downside to that is a lot of deal alerts on items that aren’t really bargains at all, so much as they’re Amazon trying to offload merchandise to make way for the next product cycle.

Why you should sit out Prime Day

With all the noise surrounding Amazon Prime Day, it’s going to be tempting to head over to that site and load up your virtual cart with all manner of marked-down gizmos. While I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, my humble suggestion would be to… maybe not do that? I don’t know the particulars of your current life situation well enough to be handing out blanket advice. Maybe you really need a new robot vacuum cleaner, in which case, hey, this is your time to shine.

But for most of us, Amazon Prime Day is probably something best viewed at a distance with our eyes shielded to prevent permanent damage. Here’s why:

• Amazon has sales all the damned time: To the extent that Prime Day has ever been something to get hyped up for, it’s been diluted by the fact that Amazon is just going to turn around and have an identical sale a few months from now. For the last few years, Amazon has held Prime Deal Days in October, and that’s followed up shortly by the usual round of price cuts for Black Friday and holiday shopping. The price cuts you’re seeing now will likely return in short order.

• A lot of the discounted items are clearance sales by another name: Prices on some Apple gear will drop this week — in fact, some things like AirPods and Apple Watches may already be available at a notable discount. But that’s because Apple likely will be rolling out new versions of those devices in the fall, and Amazon doesn’t want a lot of outdated inventory on hand. Hey, if you want a pair of AirPods Pro 3 for less than what you’d normally pay and don’t mind missing out on the new features Apple is rumored to be adding to the next-gen model, go ahead and click that Buy button with my best wishes. Just be aware as to why the price might be that low.

• Do you really feel like giving Amazon more of your money?: Jeff Bezos may not be involved in the day-to-day operations at Amazon, but he’s still the executive chairman of the company; more to the point, he profits handsomely from Amazon’s ongoing success. And whether it’s throwing a hey-look-at-me wedding last year or running a major American newspaper into the ground or bankrolling documentaries lauding the First Lady, he’s not really putting that wealth to good use. You may disagree, in which case, load up on those discounted Ring doorbells and Echo Dots to your heart’s content, but I try to send as little money to the real-life version of LuthorCorp as possible.

Oh, you’re ignoring me? Well, at least do this

As good as these reasons are to give Prime Day a pass, I know that some people reading this are already making a beeline toward Amazon. Fair enough — just follow a couple of good practices to get through this shopping event with a minimum of fuss and/or muss.

• DO use a price comparison tool: Make sure that whatever deal you’re seeing on Amazon is actually a good deal by turning to the price-comparison tool of your choice. For me, that’s CamelCamelCamel, where you can enter an Amazon product number¹ into the site’s search field, and you can see how a product’s price has been trending — including whether it’s hit an all-time low.

• DO look for coverage that treats Prime Day skeptically: When it comes to Prime Day, less is more. I tend to find the most helpful articles are the ones that are more selective in their approach to Amazon’s sale, as they acknowledge that most of the deals on offer are pretty crummy and really only highlight worthwhile picks. I tend to find that the Wirecutter site of The New York Times handles this sort of thing pretty well. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed several articles to Wirecutter as a freelance writer, though I’ve never been a part of any Prime Day coverage with that site.)

• DON’T go on a shopping spree. You see something you want that happens to be on sale at a good price? Great, pick it up. Maybe add a second item to your cart if it also fills a need. Anything more than that? No sir — down that path lies madness. Amazon is counting on you to get deal crazy and take a lot of smart speakers off its hands. Don’t give it the satisfaction.

I’m never going to see Prime Day pop up on my calendar without getting a sad, faraway look in my eye. But that doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way. Like many things in life, Prime Day is best dealt with in small doses, if at all. Together, we can get through this thing.

Years ago, in the era between the introduction of the iPhone and the modern period of widespread cellular coverage, my wife and I were driving with our quite young children across the vast, unexplored expanse of north-central Pennsylvania, en route to a family wedding. We had plotted out the route and knew where we were going: Eagles Mere, a tiny, former luxury resort town once at the end of a railway line. The town used to attract well-known actors, as well as New York City denizens, who would escape the summer heat and polio outbreaks back in the city.

As we tootled along, chatting with the kids and keeping them occupied, we suddenly went off the grid. We were still on a state highway, not yet turned to a smaller road, and yet there was no coverage. We figuratively slapped ourselves in the head. Had we gotten AAA maps or printed out whatever the technology was of the day—did MapQuest even still exist? No. We relied on having continuous cellular service. Readers, we did not wind up in the forest for a week, discovered by rescuers clad in bark and branches, feeding the children non-toxic berries. But we did learn a lesson.

Always have a map that doesn’t require cellular access! I mean, duh, of course, but we had been lulled in our coastal urban elitism to expect service, service, everywhere!

Of course, it wasn’t long after that Google introduced a download option; Apple added one for its Maps app a full decade later.¹ Downloading a map lets you access nearly everything you need while off the cellular grid, in an area where you don’t have service, when you have just a trickle of data, or when data access is metered and high-cost.

The usual provisos apply: something could go wrong, you might not have access to your iPhone or iPad, the map might be missing details you need, and so on. If you want a belt to go with your suspenders, consider printing out a paper map! Yes, paper still exists.

Common offline features

In both Google and Apple’s mapping apps—say that five times fast—a Download button should appear whenever you search by a name, like a park, business, or city. Otherwise, you have to hunt a bit, as I’ll explain below. Downloadable maps may require from about 150 MB to over 1 GB of storage, depending on the area you select and the amount of detail Apple or Google downloads for that selection.

The settings for both apps are quite similar: tap your profile picture in either app, then tap Offline Maps; in Google Maps, tap the gear icon. Now you can change preferences:

• Downloads (Apple)/Download preferences (Google): Opt whether to download only over Wi-Fi or over both Wi-Fi and cellular.
• Automatic Updates (Apple)/Auto-update offline maps (Google): When enabled, maps are periodically refreshed.
• Optimize Storage (Apple): The app automatically purges maps you haven’t used “in a while.”
• Sync with Apple Watch (iPhone only): You can also push offline maps to your Apple Watch, which has a lot less storage, but, really, how much are you keeping on it, anyway?
• Only Use Offline Maps (Apple): This forces the use of offline maps even when you have an Internet connection, which is useful when you are in one of the bandwidth scenarios above: low throughput or expensive usage-based service. Google automatically switches to an offline map when there’s low throughput available, or you have no connection.

Download from Apple Maps

If you search for a city name and there’s an exact best result, a Download button appears in the search result. I’ve also found that if Maps isn’t certain the match is correct, you may have to tap the city link, and then a Download button will appear. Enter a business name, tap the link that corresponds to the firm you want, and you can then tap the more (…) icon and choose Download Map. This also works for street addresses.

In all of the above cases, Maps shows you a portrait selection by default on an iPhone and a landscape one on an iPad. Adjust the area shape, and pinch and expand to zoom in or out, then tap Download. The estimated map download size appears above the Cancel and Download buttons.

Manage your offline data by tapping your profile picture and tapping Offline Maps. You’ll see all the stored maps, can delete them, and control settings. Tap a map, and you can then tap Rename, change the included area, or tap Delete Map. In the main Offline Maps view, tap Download New Map (iOS/iPadOS 26) or Add Offline Map (iOS/iPadOS 27) to search for a location and then immediately have the area-selection view appear.

Download from Google Maps

Search for a city name and tap a result. You may have to swipe left in the button bar to see the “Download offline map” link; tap it. If you’re viewing a map, tap your profile picture, then tap “Offline maps.” Tap “Select your own map,” then zoom in or out on the current map area; tap Download when you have the selection you want.

From your profile picture, tap “Offline maps” to view the list of available maps. Tap a map and tap Delete or Update, or tap the Edit (pencil) icon to rename it. From the main view, you can also tap the More (…) button to the right of a map to update, rename, or delete. You can’t change the selected area, however.

Print a goldarned map out

Having a physical map may seem like something from the early 2000s, so long ago few living souls remember it, but it’s an extra backup against calamity. With a color inkjet printer, you can squeeze a fair amount of detail into a letter-sized or A4 page.

Printing directions via Apple Maps in macOS Tahoe worked surprisingly well. It was like the good old days, but better, offering multiple pages of maps and step-by-step directions. You just get a standard print dialog, with no details to tweak. Google Maps on maps.google.com has a print mode, but it’s lackluster, with no step-by-step directions. In Safari, the preview and printed output were incorrect.

Postscript: Where she’s going, there are no Offline Maps

Of course, right after I wrote this, my older went off on a hike and came back…complaining about the poor performance of Offline Maps in Apple Maps. She was in a not-terribly-remote area in the mountains, about 90 minutes away, with intermittent cellular access. She had downloaded the map before she left, thinking it was successful. But even with no cell access or with the Offline Maps forced-use option enabled, she couldn’t get the offline map to work. Fortunately, the trail was well-signed and full of people, and there was no real chance of getting lost.

Back in Seattle, examining Offline Maps, these out-of-area maps she downloaded showed up as 0 KB. We tried to download the map again, but Apple Maps wouldn’t let us use the trailhead as a landmark. We found a nearby place and tried to download. The progress circle showed that a download was first underway, then complete, yet the download was again 0 KB. This happened repeatedly. More bizarrely, the offline map couldn’t be deleted. I attempted to replicate on my iPhone, where everything worked without error, including using the trailhead as the place name—a Download button appeared as expected.

We didn’t test Google Maps for comparison, since her hike was over, but it’s another reason to download and check that your offline maps are up to date and valid before departing.

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

There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint:

• Make pixel art
• Clean up document scans
• Design a flyer
• Create App Store screenshots
• Crop and resize photos
• Do some basic photo retouching
• Remove a background.

Here’s what Mojave Paint doesn’t do:

• Stick AI features into every corner of the product

Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s.

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

The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.

It’s not just Golden Gate: upon installing the beta, I immediately noticed the improvement on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 as well. The changes are mostly pretty subtle and, without having the side-by-side comparison, they’re hard to define. But if I had to chalk it up to one element, it would be “sharper.” Look at the edges on Books or the popsicle sticks on the App Store, for example: they are less fuzzy than the 26 version, by far.

Apple’s screens have always been among the best in the business, and given how great the Retina (and up) displays are, it feels in retrospect like a tremendous flaw on the part of the 26 year updates to make have prominently blurry/fuzzy/diffused icons on screens renowned for their sharpness.

But again, I return to the point that even very subtle changes can tremendously improve the experience and just make the icons feel better. That’s good design.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”….

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Cook called the current supply situation, driven by wild buying in the AI industry, “a hundred-year flood,” and that he had “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

I do wonder how Apple will raise prices. An informal guess is that a lot of cheaper base configurations will vanish, that new models will start at higher prices, that Apple’s rumored OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models will set all-time high starting prices, and that Apple will do everything it can to keep a lid on the prices of its base models across the board. The big question is, will the MacBook Neo jump up in price, and if so, by how much?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

This is a modern Samba setup that runs directly on the Time Capsule itself; macOS 27 can connect to the Time Capsule as a network share, and use it for Time Machine backups…

You get the full Apple experience reproduced: after you install this, you do not have to worry about it again, even if the device IP address changes. It will show up automatically in Time Machine in settings app, and it will use mDNS/Bonjour so it will work fine even if the IP address is not static and gets changed.

It’s a clever piece of work that uses a very specific version of Samba and some other software running on a tiny RAM disk with other files stored on the device’s storage partition. I don’t have a Time Capsule to test this myself, but if you have one and have been lamenting its retirement, think again!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

I have a Mac Studio M2 Max with 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD in front of me. While not the most powerful personal computer you can purchase today, it is among the most computationally capable ever made—a vastly capable machine. So why do I have to wait for typing to catch up with me and see a rainbow spinner on the regular?

I’ll tell you why: iCloud Drive and Spotlight. Apple lacks any transparency about how iCloud Drive works or fails. The same is true of Spotlight. These big black boxes churn away, performing a million billion operations a day, and we don’t know exactly what they do. That’s not me being conspiratorial: I honestly don’t care what’s happening under the hood—until it breaks. Without diagnostic tools, even someone like me, ostensibly an expert, can be completely at a loss and waste many hours.

I wrote “Cloudy with a Chance of Insanity: Unsticking iCloud Drive” for TidBITS back in October 2023 about a multi-month odyssey with Apple technical support in trying to dislodge unsyncable files.¹ That problem has barely surfaced since—an 80K file will sometimes get stuck for a while—and I thought Apple might have really solved syncing, at least as exhibited on my Mac. I receive dramatically fewer emails about iCloud Drive than I used to, which is another data point.

But Mr. Edge Case here can always find a way to break something.² I’ve been working on a large manuscript for my upcoming book, Flong Time, No See, a revised and expanded collection of researched articles I’ve written about printing and type history over the last several years.³ I pasted in text that was typically copied from Web pages, and wound up with over 250 footnotes.

While putting together the files for this book, Apple released its Creator Studio system, and shipped Pages 15. After having no problems, I dutifully switched over. This was months ago, and as I continued to work on this reasonably large file—weighing it at about 60,000 words now—everything seemed fine.

A few weeks ago, however, I started to experience system slowdowns. Pages was taking up 12 GB of system memory! System load went through the roof! CPU consumption was outlandish! All signs pointed to corespotlightd, a long-time enemy of performance. That daemon handles background indexing for Spotlight, and the slightest thing wrong in a file or directory, or perhaps due to mild corruption in its underlying files, turns it into a rampaging beast that eats processor cycles like I consume potato chips.⁴

There’s a well-known procedure for killing this beast, though another is spawned from its remains: stop the index, delete the index files, restart, and re-enable indexing. From the Terminal, use these commands. Make a backup before proceeding. Take extreme care with rm -rf, as a misstep in entering or copying can wipe out files!

 sudo mdutil -a -i off
 rm -rf ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight

You can use Restart from the Apple Menu while holding down the Option key (to avoid being asked), or you can take a shortcut from Terminal, assuming you have ensured all files are saved:

 sudo reboot

After your Mac restarts, go back to the Terminal and re-enable indexing:

 sudo mdutil -a -i on

For many (perhaps most) people, this solves the problem. For me, it just delayed it. With some isolation using System Settings: Spotlight: Search Privacy, I added specific folders, such as mail archives, since that seemed like it might be part of the problem.

One piece of advice I found suggested that if I thought Pages was the problem, I should exclude the iCloud Drive path containing Pages files. Fine! I clicked the plus icon in Search Privacy, pressed Command-Shift-G to bring up the path dialog, entered ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Pages/, and clicked Choose. This seemed to work for a while, then nothing availed.

Finally, after analyzing logs and caches, the culprit was clear. It was not that large a Pages file: every time I saved, Spotlight’s worker bee was performing excessive re-indexing that consumed gigabytes and one or more processor cores. Moving the file to a local directory (in my Documents folder) while editing eliminated the problem. It also freed up space, as the temporary Spotlight indexes and Time Machine snapshots had become absurdly large.

What could Apple have done to help here? This is where I would hope machine learning, coupled with some interactive code- and system-expertise bots, could help:

• Note that a system component is acting well outside known parameters.
• Identify CPU usage that is tied to Apple-owned processes.
• Provide a troubleshooting tool, even suggesting it in notifications.
• Create human-readable logs that don’t require system administrator knowledge to interpret.

In the case I describe above, an Apple-created daemon was rampaging out of control due to a single identifiable file!—cascading into other problems. It should be solvable by Apple. The fact that we have more power under the hood by orders of magnitude in the past, coupled with neural cores in the CPU packages, just makes this even more embarrassing. Solve Siri, Apple, yes, but real transparency and troubleshooting in macOS would also make a big difference.

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

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Adam Engst at TidBITS took the time to extract every item on the WWDC 2026 keynote slide that captured our attention last week. Even better, Adam grouped the changes into operating systems, apps, and other categories. While the 27 OSes dominate the list with improvements and revisions, you can also note how many changes Apple is making to Photos and Shared Albums, Find My, Music, and a number of other across-the-ecosystem tools.

Then Marcin Wichary used Adam’s post to slice the data in a different way, counting the number of times the slide used words like fast (59 times) and reliable (22 times). Marcin reasonably argues that speed is the easier problem to attack, while reliability is fuzzier and much harder to pin down.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further reading (and writing)

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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

This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC 2026, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick—but not to hurry.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

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

The AI stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snow Leopard revisited

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

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

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

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

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

Apple fixes stuff it needs to use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

visionOS: Not dead

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

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

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

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

Photos improves, but it’s complicated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know when to fold them

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reach out and touch your Mac

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

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

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

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

Messages now has a Drawing app on all platforms.

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

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

A vision of the future

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

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

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

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

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

Future proof

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siri features in apps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Platform improvements

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

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

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

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

Refined parental controls

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

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

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

More to come

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

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

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

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

At a glance, here are some particular favorites:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consolidated notifications for multiple Tapbacks in Messages — Thank god.

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

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

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

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

Let’s shift into overdrive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further reading

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

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

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

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

Embracing my inner squirrel

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

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

Just me?

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

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

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

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

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

No to the newsletter (mostly)

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

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

Audio for accessibility

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

The happy squirrel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

Of course, it’s happening because of AI.

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

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

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

Focus on the vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next step for developers

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

Depth Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spatial Scene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps Apple’s aggressively monochrome era is over?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

Well.

Here’s how it works:

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can also use keys or keyboard shortcuts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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